About This Newsletter
Your Next Ascent is for people whose current identity still works and cannot carry them into what comes next.
That is narrower than it sounds. It is not about burnout and it is not about starting over. It is about the particular silence that arrives after a win, when the calendar is still full and the metrics still move and something underneath has stopped asking anything of you. I call that condition elegant stagnation. From the outside it looks like winning.
One essay every Sunday, on the psychology, neuroscience, ancient philosophy, peak performance science, and technology of building what comes next. Short notes in between. No hacks, no hustle liturgy, no pretending to final answers.
Where to start
Five essays were published together on August 2, 2026. They were written to be read as one argument, in this order.
Who writes it
I build companies, coach executives, and write about the season that arrives after the win.
Three companies built and exited. A Harvard MBA, then a doctorate in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and years putting that training to work with founders and leaders. I served as an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, and I am a Professional Fellow at Harvard Medical School through the Institute of Coaching. My company work keeps me in the Cambridge medtech ecosystem, which means I get to spend time in both the Harvard and MIT worlds and borrow freely from each, particularly on what AI is doing to human judgment.
The psychology I studied was never one school. Humanistic and positive psychology, transpersonal and depth psychology, and the contemporary work that has grown out of each. They disagree with one another on a great deal, and the disagreements are where most of the useful material sits.
I have summited Mount Everest, traveled to more than ninety countries and lived in three, and trained for spaceflight. I am a pilot, a high-altitude mountaineer, and a scuba Divemaster. These are not hobbies: each one is an arena where a controlled mind decides the outcome, which makes them the places I find out whether what I teach actually holds under load.
I am also an Oxygen Advantage Advanced Instructor. Breathwork earns its place in this body of work for a specific reason: it is the most direct lever any of us has on the nervous system; and nervous system regulation is where the gap between knowing and becoming gets crossed (or does not).
A long education, in other words, in the difference between understanding a truth and reorganizing a life around it.
The through-line is older than any of it. The Stoics and the Hellenic schools were running experiments on how a person changes long before there were instruments to measure it. Modern neuroscience keeps arriving at conclusions they reached by observation. I work at that seam.
What it costs
Every essay is free and stays free. There are no paywalled essays and there will not be.
There is a paid side that exists for the reason this publication keeps circling back to. Understanding arrives quickly…and it arrives alone. Application is slower, it goes badly without structure and without someone who can see what you cannot see about yourself.
If a week comes when you want the work witnessed instead of only read, that door is open. If it never comes, the essays are still yours.
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