Physical

Saturday mornings at fields across the country, the fields fill up by eight. Travel kits, parents three rows deep in folding chairs, eight-year-olds coached like the scouts are in the stands.

Landon Donovan experienced it personally this year. He recently shared on a podcast that his son, who is 8, had played two seasons for a big San Diego soccer club. Then the club brought in bigger, faster, stronger kids and moved the smaller boys, his son included, to the B-team. Donovan told Front Office Sports he was in bed crying with his son, explaining he wouldn’t be with his friends anymore. The most decorated American player alive, and he experienced it like the rest of us.

What he said next is way more important. Make sure they love the sport first. Make sure they’re getting better. Throw the winning out the window. They’re 8, 10, 12 years old.

He pointed to a study of youth soccer: only 0.6% of players picked for a national program at Under-12 ever reached the professional level. The wider research backs the spirit of it. Arne Güllich’s 2014 study of the German system found the squads churn constantly, and the players selected earliest were no more likely to make it. A 2021 nationwide study out of Tübingen tested 13,869 boys aged twelve to fifteen on sprint, dribbling, ball control, the works, and three seasons later only nine percent had reached even a professional youth academy. The most data-rich talent system on earth can’t tell you at twelve who’s going to be good.

So what are we training an eight-year-old’s body for. A trophy this weekend, the chance to bite the medal in a photo for Instagram, or so they can be fit, become resilient, have fun with their friends. Most kids quit by thirteen. They don’t quit because they stopped being able to run. They quit because someone made the running stop being fun.

Mental

I’ve run far enough to know what a lot of miles can mean to you. The early alarm. The long solitary hours. The way the training quietly becomes the thing the week is built around.

This week I watched a short film called More Than the Miles, about the ultrarunner Jeff Mogavero. He ran the fastest debut in Western States history. He lines up again this Saturday, in the deepest field the race has ever had. By every measure the sport keeps, he *is* the miles. The splits, the volume, the finish times.

The film is about that, but about everything else. My favorite part is at 5:45 into the film. The point it keeps circling is in the title. The running is real, and the running is not the whole of him.

I keep thinking about this because it’s the trap of anyone good at something. The thing you do best starts to stand in for who you are. The runner becomes the running. The founder becomes the company. The parent becomes the logistics. Then one day the thing ends, or slows, or someone faster shows up, and if you let it be your whole identity, you’re left holding very little.

Mogavero is thirty-two and at the top of his sport, and he’s already saying it out loud. Most people don’t say it until the miles are far behind them.

The question isn’t whether you’re good at your thing. It’s what’s left of you when you set it down.

Financial

There’s a version of my morning I don’t talk about much. Coffee on the back step, Arlo doing his rounds in the yard, the kids still asleep upstairs in a house in a town I chose. On paper I built all of that. Sat down, made the plan, did the work. And most of it could have gone another way.

Barry Ritholtz wrote an essay this month called Serendipity, on the role of luck in a career. He’s interviewed 650 people for his podcast over twelve years. Nobel winners, billionaires, fund managers. The first time a billionaire told him luck was the reason, he wrote it off as false humility. By the fifth and the tenth, he couldn’t.

His sharpest version came from the investor Howard Marks. Everybody in my MBA class was smart and worked hard, Marks told him. Hard work and intelligence are table stakes. Not everybody gets fortune to smile on them.

Table stakes. The effort, the discipline, the skill, none of that makes you lucky. It’s the cost of sitting down at the table at all. After that, a lot of where you land is the lounge chair you happened to pick, the calendar that happened to free you up, the person who happened to say yes.

I worked in a world that loves to keep score, and the scoreboard tells a clean story: you earned this. Some of it, you did. Some of it, you got. The honest move is knowing which is which.

You can’t earn back a single hour of time. You also didn’t fully earn the time you got handed. Naming the luck doesn’t make the work smaller. It makes you hold the result a little more carefully, and a little less like you were owed it.

Spiritual

You’re going to wonder why a list like this lands in the Spiritual pillar. Stay with me.

I went back through some old notes this week and started writing down things I’m glad I’ve done since 2020. Not accomplishments. Choices.

Glad I’ve spent so much time in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, CVNP, on the trails.

Glad I haven’t missed my kids’ games, the school plays, the random Tuesday classroom party.

Glad I’ve kept my body able to get down on the ground, play catch, ride bikes, run, get on the court for pickleball or hoops whenever they ask.

Glad I live 3 minutes from my parents and most of my family.

Glad I deleted most of the social media off my phone and didn’t miss it.

Glad I’ve made myself sit with what I want life to look like twenty years from now.

Glad I’ve grabbed more slow coffees and breakfasts with friends, the kind with no agenda and nowhere to be.

Glad I’ve taken the trips while the kids still want to come.

Glad I’ve said no to more of what doesn’t matter, so there was room for what does.

Here’s why it’s spiritual. Meaning doesn’t arrive. You don’t wake up one morning holding it. You build it in advance, in choices that don’t feel like much on the day you make them, and one ordinary morning you look up and notice it’s there. This list is the receipt. Every line is something I chose on purpose, usually when no one was watching and nothing was forcing me to.

Make your own. Then look at what you’ve actually been doing this year, and see whether the two lists match.

That’s the week. Four pillars, one clock.

If Four Pillar Friday is doing something for you, send it to one person who’d get something from it. That’s how this grows.

Until next week.

Journey + The 9:03