How the internet hijacks ambition, and five ways to escape messaging overload

Executive overview

Online hustle culture targets a real human drive — the paleolithic impulse to impress your tribe through hard, visible effort. Pseudo excellence hijacks that drive and redirects it toward performance of greatness rather than the actual work of it. True excellence is a process of becoming, not a standard to reach, and it requires caring deeply about pursuits that align with your values.

The antidote to pseudo excellence is involved engagement with something real — and keeping digital communication structural rather than reactive.

Pseudo excellence vs. true excellence

• Pseudo excellence: elaborate morning routines, supplements, hustle rhetoric — optimised for attention, not output
• Influencers selling these signals are typically building a platform, not mastering a craft
• The safety of a 50-step checklist is its lack of failure — but also its lack of progress
• Elite performers have simple, mundane routines; complexity signals fragility, not readiness
• The muscular-influencer aesthetic often relies on undisclosed steroids — the supplements are the grift
• Women's pseudo excellence parallels men's: restrictive diets, tradwife performance, extreme study kabuki

What true excellence actually looks like

• Excellence is an ongoing process of becoming — there is no "arriving"
• Select pursuits based on your values, not what seems impressive or popular
• Caring deeply and risking failure unlocks potential; feigning nonchalance forecloses it
• The craft shapes you — Brad Stolberg's deadlifting taught patience, vulnerability, and community, not just strength
• Greg Popovich, Hillary Hahn, and Lane Norton all say the same thing: relationships and self-knowledge matter more than results

Finding excellence at different life stages

• In your 20s: drop the nonchalance, define your values, reduce social media — you need room to care without an audience judging you
• In your 40s: pursue excellence through your job if it challenges you; if not, a hobby with genuine craft delivers the same growth
• Parenting: model the behaviour — let children see you doing the real thing, not just the metrics that result from it

The internet's role

• The internet can be a powerful way station to real-world communities, coaches, and friendships
• When it becomes a terminal endpoint, it tends to pull people toward fads and cycles
• Viral formats reward performance; slower formats reward substance — the format shapes what gets rewarded
• Use it to find people or information, then take it offline

Five ways to escape communication overload

Knowledge workers now receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily — 270 interruptions across only 480 working minutes. None of the fixes require new technology.

1. Eliminate threads — anything requiring more than one reply should move to a synchronous call or office hours; phone zones (a broad window when you're reachable by phone) replace the need to monitor inboxes constantly
2. Relocate for deep work — a separate location without internet access trains your brain to shift modes and removes the option to drift back to communication
3. Batch group discussion — docket-clearing meetings two or three times a week (with a shared document for queued items) can eliminate 90% of group email threads and 50% of ad hoc meetings
4. Create processes — for every task, define who delivers what, where, and when; this four-W structure prevents the ad hoc message chains that generate most inbox volume
5. Reduce active projects — communication load is a side effect of project overload; limit active work to two or three things and put everything else in a formal holding status

Generative AI: an honest accounting

A structured review of a crowdsourced thread on what LLM investment has actually produced (excluding computer programming and pre-existing ML tools) yields a short list:

• Pattern finding in data sets
• Producing slides from documents
• Summarising text into bullet points
• First-line customer service chat agents
• Writing routine, formulaic text
• Making sense of complicated documents

These are useful, but not transformative. The comparison: the early internet eliminated the yellow pages, enabled global free communication, and made e-commerce possible. The bar for "the biggest thing ever" requires more than this list so far.