The Fog of War System: Turn Overwhelm to Clarity in 3 Steps
A behind-the-scenes look at developing the Fog of War System, and what happens when even your best systems can't pull you out of the darkness
Picture this: You're staring into a fog so thick you can't see what's in front of you. Everything that once felt solid has shifted. You just separated from the most important person in your life. Your parents are going through a health crisis. The work project you've poured your soul into for an entire year has stalled completely, no longer viable given how much your life has changed.
This was my reality 3 months ago, sitting in complete creative and productive silence for the past year. No newsletters, no videos, nothing. When everything important shifts at once, how do you possibly know where to put your energy?
Even my two-week life sprints—the system that's carried me through every previous challenge—couldn’t generate enough momentum to pull me out of the paralysis.
That's when I remembered something from my wilderness survival experience: navigating through pitch blackness with nothing but occasional glow sticks marking critical turns. You don't need to see the entire path. You just need enough light for the next step, one foot in front of the other, breathing, staying present, keeping faith in the process.
The Mozart's Cafe Breakthrough
On March 9, I sat at Mozart's Coffee in Austin with nothing but my iPad and the vague sense that I needed to create something—anything—to guide myself out of this “personal wilderness”.
What emerged over the next few hours became the Fog of War (FOW) Map, inspired by that wilderness navigation insight. Like a torch light in darkness, you can see your immediate vicinity clearly, with everything else radiating out into increasing ambiguity. But instead of mapping distance, the FOW system maps time.
The breakthrough was realizing that different time horizons require fundamentally different types of thinking:
1st Ring: Immediate Next Steps (This Week): Concrete, actionable tasks—like the ground directly lit by your torch
2nd Ring: Near Term Plans (This Month): Broader directions and connections, less sequence-dependent
3rd Ring: Medium Term Vision (This Quarter): Questions and themes rather than fixed answers—the shadowy shapes you sense but can't quite define
The magic happens when you stop fighting the natural limitations of each zone. You don't need to see the entire mountain to take the next step up the trail.
What You Don't See in the Video
While the YouTube version walks through the mapping process, what I didn't share was the emotional context that made this framework necessary.
Sitting in that Austin coffee shop, I wasn't just planning tasks—I was negotiating with grief. How do you honor a year's worth of work on a coaching program that no longer fits your reality? How do you hold space for dreams that served you in one season while remaining open to what wants to emerge next?
This is where the FOW approach revealed its deeper wisdom: it allows you to hold multiple emotional truths simultaneously. I could acknowledge that pausing my coaching program was the right decision and feel the loss of that vision. I could focus intensely on this week's basics while maintaining faith that longer-term clarity would emerge.
The framework became a bridge between two states of being: the person I was before entering my personal wilderness and whoever I was becoming on the other side.
Within four weeks of creating and applying this system, I went from complete creative paralysis to publishing newsletters again, creating videos, hosting community meetups, and finding my social rhythm in a new city—all during what was objectively one of the most uncertain periods of my life.
My original FOW Map dated March 9, 2025. At the corner, I wrote an affirmation: “When walking through the darkness, just put one foot over the other. Eventually you’ll get to where you need to be.”
The key was the integration with my Life Sprint system. When even two-week sprints felt impossibly long, the FOW system allowed me to compress my focus down to one-week cycles while maintaining connection to larger possibilities. I wasn't abandoning my vision—I was learning to trust that consistent weekly progress would eventually create the momentum needed to explore longer planning zones.
Love the Questions
What's struck me most about sharing this framework in IRL over the past few months is how many accomplished people have responded with relief—finally, permission to not have "all the answers" during major life transitions.
Whether you're navigating career pivots in your 30s and 40s, caring for aging parents while managing demanding professional lives, leading teams through volatility, or simply realizing you've said "yes" to too many things—the traditional planning approaches weren't designed for this level of complex uncertainty for people with as many diverse interests as we do.
The FOW approach acknowledges something most modern productivity gurus ignore, but that which philosophers and poets have long honored: some of your most important "next steps" are actually questions that need to be lived into rather than problems to be solved immediately.
It acknowledges the reality that when you're dealing with fundamental life shifts, you're not just planning tasks—you're negotiating with identity, values, and what success even means anymore.
Simple Tools, Deep Epiphanies
What transformed this insight from a personal revelation into a teachable framework was the mapping process itself. The visual nature of Epiphany Mapping allows you to see the connections between different time zones in a way that linear planning tools can’t.
When you draw the relationships between this week's actions and this month's themes, you start to see how immediate steps can serve multiple longer-term possibilities. You're not just executing tasks—you're creating optionality.
The best part? You can do it with just a piece of paper and two pens. No fancy apps and AI needed. I always prefer the lowest tech solution to the task at hand.
The red pen annotations I demonstrate in the video are crucial because they transform a brain dump into a navigation system. You're not just capturing what you need to do, you're creating a visual representation of how different elements relate to each other across time horizons.
Why This Matters Now
We're living through a period where the old models of career progression, business development, and personal growth are being fundamentally questioned. The people I serve aren't just managing tasks—they're navigating questions that didn't exist for previous generations.
How do you build a career that honors both your analytical and creative sides? How do you create impact without burning out? How do you integrate technology like AI into your work without losing what makes you essentially human? All amidst increasing distractions and seismic global shifts?
These aren't planning problems in the traditional sense. They're integration challenges that require a different approach to uncovering your WHY, focusing your thinking and aligning your actions.
What's Next
Some of our most transformative periods look like failure from the outside. The silence, the uncertainty, the apparent lack of progress. These aren't obstacles to breakthrough. They're often the necessary conditions for it.
Sometimes the most “productive” thing you can do is turn down the volume on the distant horizon and turn up the brightness on what's directly in front of you. Trust that the path reveals itself as you walk it.
Like those glow sticks in the darkness that told me I was on the right track, each completed week becomes a marker—proof that you can navigate uncertainty, one step at a time. Eventually you’ll get to where you need to be.
If you're ready to move beyond planning systems that assume your life fits into neat categories, ready for an approach designed for those who navigate complexity rather than avoid it, I'm hosting a LIVE Deep Dive Discussion this Thursday in Mind Map Nation.
Event Details:
📅 Date: June 26, 2025
🕘 Time: 7:00 AM Pacific Time
📍 Location: Zoom (Become a member today to grab the Zoom link)
During this session, we'll cover:
Focus Filters - How do you decide what stays in this week's clarity zone versus the "fog"? When do you expand or narrow your planning scope?
Foundations vs. Dreams - How do you balance your non-negotiables with ambitious projects? What happens when they clash, and how do you navigate those tensions?
Strategic Uncertainty - How do you apply "I don't need all the answers" to high-stakes decisions? What's worked for you in embracing productive ambiguity?
Implementation Reality - What resistance have you hit when limiting your planning scope? How do you handle pressure for unrealistic long-term certainty from others or yourself?
Other Applications - Using this system for major life transitions, career pivots, family crises, and periods of identity shift or professional uncertainty.
If you can't make it live, this event will be recorded and summarized in our Community Library afterwards.
Mind Map Nation members will also receive the Extended Learning Edition with 50% more content:
🪨 The Block System - Create unmovable daily anchors that guarantee wins even when focus and energy are scarce.
⚖️ Personal Crisis Management - Real examples from my life on how to map urgent personal priorities alongside professional demands.
♻️ The "No Loss Philosophy" - My framework for funneling failed projects into future opportunities, including how I'm converting my canceled coaching program into an AI app
⭕️ Feedback Loop Design - How to build self-improving personal operating systems where your current actions inform and refine future planning cycles
Not yet a member? Check out the perks below 👇
🙌 Ready to transform your diverse passions into meaningful impact?
If this newsletter resonated with you, our community might be exactly what you need. Mind Map Nation is where impact driven professionals integrate their knowledge and create aligned action. You'll get:
The complete learning system: The 7-day Mind Mapping Mastery Course ($169 value) + 10 Empowering Mind Maps Course ($199) + The Life Sprint Course & 2x Group Sprints ($400 value)) - tools specifically designed to help you organize complexity and turn insights into action.
Deep Dive Discussions that go beyond surface-level content, where concepts from my YouTube channel are explored through multiple perspectives. Connect with others who understand the value of integrative thinking.
Extended Learning Editions of my videos with the nuance and depth that doesn't fit YouTube's format. These uncut versions include the complex connections and philosophical foundations behind practical techniques.
Monthly Q&A sessions where your unique challenges get personalized attention, plus Members-only workshops that combine strategic frameworks with meaning-driven applications.
Access to the Gurus Hub - a curated knowledge base where experts from diverse domains share integrative approaches to complex problems, complete with searchable transcripts and time-saving summaries.
A community of aligned peers who understand the challenges of navigating multiple domains of expertise and are actively building bridges between different knowledge areas.
Library of previous meetups documented with mind maps and key insights - perfect for those who process information in non-linear ways and appreciate seeing connections between concepts.
Join us to bridge the gap between your diverse capabilities and aligned impact. Our frameworks help turn what might seem like scattered interests into your greatest advantage.
Make the most of your Epiphanies
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