When I started out as an entrepreneur, every new offer, audience, and platform looked like a door worth walking through. Years later, I see the opposite trap in experienced founders. In this Hebdomadal Question, I turn to Carl Sagan’s call for a “marriage of wonder and skepticism” and ask what deserves your attention, and what has earned your commitment.

• Why Sagan argued in The Demon-Haunted World that real discovery needs wonder and skepticism at once
• What happens at each extreme, and which one experienced entrepreneurs tend to slide toward
• Which of the two should govern your attention, and which should govern your belief
• How the algorithm gets this balance backwards for most of us
• A first look at the Worthy Excellence Institute’s year-long hypothesis on attention, discernment, and judgment, plus the Worthy Attention Test and the Perception Intensive

I planned to launch Gold Standards Magazine this summer. Summer came and went. In this Hebdomadal Question, I take up an old Army maxim that Eisenhower made famous, that plans are worthless and planning is everything, and ask what we lose when we hold our plans too tightly.

• What Eisenhower said to do with your plans the moment an emergency arrives
• Why the work of planning is what lets you be fully present when things go sideways
• The built-in advantage small, nimble businesses have, and how most entrepreneurs throw it away
• Why we cling to our quarterly targets almost as tightly as to the businesses they’re meant to serve
• Why I am, in a certain way, glad I missed my own deadline

Magazines have always sold us a way to live. While building Gold Standards Magazine, I went down a rabbit hole of magazine history, and it led me back to a film I admire but can’t quite call a favorite: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In this first Hebdomadal Question, I ask how to have the glamour and the meaning at once, and what it takes to want more from a place of abundance.

• Whether the glossy cover image holds up a life actually worth wanting
• The 1960 film that gave us the word “paparazzi,” and why I keep trying to rescue its protagonist
• The paradox of happiness: contentment and hunger held at the same time
• Maslow’s two kinds of hunger, and how to tell which one is driving you
• Why a podcast called Excellence Becoming has to make room for being

This is a recording of a Substack livestream. Join us live on Mondays for future episodes. Find out more at www.worthyexcellence.com