My perspective
How I See the World
What makes a life meaningful, and what gives me the freedom to live it?
The question underneath it all
Meaning & Independence
If I say I want more freedom, I ought to be able to tell you what I’d do with a free afternoon. For me that might mean skiing with Megan and our girls, or sitting with an owner long enough to get to the decision that’s really bothering them. My noble aim is my answer to what makes that time worth spending.
I want to understand how the world works so I can find meaning and alignment in the life I’m living. I want to understand what makes the effort worthwhile, choose how I spend my time, and move toward love in the way I live and relate to other people.
That pursuit connects most of what I spend my time learning about. Money affects the choices available to us. Psychology affects how we see those choices. Our relationships, beliefs and experiences shape what we want in the first place. I find it hard to understand any one of those subjects without following it into the others.
Meaning, alignment and love describe what I’m reaching toward. Understanding and independence help me pursue that: seeing my choices more clearly, deciding what matters, and putting my time and effort into a life I want to be present for.
This is my attempt to put those connections into words. Some come from experiences I've spent years thinking about. Others are questions I'm still working through. I want you to be able to follow the reasoning, see what shaped it, and tell me where you see something I don't.
I want to feel aligned in the moment I’m living
Alignment, as I’m using the word, is the feeling that what I’m doing connects to what I believe matters. I understand why the effort is worthwhile and can put myself into it. I want to experience that in work, in time with my family, and in how I treat the people around me.
I know how resentment, envy, hate and fear can pull my attention away from that experience. Understanding myself and the situation helps me consider how I want to respond. I want more freedom in that response, and I want it to move me toward love.
Conversations with God has helped me think about love and fear, and about understanding an experience through its contrasts. I connect that spiritual lens with the question of who I want to be in the choices I make. I’m still working through what that means in practice, including how to acknowledge a difficult feeling and choose what to do with it.
I want to be able to do hard things with a clear sense of why they matter. Having an honest conversation, accepting a trade-off, or putting effort into something worthwhile can be part of that alignment. I keep learning how to bring my understanding into the moment I’m actually living.
The life I'm building has to be worth living along the way
When we sold our family business, I had to confront how much of my identity had become tied to running it. The transaction was complete. The questions about what I wanted to do with my life were still there.
That experience made me pay closer attention to what I was working toward. I can spend years pursuing a goal and discover that I haven't thought enough about the ordinary days it will create. What will I do when I wake up? Who will be around me? Will I enjoy the work and the responsibilities that come with it?
Megan and our daughters make the use of my time concrete. I want to be present for our life together. Skiing with the girls, staying active, learning something that changes how I see the world, and having a conversation that helps someone are things I want in the life I'm living now.
I still want to accomplish difficult things. I want to know why the effort is worth it, and whether the way I'm pursuing the goal makes sense for the people and experiences I care about. A bigger business or a larger account balance needs to connect to an answer.
Independence gives me choices and responsibility for them
I've spent a lot of my life trying to understand anything that affects my ability to choose how I spend my time. That helps explain my interest in business ownership, money, human behavior and the rules we live under.
Independence means being able to make meaningful choices about my work, relationships and responsibilities. Those choices always have constraints. There are people who depend on me, commitments I've made, and limits to my time, money and energy. I want to understand those limits well enough to choose deliberately.
I learned some of this through working with my dad. We could be looking at the same company and want different things from it. Reinvesting made sense for the future I wanted to build. Income and retirement mattered to him. Until we understood those goals, the business argument could go in circles.
The same thing matters when I'm helping someone else. I need to understand what they want from their life before deciding what a good business or financial outcome would look like for them. My preferences can't answer that question on their behalf.
I also need people who can challenge how I'm thinking. A different perspective can reveal a choice I hadn't considered or an assumption I was treating as a fact. Choosing for myself includes being willing to listen.
A worthwhile aim makes difficult work meaningful
I enjoy working hard when I can see what the effort is for. I've felt that playing soccer, making sales calls and helping rebuild our family business. Clear goals let me put energy into the work and learn whether what I'm doing is helping.
But choosing the goal matters. I can become very effective at something and still need to ask whether it's worth the time and sacrifice. I keep returning to the idea of a noble aim: a purpose I care about that contributes to other people's lives over a long period of time.
For me, helping someone understand a decision is part of that. I enjoy learning, connecting ideas and seeing the moment when something makes sense to another person. When that understanding helps them choose a direction they feel good about, the work itself is rewarding.
I want to keep testing my aims against how I'm actually living. Who benefits from what I'm building? What does it ask of my family and the people around me? Am I willing to accept the cost? Those questions help me decide where to put my effort.
Questions about God and consciousness belong in this picture
I've been drawn to the question of why we're here for a long time. What does it mean to be conscious? Why do we experience love, fear, curiosity and the desire to make something of our lives? What is our relationship to God and to one another?
One idea I keep exploring is that God, or a universal intelligence, experiences life through us. It gives me a way to think about why each person's experience matters and why what we do to one another matters. That's a spiritual and philosophical interpretation I'm working through. I don't have a scientific explanation that settles it.
Christian stories and teachings are part of how I explore these questions. I'm drawn to the example of Jesus, to love, and to the willingness to bear a cost for something that benefits others. I think about how those ideas relate to choosing a worthwhile aim and taking responsibility for the way I live.
I want these beliefs to have consequences in ordinary life: how I respond to someone I disagree with, whether I keep a commitment, what I do with my time, and how I treat the people closest to me. Understanding what I believe means examining those choices too.
Explore the books and conversations behind my thinking about God →
Money matters because our time and choices matter
I've described money as “stored time.” That phrase captures something personal for me: we spend time and effort creating value, and we want the money we receive to help us make choices later. It's a useful lens for why I care about money, even though it doesn't explain every way money is created, earned or owned.
I want to understand what happens between doing useful work today and being able to provide for ourselves and others in the future. What determines what our savings can buy? How do debt, ownership and the rules of money affect the options we have? Who benefits when those rules change, and who bears the cost?
Those questions connect a business owner's decisions with much larger questions about our economy. In the company, we can examine cash flow, debt, reinvestment and what an owner needs from the business. Outside it, I want to understand the environment those plans depend on.
I've become especially interested in the different situations of someone who already owns assets and someone trying to buy their first home or build their first investment. I want to work through the numbers and the competing explanations carefully. An observation that feels compelling needs evidence before I treat it as a general explanation.
Money and economics will be one of the places where I develop these questions in more detail. I want the reasoning and sources to be visible enough that we can examine the argument together.
Systems matter, and people still have to make decisions
When I look at a business or an economy, I want to understand the incentives. What gets rewarded? Who makes the rules? Who can change them? What happens to someone who plays by them and works hard?
It's easy for me to get excited about a change that could solve a large problem. I've spoken strongly about changing the money. Conversations with people who challenge me have also made me consider what would remain: disagreements, the desire for power, competing goals and difficult decisions about how to live together.
I need to examine both the rules and the people operating within them. A different system can change the choices available without removing every conflict. Personal responsibility also has to account for the circumstances someone is dealing with. Two people may be making decisions from very different starting points.
That brings me back to a practical question: What can we understand, influence and prepare for from here? I want to consider several possible outcomes, see where a plan is vulnerable, and make choices I can explain. I don't need certainty about the future to do that work.
Understanding grows when I can question the connections
I love following an idea across subjects. A pattern in one area can suggest a useful question in another. Fractals, first principles and other mental models interest me because they give me ways to look again at something I thought I understood.
A connection still needs to be examined. I want to distinguish a helpful analogy from an explanation that actually holds up. What evidence supports it? Where does it stop working? What would cause me to change my mind?
I often work through those questions by talking. Sometimes I'm describing a view I've thought about for years. Sometimes the conversation is helping me discover what I think. I've learned that I need to make that difference clearer, especially when I feel strongly about a subject.
That's part of why I want to write this down. Writing makes me explain the steps between ideas, identify what I'm relying on, and return to the parts that need more work. Linking the books, conversations and concepts gives other people a way to follow and challenge that thinking.
I want this understanding to help us choose how to live
The questions connect in three broad directions: how the world works, what makes our experience meaningful, and how the systems we build affect our choices. A subject can belong in more than one of those conversations. Money can lead us into accounting, human behavior, political power and a decision about how much time to spend with our family.
I want the writing to make those connections useful. A topic page can explain my current view. An essay can work through one argument or experience. A clear explanation of a concept can help us understand the next conversation without starting over. Books and episodes can show where an idea came from and let us explore it further.
What I hope comes out of all of it is a clearer understanding of the world, our goals and the trade-offs in front of us. Then we can make thoughtful choices, feel confident about why we made them, and keep learning from what follows.
For the experiences behind these questions, start with About Ryan. Episode 500, with Kim interviewing me, is a longer conversation about the work, relationships and questions that have shaped this perspective.