Your new favorite ritual
with a side of Raising Canes Chicken Fingers
When we launched our matcha after I came back from Japan in April, we only released Matcha Powder. The most common question I heard was “How do I make this?” That question stuck with me. It showed me that people didn’t just want matcha. They wanted a ritual. They wanted guidance. They wanted a way to bring a moment of presence into their day.
Now I finally get to give our community the tools to do that with our BVOY Matcha Holiday Box. It includes a handcrafted bowl and whisk holder we made with Happy Medium, the whisk itself, a scoop for measuring, a sifter to make the matcha extra smooth, our ceremonial-grade matcha, and illustrated instructions by Kate McDuffie so anyone can make a beautiful cup of matcha through the BVOY lens.
Putting this box together reminded me why I love building things that slow life down. It made me think about how rare it is to choose the slightly harder, more intentional path in a world that pushes us toward easy comfort. And how different life feels when we push back against that current.
That thought became the seed for what I want to share next. An idea I keep learning again and again as I build, grow, and try to live with intention:
Why the hard choice is almost always the right one
Most of what we call modern life is built to keep us comfortable. Easy food. Endless noise on the small screens in our hands. Sitting on your couch scrolling into oblivion. None of these things are “bad,” but they create a gravity that pulls us toward the path of least resistance. When you flip even one of them, your whole day shifts. Your whole identity can shift too.
Every now and then a book stays with you long after the highlights and underlines fade. For me, Atomic Habits is one of those. It breaks down growth into something anyone can act on. It strips away the myth that change comes from huge, life altering moments and shows how real transformation is built through small, consistent choices. Identity is shaped by what you do repeatedly, not what you hope for. The book teaches you how to redesign your environment, your habits, and your mindset so that the person you want to become becomes the natural outcome of your days. It’s simple, practical, and quietly radical because it proves that tiny actions, done with intention, can change an entire life.
But even knowing that, I still catch myself drifting. Slipping into a soft, quiet doomer mindset. The voice that says “I’ll do it tomorrow”. The voice that says “I’m comfortable right now and pushing can wait”. It shows up exactly when life is asking me to step forward. And the older I get, the more I realize this pull toward comfort is human. We are wired to seek safety and familiarity. But we are also wired for something else. For growth. For change. For becoming more than what we were yesterday.
I heard a quote recently from David Senra that hit me hard: “Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.” That one sentence reframed how I think about growth. We often reward the people who can recall facts, when the real skill is the ability to adapt. To stay malleable. To become someone new when your life calls for it. I’ve realized this is one of my greatest strengths.
I struggled with alcohol for years. Addiction shaped a huge part of my early life, and I am deeply proud to be nearly five years sober. But the real shift was realizing that sobriety was only half the story. Addiction itself became a superpower once I learned how to redirect it. I could become addicted to the things that make my life fuller. Meditating. Eating clean. Moving my body. Building something meaningful. The same intensity that once pulled me down now pulls me forward.
That is the heart of choosing the harder path. It is rarely about willpower, but rather about reframing. The moment you understand that every hard choice is a vote for the person you want to become, everything changes. You stop negotiating with yourself. You stop waiting for motivation. You start living like someone who already is the version you are chasing.
The hard choice is almost always the right one because it is the only one that builds you. The easy choice keeps you where you are. The hard one creates who you are becoming. And the more you choose it, the more natural it feels. At some point it stops feeling hard at all. It becomes your rhythm.
This is where inertia comes in. Most people think of inertia as something that holds them back, but it works in both directions. Once you start choosing the harder path, even in tiny ways, you create a momentum that carries you forward. The first push is always the toughest because you’re moving against your old patterns. But after that, each choice becomes easier. Your identity starts to catch up with your actions. The energy you once used to resist change becomes the energy that drives it. Inertia becomes an ally, not an obstacle, and the hard choice begins to feel like the obvious one.
Growth is uncomfortable, but it is never unsafe. Stagnation is comfortable, but you will never progress. So when you hear that quiet voice in your mind saying not today, remember that this is the moment. This is the hinge. This is where your life subtly shifts towards where you’d like it to be. Make the harder choice. Let it change you. Let it create you. And let it be the quiet proof that you are becoming the person you always knew you could be.
Return to the Moment: Founders | David Senra - My Conversation with Todd Graves
It is not so often I come across a podcast that I get genuinely obsessed with, but this Todd Graves interview was one of them. Todd founded Raising Canes and is an inspiration for what it really looks like to build a business around one clear idea and refuse to dilute it. It is deeply impressive how he set a single goal, to make the best chicken fingers, then structured every decision around that. Whether that meant going to Alaska to commercially fish to fund the business, or choosing to make the menu smaller while everyone else in his industry was making theirs bigger, he kept returning to the same core belief.
What makes this episode even more powerful is David Senra himself. He has essentially dedicated his life to studying the greatest founders in history, then translating those lessons into stories and patterns we can actually use. You can feel that obsession in the way he pulls out details from Todd’s journey, connects them to other founders, and shows how the same principles repeat across time. It is like getting a curated masterclass in entrepreneurship through one conversation.
What stuck with me most was how simple Todd’s vision is and how relentlessly he protects it. No clever pivots, no chasing trends, just repeating the fundamentals at a high level for a very long time. It is a reminder that focus is a superpower in a world that is constantly pulling us toward more. Todd’s story is proof that you can build something massive by staying close to the original idea, listening to your customers, taking care of your people, and playing the long game.
For me, this conversation was a nudge to keep stripping away what is extra and keep coming back to the one thing I am really trying to build. To return to the moment, remember the core promise, and keep chasing that with the same kind of stubborn, almost unreasonable commitment Todd has to chicken fingers.