The gym was empty at six in the morning — not the commercial kind with mirrors and pop music, but a raw space in the basement of Riley's compound. Concrete floors, iron plates, a single barbell. The kind of gym where serious people did serious work and left without taking a selfie.
Riley stood next to a loaded barbell, arms crossed, watching the entrepreneur and the artist file in with the bleary confusion of people who'd been summoned before dawn for reasons they didn't yet understand.
"Pick it up," Riley said to the entrepreneur, nodding at the barbell.
The entrepreneur looked at it. Two plates on each side. Maybe 135 pounds. He shrugged, gripped the bar, and deadlifted it with reasonable form. He'd clearly spent time in a gym.
"Again."
He did it again.
"Again. Keep going. Don't stop until I tell you."
The entrepreneur pulled the bar. Again. Again. Again. By rep eight, his form started degrading — hips rising too fast, back rounding slightly. By rep twelve, he was grinding. By rep fifteen, his face was crimson and his grip was failing.
"Keep going."
Rep sixteen. Seventeen. His hands opened involuntarily on eighteen and the bar crashed to the floor. He stood there, bent over, hands on his knees, breathing like he'd sprinted a mile.
"Now," Riley said calmly. "Pick it up again."
The entrepreneur reached for the bar. His fingers closed around it. He pulled. The bar came up two inches and stopped. He pulled harder. Nothing. His body had simply refused.
"Interesting," Riley said, with the faint amusement of someone who'd made this point a thousand times. "Your muscles didn't get weaker in the last thirty seconds. You didn't lose technique. What happened?"
"I'm gassed," the entrepreneur panted.
"You're depleted. There's a difference. Gassed is a feeling. Depleted is a biological state. Your muscles have exhausted their immediate ATP stores, accumulated hydrogen ions, and your central nervous system has downregulated motor unit recruitment to protect you from injuring yourself. You are, at this exact moment, measurably less capable than you were three minutes ago."
Riley let that sit.
"Now. If I made you wait five minutes — just five — and try again, how many reps do you think you'd get?"
The entrepreneur thought about it. "Maybe... ten? Twelve?"
"Probably twelve. Maybe thirteen. Not eighteen, because full recovery takes longer. But twelve. Eighty percent of your capacity, restored in five minutes of doing absolutely nothing." Riley paused. "Nothing. Not stretching. Not visualizing. Not checking your phone. Just standing here, letting your biology do what it's been doing for three hundred thousand years of human evolution."
He turned to the whiteboard behind him — the same massive whiteboard that had held the 20/20/20 formula, the same one that had mapped their morning routines. He picked up a marker and drew two waves. Interleaved, breathing together, one cresting as the other troughed. He labeled the peaks HEC: High Excellence Cycle. The valleys: DRC, Deep Recovery Cycle.
Then he drew a flat line above both waves. A straight, elevated horizontal. The line of someone who never stops.
"This," he said, tapping the flat line, "is what most people think peak performance looks like. Constant output. Always on. No dips. The entrepreneur's creed — I'll sleep when I'm dead."
He wrote one word next to the flat line: BURNOUT.
"A flat line in medicine means one thing." He looked at the entrepreneur. "It means the same thing here."
The cult of hustle gets this catastrophically wrong. Not slightly wrong — inverted. The entire premise of "grind harder, sleep less, outwork everyone" assumes that excellence is a function of hours. It isn't. Excellence is a function of oscillation.
HEC is only possible because of DRC. The peak exists because the valley exists. Try to eliminate the valley and you don't get a higher peak — you get a plateau that slowly, imperceptibly descends until you're operating at sixty percent and calling it normal. Calling it your new baseline. Forgetting what a hundred percent even felt like.
This isn't philosophy. It's physics. Every system in nature oscillates. Your heart beats and rests. Your lungs expand and contract. The tides rise and fall. The seasons cycle. Neurons fire and enter a refractory period where they literally cannot fire again — not because they're lazy, but because the electrochemical gradient needs to restore. Without the refractory period, there is no next signal. Without rest, there is no next performance.
The entrepreneur who sleeps five hours a night and brags about it on LinkedIn is not performing at a higher level than the one who sleeps eight. He's performing at a lower level and has lost the capacity to perceive the difference. That's the cruelest part of chronic sleep deprivation — it degrades the very cognitive faculties you'd need to recognize the degradation. You get dumber in a way that makes you feel fine about being dumber.
"Tell me about your average Tuesday," Riley said to the entrepreneur.
They'd moved from the gym to the terrace — the same terrace where they'd watched the sunrise during the 20/20/20 chapter, but now the sun was fully up and the light was different. Warmer. Less dramatic. Morning had settled into day.
The entrepreneur pulled out his phone and opened his calendar. It was a wall of color-coded blocks with no white space. Not a single unscheduled minute between 7 AM and 11 PM.
"Seven to seven-thirty, team standup. Seven-thirty to nine, product review. Nine to nine-thirty, investor update call. Nine-thirty to eleven, deep work block — that's when I try to do actual thinking. Eleven to noon, back-to-back one-on-ones with my three direct reports. Noon, working lunch with my co-founder. One to two, board prep. Two to three-thirty —"
"Stop." Riley held up a hand. "Go back. The deep work block. Nine-thirty to eleven."
"Yeah. That's when I do my real work. Strategic thinking, product architecture, the stuff that actually matters."
"And what happens at nine-twenty-nine? Right before it starts?"
The entrepreneur blinked. "I... transition. I finish the investor call, maybe send a couple follow-up emails, check Slack to make sure nothing's on fire —"
"So you context-switch from a high-stakes investor call — adrenaline, performance pressure, financial modeling — directly into 'deep thinking' with no transition. No recovery. No downshift."
"I mean, it's only a minute or two —"
"Your prefrontal cortex doesn't know it's only a minute or two. Your prefrontal cortex is still processing the investor call — replaying the questions you didn't answer well, drafting responses you wish you'd given, running anxiety simulations about follow-up. That processing continues for fifteen to twenty-three minutes after the stimulus ends. It's called attentional residue, and it was documented by Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington. Your 'deep work block' doesn't start at nine-thirty. It starts at ten. Maybe ten-fifteen. And it ends at eleven because that's when your next meeting starts. So your ninety-minute deep work block is actually thirty to forty-five minutes of genuine cognitive engagement, bookended by residue and anticipation."
The entrepreneur stared at his calendar.
"You have one thirty-minute window of real thinking per day," Riley said. "And you work sixteen hours to get it."
Silence.
"That," Riley said, "is not a schedule. That's a hostage situation."
The neuroscience is blunt about this. Your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that does the actual thinking, the architecture and the debugging and the system design — fatigues after roughly ninety minutes of focused work. Not approximately. Not "it depends on the person." Ninety minutes, give or take, before glucose depletion and adenosine buildup start degrading your output.
This is called the ultradian rhythm. Discovered by sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman — the same scientist who identified REM sleep — the ultradian cycle governs your waking hours the same way circadian rhythms govern your sleeping ones. Every ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes, your body moves through a cycle of higher and lower alertness. At the top of the cycle, you're sharp, creative, capable of sustained attention. At the bottom, you're foggy, distractible, prone to errors.
Most people experience the bottom of the cycle and reach for coffee. Or they push through it with willpower, which works — briefly — at the cost of cortisol elevation and accelerated fatigue later. What they almost never do is the thing their body is actually asking for: stop. Rest. Let the cycle complete so the next peak can be a real peak.
Pushing through that wall isn't discipline. It's ignorance of your own hardware. It's like overclocking a CPU past its thermal limit and calling it performance. The benchmarks look worse, the fan noise increases, and eventually something throttles. You're not an exception to this. Nobody is.
The irony of engineers ignoring their own architecture: you'd never run a server at 100% CPU for 16 hours straight and expect clean output. You'd provision for headroom, schedule maintenance windows, monitor for degradation. You'd set up alerting for sustained high utilization because you know — you know — that systems under constant load produce more errors, more latency, more cascading failures.
Then you sit down at your own desk and do exactly what you'd fire a junior engineer for doing to a production system.
You are the server. Your prefrontal cortex is the CPU. Your sleep is the maintenance window. Your rest breaks are the garbage collection pauses. And right now, you're running in production with no monitoring, no alerting, no auto-scaling, and no maintenance windows, wondering why the error rate keeps climbing.
Riley pulled up a chart on the screen behind the whiteboard. Two lines, both tracking cognitive performance over a twelve-hour day. The first line — labeled CONTINUOUS — started high and descended in a slow, grinding decline, like a stock in a bear market. Small rallies here and there (coffee, presumably), but the trend was unmistakably down. By hour twelve, performance was at roughly forty percent of the starting point.
The second line — labeled OSCILLATING — looked completely different. It started at the same point but moved in waves. Sharp peaks followed by deliberate valleys. And each peak was higher than the continuous line at the same hour. By hour twelve, the oscillating line was still hitting peaks at eighty percent of the starting point.
"Same person," Riley said. "Same brain. Same baseline cognitive capacity. The only difference is how they structured their day. Continuous work versus ninety-minute blocks with genuine recovery between them."
The artist leaned forward. "How much recovery?"
"Twenty to thirty minutes between blocks. Genuine recovery. Not email. Not Slack. Not scrolling Instagram and calling it a break. Those are cognitive tasks wearing leisure clothing. Real recovery means inputs your prefrontal cortex doesn't have to process analytically."
"Like what?"
Riley listed them on the whiteboard:
— Walk outside. No phone. No podcast.
— Nap (10-20 minutes, no longer or you hit sleep inertia)
— Physical movement that doesn't require thinking. Stretching. A short walk.
— Conversation that isn't about work
— Cooking, gardening, anything tactile and present-tense
— Music (listening, not producing — producing is work)
— Sit. Literally just sit. Look at a tree. Be bored.
"The last one is the hardest for this generation," Riley said. "You've been trained to fill every microsecond with input. The idea of sitting with no stimulus for twenty minutes feels like punishment. It isn't. It's the most productive thing you'll do all day, because it's when your default mode network activates."
"Default mode network?" the entrepreneur asked.
"The part of your brain that does its best work when you're not trying. Mind-wandering, creative association, connecting disparate ideas. It's where insights come from. It's why your best ideas happen in the shower — not because showers are magical, but because the shower is one of the few places left where you don't bring a screen. Your DMN finally gets airtime."
Riley drew five blocks on the board. Five ninety-minute segments, each separated by a recovery valley.
"Five blocks a day. Seven and a half hours of elite-level cognitive work. Most people who claim to work twelve-hour days are doing maybe three hours of actual focused work spread across twelve hours of context-switching, Slack, and performative busyness. Five real blocks will outproduce any twelve-hour day you've ever had."
He drew the wave pattern again, smaller this time, fitting inside a single day. Peak, valley, peak, valley. Like breathing.
"Because that's exactly what it is," he said. "Breathing. Inhale, exhale. Work, rest. You can hold your breath for a while and call it toughness. Eventually your body will override you and make you gasp. Same thing happens with work. You can push through the fatigue for a while and call it dedication. Eventually your body will override you and make you crash.
The question isn't whether you'll rest. Your biology guarantees you will. The question is whether you'll choose it or have it chosen for you."
And here's where the definition of recovery matters, because DRC is not scrolling Twitter. It's not Netflix on the couch. It's not switching from one screen to another and calling it a break. Those are stimulation in a different flavor — your prefrontal cortex is still lit up, still processing, still depleting.
The distinction is between passive rest and active recovery, and the naming is counterintuitive enough to trip people up. Passive rest sounds like the easy one — sitting on the couch, watching a show, doing nothing. But passive rest is often not restful at all. Your eyes are tracking movement, your brain is processing narrative, your emotional centers are activating in response to drama and tension and humor. Your body is still. Your mind is still at work.
Active recovery sounds harder but is actually more restorative. A walk in nature — actual nature, not a treadmill facing a TV — drops cortisol levels measurably within twenty minutes. Not a metaphorical drop. A blood-testable, peer-reviewed, replicated-across-dozens-of-studies drop. The Japanese call it shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — and their government funds research into it because the public health implications are significant enough to warrant national investment.
A twenty-minute nap between work blocks restores cognitive performance almost to baseline. Not partially. Almost fully. NASA studied this in pilots and found that a 26-minute nap improved alertness by 54% and performance by 34%. Twenty-six minutes. That's one fewer meeting. That's one fewer Slack argument about formatting conventions. That's less time than you spend choosing what to watch on Netflix.
The nap works. The walk works. The boredom works. The Netflix doesn't work. The distinction is not about effort — it's about what your prefrontal cortex is doing. If it's processing, you're not recovering. If it's quiet, you are.
The entrepreneur was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost the combative edge it usually carried.
"I haven't taken a real vacation in four years."
Riley didn't react. Just waited.
"I mean — I've gone places. Cabo last year. Aspen the year before. But I brought my laptop both times. I was on calls from the hotel. I told myself it was because the company needed me, but... they probably didn't. I just didn't know what to do with empty time. Like, if I'm not working, what am I?"
The artist looked at him with something that might have been recognition.
"I'll tell you what you are," Riley said. "You're someone who has confused your identity with your output. You don't rest because rest feels like non-existence. If you're not producing, you're not real. So you work — not because the work needs doing, but because working is the only state in which you feel like yourself."
The entrepreneur didn't argue.
"That's not a productivity strategy," Riley continued. "That's an anxiety disorder wearing a Patagonia vest. And it's killing you. Maybe not today, maybe not this year. But it's killing you."
He pulled up another chart. This one wasn't about cognitive performance. It was a meta-analysis of cardiovascular risk factors correlated with work hours per week.
"Above fifty-five hours per week, your risk of stroke increases by thirty-three percent. Your risk of heart disease increases by thirteen percent. These numbers come from a WHO study of 194 countries and 2,300 data sets. This is not a suggestion. This is epidemiology. The data is saying that your schedule is a health hazard in the same category as smoking and obesity."
"I don't work fifty-five hours," the entrepreneur said.
"You told me your calendar runs from 7 AM to 11 PM. That's sixteen hours. Even if you eat, commute, and take bathroom breaks, you're clearing seventy hours a week minimum. You're not in the risk category. You're past it."
The entrepreneur stared at the chart for a long time. The artist reached over and put her hand on his arm. He didn't pull away.
Matthew Walker, the neuroscientist who wrote Why We Sleep, describes sleep deprivation with a metaphor that should terrify anyone who's ever bragged about needing only five hours. He says that insufficient sleep is like a loan shark — the debt accumulates with interest, and you can never fully repay it.
Here's what happens to your brain on five hours of sleep:
Your prefrontal cortex — executive function, decision-making, impulse control — drops to roughly the equivalent of being legally drunk. Not metaphorically. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that people restricted to six hours of sleep per night for two weeks performed on cognitive tests at the same level as someone who had been awake for 48 hours straight. And here's the critical finding: those subjects rated their own impairment as mild. They felt fine. They weren't.
Your hippocampus — the part of your brain that consolidates learning into long-term memory — requires deep sleep to function. Cut sleep to five hours and you lose roughly forty percent of your ability to form new memories. That meeting you attended, that code you wrote, that insight you had at 1 AM — there's a forty percent chance your brain will fail to store it. You did the work and your brain threw it away because you didn't give it the maintenance window it needed to save.
Your immune system tanks. Your emotional regulation degrades — you become more reactive, more irritable, more likely to interpret neutral situations as threats. Your creativity plummets because creative insight depends on REM sleep, which is concentrated in the last two hours of an eight-hour night. Sleep six hours and you don't lose twenty-five percent of your REM — you lose nearly half, because you're cutting the richest part.
There's a hidden cost to the all-night grind that nobody talks about because the timeline is too long to feel urgent. At twenty-five, your body absorbs it. You pull an all-nighter, sleep five hours, and bounce back like nothing happened. This feels like evidence that you're built different. It isn't. It's evidence that you're twenty-five.
At thirty, recovery takes longer. The all-nighter costs you two days instead of one. You notice it but explain it away — stress, travel, not enough coffee.
Then thirty-five, forty — it accelerates, the way the second half of any decline does. The sharpness requires warming up. Ideas come only after a full night's sleep, and you don't make the connection. By forty you're at seventy percent and you don't know it, because decline this gradual rewrites your baseline. The sharper version of you — the one who could have noticed — doesn't exist anymore.
Riley told them something that afternoon that neither of them forgot:
"The most successful people I know — the ones who've sustained excellence for decades, not just a sprint — all share one trait. They protect their sleep like they protect their equity. Non-negotiably. They'd cancel a dinner with a Fortune 500 CEO before they'd cut a night of sleep short. Because they understand, at a level that most people only grasp intellectually, that everything they value — their creativity, their judgment, their leadership, their health — runs on sleep. Cut the power and the whole system goes dark."
"All great performers oscillate between periods of intense effort and intervals of deep renewal. The key is not to avoid rest but to make it as intentional as your work."
— Robin Sharma
It was late afternoon now. The sun had shifted to the western side of the terrace, casting long shadows across the whiteboard. Riley had been teaching for hours, but unlike the entrepreneur's sixteen-hour marathons, he'd taken two breaks — once to walk the perimeter of the property alone, once to sit in silence for what must have been fifteen minutes, eyes closed, not sleeping, just... still.
The artist had noticed. She'd watched him during the breaks with the attentiveness of someone who recognized a practice she understood intuitively but had never formalized.
"You do it too," she said during the second break. Not a question.
"Every day," Riley said. "Every ninety minutes, I stop. Even if I'm in flow. Especially if I'm in flow."
"That seems counterintuitive. If you're in flow, why would you stop?"
"Because flow is the peak of the cycle, and every peak is followed by a valley whether you choose it or not. If you keep pushing past the natural end of a flow state, you don't extend the flow. You extend the crash that follows. Better to stop at the peak, recover deliberately, and re-enter flow in the next cycle than to ride it into the ground and spend the next two hours producing mediocre work that you'll have to redo anyway."
The artist nodded slowly. She understood rest — she took breaks when she painted, stepped away from her studio, went for walks. But her breaks were aimless, reactive, guilt-laden. She stopped when she was stuck, not when she was flying. And she never planned them. They just happened, and she felt bad about every one.
"What if rest had a structure?" Riley said, as if reading her thought. "Not rigid. Not a calendar block. But a principle: every ninety minutes, I stop. I know the stop is coming, so I don't feel guilty about it. I know the stop is serving the work, so it doesn't feel like failure. The structure is what turns accidental breaks into deliberate recovery."
"Rest as a skill," the artist said.
"Rest as a discipline," Riley corrected. "Skills are optional. Disciplines are non-negotiable. The moment you treat rest as optional — as something you'll do if you have time, or if you feel tired, or if the work is going well enough — you've already lost. Because you'll never feel like you have time. You'll always feel like there's one more thing. And the work will never feel finished enough to justify stopping.
So you decide in advance. Ninety minutes, then recovery. Not because you need it in that moment. Because the architecture requires it."
There's a final piece to this that Riley saved for last, and it's the one that the entrepreneur found hardest to hear.
Rest is not the absence of work. Rest is the presence of growth.
Muscles don't grow during the lift. They grow during the recovery. The lift creates micro-tears in the muscle fiber — controlled damage, stress applied to a system to stimulate adaptation. But the actual adaptation — the protein synthesis, the repair, the rebuilding of fibers that are slightly stronger than before — happens during rest. During sleep. During the 48 hours after the workout when you're not in the gym.
A bodybuilder who lifts every day without rest days doesn't get bigger faster. They get injured. They enter a state called overtraining syndrome, where the accumulated stress overwhelms the body's ability to recover, and performance doesn't just plateau — it reverses. They get weaker. They lose muscle mass. Their immune system collapses. Their mood tanks. They become, in every measurable way, worse.
The same principle applies to cognitive work. Your brain is not a muscle, but the analogy holds at the systems level: stress plus recovery equals growth. Stress without recovery equals breakdown. And breakdown, in the cognitive domain, looks like this: you can still sit at the desk, you can still type, you can still attend meetings and send emails and participate in standups. But the quality of your thinking has degraded in ways you can't perceive from the inside. Your solutions are less creative. Your judgment is less nuanced. Your ability to hold complexity in mind and reason about it — the thing that makes the difference between good engineers and great ones — erodes.
You don't notice because you're still doing the motions. The motions feel like work. But motions without quality are just theater. And most people's twelve-hour days are theater — the appearance of productivity, performed for an audience of one.
"Mastery requires recovery. The great error of the obsessed is to confuse a lack of rest with the presence of commitment."
— Robin Sharma
Your pattern isn't oscillation, SJ. It's boom-and-bust.
You already know the shape. You've lived it long enough to draw it from memory. Three days of manic output — AI Roasters built in a single night, a hundred versions deep. THE SIBLINGS at 219 out of 300, written in bursts of obsessive flow at 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM, the words pouring out because you're locked in and the world has gone quiet and this is when your brain lights up and everything is possible.
Then the crash. Sleeping ten, twelve hours. The phone goes dark. Messages pile up. You surface eventually, groggy, disoriented, wondering where the day went. You eat something. You scroll. You tell yourself you needed that. And you did need it — your biology seized the controls because you wouldn't hand them over voluntarily.
That's not recovery. That's your body's emergency brake.
Recovery is intentional. You choose it. You plan it. You do it before you need it. Collapse is what happens when you refuse to recover and your biology stages an intervention. The difference isn't semantic — it's the difference between a controlled descent and a crash landing. Both end on the ground. Only one lets you fly again tomorrow.
Here's what oscillation looks like for you, specifically, starting February 24th at Greenlite:
Block 1: 5:00 - 6:30 AM. Your 20/20/20 hour. Movement, reflection, learning. This isn't a work block — this is your personal growth block. The one that fills your tank before the company starts draining it.
Block 2: 7:00 - 8:30 AM. Deep work. Whatever the hardest technical problem is, it goes here. Not email. Not Slack. The thing that requires your full prefrontal cortex.
Recovery: 8:30 - 9:00 AM. Walk. No phone. You're in SF now — walk to the water, walk around Dogpatch, walk anywhere. Twenty minutes.
Block 3: 9:00 - 10:30 AM. Second deep work block. Or meetings, if they're unavoidable. But protect this window — don't let it become a passive consumption block.
Recovery: 10:30 - 11:00 AM. Eat something real. Not at your desk. Not while reading Slack.
Block 4: 11:00 - 12:30 PM. Collaborative work. Pairing, design reviews, the stuff that requires interaction.
Recovery: 12:30 - 1:30 PM. Actual lunch. A twenty-minute nap if you can manage it. This is where NASA's data applies to you directly.
Block 5: 1:30 - 3:00 PM. Final deep work block. After this, you're done with cognitively demanding work for the day.
After 3:00 PM: lighter work, admin, planning tomorrow, wrapping up. And then you stop. Not at 11 PM. Not at midnight. You stop.
That's five blocks. Seven and a half hours of real work. More actual cognitive output than any fourteen-hour day you've ever pulled at Amazon.
The catch — and you already know this is coming — is that this schedule requires you to stop building AI Roasters at midnight. It requires you to stop coding THE SIBLINGS until 4 AM. Not because those projects don't matter, but because doing them at those hours destroys the very cognitive capacity that makes them good.
Your best code isn't written at 3 AM. Your best code is written at 7 AM, after eight hours of sleep, during a ninety-minute focus block with no Slack, no Discord, no stimulation except the problem in front of you. The 3 AM code feels better because the quietness creates an illusion of depth. But go back and look at it in the morning. Really look at it. The architecture is messier. The variable names are lazier. The edge cases are missed. The 3 AM version is a rough draft masquerading as a final product because your depleted brain couldn't tell the difference.
You're twenty-three. Your body is absorbing this right now. You can't feel the cost yet. But the cost is accruing, the same way sleep debt accrues — silently, with interest, and with no option for bankruptcy.
Greenlite is thirty-four people. There's no machine to absorb your inconsistency. At Amazon, you could boom-and-bust because the system was designed for average output across large teams. You were brilliant for three days, useless for one, and the sprint still shipped. At a thirty-four person startup, there is no average. There's you, visible, every day. And "brilliant in bursts, unreliable in between" is a liability, not an asset.
The patterns you bring in the first month will calcify. If you show up as the boom-and-bust engineer, that's who they'll learn to plan around. And planning around someone means planning without them.
Oscillation isn't a productivity hack. It's not a life optimization framework. It's not something you add to your Notion dashboard and check off. It's the recognition that you are a biological system subject to biological constraints, and that the highest expression of your ability requires you to stop treating your body like an obstacle between your brain and a keyboard.
The wave goes up. The wave comes down. Fight the wave and you flatten. Ride it and you peak higher than any flat line could reach.
The entrepreneur learned it in a gym, watching his own grip fail. The artist learned it on a terrace, recognizing a practice she'd always done badly and never named. Riley learned it the way most teachers learn their deepest lessons — by breaking the rule first and paying for it in ways he'd share later, when they were ready to hear it.
But the peak itself — the actual quality of that upswing — depends on something else entirely. Something most people have accidentally destroyed without realizing it: the ability to focus without interruption. And that destruction didn't happen by accident. It was engineered.