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Breaking news!

Having big ideas and not acting on them is bad for your mental health.

That's according to a new study published March 29th in Frontiers in Psychology.

Researchers identified a profile they call the "Ambitious Procrastinator". These are individuals who dream-without-doing, and they suffered from higher rates of depression, anxiety, and burnout, compared to any other profile studied.

Yes reader, a bias for action is medicine for the soul.

(and we’re the double-strength cough syrup they keep locked behind the counter)

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and why when you’re launching something new, you need social dandelions.

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The thing you can't shake is what makes you unshakeable

Maria Montessori is one of the most influential educators in history. Her method, now used in tens of thousands of schools across the world, changed how we think about childhood development.

But after her first day of anatomy class, she went home in despair, and decided to drop out of medical school.

It was 1892 and Montessori was twenty-two years old. She had fought like hell to get there, the only woman ever admitted to study medicine at the University of Rome.

Reaching this point already required talking her way past a professor who told her no and reportedly even appealing to the Pope himself. Her mother had backed her at every turn. Her father had not. He thought the whole thing was a mistake, and made sure she knew it.

None of that mattered once she walked into the anatomy hall though.

She arrived early and was shown into the dark room alone, for it was not considered appropriate for a young woman to mingle freely with male students.

The first thing she saw in the half-light was an enormous skeleton. She stood transfixed, horrified, yet unable to look away. When she finally did, it got worse: jars of organs in alcohol, and beyond them, a cabinet of skulls. She could tell from the labels scrawled on their foreheads—"murderer," "thief," "patricide"—that these had once been criminals.

She started pacing. "My God, what have I done to suffer in this way?" she wrote later. When the lesson began, a tub of fresh bones with flesh still clinging to them were brought in. Checkmate. Blood rushed to her head as a headache tightened and her ears whistled.

That evening, her parents could see something was wrong. Her father said: "It is useless for you to force yourself. You can't." Her mother said: "It is bad for you, my child. Don't go back."

She went to her room, took her head in her hands, and made a decision. She would write to the professor in the morning, thank him for his kindness, and explain that the study of anatomy would be impossible for her.

But something nagged.

"It was like a deep inner faith," she wrote.

So she persisted with her misery. Her father walked her to the university each morning (because women were not permitted to walk the streets alone) and he did so in stony, disapproving silence.

When she passed her fellow students in the corridors, they either taunted her or pretended she didn't exist. In class, they conspired so that every seat was taken before she arrived.

One evening, walking through Pincio Park in a state of total depression, she once again thought about never coming back. But then along the way she came across a mother and toddler dressed in rags. The tiny child was engrossed with a scrap of paper, blissfully oblivious to the poverty around it.

Montessori was stopped dead in her tracks by the image. Something about that child triggered a powerful subconscious shift inside of her. She hurried back to the dissecting hall there and then. Her revulsion, she said later, vanished in that moment and never came back.

Now, when students whistled at her in the corridors, she told them: "The harder you blow, the higher I'll go." When one kicked the back of her chair during a lecture, she turned and gave him a look so fierce he said: "I must be immortal, or a look like that would have killed me."

To mask the smell during dissection, she paid a man to stand beside her and smoke. When the arrangement proved as impractical as it sounds, she resigned to taking up the habit herself.

"In those days," she later recalled, "I felt as if I could have done anything."

In her final year, every student had to give a presentation to the entire department.

Montessori expected the worst.

But when she finished, the room erupted into standing applause. Her father, sat in the audience, was (to his utter astonishment) surrounded by people congratulating him. The estrangement that had lasted the entirety of her time at medical school melted.

On July 10, 1896, Maria Montessori became the first woman to graduate from medical school in Italy. She scored 105 out of a possible 110. When she received her diploma, the words on it had to be changed by hand from masculine to feminine as the document had never been written for someone like her.

"So here I am: famous!" she wrote to a friend shortly after. "On the other hand, my dear, it is not very difficult, as you see. I am not famous because of my skill or my intelligence, but for my courage and indifference towards everything. This is something which, if one wishes, one can always achieve.”

“But,” she concluded about this courage, “it takes tremendous efforts."

If you pursue anything worth doing, the world will find many creative ways to stop you. Some will be obvious: a professor who says no, or a father who refuses to speak. Others will be subtler: an absent chair, a sideways glance, and the slow erosion of your belief that any of it is worth it.

But if something nags at you, "a deep inner faith," as Montessori called it, then there is only one acceptable response. Keep going. Direct "tremendous efforts" toward displaying the kind of courage that no obstacle, obvious or subtle, can withstand.

Science Corner

Over 100 years later, scientists are still discovering the power of the Montessori method. A randomized control trial published in PNAS at the end of 2025 found that children aged 3-6 who attended a Montessori school via lottery had significantly better outcomes on reading, short-term memory, executive function, and social understanding, than those who attended traditional preschool. These gains compounded over time and Montessori programs were found to cost about $13,000 less per child than traditional preschool.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky's monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest April edition, Scott explores what happens when we can remember everything (and why we might not want to), the three waves of agentic commerce coming for how we buy, and why change management may be the ultimate moat in the AI era.

• As our digital productivity systems become more sophisticated, the craving for analog tools only grows. The Action Method (recently featured in Lifehacker) lets you check your to-do list without accidentally opening an email or a Slack message. Just you, a pen, some premium 80lb Via Vellum Cool White paper, and the quiet space to actually get things done.

• Curious to dive deeper on the story in today’s edition? We recommend reading Maria Montessori: A Biography by Rita Kramer.

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