I recently found myself thinking about Can’t Hurt Me while walking across a freezing airport parking lot.
It was late and cold, reasonably typical for a Wisconsin February. What was different was that my wife and three kids were back at the terminal, surrounded by bags, restless and exhausted, ready for bed, waiting on me to see if the car would start after a long day of travel. And on top of that, I was nauseous, achey, getting sick, and worn out from the trip.
All that considered, there really wasn’t anything dramatic about it. There was simply a task at hand. The car needed to start. My family needed to get home. That was it.
So I focused. I breathed slowly. I pressed into a wrist pressure point to steady the nausea and used my mind to steady my body. I walked from one end of the large airport lot to the other, carrying the battery jumper pack generously provided by the parking staff. I didn’t feel heroic. I didn’t think of myself as tough. I just didn’t question the responsibility in front of me. It had to get done.
What struck me shortly after was this: I didn’t always operate that way.
My first year of college, I was perfectly fine sleeping until one in the afternoon on a weekday. No structure. No urgency. No real discipline. What changed wasn’t inspiration. It wasn’t personality. It was systems. I changed when I woke up, how I trained, who I surrounded myself with, and what I expected of myself. Slowly, the structure shifted — and the outcomes followed.
The Dean’s List followed. I became one of the winningest tennis players in my university’s history. I started a business, then another, then another. I became a father — and a committed, present one. I became a distance runner, having never previously run more than a 5K, not just jogging but often competing near the front on both road and trail. I even competed on American Ninja Warrior.
That version of me in the parking lot was built, slowly, over time. That is an important realization and reveals, in turn, a much bigger lesson.
We love to glorify grit. We elevate stories of accomplishment against all odds and promote radical accountability. These are inspiring, and we should try to internalize them — perhaps even while walking through a cold airport parking lot, quietly holding back vomit. But in reality, sustained discipline is almost always downstream of structure.
Behavioral economics has shown this in quieter ways. Defaults shape decisions. Incentives guide effort. Friction determines follow-through. When environments support long-term outcomes, progress compounds. When they work against them, willpower drains.
Motivation matters. Structure carries.
At the individual level, I needed stability before I could expect excellence from myself. I needed space to redesign my routines. Guardrails first. Then growth.
The same logic applies to economies.
Policy is not written for the exceptional outlier. It is written for the median — and especially for those with the least margin for error. It must assume average energy, uneven access to opportunity, and limited bandwidth.
Individual motivation frameworks optimize for those who can endure extreme pressure. Public systems cannot.
If an economy relies only on extreme individualism, it will produce remarkable performers. It will also produce volatility. And over time, that volatility erodes the very competition it claims to protect.
Competition requires structure. Predictable rules. Contract enforcement. Open access to opportunity. Reasonable downside protection. Barriers low enough for new entrants and guardrails strong enough to prevent collapse. Without these conditions, competition consolidates. Incumbents entrench. Capital concentrates. Mobility slows.
You can see this tension clearly in the relationship between food and healthcare.
Our food system is extraordinarily efficient at producing cheap calories. It is not optimized for metabolic health. Highly processed food, produced at scale, contributes to chronic disease. Healthcare then spends trillions managing those conditions.
Cheap food contributes to illness. Healthcare treats the illness. Healthcare spending grows. The underlying production structure remains largely unchanged.
What can look like villainy is often simply incentives playing out.
When treatment is billable and prevention is not, capital flows downstream. When scale is rewarded and consolidation is subsidized, incumbents stabilize. Two massive sectors grow together around managing consequences rather than preventing causes.
From a competitive standpoint, that creates stability — but not dynamism. Smaller producers and preventive models face friction at nearly every turn.
Still, there are people working to bend that curve.
Across the country, “Food is Medicine” programs are weaving nutrition into healthcare reimbursement. Health systems are prescribing produce, medically tailored meals, and grocery support as part of treatment plans. Partnerships such as those between VCU Health and UGK Community First show what happens when healthcare dollars move upstream — when prevention becomes reimbursable, when nutrition becomes clinical, when healthier food gains institutional demand.
That shift is not charity. It is incentive alignment. And when incentives align with health, competition has room to breathe again.
Back in that parking lot, I was not thinking about economic theory. I was thinking about getting my family home. But the capacity to endure that moment was not spontaneous. It was the result of years of structural adjustment.
You cannot simply tell people to eat better inside a system that makes unhealthy calories cheaper and more accessible. You cannot simply tell small producers to compete harder inside consolidated markets. You cannot simply tell patients to be disciplined when structural incentives point the other direction.
You create the space to change the system first. You build stability for the median. Then you motivate.
Grit matters. Personal responsibility matters. Individual drive is powerful. But economies cannot rely on heroics.
If the battery fails every week, carrying a jumper pack across the parking lot is not a durable solution. The system itself requires attention.
When personal drive and informed policy structure work together, resilience compounds. It is not simply about saying “you can’t hurt me.” It is about building systems strong enough that we do not have to rely on heroics in the first place.
And that is a more durable kind of strength.
