A summer reset — soccer, fiction, and guarding my evenings

I'm in the middle of a quiet reset this summer. No grand plan behind it — just three small changes that have added up to a different kind of week: watching a lot of soccer, reading fiction again, and being deliberate about protecting my evenings. Writing it down because the three turned out to be more connected than I expected.

The underdogs are the whole point

The World Cup has me up at odd hours again, and the games I can't look away from aren't the ones with the biggest names. It's the underdogs — Paraguay grinding out a result, Congo refusing to be the pushover the bracket assumed, the non-European sides who show up with less pedigree and more spirit and just give everything until the whistle.

What gets me isn't the upset itself. It's the posture behind it: a team that plays like the score is still 0–0 in the 89th minute, chasing a ball that a more cynical squad would have let roll out. There's no analytics model for that. It's want. It's eleven people deciding, together, not to give up before it's actually over.

I keep thinking about how rare that is — in sport and everywhere else. Most things aren't lost because the gap was too big. They're lost because someone quietly decided the gap was too big and stopped trying a few minutes early.

Reading fiction again

For a couple of years my nightstand was all nonfiction — economics, psychology, systems, the "useful" stuff. This summer I swapped the stack: Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea, and Orbital, with Four Thousand Weeks as the bridge between the two worlds.

Fiction does something nonfiction can't. Nonfiction hands you a conclusion; fiction makes you sit inside a situation and feel your way to your own. Hemingway's old man loses the marlin to the sharks and rows home with a skeleton — and somehow it's not a story about losing. It's the same thing the underdogs are showing me on the pitch: the effort was the point, not the trophy.

Guarding the evenings

The third change is the least visible and maybe the most important. Life is short in a way that's easy to abstract away when every evening gets spent on one more thing. So I've started treating evenings as something to protect rather than fill — fewer commitments, more of the walk, the match, the book, the nothing.

The best framing I've heard for this is a simple prioritization rule: write down your top 25 goals, circle the 5 that matter most, and then — here's the twist — avoid the other 20 at all costs. They're not your someday-list. They're the exact things that will quietly eat the time and attention your top 5 need.

The idea stuck with me anyway. My "20" aren't bad things. They're good things — good enough to be dangerous, because they're the ones that sneak into an evening dressed as productivity and leave no room for the 5.

The small connection

I didn't set out to make this a work post, and I won't. But there's one thread I can't unsee: the underdog who plays till the 90th, the old man who rows home anyway, and the discipline of saying no to the 20 are all the same muscle. Give everything to the few things that matter, and refuse to quit on them early. It turns out that's also just a decent way to build systems — and a decent way to spend a summer.