Ten thousand people over fifty, followed for twelve years. The ones who handled hardship best were far more likely to still be alive. Nobody’s training grit. Let’s fix that.
Ten thousand people over fifty. Same questionnaire. Followed for twelve years.
Ten years in, 61 out of 100 of the least resilient were still alive. For the most resilient, it was 84 out of 100. The difference wasn’t money. It wasn’t cholesterol. It was how well they handled getting hit.
People will rearrange their whole lives to cut a health risk. Nobody’s lining up to train how they handle hardship. Nobody’s training grit.
In this solo episode of Warrior Mindset, I walk through a study in BMJ Mental Health that linked psychological resilience to a lower risk of death, even after accounting for disease and unhealthy habits. Then we look at what it actually measured, which reads a lot like a martial arts curriculum.
We get into:
The survival staircase and why every step up counts
Why the number drops from 53% to 38%, and why 38% still matters
Perseverance, calmness, purpose, self-reliance and facing some things alone, and how we train every one on the mat
Why the link was stronger in women, and what that means for men
You don’t pick your genes, but you can pick your training
The resilience bank: the withdrawals that come later and four deposits you make now
The old guy at the gym, and what he knows that you don’t yet
A three-deposit challenge (I’m doing it too)
Toughness gets you through the hit. Resilience gets you through the decades.
The study: “Association between psychological resilience and all cause mortality in the Health and Retirement Study,” BMJ Mental Health (2024), Sun Yat-sen University and Karolinska Institutet
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.61
Seneca, On Providence
Earlier episode on calmness under pressure: “The Purposeful Pause”
Two guys get mounted in the same roll. The white belt explodes, bucks, gives up his back and taps in ten seconds. The black belt does nothing for a beat. Elbows in, chin down, one breath. Then he goes to work. Same hit. Different three seconds.
Most of us bought the 4 a.m. version of discipline. Cold showers, stay hard, grind more. None of that is wrong. But getting up early is easy compared to keeping your mouth shut when someone is pushing your buttons.
In this short solo episode of Warrior Mindset, I dig into a Forbes Coaches Council piece where executive coaches named 17 habits that make leaders effective. Not one of them was “work harder.” The habits that stood out were slow ones: pausing on purpose, writing by hand, breaking big problems into small ones.
We get into:
Why the person who pauses reads as control, not weakness
Epictetus, a slave who taught that your first impression isn’t the truth
What your heart rate does to your decisions, and why we teach gross motor movements in self-defense
Box breathing and the “hot email” trick
A daily discipline stack built on the Daily Armor: a handwritten morning list, a midday pause, and an evening pre-mortem
Making the fight small, the same way we teach beginners to escape mount
A five-day challenge (I’m doing it too)
If someone can make you react on command, they’re holding the remote. Let’s take it back.
CEOs are warning that AI without hard thinking just gives you a faster version of yesterday. The tool doesn’t build judgment. The reps do. A discipline-of-thought episode.
This one started with a text. Dr. Scott Padgett told Gene he had been drifting toward a real belief that we have no free will, and Gene, whose entire show is about choosing discipline, wanted to know how a doctor gets there. So they sat down and worked it out.
Scott’s path in was AI. He was reading everything about Anthropic and the rest of the industry, and everybody kept talking about the moment machines become sentient. Nobody could explain what they thought that was. That sent him into consciousness, which sent him into free will, and the more he read the more it looked obvious. Every self-improvement program he had ever been in tells you that when somebody wrongs you, they were doing the best they could with their childhood, their biology, and their life experience. Scott’s point: if you accept that, you have already admitted there is no free will. You are being asked to forgive people on the basis of something you do not believe in. He went deeper and came out a determinist.
Gene asked him to explain it like a white belt. When I got out of bed this morning, what happened? Scott’s answer starts before you were born. Everything your mother was going through while your brain was forming, the stress hormones, the smoking, the environment, and then the years after birth when the brain is most malleable. We already use this logic every day. He was abused as a child, so of course he turned out that way. Scott says if you are going to use the excuse, you have conceded the argument. And if we truly had free will, every decision would take five minutes, because you would have to weigh everything instead of running on the patterns already installed.
They work through Sapolsky’s chain, the turtles all the way down, and the button experiment where the decision-making part of the brain lights up seconds before the person thinks they chose. They get into randomness (the universe may be unpredictable, but we still respond with the tools we already have), the degrees of consciousness all the way down to fish that recognize themselves in a mirror, and the one argument Scott liked best for consciousness having a purpose: evolution trends toward systems that use less energy, and the prefrontal cortex burns about 20 percent of yours. It would not be there for nothing. Which is also why Scott’s text that consciousness is an accident is more of a question than a claim. We get brain lock on big decisions while animals further down the chain just respond and get out faster. Is the thing that makes us hesitate an advantage or a byproduct?
Then Gene puts his problem on the table. My whole life and my whole show are about choosing discipline. If nobody is choosing, what is the point of getting up early and doing the hard thing? Scott’s answer is that it does not change what you do. It changes how you feel about it. It makes you feel better when you think you broke the chain, but it is still the chain. Deciding to start wearing yellow because you hate yellow is not breaking free will. It is just being the contrarian you always were. Gene brings in the Stoics, who were determinists and still built the most disciplined philosophy in history. Marcus Aurelius believed in fate and did the work anyway. Scott lands somewhere close: if you accept you have no control over the two cornerstones, biology and environment, life gets a whole lot easier. You stop fighting the programming and do the next right thing. That phrase was foreign to him until 25 years ago. It is the basis for forgiveness and for every other action an empathetic person takes.
The back half is about blame. Sapolsky’s quarantine model, where dangerous people get contained without hatred, and whether that goes far enough. The Massachusetts trial and how any psychological defense in a criminal case quietly argues the same thing. Where the two of them actually land on it: she has to be held accountable, and she will be, and that is different from blame. Gene draws the line between the two with a good apology. Not “sorry, won’t happen again,” which is a promise. Owning what you did, explaining it so the other person understands, and saying what you will do differently. They talk about corporal punishment, how both of them grew up with it, how 90 percent of a kid’s decisions become about not getting hit, and how that is just a method of programming that does nothing for character. Scott remembers the whipping and not what he did to earn it. Gene is the same. What does that tell you?
Gene asks the question he was afraid of: does understanding all this make us more patient with people or just more detached? Scott says there is a difference, and detachment wins because it is easier. Patience is something you work on forever.
They close on AI. Scott finds the whole thing disturbing, mostly because we do not seem to have the capacity to see what is coming, and we invented great intelligence to tell you whether you have a kidney stone and to make your dog look like a prince. Gene pushes back: look at who is telling the stories. The people selling it are the ones saying it will take over everything, and the scary headlines about an AI hacking something or sacrificing itself fall apart when you look at them. The AI did not decide to hack anything. Somebody told it to. For Gene, AI makes the no-free-will argument more obvious, not less. It is the same programming from the womb. Patterns in, patterns out. Which is exactly what you train in the gym. Drill the pattern until it is subconscious, then respond.
Lightning round. Free will: Scott hopes misunderstood, thinks illusion. Sapolsky over Harris, because he is more thorough. No habits killed by the belief, maybe one created: knowing the consequences and doing it anyway. A dog has even less free will than you. And the last thing Scott decided today was not to eat an Uncrustable.
CEOs are warning that AI without hard thinking just gives you a faster version of yesterday. The tool doesn’t build judgment. The reps do. A discipline-of-thought episode.
A couple of weeks ago, the CEO of one of the biggest retailers in the world stood in front of a room of executives and said the biggest risk with AI is ending up with “a better version of yesterday.”
Her name is Malina Ngai, she runs AS Watson Group, and she wasn’t saying AI is bad. She was saying most companies are using it to make the same old process run faster. Same decisions, same blind spots, same weak spots. Just quicker.
The number that backs her up is rough. According to the Fortune piece where she said it, only about 5% of companies that have rolled out AI agents actually restructured how they work. Everyone else bolted a jet engine onto a horse cart and called it transformation.
I run a web agency. I use these tools every day. I also run a gym. And I’ve watched the same thing happen in both places for years, long before AI showed up. Somebody grabs a tool hoping it’ll do the hard part for them. It never does.
Speed multiplies whatever you already are
That’s the whole thing in one sentence. If you’re a sharp thinker, AI makes you sharper. If you’re sloppy, it makes you sloppy faster and with a lot more confidence.
I’ve watched a client want AI to fix a marketing problem that was actually a “we don’t know who our customer is” problem. The tool wrote gorgeous copy aimed at nobody. I’ve watched a guy at the gym buy the program, the app and the tracker and still skip the hard sessions. The tool didn’t make him disciplined. It gave him a nicer-looking record of not being disciplined.
The trap was never the tool. The trap is believing the tool did the thinking.
Judgment is the thing getting scarce
Another exec at that forum, Christina Zhu from Walmart China, made the point that AI makes the human more important, not less. Data can tell you what customers picked. It can’t tell you what they needed and never found. That takes a person who’s paying attention.
Judgment isn’t knowing the answer. It’s knowing which question matters, what to ignore, when the data is lying to you, and when to move before you have all of it. None of that comes from a prompt. It comes from having been wrong enough times, in enough situations, that you’ve built a feel for it.
Martial artists already know this. Anybody can learn a technique from a video. Knowing when to throw it, against this guy, in this moment, with this much gas left in the tank? That’s reps. Only reps.
How the people who make real calls actually train
Look at how special operators, first responders and fighters build judgment. They don’t train with the answer key. They train under ambiguity. Bad information, time pressure, real consequences. Then they debrief. Then they do it again.
Those people use tools constantly. Intel, comms, maps, data. But the tool feeds the decision. It never makes it. The second the tool makes the decision, you’re not a leader anymore. You’re a relay.
The crutch test
Here’s how you know which side of the line you’re on. Ask yourself: am I using this to sharpen my thinking, or to skip it?
Sharpening looks like this. You’ve already thought about the problem. You have a position. You hand it to the tool and tell it to attack it, find what you missed, or clear the grunt work so you can spend your energy on the call.
Skipping looks like this. You don’t have a position. You ask the tool what to do. It gives you something confident and plausible and you go with it, because it sounded smart and you didn’t want to sit in the discomfort of not knowing.
From the outside, both look identical. Only you know which one you’re doing.
Where AI belongs in a decision
It belongs in the research. Let it gather and summarize. That was always grunt work.
It belongs in the stress test. After you’ve made your call, let it argue with you. Great sparring partner. Terrible coach.
It belongs in the execution. Once the decision is made, let it draft and build and ship.
It never belongs in the decision itself. The moment where you weigh it, own it and put your name on it. That’s yours. Hand that over and you’ve handed over the one thing that made you worth following.
The reps that build a decision-maker
Decide before you ask. Write down what you’d do before you open the tool, then compare. Over time you’ll learn where your judgment is strong and where it’s weak.
Debrief your calls. Once a week, look back at the decisions you made. Which ones were you actually thinking on? Which ones did you just accept?
Sit in the uncomfortable part longer. Not knowing is where judgment gets built. The tool is designed to end that feeling as fast as possible. Don’t let it.
Own the outcome out loud. If it goes bad, “the AI suggested it” is not a sentence a leader gets to say.
The warrior take
The tool doesn’t build the judgment. The reps do.
A better version of yesterday is still yesterday. If you want a different tomorrow, you’ve got to do the thinking that’s uncomfortable, and nothing can do that part for you.
This week’s challenge: for seven days, before you use AI for anything that matters, write your own answer first. One line. Then ask. Then compare. At the end of the week you’ll have a map of exactly where you’ve been leaning on a crutch.
Gene and Aaron take Carl Smith’s four-step process for hard decisions and run it through a basic training emergency, a stalled event, and the calls they both still carry. Get after it.
Aaron came back for another one, and after a detour through zombie apocalypse prep and the two axes on the wall behind Gene, the conversation landed on a newsletter. Carl Smith, a good friend of both of them from the Bureau of Digital, wrote up the process he used the day he had to cancel one of his own events. Four steps. Say the decision out loud in a plain sentence. Talk to the people closest to it before you decide. Put a date on the calendar. Then say what is changing, plainly. Gene and Aaron take each step and hold it up against their own history.
They open on why the tough calls pile up in the first place. The easy thing is easy right now and expensive later, and most of us are optimists who figure it will work out. Sometimes it does, which teaches you the wrong lesson. Aaron tells the Chinese farmer parable, the one where every stroke of luck and every disaster gets the same answer, we will see, and the two of them draw the line that matters: choosing to do nothing is a decision. Just not deciding is not. Gene brings in Musashi, the way is in training, and the idea that decision-making is a drilled skill and not a character trait. That is where Aaron’s basic training story comes in. Twenty-three years old, on staff duty at Fort Bragg, drill sergeant nowhere to be found, a kid going into seizures. He made the call to go help and then made a second call to get an ambulance there. The right thing by any human measure and the wrong thing by military procedure, and he stood outside at parade rest for three hours waiting to find out which one counted. The drill sergeant came back and told him the kid really did have a problem, and he was okay thanks to Aaron, and he was still going to stand there another hour because it was never about that.
From there they work Carl’s steps in order. The plain sentence, and why the verb in it is the whole point. Aaron’s journaling habit and the value of writing out the instead of, the other outcomes, before you can get to the sentence. Then the hardest step for any owner operator: asking people what they think before you have decided, instead of shopping a decision around for validation. Aaron has run that experiment on purpose, and the feedback is always better when he asks what would you do instead of what do you think of what I am doing. He also shares an event that has been in limbo for months at his organization. He said no when the estimate came in a hundred thousand dollars over, the space turned out to be reserved already, the cost dropped, and now there is a week left to decide and still not all the information. Which leads to the line Gene needed to hear: sometimes you cannot get all the information. You just have to go through the thing.
They spend real time on ego and leadership. Gene admits he promoted Thomas and Brian to coaches at the gym without asking a single person first and calls it leading with his ego without meaning to. Neither of them has ever worked with a truly democratic leader and both admit it would drive them nuts. Aaron’s formula: three quarters ego to make the hard calls, one quarter held in reserve to figure out what is actually right. Then the two dates, deciding and telling, and why they should never be the same day. The military rule that an 80 percent plan executed now beats a perfect plan later. And the step both of them are guilty of, over-explaining the decision because sharing the process feels safe. Aaron’s leadership team argued over whether to present the decision then the justification or walk people through the story that leads to it, and he is honest that presenting the decision is often harder than making it.
The episode closes on the aftermath. The warrior does not pretend the cost is zero. He carries it honestly and keeps walking. Gene talks about quitting events two years before COVID and losing an entire world of people in the process. Aaron has made plenty of bad decisions and does not regret the big ones, because sometimes the decision gets made for you and sometimes you were the one who made it, and you have to be okay carrying either.
Mentioned in this episode: Carl Smith and the Bureau of Digital newsletter, “Making The Tough Call” Miyamoto Musashi, the way is in training Marcus Aurelius, “If anyone can refute me, show me I am making a mistake, I will gladly change “The Chinese farmer parable (we will see) SEAL Team (the series) Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and the observer effect
