In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.

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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Author Brianna Wiest on learning something new:

The book of the week is The Courage to Commit: Embrace the Radical Power of Sticking with Something by Shawn Johnson and Andrew East.

A practical, deeply inspiring and timely call to action we all need right now.

Commitment is a skill. It has an infrastructure, a process and a set of practices that make it sustainable. There are ways to design your environment, your relationships, your daily rhythms so that staying the course becomes easier than giving up. In this book, Shawn Johnson and Andrew East show how the same grit that made them elite athletes extends into every area of life: marriage, family, faith, and purpose. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is fundamentally about commitment. If you practice the art of commitment, if you learn to find the sacred in the repetitive and the profound in the mundane, your life will be richer for it. Richer in depth. In meaning. In the quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re someone who stays.

If you’re feeling restless, anxious, or burned out, this book will shift your perspective and equip you to build something meaningful right where you stand.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

The deepest, most lasting joys come from walking fully through the doors we choose. The richest joys are cultivated through focus and care. Far from being joy’s opposite, commitment might be its secret ingredient.

Research backs this up in fascinating ways. Studies have found that couples with stable, high relationship satisfaction report significantly more positive affect and well-being than those in newer relationships; not despite their commitments, but because of them. When you’re dating someone new, you might spend 30 percent of your brain cells wondering if they like your texts, if you’re being too forward, if that joke landed wrong. But in a committed relationship, all that mental bandwidth gets freed up for something else: the creation of shared joy. It creates a protected space where delight can take root and grow. The security of commitment creates the psychological safety needed for playfulness, vulnerability, and spontaneity to flourish.

This pattern repeats across every domain where humans find deep satisfaction. The musician who commits to daily practice discovers subtle beauties in the music that casual listeners never hear. The writer who shows up at the desk every morning, even when inspiration feels distant, experiences the unique thrill of watching rough ideas transform into polished prose. Studies in positive psychology have found that people who make and stick to meaningful commitments report higher levels of what researchers call “eudaimonic well-being,” the kind of deep, sustained happiness that comes from living a life of purpose and engagement.

Experts who deeply commit to their fields experience more frequent states of “flow,” that coveted mental state where joy and performance peak simultaneously. Musicians with extensive deliberate practice show distinct neural patterns during flow states that less experienced musicians don’t exhibit, suggesting that sustained commitment literally rewires the brain for optimal creative experiences. These studies reveal that commitment changes what we experience and how we experience. It’s not just that committed people encounter more joy; it’s that commitment itself enhances our neurological capacity for satisfaction and meaning.

We all live in an age that promises instant everything: instant coffee, instant messaging, instant gratification. So it’s natural to hope for instant mastery too. The internet is full of articles promising to teach you anything “in just 10 steps!” or “in 30 days or less!” as if skills were Amazon Prime deliveries that could show up at your door if you just found the right algorithm. But here’s the thing about mastery: It’s stubbornly analog in a digital world. It refuses to be disrupted, optimized, or compressed into a TikTok video. You can’t download it like an app or subscribe to it like a streaming service. It’s the one area of human experience that has remained fundamentally unchanged.

There’s something both humbling and liberating about accepting that mastery requires commitment. Humbling because it means acknowledging there are no shortcuts, no matter how many YouTube videos promise otherwise. Liberating because it means the path to excellence is available to anyone willing to put in the work. But it’s also worth saying: Excellence doesn’t guarantee recognition, reward, or success in the conventional sense. The real reward is who you become in the process, not just what the world gives you for it.

This is why commitment and mastery are so deeply intertwined. Mastery requires not just technical proficiency but psychological resilience, the ability to maintain focus and effort precisely when external validation is least available. And genuine commitment is about developing a relationship with the entire journey, including its most disorienting passages, and finding some humor along the way to keep yourself sane. Elite performers develop a connoisseur’s appreciation for different types of failures, learning to welcome setbacks as teachers rather than enemies. But here is the secret: The path itself is the point. The commitment is not just the means to mastery; in many ways, it is the mastery.

Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again by Austin Kleon. This book is about rediscovering the joy of creating with kid-inspired insights, and ultimately, to feel the unbridled joy of creating in your own unique way.

Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! by Mark Pincus. An unconventional, hands-on guide to turning ideas into products that matter and that people love.