On intellectual discernment, identity, and the best decision I've made in a year.
It's just past midnight on June 9th, 2025.
I'm in BahÃa de Banderas, Mexico. One of my closest friends is getting married tomorrow on the beach. I've had a couple of drinks that evening. Nothing wild, just the casual, social kind you don't even think about.
I'm sitting in front of the TV, half-watching a show called The Apprentice - the biographical drama that follows Donald Trump's early career. There's a scene where Ivana asks him: "You're really not gonna drink anything?"
Trump looks at her and says: "I don't like anything that slows me down."
I put my drink down, and I never picked it up again.
The next morning I got up sober, got dressed, and watched my close friend exchange vows under a flower arch on the beach, with the ocean behind them, in the clearest state of mind I'd been in at a social event in years.
That was one year ago.
I haven't had a drink since, with one exception: half a glass of champagne when I got down on one knee and proposed to my fiance (now wife) on November 4th, 2025. We got married on March 8th, 2026. That moment aside, I have been completely sober, and it has been the best decision I've made in recent memory.
I don't fully agree with Donald Trump. On a lot of things. And yet a line from a TV show about his life changed mine. That is what this article is about.
#The man you're not supposed to learn from
Donald Trump is one of the most polarizing figures alive.
People either worship him or despise him, with almost no middle ground. That binary - hero or villain, saint or monster - is where most people get stuck. If you love Trump, you defend everything he does. If you hate him, you dismiss everything he says.
Both positions are intellectually lazy.
I say that as a philosophical point, not a political one. The moment you decide a person is entirely right or entirely wrong, you have stopped thinking. You've handed your discernment over to your emotions and asked them to do the heavy lifting, and they will fail you every time.
What I've come to believe is that the world's most capable people are rarely admirable in every dimension of their life. That's fine. You don't need them to be. What you need is the ability to take the parts that are genuinely valuable and discard the rest - without guilt, without confusion, and without compromising your own values in the process.
I don't agree with Trump on a lot of things he says and does. I'm not here to defend his politics, his character, or his choices. One line he said stopped me from drinking, and I'm grateful for it.
#Why the line landed
How that line landed matters.
I had read articles about the health benefits of sobriety. I had seen the data on sleep quality, cognitive performance, liver health, mental clarity. I had friends who'd quit drinking and told me how much better they felt. None of it moved me.
Not because I was in denial, but because none of it spoke to something I cared about at an identity level.
"Alcohol is bad for your liver" is a health argument. It targets the part of your brain that processes risk and consequence, and that part is remarkably easy to override when there's a cold drink in front of you and good company around you. The cost feels abstract. The pleasure feels immediate.
"I don't like anything that slows me down" is a different kind of statement. It's an identity declaration, not a health argument or a moral position. It says: this is the kind of person I am. I move fast. I stay sharp. I don't accept friction voluntarily. The decision not to drink isn't about what alcohol does to your body. It's about your relationship to your own momentum.
I care deeply about my momentum. I build companies. I think obsessively about performance - of products, of teams, of systems, of myself. The idea that I was voluntarily introducing something that slowed me down, even marginally, even socially, suddenly felt absurd. Not dangerous, not immoral, just absurd. Like driving with the handbrake slightly engaged because everyone else does it.
#The decision was instantaneous
People ask me if it was hard to stop.
It wasn't, and I think that says something.
There were no weeks of deliberation and no plan. No "I'll start after the trip" or "I'll give myself until the new year." The line landed, something clicked, and I was done.
The next morning was my close friend's beach wedding in Mexico, surrounded by people drinking, celebrating, toasting. By every conventional logic that should have been the hardest test. Your best friend is getting married, you're in Mexico, and everyone has a glass in their hand.
I didn't feel the pull.
That's when I understood something: the decisions that change your life don't happen through discipline. They happen through identity shifts. Once you become the kind of person who doesn't do something, the willpower question stops mattering. You're not fighting an urge. The urge just stops making sense.
Behavior change says: "I'm going to try not to drink this month." It's a rule. Rules require enforcement, enforcement requires energy, and energy is finite.
Identity change says: "I'm not someone who drinks." It's a fact, and facts don't need defending.
What Trump's line did, accidentally, from a TV show, at midnight in Mexico, was trigger an identity shift rather than a resolution. I didn't decide to stop drinking. I became someone who doesn't drink, in the moment I heard that line, and that's why it stuck.
#What a year of sobriety changed
I'm not going to write a listicle about the benefits of sobriety. You've read those. The better sleep, the mental clarity and the sharpness in the morning are all real, and I'll leave it at that.
What I want to talk about is texture.
The texture of your life changes when you remove alcohol from it. Not dramatically or overnight, but steadily, and in a direction you don't fully anticipate. The version of me that existed before June 9th, 2025 and the version that exists today are not the same person.
Sober, you are more present than you realize you weren't before. Not just at events. In conversations. In the quiet moments in the morning before the day starts. In the spaces between things. A quality of attention comes back when you stop dulling it, even slightly, on a regular basis. You notice more, you remember more, and you feel things more cleanly.
The second thing that changed was my relationship to social pressure.
Drinking is one of the most socially enforced behaviors I've ever encountered. When you stop, people notice. They ask why. Some get uncomfortable, which tells you something about their own relationship with it. Learning to hold that pressure without caving - politely, without making it a whole thing, without lecturing anyone - built a quiet confidence in me that I didn't expect.
And then there's Lauriane.
I stopped drinking on June 9th. Five months later, on November 4th, I proposed to the woman I was going to marry. We wed on March 8th, 2026. I want to be careful not to over-engineer a causal story here, but the clarity from those five months was not irrelevant to the quality of that decision. The version of me that got down on one knee was sharper, more present, and more certain than any version of me that drank regularly.
The one glass of champagne I allowed myself that evening wasn't a relapse. It was a moment of celebration with the woman I love, conscious and chosen, not habitual. There's a difference.
That is all the alcohol I've had in a year, and I don't regret any of it.
#The Elon problem
Trump alone might look like a coincidence, so here is a second example.
Elon Musk is another person the world has decided you must have a single, total opinion about. Either he's a visionary genius saving civilization, or he's a dangerous billionaire destroying it. The discourse gives you two options and asks you to pick one.
I'm not going to pick one.
Watching one person run Tesla, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company simultaneously, with the intensity that he does, is one of the most motivating things I've ever witnessed professionally. Not because I agree with everything he says or does, and not because I want to replicate his personal life. Because what he demonstrates about what is possible for a single human being is extraordinary.
What makes it more striking is that he doesn't need to do any of it. He's the richest human being alive. He has more money than most countries. He could stop tomorrow and live ten lifetimes in comfort. That he doesn't - that he is still possessed, still driven, still building things that didn't exist before - tells me something about motivation at the highest level. Money clearly isn't what keeps him going. The mission is, and the obsession, being the kind of person who cannot not build.
That quality - the refusal to coast, the obsessive forward motion, the drive to matter regardless of external validation - is something I find genuinely inspiring, and I have chosen to learn from it.
I didn't have to agree with his politics to do that. I didn't have to endorse his personal decisions, become a Musk disciple, or defend everything he's ever said on the internet. I only had to be discerning enough to take the thing that was valuable and apply it to my own life.
#The framework: absorb, discard, add
There's a principle, often attributed to Bruce Lee, that goes something like: absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is essentially your own.
The idea is simple. The execution is harder than it sounds.
Most people run binary logic on the people they admire or despise. Hero worship: this person is great, so everything they say is correct and worth adopting. Total rejection: this person is wrong about something important, so nothing they say is worth hearing. Both are cognitive shortcuts, and both waste your intelligence.
The mature way to engage with another human being - especially a public figure, especially a controversial one - is to treat them as a collection of ideas and behaviors, some of which may be valuable to you and some of which may not. Your job is to sort them, not to accept or reject the whole package.
If you can learn from people you disagree with, your pool of useful ideas becomes close to unlimited. You're no longer restricted to people whose entire worldview matches yours. You can learn from people across the political spectrum, across industries, across cultures, across moral frameworks, and still keep your own values and identity intact.
If you can only learn from people you fully agree with, you have badly constrained your own growth. You've built a wall around your intellectual development and called it integrity, when it's fear dressed up as principle.
The framework I use is simple:
- Does this idea or behavior, applied to my life, make me stronger, sharper, more effective, or more aligned with who I want to be? If yes, take it. Use it. Let it compound.
- Does this idea or behavior conflict with my values, harm others, or pull me away from who I am? If yes, discard it. You owe no one loyalty to their worst qualities.
- Am I idolizing this person broadly, or learning from them specifically? The distinction matters enormously. No one should be your idol in totality. Domain-specific admiration is healthy. Wholesale hero worship makes you intellectually dependent.
Trump on not drinking: taken, applied, and it changed my life.
Elon on obsessive mission-driven work: taken, applied, and it shapes how I approach building every day.
Trump's politics: not mine, not adopted, not my responsibility to defend.
Elon's personal life choices: his business, not mine. I'm not running his life. I'm running mine.
#The liberty of a discerning mind
We are more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for.
I mean that seriously. The human brain is extraordinary at pattern recognition, at separating signal from noise, at telling what serves us from what doesn't. But we have been culturally conditioned to outsource that judgment. To teams. To tribes. To media narratives that tell us who the heroes and villains are, so we don't have to decide for ourselves.
The all-or-nothing thinking that dominates public discourse about polarizing figures is not wisdom. It feels like having strong opinions, and it feels like integrity. In practice it's a way of avoiding the harder and more rewarding work of thinking for yourself.
Nobody gets to own all of you.
Not Trump. Not Elon. Not your political party, your culture, your industry, or the prevailing consensus of whatever room you happen to be in.
Your idols, if you have them, should be domain-specific. Even within that domain they should be instructive, not prescriptive. You take the lesson, not the whole person.
I am a year sober today.
I am married to the woman I love. I am building companies I believe in. I am sharper, more present, and more deliberate than I was a year ago. None of that happened despite clear thinking. It happened because of it.
It started with a line from a man I don't fully agree with, on a TV I was half-watching, at midnight in Mexico, while holding a drink I was about to put down for good. The lessons that change you rarely come from the sources you'd pick. Mine came from someone I argue with, and I'd have missed it if I had decided in advance that he had nothing to teach me.
- An
