Podcast
The Economy of Her
This conversation is about redesigning the systems that determine who earns, who owns, who gets funded, and who gets remembered when opportunities eme...
Grit is not force but sustained progress—balancing effort and restraint, regulating dopamine through meaningful goals, and building wealth through consistency, patience, and long-term discipline.
One afternoon in late March 2026, my youngest son Ben and I found ourselves at the top and outermost edge of the West Bowl at Lake Louise. Despite the constant wind and blowing snow, it was quiet in a way very specific to being that high up in the mountains, and that far from the world we know.
The wind moved across the top of the bowl in long, patient currents, lifting giant ribbons of snow into the air before letting them settle again. From where we stood, the slope dropped away steeply enough and for long enough, that the trees at the bottom of the bowl of shin deep powder looked like ants standing upright in the distance. Somewhere way down below us the run becomes a run again, with signs and other skiers, but from here all we could see was the wide pitch.
Ben leans on the tops of his poles and peers over the edge with the calm curiosity of someone whose nervous system has not yet learned to overthink gravity. He joyfully admits he has never felt this kind of vertigo before, and without flinching then says, “You ready?” To him the line looks like possibility, but no matter how hard I try, it looks like a question.
Whether it’s a chute, or a bowl, or a path of moguls through the trees, this is the moment the nervous system always faces on a big mountain: the quiet negotiation between caution and courage. Is this danger or is this challenge?
If you saw us standing there together on the ridge this week in Banff, the mythology of the moment would have struck you just as it did me.
He is Hercules. At sixteen, strength arrives easily. Speed comes naturally. His nervous system is wired for acceleration, and he moves through terrain with the kind of physical confidence that only youth and training can produce. When he looks at a steep pitch he sees motion, rhythm, momentum.
I see a system. If he is Hercules, charging headfirst into the labour of the mountain, then I am something closer to Odysseus – the strategist – the one quietly studying the snow surface, how to navigate the angle of the slope, the direction of the wind, and reminding both of us that the goal of any good adventure is not simply intensity, it’s getting home again at the end of it.
What has been fascinating about skiing together this week is how naturally those roles emerge, and how they seem to serve us both separately and together.
I regulate his dopamine, and he trains my grit, because resilience, it turns out, is rarely built alone.
More often it emerges in the space between people – between strength and patience, between momentum and restraint, between the instinct to charge forward and the wisdom to pause for just a moment longer.
Somewhere between Hercules and Odysseus is where most real resilience actually lives. And biology, interestingly enough, agrees.
Popular culture tends to describe grit as a kind of heroic stubbornness: push harder, work longer, just do it. But the nervous system tells a quieter and far more interesting story because the brain does not reward endless strain, it rewards progress. Think about doing something physically challenging – say carrying a heavy piece of furniture up a flight of stairs. Do you feel great doing it? Or do you get a hit of feeling great when you pause at the landing and declare the halfway point? That’s dopamine.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter most commonly associated with pleasure and is better understood as a signal of forward motion. When the brain detects movement toward a meaningful goal, dopamine rises, reinforcing the behavior that produced that progress. So you don’t suddenly love carrying heavy things that could steal one or more toes with one false move, rather you love dopamine and you know you will get more of it by making it all the way to the top.
This creates what neuroscientists sometimes describe as an effort loop:
Effort produces progress → progress produces dopamine → dopamine strengthens the willingness to exert effort again.
Over time the nervous system stops associating challenge purely with discomfort and begins associating it with meaning. As an athlete I know this feeling well. When I used to compete at CrossFit people would ask “how often do you train?” to which I would reply “two to three hours a day, but Monday is a rest day.” This wasn’t because I was crazy, it’s because I was fascinated by the effort loop and learned to translate it to other parts of my life. As a result of this powerful system, entrepreneurs recognize it too, and yes even long-term investors experience it in their own way (if they can ignore the algorithm’s noise designed to take them off course).
The work does not necessarily become easier but the brain learns to enjoy the climb, and this is why the ancient myths about endurance remain so strangely relevant even today. They understood something about resilience that modern hustle culture often forgets.
The story of Hercules is long considered an illustration the strongest hero in Greek mythology. But when you look closely at the twelve labours he has to complete, strength alone rarely solves the problem.
Take the Hydra for example. Every time Hercules cuts off one of the creature’s heads, two more grow back in its place. The harder he fights and the more heads he cuts off, the worse things become. He only succeeds when he changes strategy.
With the help of his companion Iolaus, he eventually figures out he has to cauterize each wound after cutting it to prevent the monster from regenerating. The lesson embedded in that myth is subtle but powerful: persistence without adaptation is not resilience, it’s just plain exhausting.
Hercules does not succeed because he keeps swinging his sword harder, but because he learns how the system he is fighting actually works.
Spend enough time skiing with a teenager and you will see that lesson play out in real time. Strength gets you into the terrain, but sometimes it’s strategy that gets you out of it.
If Hercules represents physical strength made great by lessons in strategy, Odysseus represents something operating in another time zone altogether: enduring strategic patience.
After the Trojan War ends, Odysseus spends ten years trying to return home. His journey is not defined by brute force but by restraint, creativity, and the ability to think several moves ahead. He survives the Sirens by binding himself to the mast so he cannot steer the ship toward their song. He navigates the narrow passage between Scylla and Charybdis not by eliminating risk entirely, but by choosing the least catastrophic option.
Odysseus survives because he understands something essential about resilience: sometimes the real victory lies in staying in the journey long enough to reach the horizon.
That particular form of resilience turns out to be extraordinarily useful in another domain where human beings regularly face uncertainty, temptation, and delayed reward.
Money.
On the ski hill this week, the dance between Hercules and Odysseus has been unfolding run after run. Ben brings the willingness to push harder, ski faster, and explore terrain that stretches my comfort zone, and damn it if I didn’t amaze myself with the help of little shots of dopamine every time I levelled up. But I bring the quiet nervous system regulation that says let’s ski this face tomorrow when the light is better, stop while we still feel strong, or save something in the tank for the next day.
He trains my resilience, and I train his patience, because resilience isn’t a single trait it is a relationship between intensity and restraint. Like skiing, like investing, like life. So how, you ask, is this going to help me build real wealth?
Let me tell you.
After decades of advising families about money, I have come to believe that the most powerful wealth-building skill I have ever seen is not brilliance, it’s definitely not market timing, and you don’t even have to have a high appetite for risk although that can be helpful if you really know how to block out the noise.
It’s ability to live within your means.
When someone masters this skill, two extraordinary things begin to happen biologically which create learning loops and effort loops and, you guessed it, real wealth.
First, stress decreases. The nervous system stops operating in a constant threat state, and all that noise that is engineered to freak you out and make you buy things don’t stand a chance. You suddenly have a Herculean strength “B.S.” meter working for you.
Second, time horizons expand. Like Odysseus you gain the ability to delay gratification and allow investments to compound because you have your eye on that horizon you are moving steadily towards – and yes, it takes a decade to build real wealth. Get that into your mind right now: people gravely overestimate what they can achieve in one year, and underestimate what’s possible in ten years. Get off the 500 million terabyte cycle of news, stop thinking in years, and start thinking in decades. What is possible in TWO decades will totally blow your mind if let it. Living within your means is essentially Odysseus tying himself to the mast. It protects you from the seductive pull of short-term dopamine, and gives you back the clarity of vision for your goals, your horizon, your home and future.
Once that discipline is in place, wealth building becomes surprisingly straightforward. The gap between what you earn and what you spend – even if it doesn’t seem like much at first – can be directed toward investment, which is where the miracle of compounding becomes your Hercules and starts doing some of the heavy lifting for you. Over time those contributions gather momentum the way physical training gathers momentum after months and years of consistent effort.
There is nothing particularly dramatic about this process, it’s simply Hercules doing the labour over and over again, while Odysseus guides the journey, because the final ingredient of wealth is not effort, it’s time.
It’s also having the patience to stay invested when markets fluctuate, and to save more into volatile markets whenever you can. It’s letting the voice in your head become smarter and louder and better at ignoring the noise so that compounding can quietly do its work across decades.
The investors who succeed are not necessarily the smartest, they’re the ones who understand these rules of time and biology, and simply stay in the boat.
Standing on the ridge this week watching my son point his skis down a line that makes my own nervous system hesitate and stomach churn, I was reminded again of how resilience actually works: strength matters, but strength alone is not enough.
Hercules teaches us how to endure the labour, and Odysseus teaches us how to stay the course.
And somewhere between those two forms of resilience lies the quiet discipline that builds both capability and wealth.
In finance, it means living within your means, investing consistently, and allowing time to do the heavy lifting. Grit, it turns out, is not white-knuckling life, it’s learning how to manage energy – biological and financial – over time. And when we do that well, something remarkable happens.
The climb itself becomes the reward.
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