Good morning!

If you're a regular, you may have noticed that it's been a short while since I sent out a newsletter, but it's all good.

It's just been a very busy time with a few projects I'm working on, the most exciting of which is polishing the newest version of my keynote speech.

It's called Adaptive Agency: Winning The Fight That Matters.

I know this is a long shot, but if anyone is in a position to have a speaker address an audience—whether it's a youth program, sports team, non-profit, association, or corporate audience—I'd love it if you shot me an email and we had a chat.

Prole Drift: How America Is Becoming The Hood—And Calling It Progress

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I just got hip to this phrase “prole drift.”

It’s a fancy term for something I’ve been watching happen for years: middle-class Americans gradually adopting the lifestyles and habits I grew up around in the projects.

And I’m witnessing this trend with a rather unique perspective.

​I was born and raised in the ghetto, the hood, the projects, or whatever name you prefer for government-subsidized housing.

​Not just a run-down neighborhood that’s been overrun by hordes of Section 8 vouchers, but entire city blocks that function more as a theatre of war for rival street gangs than a place to raise a family.

But then, by the grace of a school magnet program, I spent my teenage years at a high school across town, where I no longer had to worry about what colors I wore to school or getting made fun of for using proper grammar and speaking in complete sentences.

​In terms of attitudes and behaviors, for a long time, the ghetto was like Vegas: what happened in the hood stayed in the hood. But now, many of the behaviors I associated with the ghetto are becoming surprisingly common in the middle class.

Why is this happening, and what does it mean?

Is the whole country turning into the damn ghetto?

That depends on where you’re looking, who you’re looking at, and—most importantly of all—what you know about both sides of the fence.

It’s easy to call something ghetto if you’ve never been there and all you know is from rap music and that one time you decided to “learn the culture” and marathon-watched BET.

It’s even easier to think something is for middle and upper classes if the only card you’ve ever touched is EBT. I remember thinking my high school classmates were rich because they had a house, a car, and a fridge full of food that didn’t depend on the first of the month to be refilled.

Growing up in one world and going to school in another made it easier to see which habits were crossing that fence. What interested me was how they went from being things my classmates would have called ghetto to things their peers took for granted.

• ​Read the rest of the article on my website​
• ​Read the rest of the article on Substack​
• ​Read the rest of the article on X​

Today's Sponsor: Moment

Moment is a fascinating new player among apps designed to help men quit porn. Rather than having you sign up for a course or join a cohort, or learn about the psychology of compulsive behavior, the Moment app takes a different approach.

I’ve worked with companies in this space and used their products, including Covenant Eyes, Quittr, and Relay.

Across the category, you’ll always find the usual suspects of features and tools such as content blockers, educational modules, accountability groups, and streak counters. Many programs also offer support rooted in religious faith.

There is a lot of value in those approaches.

Understanding your behavior and having people to lean on is incredibly useful when it comes to making change. But what many of these approaches have not been able to do is devise a system to anticipate and navigate urges as they arise.

And that moment looks different for everyone.

For one person, it might come late at night when he’s alone. For another, it might follow a stressful workday, an argument, or an afternoon of aimless scrolling. Even knowing your triggers doesn’t necessarily mean you have a plan for responding to them.

Moment focuses on those individual patterns.

Through check-ins, an interactive journal, and practical principles rooted in behavioral psychology, the app is designed to learn from what you record about your habits, moods, and triggers.

It uses that information to help you recognize when you are most likely to experience an urge, check in with you, and guide you through those situations.

When an urge hits, you can open the app to access guided breathing and mindfulness exercises designed to interrupt the path between stimulus and action. Afterward, you use the interactive journal to reflect on what happened and use that information the next time.

The beauty of this approach is in its simplicity: recognize the pattern, interrupt the automatic response, and practice a different one.

​You can read my entire review of the Moment app here.​

​You can also download it from the Apple iOS Store or Moment's website.​

Hard Lesson Of The Week

A hard thing for many well-meaning people to accept:

• The people who need help the most usually resist it the hardest.
• Not everyone wants to be helped.
• They will get mad at you for trying to help them.
• Some people are beyond help.

It's an unfortunate fact of life, but no good deed goes unpunished, especially when it's the only way out for someone.

I don't know whether it's resentment at requiring assistance or a genuine self-destructive pathology, but this is an unfortunate trend.

A simple set of rules for the person who does not want their heart to harden in the face of human stubbornness:

1. Don't offer help to people who aren't trying to help themselves.
2. Don't offer unsolicited advice to people who have made their issue an identity.
3. Don't extend a hand more than once unless the person uses your advice the first time.
4. Never repeat yourself.
5. This rule is the hardest one: stop caring if they listen to you or not. As Ivan Drago said in Rocky 4, "If he dies, he dies."

These rules are more for your sanity than for their benefit. Never stop wanting to help, but definitely stop trying to help people who won't take it or use it.

You can't care about someone more than they care about themselves.

​Read more Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business​