Meanwhile your 30s are the decade where the money decisions you make (or don't make) actually compound. Investing, paying down debt, building a cushion, figuring out what "financial stability" even looks like when your income isn't guaranteed.

Most people white-knuckle through it alone. Habits connects you with a vetted financial advisor who works with people in your exact situation…same age, same income range, same set of questions.

If you read last week, I made the argument that I had posted the most viral video of my career.

Nearly 8M views across channels. And nearly 2M came from YouTube! The newest channel added to our arsenal at Habits.

Someone on our team pulled me aside recently. Smart, driven, the kind of person who asks hard questions because they're already thinking two steps ahead. They wanted to talk candidly about competition, about pressure, about what it actually takes to break through when it feels like everyone is running the same playbook and the playbook keeps changing.

I didn't have a clean answer. But I had a story.

Quick context before I tell it. My generation — the early-to-mid 90s kids, the ones who snuck through the middle — has lived through five once-in-a-lifetime events before turning 35. The financial crisis, a pandemic, an inflation spiral, a complete rewiring of the job market, and a social media landscape that makes everyone else's highlight reel the wallpaper of your daily life. The running joke is that we never got a slow year to just exist in. And I think that's a big reason why so many of us carry this low-grade, persistent feeling of being behind. Like everyone else figured something out that we missed the memo on.

That feeling is worth naming before the story, because the story is about where it actually comes from — and why it's mostly wrong.

2017. Second-year analyst at JPMorgan. On a Thursday morning I opened an email that had been forwarded to my inbox at 2am. Saturday meeting. One of the largest publicly traded companies in the country. The CMO had been approached by a startup that just raised $200M to commercialize a drug that, at the time, was generating serious buzz in the health and wellness space. High-stakes in every direction — regulatory, financial, legal, personal. Two sets of attorneys. Multiple banking groups. Leadership from across the firm.

I was the only analyst.

This would have been fine, except it was April, which meant I was supposed to be in Chicago on Saturday. And if you're from the Midwest, you know that 50 degrees and sunny in Chicago in April is not 50 degrees. It's the closest thing to paradise the region produces. My college friends were already making plans. Wrigleyville. Day drinking. The full situation. I was 23 and had been looking forward to it for weeks, and now I was staring at an email at 7am that was very clearly about to blow the whole thing up.

I spent the next two days building materials I had no business building yet. Coordinating across attorney teams, internal approvals, people casually dropping in new sections at 9pm and then going completely silent so I had no idea if the silence meant it was approved or they'd just forgotten about me entirely. By Friday at 6pm I manually bound thirty books of 120-page decks. Somewhere in the process I'd been biting my nails so aggressively that I nicked my finger and didn't notice until I saw blood on a few of the finished decks. I made a note to deal with that later, went and grabbed a drink with some college friends, and was back out the door at 7am Saturday.

The meeting was eight hours in a room that was inexplicably about 80 degrees because apparently on Saturdays, corporate buildings in Indianapolis in April just decide to be that temperature and there's no maintenance staff around to fix it. I sat in the corner, took notes, managed the catered breakfast, managed the catered lunch, barely tracked half the conversation, and spent a meaningful portion of the afternoon doing mental math on whether I could still make it to Chicago if I left right after. The second wave of going out was absolutely still in play if I showered at my friend's place and got there by 10.

Around 3pm the CMO started wrapping up. He had a grandson's basketball game. In Indiana that's not a soft conflict — high school basketball here is basically mandatory attendance, somewhere between a civic duty and a religious obligation.

We were in the lobby doing the handshake round when he walked over to me. My banking team, from across the lobby, immediately locked eyes with me with a look that communicated one thing very clearly: do not say anything stupid.

He asked my name. Made a comment about me looking tired. Then said something I've been carrying around ever since.

"The only difference between you and me is that I've made more mistakes and had a little more life experience. I'm your equal. And when you're a director, a CEO, an executive — everyone will still be your equal. Just as smart. Just as hardworking. Just as capable."

He left to watch the basketball game. I stood there for a second processing it. Later I found out my managing director had opened his deck mid-meeting and spotted the blood on the pages. He didn't say anything at the time — just found me from across the conference room with a long, slow, wide-eyed look that required absolutely no translation. I did not make it to Chicago.

I've thought about that lobby moment probably a hundred times since. Not because of the setting, or the fact that I was 23 and running on four hours of sleep and mild fury about missing a Saturday in Wrigleyville. But because of what he actually said, and that he clearly meant it.

He wasn't performing humility. He was making a real argument: that experience doesn't elevate you above people who haven't had it yet. It just gives you more repetitions. More pattern recognition. More comfort with the specific flavor of uncertainty you've already survived. The gap between him and me wasn't intelligence or capability. It was that he'd had more chances to be wrong and had lived through them.

When that person on our team was talking to me about feeling the pressure, about the world getting more competitive — they weren't being dramatic. It is harder. Selling anything in 2025 is genuinely more difficult than it was ten years ago. Cold outreach barely works. Attention is scarce and fought over by algorithms designed by the smartest engineers in the world. Whatever your craft is, the floor has risen and the room is more crowded.

But the thing that makes that harder is not actually the competition. It's the story we tell ourselves about the competition — that the people ahead of us are a fundamentally different category of person. More talented. More wired for this. Built differently in some way that explains the gap.

They're not. Everyone is navigating the same basic uncertainty. The person who seems to have it figured out is also having weeks where nothing works. The executive who seems unshakeable has their own version of blood on the deck and a mentor from twenty years ago whose words they still hear. The competitor winning right now is also lying awake at 2am running the same math you are.

I genuinely believe everyone is trying their best. Not as a platitude — as an operating assumption that actually changes how you move. Because if that's true, then the only real question is whether you're willing to keep accumulating your own repetitions. Keep getting it wrong. Keep showing up on Saturdays when you really, really wanted to be somewhere else.

The gap between you and whoever you're measuring yourself against is smaller than it looks. And it's almost entirely made of time.

The most competitive thing you can do is stop treating the people ahead of you as a different species.

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