Articles

Why Your Morning Routine Never Lasts

I'm currently writing about new parenthood and spoke with a new mother about her experience. This week she started a new morning routine where she would start waking up at 5 am to meditate, journal, and workout before the baby woke up. I asked her about this new routine, and she seemed so passionate and excited about it. Unfortunately for her, the new baby routine was short lived. The baby’s schedule wasn’t the reason...
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Why You Are Always Tired: How to Structure Your Day to Get Your Energy Back

Once, when I interviewed a therapist for a completely different project, they mentioned almost in passing something that has been extremely insightful for me. Most of the therapists' burnt-out...

Why Waiting to Feel Ready Is the Real Time Waster

A colleague kept a manuscript open on her laptop for four years. She would add a paragraph each time she had the opportunity to do so (whenever the mood...

Why Small Rules Beat Big Goals

Habits
One page of my friend’s notebook mattered the most, and for three Januarys that I know of, it said something rather straightforward: “Get healthier”....

How Identity Actually Gets Built

Identity
A friend recently described himself as a morning person. It’s true, he is a morning person now, but it’s a recent development. He could...

How Good Decisions Actually Get Made

Decisions
A friend of mine made a purchase during the spring that I believe is useful to document. This friend bought a standing desk, which...

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Each issue of the Borgella Street Journal begins with five extensively researched long-form essays and summarizes an argument across all essays as a single, sustained point. There are no trend pieces or listicles.

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Why Most Morning Routines Fail by 9am

Habits
This article examines why morning routines fail not from a lack of discipline but from three structural causes: routines designed for perfect conditions, environments not redesigned to support them, and routines too large...

What the Military Taught Me About Building Systems That Work

Leadership
Before I understood organizational theory, before I read the research on behavior change, before I had language for any of it, the military was teaching me something that would take me two decades...

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ArticlesDecisionsDisciplineFocusHabitsIdentityIssuesLeadershipTime

Why Changing Your Habits Starts With Changing Your Identity

The standard approach to habit change begins with the behavior. Decide to run three times a week. Decide to...

The Smallest Believable Version of Who You Want to Be

It usually begins with a moment of clarity, a birthday, a setback, a conversation that cuts through, when the...

Why You Keep Becoming the Old Version of Yourself

There is a pattern so common it has become invisible. A person decides to change. They are serious about...

The Identity Architects

There is a version of history we tell ourselves that is largely false. This version posits that exceptional individuals...

Why Habits Shape Your Future

Habits
A Lot of people believe their future will be determined by a major decision they have not yet made. A career change. A commitment to better health. A serious creative project they have...

The Power of Systems Over Goals

Habits
When people make progress on something important, they believe the problem is motivation. They think they need to want it more, commit harder, or find a deeper reason to push through. They set...

Why Looking Away Beats Trying Harder

Discipline
A man I know keeps a bag of chips in his pantry for guests and swears he never touches them. That belief holds completely, right until the night he stands in front of the open pantry at eleven, bag in hand, wondering how he got there. He never ate the chips. Opening the pantry for a glass was the actual decision, and the chips did the rest of the deciding for him. This is not a story about a weak character. It is a story about where he let his eyes land. He described it almost apologetically once, the way people describe a small failure they cannot fully explain. Hard...
Book 3

Books from Pierre Poteau, Ph.D.

Pierre writes about how people deliberately build themselves up . He explores habits, time, identity, and decision-making in his work, grounded in the belief that people build a fulfilling life deliberately, one step at a time.
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Selected articles from the BSJ archives

Explore Yearly Archives

The Compound Effect of Small Decisions

Change looks like an event from the outside. A decision gets made, a line gets crossed, a new chapter begins. People search for the moment, the breakthrough, the rock...

Why Changing Your Habits Starts With Changing Your Identity

The standard approach to habit change begins with the behavior. Decide to run three times a week. Decide to...

Why Time Alone Will Not Fix Your Life

The feeling of being perpetually behind almost always produces the same diagnosis: not enough time. The schedule is too full. The day ends before the important work begins. The...

About BSJ

The Borgella Street Journal analyzes discipline, habits, identity, and decision-making under pressure. The authors support all articles with research and design them to include actionable tips at the end of every article.

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The Deliberate Project

The Deliberate Project by Borgella Street Journal offers weekly briefs centered around discipline, habits, and intentional living with brief research notes. Each brief provides one definite action item to try.

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