I spent years thinking I had a discipline problem. Turns out I had a framing problem.

The Story

I am a writer, speaker, and engineer working on return as a meta-skill: the trainable capacity to come back to coherence, to what matters, after drift. Everything on this site grows from that idea.

I grew up in Chile, moved to the US, and spent years building distributed systems at Big Tech. Along the way I drifted — repeatedly, across most of the things that mattered to me. I read the books. I built the routines. I tried the apps. None of it stuck for long.

Turns out I was solving the wrong problem. I was trying to stop drifting. But drift is the default state of any complex system. The solvable question is not how to stop forever. It is how to return once you have drifted.

The Framework

The engineering background made that concrete. Complex systems do not achieve reliability through perfection. They achieve it through fast, consistent recovery. I started applying that lens to human behavior. The result was a larger body of work around return, and from it, applied pieces like Coherence Dynamics Theory and Adaptable Discipline.

Adaptable Discipline is one expression of that work. It is a framework for engineering the conditions that make return more possible in practice. Not better habits. Not more force. The conditions that make coming back easier.

I write about it in the Self Disciplined newsletter — for people who are done with hustle mythology and want something that holds up over time.

The Now

Right now I'm finishing Returning: The Gentle Art of Finding Your Way Back — a book I've been building toward, in one form or another, for the better part of a decade. It pulls everything together. Expected 2026.

On April 18, 2026, I gave a TEDx talk on drift, returning, and comeback speed. The recording is forthcoming. I'm also speaking more at leadership events — the idea tends to land differently in a room full of people who've spent years pushing harder without getting farther.

And when I'm not doing any of that, I'm working with a small number of founders and leadership teams on organizational coherence. Same framework, different scale.