I’ve been thinking about why some AI-generated videos go viral while most die in obscurity. They have similar facts, similar production quality, similar everything.

Then I stumbled on a book by Taiwanese screenwriter Rongzhe Xu called Story Class, and it clicked: AI makes creating content effortless, but it doesn’t make content persuasive.

That requires something else entirely—something a Prussian king figured out in 1772 while trying to convince people to eat potatoes.

Yeah, you read that right. Potatoes.

Stories Beat Facts (Especially Now)

Here’s what Frederick the Great learned the hard way: you can’t logic people into anything.

His problem was simple. Prussia needed a backup crop in case wheat failed. Potatoes were perfect—easy to grow, nutritious, abundant.

But people refused to eat them.

Their reasoning was airtight: Potatoes are in the nightshade family (so is deadly nightshade—coincidence?). They grow underground like criminals hiding from the law. The Bible never mentions them, so clearly God disapproves.

Frederick tried the obvious approach. He commanded everyone to eat potatoes.

Nobody ate potatoes.

Think about this for a second. A king couldn’t change behavior with direct orders.

So Frederick tried something different. He declared potatoes royal vegetables—only the king could grow and eat them. He posted guards around potato fields. But he secretly told the guards to look away if people tried stealing them.

Human nature did the rest. People got curious. They stole potatoes. Loved them. Stole more. Word spread.

Same potato. Same nutritional facts. Zero change in reality. But the story changed everything.

This is why I’m obsessed with this right now. We’re entering an era where AI can generate perfect tutorials, flawless explanations, technically accurate everything. Your competition isn’t other creators—it’s infinite AI-generated content that’s 90% as good as yours.

The differentiator isn’t better facts. It’s better stories.

Every video you make competes on two dimensions: actual value (the information) and perceived value (how people feel about it). AI is commoditizing actual value. It’s making the first one basically free.

Perceived value is the moat. And stories control perceived value completely.

When Steve Jobs wanted engineers to speed up Mac boot time by 10 seconds, he didn’t say “it’s good UX.” He calculated: “5 million users times 10 seconds equals roughly ten human lifetimes per year. You can save ten lives.“

Boot time and human lives have nothing to do with each other. But the engineers cut 28 seconds anyway.

That’s story distortion in action.

The Formula Nobody Tells You

Here’s the counter-intuitive part: storytelling isn’t a mystical talent. It’s a formula.

I know. I spent years thinking “some people are just naturally good at this.” Turns out I was wrong and also wasting time.

Xu broke it down into seven steps: Goal, Obstacle, Effort, Result, Surprise, Turn, Resolution.

Every good story—from novels to Nike ads to your video scripts—follows this pattern.

Let me show you something wild. Steve Jobs’ entire life perfectly fits this formula:

Goal: Change the world (audacious enough to care about)

Obstacle: Adopted as baby, foster parents sold used cars, dropped out after 6 months

Effort: Started Apple in a garage

Result: Success! Then the board fired him in 1984

Surprise: Apple crashed without him, board begged him back

Turn: He returned and launched iMac, iPod, iPhone

Resolution: Changed the world

People didn’t buy iPhones because they were good phones. They bought Steve Jobs’ story. The phone was just the vehicle.

This is directly applicable to your video strategy. Every piece of content you make should follow this structure:

For a 3-minute video: Use all seven steps.

For a 1-minute video: Simplify to “Effort Person” (overcome obstacles, achieve goal) or “Surprise Person” (unexpected outcome).

For a 10-second hook: Deploy what Jobs called “reality distortion.” Swap boring facts for emotional resonance.

Example: Jobs wanted to recruit John Sculley from PepsiCo. He could have pitched salary, equity, career growth.

Instead: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or change the world?”

That’s not a job offer. That’s an identity crisis wrapped in a question.

This is your competitive advantage in the AI age. AI can generate information. It can’t generate identity crises. It can’t make people question who they are.

Your video scripts should do exactly this—use the formula to create emotional momentum, then deploy reality distortion at key moments.

Three Tactics That Work Tomorrow

Okay, you’ve got the formula. Now here are three specific techniques for your next video:

Tactic One: Weaponize Contrast

There’s a famous story about Watergate. Nixon’s team got caught bugging the opposition’s office. Terrible plan, obviously. But here’s the weird part—these were political elites. How did this idiot plan get approved?

The guy who proposed it (Liddy) was actually on his third attempt:

Attempt one: Rent a yacht, hire prostitutes, lure enemies aboard, track with aircraft, deploy special ops. $1 million. Rejected.

Attempt two: Same plan, $500k. Rejected.

Attempt three: Just install some bugs? ...Approved.

The same people approved the third plan because the first two made it seem reasonable by comparison.

If you’re pitching something controversial or different, don’t defend it directly. First show something more extreme. Then “compromise” to your real idea.

Tactic Two: Closed Questions

Ancient China has this great story. King Wei ignored government for three years. Country fell apart. Nobody dared confront him.

Finally, advisor Kun visited: “Your Majesty, a beautiful bird arrived at the palace. Stunning plumage. But it’s sat for three years without flying or singing. Why?”

Everyone knew the bird represented the king. The question was ultra-closed: Will you do your job or not?

The king could only answer one way. And he did—became a great ruler.

The answer was embedded in the question.

Your CTAs should work the same way. Don’t ask “Would you like to subscribe?” Ask “Want to see how this ends next week?” You’ve planted “yes” inside the question.

Tactic Three: Engineer Experience

NBA training camps had a problem. Young players would hook up with fans, some carrying HIV. Coaches warned them constantly. Didn’t work.

One day, three female fans met players after practice. Great conversation. Plans to meet tomorrow night.

Next morning in class: “Today we have special guest speakers.”

Same three women walked in.

Each said one sentence: “My name is [X]. I was diagnosed with HIV in [year].”

They were volunteers. The players were one step from disaster and had no idea.

Way more effective than any lecture.

Don’t just tell people facts. Make them feel how close they are to missing out. Use visualization, put them in scenarios, create “what if you’d started yesterday” moments.

The Punch

We’re in this bizarre moment where AI can generate infinite content, but people still choose what to watch based on feelings, not facts.

Everyone has access to the same information now. The winners will be whoever tells better stories about it. Not more accurate stories. Not longer stories. Better stories—ones that change how people see themselves and their choices.

The formula is here. The tactics work. Now it’s just about practice.

Links:

1. Rongzhe Xu

2. Story Class

I just finished a book that made me rethink every career decision I’ve ever made.

It’s by a Nobel Prize winner who spent decades studying why smart, capable people end up with lives they didn’t really choose.

Turns out, the problem was never about what we want.

The real culprit? The invisible constraints we’re all operating under. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

The Constraint You Didn’t Know Was Running Your Life

Here’s a brain-bender: In 1900-1920, the first generation of college-educated women had the LOWEST marriage and birth rates of any generation since.

This makes no sense. Earlier times = more traditional = everyone married young, right?

Nope. Half never had kids. A third never married.

Claudia Goldin (2023 Nobel laureate) studied five generations of educated women from 1878-1978. What she found applies to anyone trying to build a career and a life at the same time.

Each generation wanted roughly the same thing: meaningful work AND a personal life. But their outcomes were wildly different.

Why? Because what changed wasn’t their preferences. It was their constraints.

Generation 1 faced “marriage bars” – actual policies banning married women from certain jobs. Plus no washing machines, so laundry took 6 hours. Choose one: career or family.

Generation 3 (the Baby Boom moms) got dishwashers and no marriage bars. Suddenly having both seemed possible! Marriage rate: 90%+. They’d work, have kids, quit, return later to “low-risk jobs” like teaching.

Generation 4 watched their moms do unfulfilling work and said “hard pass.” They wanted law, medicine, finance. They got birth control pills. They crushed their careers. Then looked up at 45 and... 28% had no kids. Oops.

Generation 5 learned from Gen 4’s mistakes. They got IVF and better maternity leave. Result: late marriage (age 27) but kids too (only 17% childless).

The pattern: People don’t actually change that much. But when the constraints change, suddenly different choices become possible.

This matters for you because you’re operating under constraints you probably can’t see. Your industry’s norms. Your company’s unwritten rules. The way your role is structured. The tech available to you.

You think you’re choosing based on preferences. But you’re mostly just optimizing within your constraints.

Your Job Might Be “Greedy” (And That’s Costing You)

Even with better constraints, Generation 5 women still earned 27% less than men with identical education.

Why? Everyone assumes: sexism.

Which... exists. (Michelle Williams got $100K while her male co-star got $1.5M for the same reshoots. )

But Goldin found the real driver: “greedy work.”

Here’s how it works. In some fields, the more hours you worked in the PAST, the more each hour is worth in the FUTURE. Your time compounds.

Law, medicine, finance, management – all greedy. A doctor who’s seen more patients? Each hour becomes more valuable. A lawyer who’s built client relationships? Gets the big cases.

But take time off – for kids, or burnout, or literally anything – and your hour-value drops. Permanently.

The pay gap doesn’t exist at age 25. It opens at age 28-29, right after people have their first kid. Then it grows.

Why? Because greedy jobs punish any career interruption. They demand you be available 24/7. Client relationships matter. Face time matters. Past hours worked matter.

And from a household perspective, having one person in a greedy job and one in a flexible job maximizes family income. That’s just math.

So millions of rational families independently make the same choice: one person goes greedy, one stays flexible. And the flexible one is usually the woman.

Here’s why this matters for you: Your field might be greedy without you realizing it.

If your value compounds based on relationships, face time, and uninterrupted experience accumulation – you’re in a greedy field. Every hour you work makes future hours more valuable. Every break costs you more than the time away.

This isn’t good or bad. It just IS. But knowing it lets you make better decisions.

Maybe you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. Maybe you should switch to a less greedy field. Maybe you should restructure how your team works so it’s less greedy for everyone.

You can’t fix what you can’t see.

The Counter-Intuitive Solution: Make Yourself Replaceable

Goldin’s solution to greedy work will sound insane: increase substitutability.

Translation: make it easier for someone else to do your job.

Every instinct screams this is wrong. Job security = being indispensable, right?

Wrong.

Look at pharmacists. High-paying job. Lots of customer interaction. But the gender pay gap? Tiny. Women earn 94% of what men earn.

Fifty years ago, pharmacy WAS a greedy job. Pharmacists had “their” customers. Personal relationships mattered. You’d get 2am calls for emergency prescriptions.

Now? Standardized medications. Electronic records. Any pharmacist can help any customer. They’re highly substitutable.

Result: Job stopped being greedy. Pay gap shrank. But pay DIDN’T drop.

The same thing is happening in consulting, accounting, finance, hospitals. Why?

Better knowledge management. Documentation. Slack histories. Handoff protocols.

When team members are more substitutable, everyone’s schedule can be more flexible. The work becomes less greedy. And paradoxically, this makes the team MORE valuable, not less.

For you, this means: Document everything. Build systems. Make your knowledge transferable. Create processes others can follow.

This feels like you’re making yourself expendable. But actually, you’re making your entire operation more resilient, more scalable, more attractive to clients (internal or external).

Plus, young professionals quit jobs with brutal hours now. If you want to keep good people, you HAVE to build substitutability in.

The thing we’re all afraid of – being replaceable – might actually be the thing that saves us.

The Thing That’ll Stick With You

Five generations. Same basic wants. Completely different outcomes.

What changed wasn’t people. It was constraints: laws, technology, social norms.

The problem isn’t preferences or individual bad actors. Which is good news – we can fix systems. Bad news – fixing systems is harder than blaming people.

A world that’s better for women turns out to be better for men too. Less greedy work. More flexible schedules. Better work-life balance for everyone.

We just have to be willing to see the constraints we’re operating under. And then change them.

Wild how that works.

Links:

1. https://goldin.scholars.harvard.edu

2. https://www.amazon.com/Career-Family-Womens-Century-Long-Journey/dp/0691201781

Ever notice how you keep making the same mistake in different packaging?

Like, you swore you’d stop volunteering for every project, but here you are at 11 PM finishing someone else’s slides. Again.

Or you promised yourself you’d speak up in the next meeting, but when it came time, you just... didn’t.

It’s not willpower. It’s not discipline. It’s something way more interesting (and fixable).

Today we’re talking about the mental code you wrote when you were six years old—and why it’s still running your life.

Your Brain Is Running Code from Kindergarten

Here’s something nobody tells you in business school:

The way you handle conflict at work? Mostly determined by age 6.

Your relationship with authority? Age 6.

That thing where you overcommit and burn out? You guessed it—age 6.

German psychotherapist Gitta Jacob calls these patterns “schemas.” They’re the mental frameworks you built as a kid to understand yourself and the world.

And here’s the kicker: they’re self-reinforcing.

Let me show you how this ruins your Tuesday.

Say you developed this schema: “I need to work twice as hard to deserve recognition.”

Your manager praises your work. Your brain translates: “They’re just being nice. They don’t really mean it.”

You ship a successful project. Your brain: “Lucky timing. Next one will expose me.”

You get promoted. Your brain: “They must be desperate. I’m a fraud.”

See the pattern?

Every piece of evidence that contradicts your schema gets twisted to fit it anyway. It’s like your brain is running a spam filter, except it’s filtering out good news and keeping the garbage.

Psychologists call this a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I call it “why I went to therapy.”

The cycle goes: Schema → You notice things that confirm it → You ignore things that contradict it → Schema gets stronger → Repeat until retirement.

And the truly maddening part? You probably can’t even see it happening.

It’s like trying to read the label from inside the bottle.

The goal isn’t to delete these schemas. It’s to see them clearly enough that you can choose whether to use them.

Because sometimes that “work twice as hard” schema serves you. And sometimes it just makes you the person who’s still online at midnight while everyone else is asleep.

The trick is knowing the difference.

The Four Voices in Your Head (And Why They Won’t Shut Up)

Your schema isn’t one thing. It’s four distinct voices having a very loud argument in your head.

Voice 1: The Inner Child

This is the part of you that still remembers what it felt like to be small and powerless.

When a senior executive asks you a question and you suddenly feel like you’re seven years old getting called on in class? That’s your Inner Child.

There are three types:

The Wounded Child feels inadequate. I once met someone making $300K who still felt “not good enough” because she grew up poor. The bank account changed. The feeling didn’t.

The Spoiled Child never learned boundaries. These are the people who rage-quit when told “no.” They look entitled, but really they’re just terrified because they never learned where the limits are.

The Happy Child remembers joy and curiosity. This is the only one we actually want to keep around.

Voice 2: The Inner Critic

Remember your parents’ voices? The things they said about work, success, what you “should” do?

Congratulations! They live in your head now. Rent-free. Forever.

Three flavors:

The Achievement Police: “Why are you resting? You’re not successful enough yet!” Useful in small doses. Exhausting in large ones.

The Guilt Monger: “Your parents sacrificed everything. How dare you be happy?” This one is just pure poison.

The Demolition Expert: “You’re worthless.” If this voice shows up, tell it to shut up. Seriously. Out loud if necessary.

Voice 3: The Coping Strategy

As a kid, you figured out how to survive. Maybe you:

• Complied: Became the “good kid” who never caused trouble (now you’re the “yes person” who can’t say no)

• Avoided: Stayed in your lane (now you’re the person who never takes risks)

• Overcompensated: Fought back constantly (now you’re the workaholic who can’t stop)

Here’s what’s wild: The strategy that saved you at seven is probably sabotaging you at forty.

Voice 4: The Adult Self

This is your idea of what a “professional adult” looks like. Some of it’s healthy (taking responsibility, managing emotions). Some of it’s a disaster (perfectionism disguised as standards).

The question: Which voice is driving when you make decisions?

Because I guarantee it’s not always the Adult.

How to Rewrite Code That’s Been Running for Decades

Okay, you’ve identified your schemas. Now what?

Here are four practices that actually work. I know because I’ve had to do all of them. (Therapy is expensive and also the best money I’ve ever spent.)

Practice 1: Talk to Your Inner Child (Yes, Really)

Find a quiet moment. Imagine meeting your childhood self.

What would you say to that kid?

When I did this exercise, I imagined seven-year-old me, terrified of getting in trouble, trying desperately to be perfect.

I told her: “Hey. You’re going to be okay. You’ll mess up sometimes. People will still like you. Actually, they’ll like you more when you’re not trying so hard. I know because I’m you, thirty years later.”

It sounds ridiculous.

It’s also surprisingly powerful.

Practice 2: Reparent Yourself

Give yourself permission to do things for no reason except joy.

Listen to music. Dance badly. Take a walk. Play.

I know, I know. You have seventeen Slack messages and a deck due Friday.

Do it anyway.

The more you amplify the happy parts, the less room there is for the wounded parts.

It’s not about “fixing” yourself. It’s about crowding out the old patterns with better ones.

Practice 3: Negotiate with Your Critic

List the harshest things you say to yourself.

Now ask: Would I say this to a colleague I respected?

No? Then why are you saying it to yourself?

Rewrite the criticism as if you’re talking to a peer you want to help succeed.

Instead of: “You’re so lazy, you should be working harder” Try: “You seem tired. What if we tackle this differently?”

Practice 4: Test Different Strategies

If you always say yes, practice saying no once.

If you always avoid, try engaging once.

If you always push, try resting once.

You don’t have to change everything. Just run one experiment.

See what happens.

Most people are shocked to discover the world doesn’t end when they try a new approach.

(Some are disappointed. They were kind of hoping for the drama.)

The Punchline

Your schemas aren’t personality traits. They’re not fixed. They’re code—code that you can debug.

The first step is seeing the code. The second is deciding if it still serves you. And the third is having the guts to run a different program, even though the old one feels safer.

Because here’s the thing: You can keep running six-year-old code and wondering why your forty-year-old problems won’t resolve. Or you can rewrite it. Your call, boss.

Links:

1. https://www.instagram.com/gittajacobofficial

2. https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Negative-Thinking-Patterns-Self-Help-ebook/dp/B00RQECLNW

Morning, CEO!

Your gut is giving you career advice right now.

It’s telling you that young founders have an edge. That pivoting industries will bring fresh perspective. That each failure is a stepping stone to success.

Your gut is very confident about this.

Your gut is also completely wrong.

Today we’re looking at Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Don’t Trust Your Gut—a book that uses millions of data points to demolish basically every intuitive belief you have about success.

AI can process data faster than you. But it can’t tell you which data to ignore.

That’s still your job.

The Boring Truth: Success Stories Are Lies

Quick question.

What does a successful entrepreneur look like?

If you said “twenty-something college dropout with a world-changing idea,” congratulations—you’ve been successfully manipulated by media narratives.

The actual data is way less sexy.

Economists analyzed 2.7 million American startup founders.

Average age? 42.

Not 27. Not 30. Forty-freaking-two.

(This is the part where you either feel relieved or personally attacked, depending on your age.)

But wait, there’s more disappointing news!

The “outsider advantage” is also a myth.

You know, that inspiring idea that industry outsiders bring fresh thinking while insiders are trapped in old paradigms?

Complete fiction.

If you have direct experience in an industry, your success rate is about double that of outsiders.

The deeper your experience, the bigger your advantage.

Oh, and that whole “fail fast, learn from failure” thing?

Also wrong.

Researchers looked at founder salaries before they started their companies.

The higher your previous salary (meaning: the more successful you already were), the more likely your startup succeeds.

So the actual profile of a typical successful entrepreneur is:

A middle-aged person who spent 15-20 years mastering their industry, climbed to near the top, built deep expertise and connections, then leveraged all that accumulated advantage to start something.

It’s not a movie plot.

It’s not inspiring.

It’s not even interesting.

Which is exactly why nobody talks about it.

But here’s what this means for you, sitting at your desk right now:

Every day you spend building expertise in your field, every relationship you develop, every pattern you learn to recognize—that’s not preparation for your “real” career.

That IS your competitive advantage.

You’re not killing time until you can pivot to something exciting.

You’re building an unfair advantage that gets more valuable every year.

The twenty-somethings with fresh perspectives? They’re not your competition.

They’re playing a completely different game with much worse odds.

Your biggest asset isn’t your youth or your “beginner’s mind.”

It’s the 10,000 hours you’ve already put in that nobody can take away.

The Three Questions: Your New Decision Framework

Okay, so you’ve been building expertise. Great.

Now what?

Whether you’re evaluating a side project, considering a career move, or just trying to figure out where to focus your energy, you need a framework.

Here’s the one that data suggests actually matters:

Before any big bet, ask yourself three questions:

1. Will this give me ownership?

Not necessarily equity (though that’s nice). But will you OWN the outcomes?

Because here’s the harsh truth: You’re probably not getting rich from your salary.

Among the top 0.1% of earners in America, over 80% own a business.

Only 20% got there through salary—and they’re CEOs of giant corporations or famous coaches.

For everyone else, the path to wealth runs through ownership.

Even a small ownership stake in outcomes beats being the best employee.

2. Can I avoid brutal price competition?

This is the question most people skip.

Economists call it the “Zero Profit Theorem”: In any industry with perfect price competition, profit margins get competed down to zero.

Think about it: If anyone can do what you do, and everyone can see what everyone else charges, prices race to the bottom until nobody makes money.

This is why the most successful industries aren’t the ones with the coolest products.

They’re the ones with moats.

Real estate dealerships? Protected by regulations. Wholesale distribution? Exclusive contracts. Specialized consulting? Deep expertise that can’t be comparison-shopped.

You don’t want to be in a fair fight.

You want structural advantages that keep competitors away.

3. Can I avoid winner-take-all dynamics?

This is the counterintuitive one.

Everyone wants to be in the “hot” industry. Tech. AI. Crypto.

But these industries have a problem: They tend toward 70-20-10 market splits.

First place takes 70%. Second takes 20%. Everyone else fights over 10%.

We see the billionaires who won. We don’t see the thousands of failed startups at the bottom.

The most consistently wealth-generating industries? They’re boring.

Auto dealerships. Market research. Specialized wholesale trade.

Industries where no single player devours the entire market. Where there’s room for hundreds of successful operators.

Here’s how this applies to your career right now:

That exciting pivot to a hot new field? You’re probably walking into a winner-take-all game where you have no accumulated advantage.

That boring deepening of expertise in your current domain? You’re probably building a moat in a space with room for many winners.

Most of us have been trained to chase the exciting opportunity.

Data suggests we should be building boring, defensible advantages in markets with structural protection from competition.

It’s not sexy. But neither is losing.

Manufacturing Luck: The Volume Strategy

Last piece: How do you get luckier?

Because let’s be honest—at some point, success isn’t just about skill or judgment. You need to be in the right place at the right time with the right people noticing.

Physicist Albert-László Barabási analyzed nearly 500,000 artists’ career trajectories.

What predicted success?

Not talent. Not hours practiced. Not number of works produced.

It was the number of different places they exhibited.

Artists who kept showing in the same galleries? Lower success rate.

Artists who constantly moved around exhibiting everywhere? 6 times higher success rate.

Why?

Because luck is a volume game.

You can’t increase your luck per attempt. But you can increase your number of attempts.

More places = more diverse eyeballs = higher chance of meeting your champion.

This applies directly to your career:

That project you’re working on? Don’t just show your boss. Show your boss’s boss. Show the team across the hall. Write about it internally. Present at the company all-hands.

That insight you developed? Don’t keep it in your notes. Write a memo. Share it with your network. Post about it.

That skill you’re building? Don’t hide it until it’s perfect. Use it on visible projects. Volunteer for cross-functional teams.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The best idea that nobody sees is worthless.

The mediocre idea that gets in front of 100 people beats it every time.

This feels wrong because we’ve been trained to “put our heads down and do good work.”

But doing good work in silence is like being the best singer in your shower. Technically proficient, zero impact.

Research on dating sites proves this brutally:

If “unpopular” people message “popular” people, they think they’ll get ignored.

Actual response rates? 15-35%.

If you message 10 people you think are “out of your league,” odds of at least one reply: 80%.

Most people reject themselves before anyone else gets the chance.

In your career, this looks like:

Not applying because “they’d never pick me.” Not speaking up because “someone smarter probably thought of this.” Not sharing your work because “it’s not ready yet.”

Meanwhile, the programmer who wrote a script to auto-visit 100 dating profiles a day got 20 messages per day and met his future wife on date #88.

Volume works.

So here’s your action item: Pick one thing you’re working on and show it to 10 people this week.

Not people who will definitely care. People who might care.

Not when it’s perfect. Now.

You’re not increasing your luck per attempt.

You’re increasing your surface area for luck.

The Bottom Line:

Your gut evolved to avoid lions, not to optimize career decisions.

Data isn’t perfect. Your life isn’t an average. Sometimes intuition is right.

But when millions of data points all say “your intuition is systematically wrong about this,” maybe listen?

Think of data as a second opinion. Not gospel, but worth considering before you bet your career on a feeling.

Now go increase your surface area for luck.

You’ve got 10 people to bother this week.

Links:

1. https://sethsd.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Trust-Your-Gut/dp/1526605090

Here’s a fun thing I’ve noticed: The smartest people I know are getting quieter.

Not because they have less to say.

But because when they do speak up, they get shut down with three words: “I know that.”

Thomas Nichols calls this “The Death of Expertise.”

And if you’re running your own operation—making calls, managing stakeholders, staying ahead of AI—you need to understand why this matters for your judgment.

1. The Customer Takeover (Or: When Everyone Became the Judge)

Let’s start with universities.

Before WWII, college was for the few. Getting in meant you passed serious filters. Graduating meant even more.

A degree was a signal: “This person knows stuff.”

Then America decided everyone should go to college.

Great idea in theory.

Terrible in execution.

New schools popped up everywhere. Quality became... negotiable.

And suddenly, students became customers.

Which meant universities had to keep customers happy.

How?

Fancier dorms. Better food. More A’s.

(Harvard’s most common grade is now A-minus or above. Yale gives 60% of students A’s. Everyone is above average!)

But here’s the kicker:

Students also got to rate their professors.

And not on teaching quality.

On whether the chairs were comfortable.

Whether the professor’s shirt was ironed.

Whether they should “lose some weight.”

(Yes, Nichols got that feedback. I would’ve burned the evaluation form.)

The result? A generation trained to believe: “Even though I know nothing about this subject, I’m qualified to judge the expert.”

Which brings us to you.

When you’re the one making decisions, you need to know when to trust specialists and when to push back.

But if your reflex is “I could’ve figured that out myself,” you’re not being discerning. You’re being a customer rating a professor’s shirt.

2. The Google Delusion (Or: How Searching Became “Knowing”)

Quick question:

Have you ever saved an article you never read but somehow felt smarter for having saved it?

Yeah. Me too.

That’s the Internet’s gift to humanity: The illusion that access equals understanding.

Yale researchers found that when people browse online, they mistake “outsourced knowledge” for “internalized knowledge.”

Translation: Googling something makes you feel like you learned it.

It’s like walking through a rainstorm and thinking you’re a swimmer.

But here’s where it gets worse:

The Internet doesn’t just make you feel smart. It makes you feel right.

Because no matter what wild opinion you hold, somewhere online, someone agrees with you.

Think vaccines cause autism? There’s a website for that.

Think vinegar cures everything? Here are 47 TikToks.

And once you find your tribe, algorithms make sure you never have to see a dissenting view again.

So what kind of person does this create?

Someone who:

• Thinks they know a lot

• Barely reads anything deeply

• Can always find validation

In other words: Someone you cannot convince.

Now imagine you’re trying to influence a stakeholder who operates this way.

You present data. They Google a counterpoint.

You explain nuance. They send you a YouTube video.

You realize: This isn’t about facts. It’s about feelings.

Which means your job isn’t to be right. It’s to make the right answer feel right to them.

That’s the counterintuitive part: In a world drowning in information, expertise isn’t about knowing more. It’s about communicating in ways that land.

3. The Entertainment Trap (Or: When News Became Clickbait)

In 1960, American households had access to 3 TV channels.

By 2015? 189 channels.

More channels. More competition. More panic.

So media companies did what anyone does when they’re desperate for attention: They made everything entertaining.

CNN became “Chicken Noodle News”—watering down complex stories into bite-sized drama.

Fox News and MSNBC picked sides and played to their tribes.

And somewhere along the way, “news” stopped being about truth and started being about what you want to hear.

Example:

A fake study went viral claiming chocolate helps you lose weight.

It was published in a real journal. Picked up by media worldwide.

The study was fake. The scientist didn’t exist. The whole thing was designed to prove how easy it is to manipulate media.

(Spoiler: It’s very easy.)

But here’s what this does to people:

On one hand, they feel confident.

“I can access information anytime! I’m informed!”

On the other hand, they feel suspicious.

“But which source is right? I’ll just pick the one I like.”

The result? Confidence + skepticism = Impossible to influence.

Which brings us back to you.

When you’re presenting an idea, you’re not just competing with other ideas.

You’re competing with every media outlet, influencer, and algorithm that’s already shaped how your audience thinks.

So what do you do?

You stop trying to win with logic. You win with narrative.

Make your point entertaining.

Make it memorable.

Make it feel true before you prove it’s true.

Because if experts are dying, it’s not because they’re wrong. It’s because they’re boring.

So here’s the punch line:

We live in an age where everyone thinks they know everything.

And the smarter you get, the quieter you’ll be tempted to become.

But silence isn’t the answer.

Better communication is.

Stop assuming people will respect your expertise.

Start making your expertise impossible to ignore.

P.S.

The irony of this newsletter isn’t lost on me.

I’m writing about how hard it is to communicate expertise...

...in a format designed to make complex ideas digestible...

...which is exactly what got us into this mess.

But here we are. Trying anyway.

That’s the job.

Links:

1. https://x.com/RadioFreeTom

2. https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-Knowledge/dp/0190469412

Morning, CEO!

I recently read The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom, and it’s the kind of book that makes you feel intellectually superior while simultaneously realizing you’ve been playing the wrong video game for the last 15 years.

If you think hitting a specific number in your bank account will finally make the Anxiety Birds in your head stop screeching, I have bad news. The scoreboard is broken. Let’s fix it.

1. The “I’ll Be Happy When...” Trap

I have this recurring delusion. It goes like this: “Once I finally ship this one specific feature, then I will be a calm, enlightened being who drinks herbal tea and never stress-eats cheese.”

Spoiler: I ship the feature. I eat the cheese anyway.

Sahil Bloom calls this the “Arrival Fallacy.”

It’s a glitch in our human operating system. We treat happiness like a destination on Google Maps. We think if we just drive hard enough, we’ll “arrive” at Satisfaction.

But biology is a cruel prankster. The moment you arrive, your brain moves the finish line.

There is a story in the book about a guy who sold his tech company for $100 million. To celebrate, he rents a mega-yacht. He is drinking expensive champagne. He has “won” capitalism.

Then, he looks over the railing.

Parked next to him is another yacht. But this one is twice as big. It has a helicopter pad.

In approximately 0.4 seconds, the guy goes from “I am the King of the World” to “My boat is a dinghy and I am a failure.”

This is why the Financial Wealth scoreboard is broken. There is always a bigger boat. There is always a guy with a helicopter pad. If you are only optimizing for the “Money” column in your life spreadsheet, you are playing a game you are mathematically guaranteed to lose.

2. You Are a Time Billionaire (For Now)

Let’s look at a different column in the spreadsheet: Time Wealth.

The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos (the terrifying ticking clock) and Kairos (the moments you actually remember).

Here is some math that might make you want to stare at a wall for a while:

If you are 30 years old, you have roughly 2 billion seconds left. You are a Time Billionaire.

Now, imagine Warren Buffett. He has roughly $100 billion. He is the Oracle. He is a legend. But he is also 94.

If he offered to trade places with you right now—he gets your 30-year-old body and your 2 billion seconds, and you get his 94-year-old body and his bank account—would you do it?

Absolutely not.

You wouldn’t trade your youth to be a geriatric billionaire on life support. This means, logically, your time is worth more to you than $100 billion.

Yet, we give this asset away for free. We sell it for pennies to sit in meetings that could have been emails. We burn it doom-scrolling to see what people we hated in high school are doing for dinner.

The most painful part of the book is the “Death Math.”

Let’s say your parents are 65 and live across the country. You visit them once a year. If they live to 80, you don’t have “15 years” left with them.

You have 15 visits.

You can count them on your hands and toes. When you frame Time Wealth like a depleting inventory, you stop wasting it on things that don’t matter.

3. The Funeral Test & The “1”

The other columns in the new scoreboard are Social, Mental, and Physical wealth.

Social Wealth isn’t your LinkedIn connection count. It passes the Funeral Test.

Close your eyes (after you read this sentence). Imagine your funeral. Who is sitting in the front row? Who is actually crying versus just checking their watch?

The client you replied to at 11 PM on a Sunday is not in the front row. The boss you were afraid of is not in the front row.

Prioritize the people who will actually show up.

Mental Wealth is about “Energy Vampires.” Some tasks (and people) give you energy. Some suck the life force out of you until you are a husk. Wealth is structuring your “Agency of One” so you spend your days doing things that actually recharge your battery.

And finally, Physical Wealth.

Think of your life as a long number. Your money, your status, your career achievements... those are all zeros.

1,000,000,000.

Your health is the “1” at the front.

If you remove the “1,” it doesn’t matter how many zeros you have. You just have zero.

This brings us back to Financial Wealth. In this new model, money is last.

Why? Because money is just a tool.

If you use money to buy a bigger boat to impress people you don’t like, you are using the tool wrong.

But if you use the tool to buy back your Time (so you can have those 15 visits), or to facilitate Social connection (buying the plane ticket), or to fix your Physical health (better food, gym)... then you are actually winning.

The Bottom Line:

The “Arrival Fallacy” is a lie. There is no destination where the music swells and the credits roll.

Stop trying to max out the Money stat while letting the Time and Health stats crash to zero. That’s how you lose the game.

Check your “Death Math.” Call your parents.

Links:

1. https://www.sahilbloom.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Types-Wealth-Transformative-Guide-Design/dp/059372318X

I know, I know. You haven’t even finished your first coffee, and I’m already handing you the keys to the castle.

But here is the reality of January 2026: Your AI staff can write the code, draft the emails, and probably even hallucinate a better strategy deck than you can.

But there is one thing the machines are still terrible at.

They have zero chill.

They can simulate conversation, but they can’t feel the room.

Today, we are looking at Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. Because while your digital interns are churning out output, your job is to master the one algorithm they can’t run: The Human Connection Protocol.

1. The Brain Bluetooth

I am an engineer. I like things that are logical. If Input A goes in, Output B should come out.

But for the first 40 years of my life, social interaction felt like I was feeding Input A into a black box, and the output was usually “awkward silence” or “Hannah, why would you say that?”

I used to think “socially gifted” people—let’s call them Social Wizards—were just born with a magic gene.

Duhigg says that is nonsense.

It turns out, connection is biological. It’s called Neural Entrainment.

Scientists did this weird experiment where they made people watch movie clips (including one of a bald guy yelling at a blonde guy—science is wild) and then put them in groups to discuss it.

They scanned everyone’s brains.

In the groups that failed to agree, everyone’s brain waves looked like chaotic scribbles.

But in the groups that clicked? The brain waves actually synchronized. The electrical pulses in their heads started firing in the exact same patterns.

Basically, Brain Bluetooth.

Now, here is the part that blew my mind and explains why my previous strategy failed.

I used to think the best way to lead a conversation was to be the “Alpha.” You know, talk the most, be the most confident, steer the ship.

The data says the Alpha is actually the connection killer.

In the experiment, the groups with a dominant, loud leader had the least amount of neural sync. The “Alpha” actually forced everyone else into their own isolated mental silos.

The real Social Wizards were the ones who barely spoke about themselves. They asked questions. They laughed at the awkward moments. They admitted they were confused.

They weren’t steering the ship; they were the WiFi routers making sure everyone else was online.

2. The Three Boxes (And Why I’m Usually in the Wrong One)

The biggest reason I—and probably you—fail at connection isn’t because we are dumb. It’s because we are having the wrong conversation.

Duhigg explains that every conversation falls into one of three specific boxes.

Box 1: The Practical Box (”What’s this really about?”)

This is logic. Planning. Strategy.

“How do we fix this bug?”

“Where should we go for lunch?”

Box 2: The Emotional Box (”How do we feel?”)

This is feelings. Venting. Empathy.

“I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of tacos.”

“My boss is a reptile.”

Box 3: The Social Box (”Who are we?”)

This is identity. Tribe. Gossip.

“Did you hear about Dave?”

“I am a person who loves tacos.”

Here is the disaster scenario.

Someone comes to you in Box 2 (Emotional). They say, “I am so exhausted, this client is draining my soul.”

If you are me, your Engineer Brain immediately jumps into Box 1 (Practical). You say, “You should fire them. Or raise your rates. Here is a three-step plan.”

You think you are being helpful. You think you are a hero.

But to the other person, you are a monster.

Their brain is running emotional software (Amygdala), and you are trying to upload a spreadsheet (Prefrontal Cortex). The file formats are incompatible. Error 404: Connection Not Found.

The counter-intuitive insight here?

You cannot move someone out of a box until you climb in there with them first.

If they are emotional, you have to be emotional. If they are gossiping (Social), you can’t lecture them on productivity (Practical).

You have to match their frequency first. Only then can you guide them somewhere else.

3. Energy Matching and the Mammoth

So, how do we actually do this “matching” thing without looking like a mimic?

NASA figured this out.

When they were screening astronauts, they noticed that the most successful candidates—the ones people wanted to be trapped in a tin can with for a year—had a specific laugh habit.

It wasn’t just that they laughed. It was Energy Matching.

If the interviewer laughed loudly, the candidate laughed loudly.

If the interviewer chuckled softly, the candidate chuckled softly.

It sounds manipulative, but it’s actually an ancient survival mechanism.

Inside our brains, we all have a Social Survival Mammoth. This Mammoth is terrified of being kicked out of the tribe because, in 10,000 BC, that meant getting eaten by a lion.

When we talk to someone, our Mammoth is constantly asking: “Are we safe? Are we the same?”

When you energy match—when you match someone’s volume, their speed, and their intensity—you are telling their Mammoth: “Yes. We are the same. Put down the spear.”

This even applies to the dreaded “Gossip”.

I used to think gossip was shallow. I thought I was above it.

But Duhigg points out that for most of human history, knowing who was sleeping with whom or who stole the extra meat was literally life-or-death data.

Gossip isn’t a character flaw; it’s a trust test.

When someone gossips with you, they are offering you a piece of “Social Currency.”

If you reject it (by staying in the Practical Box and saying “I don’t care about rumors”), you aren’t being noble. You are telling their Mammoth: “I am not in your tribe.”

So, the next time someone complains to you, don’t fix it. Don’t judge it.

Just match it.

The Bottom Line

Harvard ran a study for 85 years to find out what makes a good life.

The answer wasn’t money, or fame, or how optimized your Notion dashboard is.

It was relationships.

In 2026, you have an army of AI agents to handle the logic, the data, and the execution.

That frees you up to do the one thing they can’t.

Stop trying to be the smartest computer in the room.

Be the WiFi router.

Links:

1. https://charlesduhigg.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Supercommunicators-Unlock-Secret-Language-Connection/dp/0593243919

Morning, CEO!

It’s 2026. My AI “staff” is currently writing code faster than I can think, the market is doing interpretive dance, and I am sitting here trying to remember how to be a human.

If you’re anything like me—a socially awkward introvert trying to run the business of “Me”—you’re probably exhausted by the constant updates.

So today, we’re talking about Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever recently. It’s a book about the stuff that doesn’t change when the world goes crazy.

1. Your Crystal Ball is Actually a Magic 8-Ball (And it’s broken)

I have a confession. I spend roughly 40% of my CPU cycles trying to predict the future.

“If I launch this Substack post on Tuesday at 9 AM, the algorithm will love me.”

“If I learn this specific tech stack, I will be safe forever.”

Morgan Housel would look at my spreadsheet of predictions and gently throw it in the trash.

He tells a story about the Lusitania. You know, the big ship that sank in 1915 and dragged the US into WWI? That war changed everything—Hitler, nukes, the internet, this newsletter.

But the Lusitania only sank because a German sub happened to spot it. And the sub only spotted it because the ship was moving a tiny bit slower than usual.

Why was it slow? Because one guy—the ship’s captain—turned off a boiler room to save some coal.

If that one guy hadn’t tried to save a few bucks on coal, the 20th century looks completely different.

We are terrible at predicting the future because history is just a conga line of “One Guy Saving Coal” moments.

I call this the “Boiler Room Error.”

We spend all our time analyzing the competitors we can see, the market trends we can read about, and the risks that have names.

But Housel says: “Risk is what you don’t see.”

If you can see it, you prepare for it. If you prepare for it, it’s not a risk anymore; it’s a to-do list item.

The thing that will actually derail your year isn’t AI taking your job. It’s something stupid and invisible. Like your back giving out because you bought a cheap chair, or a random law changing in a country you can’t find on a map.

Stop trying to be a Prophet. Start being a Prepper.

Don’t optimize for the “most likely” future. Optimize for a “maximum survival” future. Build a buffer so thick that even if the Boiler Room Guy flips the wrong switch, you’re still standing.

2. The “Exploding Fish” Theory of Career Growth

My brain has a resident terrible advisor. I call him the Efficiency Goblin.

The Efficiency Goblin loves shortcuts. He sees a “30 Days to Master Rust” course and screams “YES! DO THAT! WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THE HARD WAY!”

He wants me to scale my output, double my subscribers, and optimize my sleep schedule by tomorrow.

But Housel hits us with some biology that shuts the Goblin up.

Scientists did a test with fish.

Group A: Put in cold water. They grew slowly.

Group B: Put in warm water. They grew super fast.

Later, they put both groups in a normal tank.

The slow-growth fish lived long, happy fish lives.

The fast-growth fish? They died. Immediately.

Why? Because when you grow too fast, your body uses all its resources for expansion and zero resources for repair. Their bones and organs were basically made of papier-mâché.

Efficiency is often just a fancy word for “fragile.”

In our careers, we look for hacks. We want the title without the politics, the salary without the stress, the audience without the bad first drafts.

But Housel reminds us: “It’s supposed to be hard.”

If your “Agency of One” is growing effortlessly, if everything feels easy and efficient, you might be a warm-water fish. You aren’t building bone density; you’re just getting puffy.

A good idea—or a good career—that accelerates too fast becomes a bad idea.

Embrace the “Inefficiency.”

The hours you spend struggling with a problem? That’s not wasted time. That’s bone density.

The slow growth of your client base? That’s structural integrity.

The shortcut isn’t a bridge; it’s a trap door. Take the stairs.

3. The Paranoia of the Survivor

I consider myself an optimist. I think things will work out! (Mostly because the alternative is curling up in a ball under my desk, which is bad for my posture).

But Housel introduces us to a weird concept: The Stockdale Paradox.

Admiral Stockdale was a POW in Vietnam. He was tortured for years but made it out sane.

When asked who didn’t make it out of the camp, he gave a surprising answer: “The optimists.”

The optimists were the ones who said, “We’ll be out by Christmas.”

Christmas came. They were still in a cell.

Then they said, “We’ll be out by Easter.”

Easter came. Still in a cell.

Eventually, they died of a broken heart.

Stockdale survived because he held two opposing thoughts in his head at the exact same time:

1. Long-term Faith: “I will prevail in the end.”

2. Short-term Paranoia: “I am not getting out by Christmas, and today is going to be absolute hell.”

This is the hardest mental gymnastics for us to perform.

In your career, you need to be bi-polar (in a strategic sense).

If you are only a pessimist, you’ll never launch the product because “the economy is bad.”

If you are only an optimist, you’ll run out of cash in six months because “sales are just around the corner!”

You need to be a Paranoid Optimist.

Save like a Pessimist: Assume the client will fire you. Assume the AI will get better. Assume your car will explode. Hoard cash and skills like a squirrel preparing for a nuclear winter.

Invest like an Optimist: Despite the hoarding, keep betting on yourself. Keep learning. Keep pitching. Belief that in 10 years, you’ll be on top of the mountain.

To wrap this up:

It’s 2026. The world is noisy.

But the math of a good life is actually pretty simple. Housel gives us this equation:

Happiness = Results - Expectations

If you expect 2026 to be predictable, easy, and linear, you are going to have a bad time.

But if you expect it to be a chaotic mess that requires preparation, hard work and the mindset of a survivor?

You might just be the happiest person in the room.

Links:

1. https://www.morganhousel.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Same-Ever-Guide-Never-Changes/dp/B0C1HRH2RH

We love to think that if we just think hard enough, we can design the perfect thing. A perfect city, a perfect diet, or in this case, a perfect electronic brain.

Rich Sutton tried to slap us out of this delusion back in 2019 with The Bitter Lesson. He basically said: “Stop trying to teach AI how you think. You are not that smart. Just give it a massive computer and let it figure it out.”

It hurt our feelings, but he was right. Computation beat human cleverness.

But now, in 2025, we are doing it again.

We are staring at a new problem: The Library is Empty.

We fed the AI every book, every tweet, and every cat meme in existence. Now the AI is looking at us like a hungry teenager at an empty fridge. “What’s next?”

And the smartest people in the room—Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li—are all saying some version of the same thing: “Let’s build a God Model.”

Yann wants to code a “Physics Engine” into its brain so it understands gravity. Fei-Fei wants to build a “3D Matrix” so it can learn spatial reasoning. They are trying to build a single, perfect, omniscient entity.

They are trying to be Intelligent Designers.

But here is the Ecological Lesson, and it might be even bitterer than the first one:

You cannot design a Superintelligence. You have to grow a Civilization.

Here is why.

1. The “Lonely God” Problem

Imagine you cloned Einstein. But you put him in a white room with nothing to do. No books, no other people, no physics problems. Just him and a white wall.

Does he invent General Relativity? No. He probably just goes insane and starts eating his own hair.

Intelligence isn’t a thing stored in a brain. Intelligence is what happens when a brain bumps into a problem. And the hardest problems don’t come from static data. They come from other brains.

2. The Complexity Trap

We are trying to teach AI “physics” or “common sense” by building simulators. But reality is messy. The wind blows weirdly. Floors are slippery. People are irrational.

Trying to code all that complexity into a World Model is like trying to teach a toddler how to walk by explaining the mechanics of a gyroscope. It doesn’t work. The toddler learns to walk because if they don’t, they can’t get to the cookie jar.

3. The Solution: The Mosh Pit

If we want AI to keep getting smarter forever, we need to stop building a “Student” and start building a “Schoolyard.”

Actually, more like a Gladiator Arena.

We need to dump a billion little AI agents into a virtual world and give them conflicting goals.

• Agent A wants to hide a secret message.

• Agent B wants to find it.

Suddenly, Agent A invents encryption. Not because we taught it math, but because Agent B was getting too good at snooping.

Then Agent B invents code-breaking. So Agent A invents quantum encryption.

See what happened? The “Curriculum” wasn’t written by a human. The Curriculum was written by the struggle.

4. The Garden vs. The Architect

The Ecological Lesson tells us that the next leap in AI won’t come from a better architecture (sorry, Transformers). It will come from a better Ecosystem.

We need to stop trying to be the Architect who designs the cathedral. We need to be the Gardener who throws a bunch of seeds in the dirt, adds some manure (computation), and watches the chaos unfold.

In this ecosystem:

• Physics isn’t a module you code; it’s the rules of the game you have to master to survive.

• Language isn’t a dataset you memorize; it’s the tool you use to lie to your enemies or ally with your friends.

• Intelligence isn’t a destination; it’s an arms race.

The Bottom Line

We want to build a God. But nature didn’t start with a God. Nature started with a single-celled organism that really, really didn’t want to get eaten.

And a few billion years of “not wanting to get eaten” later, you get Shakespeare.

So, let’s stop trying to code the perfect mind. Let’s build the perfect mosh pit, throw the AIs in, and see who crawls out.

That survivor? That’s your AGI.

Links:

1. http://incompleteideas.net

2. http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

3. Yann LeCun: We Won’t Reach AGI By Scaling Up LLMS

4. The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots & why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li

Morning, CEO!

Happy New Year.

If you’re anything like me, you’re currently staring at a blank page of “2026 Goals,” vibrating with a mix of caffeine and existential dread.

We are obsessed with winning. We want the promotion, the launch, the hockey-stick graph.

But today, I want to talk about something I am personally a world-class expert at.

Losing.

Specifically, failing.

I recently read Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. I read it hoping it would justify the time I tried to fix a plumbing leak myself and ended up creating an indoor swimming pool.

But it did teach me that my internal Operating System is buggy. It hates failure. And if you want to run your career like a business, you need to patch that code immediately.

Here is why failing sucks, and how to do it without hating yourself.

The Caveman in the C-Suite

First, let’s acknowledge a design flaw in our hardware.

The brain is a scared lizard.

We run on a biological operating system I call “Caveman OS v1.0.” This system has one primary KPI: Do not die.

To a caveman, making a mistake—like eating the bright red berry or petting the fuzzy saber-toothed tiger—meant game over. So, we evolved a deep, visceral, panicked reaction to failure.

Edmondson tells a story about a dad driving his toddler to school. He accidentally bumps the car in front of him. Immediately, the 3-year-old in the back seat screams:

“Daddy, I didn’t do it!”

That toddler is my spirit animal.

Whenever something breaks in my life—a project stalls, a deploy fails, a relationship hits a snag—my first instinct isn’t a calm, rational Root Cause Analysis.

My first instinct is a primitive screech from the back of my brain that says: It wasn’t me! It was the wifi! It was the mercury retrograde! I was in the bathroom!

Scientists call this “loss aversion.” I call it “The Blue Screen of Death.”

When we encounter failure, our brains go into an “Away State.” We shut down. We get defensive. We hide the data.

If you are running your own career, this is a disaster. You can’t optimize a system if the CEO (you) refuses to look at the error logs because they make you feel bad.

You have to drag that Caveman out of the C-Suite and remind him that a failed cold email is not a tiger. It’s just data.

The Imposter Syndrome Trap

The second bug in our system is social fear.

Back in the tribal days, if you messed up, the group might kick you out. And in the wild, being alone meant being eaten.

Today, we don’t have tribes. We have Slack channels. But the fear feels exactly the same.

If I admit I made a mistake in a meeting, my Lizard Brain whispers, “They are going to realize you are a fraud, exile you to the parking lot, and you will starve.”

This leads to the Imposter Trap.

To protect our egos, we hide our mistakes. We nod along in meetings when we have zero idea what an acronym means. We pretend everything is “on track” until the building is literally on fire.

Edmondson found something counter-intuitive when she studied hospital teams.

The best teams reported MORE errors than the bad teams.

Wait. What?

Was the best team just a disaster zone of nurses tripping over cords? No.

They just had Psychological Safety. They felt safe enough to say, “Hey, I almost gave the patient the wrong pill.”

The bad teams were terrified. They hid their mistakes to look competent. And because they hid them, nobody learned, and patients got hurt.

Here is the hard truth for your career: If you aren’t logging errors, you aren’t “crushing it.” You’re just lying to yourself.

I often prioritize “looking smart” over “getting smarter.” I will spend three hours Googling something privately rather than asking a five-minute question publicly.

That is bad management. You need to fire your inner PR person who spins everything as a “win,” and hire an inner Scientist who gets excited about the mess.

Not All Screw-Ups Are Created Equal

We tend to think failure is binary. You win or you lose.

But Edmondson argues there are three types of failure.

1. Basic Failure (The Facepalm)

This happens in known territory. You know exactly what to do. You just... didn’t do it.

You forgot to check the timezone on the invite. You uploaded the wrong file.

In 2020, Citibank accidentally wired $900 million instead of $8 million because of a confusing UI. That is a Basic Failure.

The solution here isn’t “try harder.” It’s Checklists.

Sometimes I think I’m too smart for them. Then I go to the store for three things and come back with zero of them, but I did buy a scented candle.

Don’t trust your brain. Use a checklist.

2. Complex Failure (The Perfect Storm)

This is the Titanic. It’s not one big thing; it’s a bunch of small things lining up.

The captain is tired + the radio is broken + there is fog + a random iceberg.

In your career, this looks like: Burnout + a bad internet connection + a difficult client + missed alarm = Meltdown.

You can’t prevent these easily, but you can catch the small signals early. You have to be the annoying person who says, “Hey, that iceberg looks kind of close,” even if everyone else is partying.

3. Intelligent Failure (The Good Stuff)

This is what we are aiming for.

Think of Thomas Edison. He tried thousands of materials for a lightbulb filament. When they didn’t work, he didn’t cry and eat ice cream. He just knew what not to use.

An Intelligent Failure is in new territory, goal-driven, and small enough not to kill you.

If I launch a new project and nobody clicks? Intelligent Failure. I learned what the market hates.

Most of us tolerate Basic Failures (sloppy mistakes) because we’re lazy, but we avoid Intelligent Failures (bold experiments) because we’re scared.

Flip that.

Be ruthless about eliminating the sloppy mistakes. Be fearless about chasing the bold experiments.

The Takeaway

So, here is your assignment.

Give yourself a Failure Quota.

If you get to December and you haven’t broken anything, you didn’t run a business. You ran a museum.

But let’s try to have the Right Kind of Wrong.

Stop tolerating Basic Failures. Make the checklist.

Start hunting for Intelligent Failures. Try the scary thing.

And when you fall on your face?

Don’t let the toddler in your brain scream, “I didn’t do it!”

Take a breath. Look at the mess. And say:

“Cool. Data.”

Links:

1. https://amycedmondson.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Right-Kind-Wrong-Science-Failing/dp/1982195061

Morning, CEO!

I’m currently staring at my bank account and trying to calculate if I can afford the “good” coffee beans this week.

Usually, this leads to a spiral about inflation, the economy, and why my savings account looks like it’s on a diet.

But I recently read Life after Capitalism by George Gilder, an 86-year-old futurist who basically told me my anxiety is mathematically incorrect.

He argues we’re measuring wealth with the wrong ruler. So, let’s upgrade your operating system.

1. Your Money is actually Frozen Time

I used to think money was just... money. Green paper. Digital numbers. The stuff that keeps the roof over my head from magically disappearing.

But Gilder says: Money is Time.

Here’s the logic: In 1986, a Thanksgiving dinner cost $30. Today, it’s over $50. My brain screams, “I am poorer!”

But wait. In 1986, the average person had to work 33 minutes to earn that dinner. Today? Only 23 minutes.

The price went up in dollars, but down in hours.

This blew my mind.

We usually measure our careers by the number on the paycheck. But as the boss of your own career, you need to measure in Time Prices.

If you use an AI tool to automate a report that used to take you four hours, and now it takes 15 minutes, you didn’t just “save time.” You literally printed wealth.

You lowered the “time price” of your output.

Most people are trying to hoard cash. But cash inflates and rots.

Smart operators hoard time.

If you’re spending 10 hours a week on email, you are essentially lighting your wealth on fire. The goal isn’t just a higher salary; it’s reducing the minutes it takes you to deliver value.

2. Stop Selling Atoms, Start Selling Recipes

Let’s talk about IKEA furniture.

If I buy a flat-pack bookshelf for $100, I possess $100 of ‘wealth.’

Then, I try to assemble it. I lose a screw. I put the back panel on upside down. The whole thing leans to the left like it’s drunk.

Technically, the atoms are all still there. The wood, the metal, the plastic—nothing physically left the room.

But the value dropped from $100 to $0.

Gilder points out that a crashed Ferrari has the exact same molecular weight as a brand-new Ferrari. The only difference? Knowledge.

The “knowledge” of how the parts fit together was destroyed in the crash.

We are stuck in a “materialist” mindset. We think wealth is stuff. Resources. Gold. Silicon.

But silicon is just sand. It’s dirt. It’s worthless until we etch knowledge onto it to make a chip.

As a professional, are you trying to sell your “stuff”? Your hours? Your physical presence?

That’s a losing game. The market for “warm body in a chair” is crashing.

You need to sell the recipe.

Your value isn’t that you know how to type; it’s that you know what to type.

When you use AI, you are the Chef. The AI is just the sous-chef chopping the onions. If you don’t have the “knowledge” (the taste, the judgment, the strategy), all the AI will do is help you create a bigger pile of burnt salmon faster.

Wealth is knowledge. Hoard that instead.

3. If You Didn’t Faceplant, You Didn’t Learn

I am a creature of extreme habit. My comfort zone is heavily fortified, temperature-controlled, and has excellent Wi-Fi.

This means I hate surprises.

My ideal day is a day where everything happens exactly as I predicted it would in my Google Calendar.

But Gilder has a bone to pick with my comfort zone. He says: Information is Surprise.

Think about it. If I tell you “1+1=2,” I have given you zero information. You already knew that. It’s redundant.

But if I tell you, “Hey, the project you thought was safe just imploded,” that is information.

It’s unwanted, sure. But it’s high-signal.

Gilder argues that Growth = Learning, and you can’t learn if you’re just confirming what you already know.

The economy (and your career) grows through the “Learning Curve.” Every time you double your output, your costs should drop by 20-30% because you learned shortcuts.

But you only find shortcuts by tripping over things.

If your week went perfectly according to plan, you generated zero new wealth. You just executed a script.

To upgrade your OS, you have to hunt for the “Surprise Quotient.”

Did something weird happen? Did a client ask a question you couldn’t answer? Did the AI hallucinate a solution you hadn’t thought of?

That “Huh, that’s weird” moment is the only place where value is created.

I’m trying to retrain my brain to stop viewing chaos as a “failure of planning” and start viewing it as “high-bandwidth data downloading.”

It’s terrifying. But apparently, it’s profitable.

To wrap this up:

The old operating system says: Work hard, hoard cash, avoid risk.

The upgraded “Agency of One” OS says:

1. Time is the real currency. Automate the boring stuff to buy your life back.

2. Knowledge is the real asset. The atoms don’t matter; the arrangement does.

3. Surprise is the real teacher. If you aren’t slightly confused, you aren’t growing.

Go out there and find some good surprises today.

Links:

1. https://www.gilderreport.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Life-after-Capitalism-George-Gilder/dp/1684512247

Morning, CEO!

Here is the situation. It is December. The holidays are looming.

In your professional life, you are a cool, collected operator. You manage budgets. You manage AI workflows. You make high-stakes decisions before your second cup of coffee.

But in about two weeks, you are going to walk through your parents’ front door.

And within 14 minutes, your mother will make a comment about your haircut, or your dad will ask why you haven’t been promoted yet, and—poof.

The professional vanishes. You are suddenly a sulky 14-year-old. You slam a door. You eat your feelings.

Why does this happen? Why is our internal operating system so buggy around the people we love?

Today, we’re looking at Growing Yourself Up by Jenny Brown. We’re going to patch your emotional firmware so you don’t crash this holiday season.

The “Emotional Sponge” vs. The Membrane

I used to think “maturity” meant owning a slow cooker and having a diversified 401k.

Turns out, I was wrong.

According to Murray Bowen’s systems theory, maturity is actually “Self-Differentiation.”

Think of your psyche like a cell.

Most of us—especially me—have very thin, leaky cell walls. We are Emotional Sponges.

If my boss is stressed, I absorb it and become anxious.

If my partner is grumpy, I absorb it and become defensive.

If my mom is critical, I absorb it and feel small.

I have no boundary. The “atmosphere” of the room dictates my internal state.

Differentiation is the ability to grow a semi-permeable membrane. It’s the ability to say: “That is your anxiety. It is over there. I am over here. I can see your anxiety, I can empathize with it, but I do not have to eat it for breakfast.”

This is the hardest thing in the world to do.

When we lack this membrane, we fall into the trap of “Enmeshment.” We try to fix other people’s feelings so we can feel better.

• “I need to make Mom happy so I don’t feel guilty.”

• “I need to make the client stop panicking so I can stop panicking.”

This is a terrible way to run a business. If your internal stability depends on external validation, you aren’t the boss. The environment is the boss. You’re just the intern running around trying to put out fires with your own tears.

Stop trying to control the weather. Build a better roof.

The “Gossip Triangle” (The Anxiety Hot Potato)

Let’s talk about office politics. Or family drama. They are the same thing, just with different lighting.

When anxiety hits a system, people do something called Triangulating.

It looks like this:

Person A has a problem with Person B.

Person A is too scared/immature to talk to Person B.

So, Person A grabs YOU (Person C) and starts venting.

“Can you believe what Steve did in the meeting? He’s impossible.”

Now, my instinct—my people-pleasing instinct—is to say, “Omg yes, Steve is the worst. I totally agree.”

Why do I do this? Because it feels good. It creates a bond. It lowers the anxiety in the room.

But I have just swallowed the Anxiety Hot Potato.

I have stabilized their relationship by becoming the dumping ground for their stress. I am now part of the problem. I am “triangulated.”

In a high-functioning enterprise (which is you, remember?), this is a productivity killer. It solves nothing. It just spreads the emotional virus.

A differentiated leader does something incredibly awkward. They refuse the potato.

When someone tries to triangulate you, you say:

“Wow, that sounds frustrating. Have you told Steve that?”

The silence that follows will be deafening. It will be uncomfortable.

But that discomfort is the sound of you growing up. You are forcing the anxiety back to where it belongs—between the two people who can actually solve it.

You are not the therapist. You are not the trash can. You are the operator. Keep the lines clear.

The “Second Growth Curve” (or: Why Midlife is Awesome)

If you are like me (a mid-career professional), you might feel like you’re hitting a wall.

The fuel that powered the first half of your life is running out.

That fuel was External Validation.

Gold stars. Good grades. Promotions. “Good girl/boy” points.

We spent decades contorting ourselves to fit into other people’s boxes so they would clap for us.

But eventually, the clapping gets quiet. Or you realize you don’t care about the clapping anymore. This is what people call a “Midlife Crisis.”

But Jenny Brown calls it the Second Growth Curve.

The first growth curve is physical and social—learning to walk, talk, and fit in.

The second growth curve is internal—learning to stand out and stand firm.

This is where the real work begins.

This is the transition from “You make me feel...” to “I choose to feel...”

For those of us building our own solo empires, this shift is critical. There is no HR department to validate you. There is no teacher to give you an A.

You have to generate your own gravity.

If you are still operating on the “Please Like Me” operating system, you will burnout. You will chase the wrong clients. You will undercharge because you’re afraid of rejection.

The “Value Crisis” of midlife isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s the system forcing you to switch from solar power (relying on others’ light) to nuclear power (generating your own energy).

It’s terrifying. But it’s the only way to fly the ship.

The TL;DR

Maturity isn’t a destination where you arrive and suddenly love jazz and never get angry.

It’s a direction. It’s a muscle.

This holiday season, treat your family dinner like a laboratory.

When the anxiety spikes, when the old triggers get pulled, just pause.

Visualize your membrane.

Don’t eat the hot potato.

And remember: You can’t change them. You can only change you.

(And if you fail and eat an entire pie in the pantry? That’s okay. We try again tomorrow.)

Links:

1. https://www.facebook.com/drjennybrown

2. https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Yourself-Up-bring-relationships/dp/145963327X

Morning, CEO!

Let’s be real for a second.

Sometimes I scroll through LinkedIn, see a 22-year-old who just sold their third startup for a GDP of a small country, and I feel… tired.

I feel like a very slow, very old computer trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 95.

We tell ourselves this story: “Well, they’re just geniuses. They have the ‘It Factor.’ I missed the boat.”

But I recently read Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, and it turns out that story is total garbage.

It’s not about the hardware (your raw talent). It’s about the operating system (your character).

And the best part? We can upgrade the OS whenever we want.

1. Character is a Skill (And it Pays Better than IQ)

Here’s a fun fact that made me feel better about my mediocrity.

Researchers tracked 11,000 kindergarteners all the way to adulthood. They wanted to know what predicted who would make the big bucks later in life.

Was it the kids who could read “War and Peace” at age four? Nope.

It was the kids who had experienced teachers who taught them character skills.

Things like:

• Raising your hand.

• Waiting your turn.

• Not melting down when the glue stick dries out.

Technically, they call this Proactivity, Prosociality, Discipline, and Determination.

In the long run, these skills were 2.4 times more valuable for future income than math or reading scores.

We tend to think of “character” as your personality—something you’re stuck with, like your height or your irrational fear of moths (just me?).

But Grant argues that character is a skill. It’s a muscle.

Talent is just your starting speed. Character is how far you can drive the car before the wheels fall off.

As a professional running your own show, this is huge.

Your “clients” (aka your boss or stakeholders) don’t actually care if you’re the smartest person in the room. They care if you have the discipline to deliver when you don’t feel like it, and the prosocial skills not to be a jerk about it.

Your cognitive skills might get you the contract. Your character skills keep the retainer.

2. Embrace the “Ick” Factor

I am a recovering perfectionist.

If I decide to learn a new language, my strategy is usually:

1. Buy three textbooks.

2. Download Duolingo.

3. Study in a dark room for six months so nobody hears me mispronounce “library.”

4. Quit because I’m not fluent yet.

I call this “preparing.” Adam Grant calls this “hiding.”

The book highlights polyglots—people who learn languages in months, not years. Their secret isn’t a special brain gene.

Their secret is that they are willing to look like idiots. Immediately.

One guy, Benny, aims to make 200 mistakes a day. He calls it “Social Skydiving.” He walks up to strangers and butchers their language enthusiastically.

This applies to everything we do.

We obsess over “learning styles.” We say, “Oh, I’m a visual learner,” or “I need a quiet environment.”

Grant says that’s nonsense. Comfortable learning is barely learning.

If you aren’t feeling that cringey, awkward, “I have no idea what I’m doing” sensation in your stomach, you aren’t growing. You’re just consuming content.

To leverage your hidden potential, you have to stop waiting until you feel “ready.”

You don’t prepare to launch. You launch to prepare.

3. Be a Sponge (But Spit Out the Bad Stuff)

We need to talk about feedback.

I used to think being “coachable” meant taking everyone’s opinion, putting it in a blender, and drinking the slurry.

Result: A stomach ache and a confused project.

Grant introduces the concept of being a Sponge.

Sponges have been around for 500 million years. They survived mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs. Why? Because they are masters of filtering.

They suck in nutrients and expel toxins.

To upgrade your judgment, you need to change how you ask for input.

When I finish a project, my insecure brain wants to ask: “Was that okay? Did you like it?”

That’s asking for feedback. Feedback looks at the rearview mirror. It usually leads to people being nice to you (which is useless) or critiquing things you can’t change (which is depressing).

Instead, Grant suggests asking for advice.

“What’s one thing I could do better next time?”

Advice focuses on the windshield. It forces the other person to be a coach, not a critic.

Also, stop trying to be perfect.

Grant points out that if perfectionism were a drug, the FDA would ban it for causing “stunted growth.”

Focus on your high standards, not your strict requirements.

People judge you by your peaks (your best work), not your valleys. Shakespeare wrote some absolute duds, but nobody cancels Hamlet because The Merry Wives of Windsor was kind of mid.

Summary

Talent is overrated.

The “geniuses” are usually just people who are willing to be uncomfortable, willing to filter advice, and willing to play the game long enough to get good.

So, go out there today and be a little bit awkward.

Make a mistake. Ask for advice.

And if you feel like a potato? Just remember—potatoes can be turned into vodka, fries, or batteries. That’s a lot of potential.

Links:

1. https://adamgrant.net

2. https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Potential-Science-Achieving-Greater/dp/0593653149

Morning, CEO!

The holidays are here. The eggnog is flowing. And the urge to make “Big Plans” for 2026 is currently spiking your dopamine levels.

You are visualizing the new product launch. The home renovation. The total rebrand.

Stop. Put the pen down.

I recently read How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, and the data is terrifying. 99.5% of big projects fail. They go over budget, over time, or under-deliver.

Before you draft that 2026 roadmap, let’s take a breath. The goal isn’t to be pessimistic; it’s to be strategic.

Let’s look at how to steal the playbook from the successful 0.5%.

1. The “Fat Tail” Monster Under Your Bed

Let’s talk about the Sydney Opera House.

You know it. It’s gorgeous. It looks like white sails catching the wind.

It was also a disaster.

It was supposed to take 4 years and cost $7 million.

It took 14 years and cost $102 million.

That is 1,400% over budget.

In statistics, we usually expect things to follow a “Normal Distribution” (the Bell Curve). Most things are average. Some are a little good, some are a little bad.

But projects follow a “Fat Tail” distribution.

In a Fat Tail, things don’t just go “a little wrong.” If you trip, you don’t scrape your knee; you fall into a black hole.

One tiny error—like a cabinet not fitting in your kitchen reno—triggers a domino effect that ends with you rewiring the entire electrical grid of your house.

I am guilty of this. I have an “Optimism Bias” the size of Texas.

I think saying “yes” to a coffee chat three weeks from now is a great idea. When the day comes, I stare at my calendar like it’s a bomb defusal timer, wondering why Past Hannah hates Future Hannah so much.

I think I can record, edit, and publish a YouTube tutorial in one day. Reality: I spend six hours fixing the lighting and then give up because my voice sounds weird.

We assume we are in the safe middle of the Bell Curve. We are not. We are dancing on the edge of the Fat Tail cliff.

2. Think Slow, Act Fast (The Pixar Method)

Humans have a bug in our code: We love Action.

We want to start digging. We want to start coding. We want to start recording the podcast.

“Planning” feels like “Stalling.”

But the 0.5% of projects that actually succeed? They do the opposite. They Think Slow and Act Fast.

Look at Pixar.

Pixar doesn’t just write a script and animate it. That’s the Sydney Opera House method (start building before you know if the roof stays up).

Pixar makes the movie. Then they realize it sucks. So they throw it out and make it again. And again. They make the movie roughly eight times on cheap storyboards before they render a single pixel of expensive 3D animation.

Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Guggenheim Bilbao, does the same thing.

He builds hundreds of cheap cardboard models. He simulates the building in software thousands of times. He crashes the plane in the simulator so he doesn’t crash it in real life.

When they finally broke ground on the Guggenheim? It was boring. Everything went exactly to plan because they had already “built” it virtually.

My default mode is “Fire, then Aim.”

I get a vague idea for an article. I sit down and type 3,000 words of pure stream-of-consciousness.

Then I read it. It’s a mess. It has no point. I have to throw the whole thing away.

I wasted an hour typing because I was too impatient to spend five minutes outlining.

3. Don’t Be a Hero, Be a Copycat

We all want to be unique. We want to be “disruptors.”

But when it comes to execution, being unique is expensive.

The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Do you know how long it took to build?

13 months.

That is insane. It takes longer than that to fix a pothole in my neighborhood.

How? Modularity.

The builders didn’t try to invent a new way to build a skyscraper. They treated the building like a giant Lego set.

They realized the building wasn’t one giant, unique monster. It was just a bunch of identical floors stacked on top of each other. They mastered the process of building one floor, then just hit “Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V” 102 times.

They used “Reference Class Forecasting.”

Instead of looking inward and saying, “I’m special, I can build this faster,” they looked outward. They looked at the data of other steel buildings.

This is the hardest pill for me to swallow.

When I estimate a project, I use the “Inside View.” I look at my skills, my coffee intake, and my enthusiasm. “I can finish this Coursera certification this weekend!”

The “Outside View” looks at the data. It asks: “Hannah, how many courses are currently sitting in your browser tabs, 8% complete?”

The answer is seven. The data says I will watch the intro video and then never log in again.

The data doesn’t lie. My ego does.

So for your next project:

1. Break it into Legos (small, repeatable chunks).

2. Find someone who has done it before.

3. Copy their timeline.

To recap:

Your brain loves the dopamine hit of the “start.” It’s addictive. But your success depends on the boring safety of the “plan.”

Be the boring architect first, so you can be the fast builder later.

Think slow. Simulate the failure before you spend the money.

Act fast. Once the plan is bulletproof, execute like a Lego master.

Fear the Fat Tail.

Links:

1. https://dk.linkedin.com/in/flyvbjerg

2. https://www.dangardner.ca

3. https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

Morning, CEO!

I used to have a very sophisticated productivity strategy.

It was called “Suffering.”

I assumed that if I wasn’t slightly miserable, sleep-deprived, and fueled entirely by panic and stale coffee, I wasn’t actually working. I treated my own brain like a rental car I bought the extra insurance for—I drove it into the ground.

Then I read Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal.

It turns out, I had the equation backward. Success doesn’t lead to happiness. Happiness is actually the fuel that gets you to success.

1. The “Misery Tax” is a Scam

Here is the lie we tell ourselves: Success leads to Happiness.

We think life is a video game where we have to crawl through a sewer of stress for 50 levels, and only when we beat the Final Boss (Promotion/Exit/Retirement) do we get the “Happiness” power-up.

Ali Abdaal, a doctor-turned-YouTuber (who is annoyingly younger and more successful than me), looked at the medical data and realized we have the arrow pointing the wrong way.

Happiness leads to Success.

Biologically, this isn’t just “live, laugh, love” poster nonsense. It’s chemistry.

When I’m stressed, my brain floods with cortisol. This gives me “tunnel vision.” It’s great if I’m running from a bear. It is terrible if I’m trying to solve a complex AI architecture problem or negotiate a contract. My brain literally shuts down the “creative problem solving” department to focus on the “don’t die” department.

But when we feel good—even just a little bit—we get a hit of dopamine.

Dopamine doesn’t just make you smile. It makes you smarter. It expands your cognitive field of view.

For years, I treated my happiness like a reward I could only unlock after I finished my work. But the science says happiness is the fuel required to do the work in the first place.

I’ve been trying to drive a car with no gas, screaming at it to move because I promised it a car wash later.

2. Stop Working, Start Larping

Okay, so we need to “feel good” to work well. But my work is sometimes boring.

I spend hours trapped in the infinite loop of answering Slack messages. It’s hard to feel “in the flow” when I’m effectively being my own overworked executive assistant.

The solution? Roleplay.

Remember when you were seven? You didn’t “walk to the kitchen to get a juice box.” You were an Intergalactic Ranger traversing the Wasteland to secure the Elixir of Life.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that “being professional” meant “being boring.”

Abdaal suggests gamifying your life by picking a character.

If I sit down as “Hannah,” I spend the whole time rolling my eyes at a feature request that is clearly just a buzzword salad.

But if I sit down as “The Intergalactic Mercenary,” a gun-for-hire who doesn’t ask questions as long as the credits transfer? Suddenly, I don’t care if the mission makes sense. I just care about executing the contract with ruthless efficiency.

If you have to do a boring competitor analysis, don’t be a Researcher. Be a Spy. You are gathering intel behind enemy lines. The stakes are high. The background music needs to be intense.

I tried this last week. I had to write a very dry documentation file. I decided to roleplay as a Wise Historian leaving records for future generations (my future self, who usually forgets how the code works).

I ended up writing the best documentation of my life, and I actually giggled while doing it.

The machine (AI) can do the task. Only you can create the adventure around the task.

3. The 12-Month Party

I love a good 5-Year Plan.

I make them constantly. I sit down, map out my empire, visualize Tahiti, and plan my AI Breakthrough Awards acceptance speech.

Then reality hits. I remember that yesterday I had to Google “how to spell ‘guarantee’” and I lose all hope. The “Tahiti Me” feels like a different species entirely. The climb looks so exhausting that my brain decides the safest survival strategy is to lie on the floor and nap.

This is the problem with long-term vision: It’s intimidating.

Abdaal suggests shrinking the timeline. Forget the 5-year plan. Try the 12-Month Celebration.

Imagine it is December 2026. You are out to dinner with your best friend. You are buying the expensive wine. What are the three specific things you are celebrating?

• Maybe you finally launched that side project.

• Maybe you can do a pull-up (a girl can dream).

• Maybe you fixed your sleep schedule.

This pulls the goal out of the nebulous future and puts it right in front of your face.

But here is the trick: You have to shrink it again.

The human brain (especially my brain) behaves like a toddler. If you tell it to “Build a Business,” it throws a tantrum. It’s too hard.

But if you tell it to “Send three emails,” it says, “Okay, I can do that. Then can we have a snack?”

Motivation isn’t a lightning bolt that strikes you from the heavens.

Motivation is a byproduct of action. You do a small, non-scary thing (send the email), you get a little hit of dopamine (good job, monkey!), and that gives you the fuel to do the next thing.

Stop looking at the summit of Everest. Just look at your boots. Take one step. Then another.

To summarize:

1. Stop paying the Misery Tax. Suffering doesn’t make the work better; it makes your brain slower.

2. Gamify the boring stuff. Be a Spy, a Wizard, or a Commander. Reality is negotiable.

3. Look at your boots. Stop staring at the summit of Everest. Just take one step. Then do it again.

The year is almost over. Don’t grind your way to the finish line.

Go play.

Links:

1. https://aliabdaal.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Feel-Good-Productivity-More-What-Matters/dp/1250865034

Morning, CEO!

I spend 90% of my day jealous of my AI staff. They don’t get migraines, they don’t have existential crises, and they never need a mental health day.

I, however, am running on wetware that hasn’t had a firmware update in 200,000 years.

So, while my “employees” crunched data, I read The Illness Narratives by Dr. Arthur Kleinman. I thought I was reading a medical book. Turns out, I was reading the missing documentation for the human operating system.

The “Why Is This Happening To Me?” Bug

There is a difference between Pain and Suffering.

Pain is hardware damage. A server crash. A difficult client. A headache that feels like a tiny construction crew is jackhammering behind your left eye.

Pain is inevitable. The data signal is real.

Suffering, however, is a software error.

Kleinman gives us this equation: Suffering = Pain x Resistance.

I am the queen of Resistance. When something hurts—physically or emotionally—my brain immediately launches panic_mode.exe.

I scream internally: This shouldn’t be happening! I have deadlines! I do not have time for a migraine!

That screaming? That’s the suffering. It’s the “Resistance” multiplier.

If pain is a level 5, and my resistance is a level 10, my suffering is a 50.

The upgrade here is counter-intuitive: Stop trying to fix the unfixable.

When the “Pain” signal hits, switch from “Fixer” to “Observer.”

Describe the problem like a boring scientist. “Oh, interesting. My chest feels tight. It’s a cold, gray sensation. About a 6 out of 10.”

Don’t judge it. Just look at it.

When you stop trying to delete the file and just let it sit on the desktop, the “Resistance” variable drops to zero.

Suddenly, you’re just in pain. You aren’t suffering.

Running Crysis on a Toaster

We live in a culture that worships the “Always On” server.

But sometimes, you are just a toaster. And you are trying to run high-end graphics software.

Kleinman talks about Neurasthenia (chronic exhaustion). It’s what happens when the system load exceeds the hardware specs for too long.

I spent my 30s pretending I had infinite battery life. I’d hit a wall, drink three espressos, and yell “OPTIMIZE!” at my own reflection.

Spoiler: The wall won.

If you feel weak, brittle, or “glitchy,” that isn’t a moral failing. It’s physics.

The “CEO” move here isn’t to whip the yourself harder. It’s to acknowledge the low voltage.

1. Strategic Refusal.

If you have 10 units of energy, and your boss wants 12, you don’t borrow from tomorrow. You say “No.”

I know. Terrifying.

But saying “yes” when you’re empty isn’t ambition; it’s lying. You’re selling inventory you don’t have.

2. Stop the Shame Spiral.

When I’m exhausted, I usually waste my remaining 2% of battery life beating myself up for being exhausted.

“Elon Musk probably doesn’t need naps,” I think, while drooling on my keyboard.

Stop it. Accept the “Low Power Mode.” Do the one critical thing. Then shut down. The machine needs to cool off.

The “I’m a Weirdo” Tax

Kleinman talks about Stigma.

Originally, a “stigma” was a brand burned into skin. A mark that said: This one is different. Stay away.

In the medical world, this happens with things like chronic depression or visible disabilities.

In our professional world, we have “The Imposter Tax.”

It’s that gnawing feeling that everyone else got the manual for “How to be a Successful Adult,” and you are just winging it with a few sticky notes and a prayer.

(Hi, I pay this tax daily.)

The instinct is to hide the mark. To pretend we are perfect, invincible entities.

But hiding is expensive. It eats bandwidth.

Kleinman suggests a three-step protocol to clear this cache:

1. Connection: Find the other broken toys.

When you realize other people are also faking it, the shame dissolves. You aren’t a broken unit; you’re just part of a glitchy batch.

2. Disclosure: Say the scary thing out loud.

“I don’t know how to do this.” “I’m overwhelmed.”

It’s like saying “Voldemort.” Once you say it, the monster shrinks.

3. Negotiation:

Once the card is on the table, you can deal with it. You can’t fix a bug you refuse to acknowledge in the code reviews.

The Patch Notes

To recap your OS upgrade:

1. Pain is mandatory; Suffering is optional. Stop resisting the crash. Observe it.

2. Respect your battery life. You cannot override physics with caffeine.

3. Open source your struggles. Secrecy breeds shame.

Your “staff” (the AI Agents) can process data, but they can’t feel. They can’t navigate pain or negotiate weakness.

That’s your job. That’s why you’re in charge.

Go be human today. It’s your competitive advantage.

Links:

1. https://anthropology.fas.harvard.edu/people/arthur-kleinman

2. https://www.amazon.com/Illness-Narratives-Suffering-Healing-Condition/dp/1541647122

Morning, CEO!

I’m currently staring at a calendar that looks less like a schedule and more like a crime scene.

We spend a lot of time optimizing our “billable hours” (aka the day job). We optimize our sleep (hello, Oura ring).

But then there’s that weird, gray sludge of time between 6:00 PM and bedtime.

I usually treat this time with the respect of a raccoon rummaging through a dumpster. I doom-scroll until my retinas burn, telling myself I’m “decompressing.”

But 100 years ago, a British guy named Arnold Bennett called me out. He wrote a little manual called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

I hate to admit it, but the Victorian guy is right.

The “Waiting Room” Fallacy

Here is a fun fact about me: I am 41 years old, and for approximately 20 of those years, I have been bad at math.

Not the “AI algorithm” kind of math. The “Life Math.”

Bennett points out that most of us treat our day like a sandwich where the bread is stale and the meat is the only thing that matters. We view the 8 hours we spend at our desks (or Zoom calls) as “The Day.”

The time before work? That’s just the commute to The Day.

The time after work? That’s recovery from The Day.

We treat 16 hours of our daily existence—literally two-thirds of our time alive—as a waiting room.

I am guilty of this. I finish coding, close my laptop, and tell myself, “I am mentally exhausted. I deserve to stare at a screen until my eyes dry out.”

Bennett calls this nonsense. He says that if you are tired after work, it’s not because your brain is out of gas. It’s because your brain is bored. It’s been running the same “Work.exe” program for 8 hours.

The solution isn’t to shut the machine down (vegetating). The solution is to open a different app.

If you treat the 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM block as “leftovers,” you will feel like a leftover. If you treat it as the actual movie, and work as just the trailers, the whole vibe shifts.

The Great 7-Hour Heist

So, how do we fix this without having a nervous breakdown?

Usually, when I decide to “fix my life,” I go Full Goggins. I decide I’m going to wake up at 4 AM, run a marathon, learn Rust, and meditate for an hour.

This lasts exactly three days. On Day 4, I am eating a block of cheese for dinner.

Bennett, bless his heart, suggests we lower the bar. He suggests a heist.

We aren’t trying to reclaim every second. We are just going to steal back 7 hours a week.

Here is the heist plan:

1. Five mornings a week: Claim 30 minutes.

2. Three evenings a week: Claim 90 minutes.

That’s it.

But here is the trick: You need a ritual. Bennett talks about tea and alcohol lamps because it was 1910, but the logic holds.

You need a trigger that tells your brain, “The CEO is clocking in for the real work now.”

Maybe it’s making a pour-over coffee. Maybe it’s putting on a specific pair of noise-canceling headphones.

For those 90 minutes, you are untouchable. You aren’t a mom, a dad, an employee, or a citizen. You are a sovereign nation.

If you use that time to read poetry, study history, or analyze stocks (my personal vice), you aren’t just “doing a hobby.” You are proving to yourself that you exist outside of your Outlook calendar.

The ROI Trap (Don’t Be a Weirdo)

Here is where I usually ruin everything.

I am an engineer. I like efficiency. If I am going to spend 90 minutes reading about history, my brain immediately asks: “Okay, but how does this help me build a better AI Agent? How do I monetize this?”

This is the “ROI Zombie” talking.

We live in a culture obsessed with the hustle. If you aren’t optimizing, you’re dying.

Bennett warns us about this trap explicitly. He says if you try to turn your self-cultivation into a transaction, you will fail.

If you read philosophy just to sound smart at dinner parties, you’re missing the point.

If you learn to paint just to sell stuff on Etsy, you’re missing the point.

The point of the 7 hours is uselessness.

Well, “uselessness” in the capitalist sense.

Its function is to remind you that you are a sentient being capable of reason and wonder, not just a productivity node in a cloud server.

Bennett also advises us to shut up about it.

When we start a new routine, we want to announce it. “Hey everyone, I’m starting my ‘New Me’ era!”

Don’t.

External validation is a flimsy fuel source. Keep your 7 hours a secret. Build in silence. The only person you need to impress with this new operating system is the person looking back at you in the mirror.

The Bottom Line

We can’t add more hours to the day. The universe is stingy like that.

But we can stop treating the majority of our hours like trash.

Start small. 30 minutes tomorrow morning. Don’t do it to get ahead. Don’t do it to get rich. Do it just to prove that the machine doesn’t own you.

Links:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett

2. https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-24-Hours-Day/dp/1250250676

Morning, CEO!

It’s December 2025. If you’re anything like me, you are currently staring at a list of New Year’s Resolutions that looks suspiciously similar to the list you made in 2015.

I treat my life like a buggy codebase. I assume if I just patch enough lines of code—drink more green juice, download a better To-Do app, wake up at 4 AM—the system will finally run smoothly.

But I recently read a book from the 70s called Change that basically told me my “patches” are actually the malware.

The “Try Harder” Trap

Let me tell you a story about a grumpy old soldier.

He’s a tough guy. He survived wars. But in his old age, he meets an enemy he can’t kill: Insomnia.

He treats sleep like a combat mission. He lies in bed, veins popping on his forehead, screaming internally: “I WILL SLEEP NOW. ENGAGE SLEEP PROTOCOL.”

Obviously, he stays wide awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling like a failure.

He goes to a therapist who says something insane: “I bet you’re actually asleep and just don’t know it.” The soldier gets so offended by this accusation that he decides to go home and prove the doctor wrong. He vows to stay awake the entire night, just out of spite.

He gets in bed, eyes wide open, determined to not sleep a wink.

And he passes out immediately.

This is the core of the book. The authors—some very smart guys from the Mental Research Institute—point out that for most human problems, the solution is the problem.

I do this constantly with writing. I want the draft to be perfect, so I edit every sentence as I write it. I delete. I rewrite. I criticize. The “solution” (high standards) cripples the flow, and I end up with three perfect sentences after four hours, instead of a finished messy draft.

If you are currently struggling with a project or a difficult stakeholder, ask yourself: Is your method of fixing it actually the gasoline on the fire?

Running Inside the Nightmare

The book splits change into two types: First-Order and Second-Order.

First-Order Change is what happens in a nightmare.

Let’s say you’re dreaming that a giant, sentient Excel spreadsheet is chasing you. You run. You hide. You climb a tree. You try to fight it with a calculator.

You are doing a lot. You are sweating. You are trying new tactics. But you are still trapped, because all your actions are consistent with the logic of the dream. You are running faster, but you’re still on the hamster wheel.

Second-Order Change is waking up.

Waking up is the only way to escape the spreadsheet monster. But here’s the kicker: “Waking up” makes zero sense from inside the dream. It’s a leap to a totally different system.

Most of us spend our careers doing First-Order Change.

• The Problem: You are invited to a useless recurring meeting.

• First-Order Fix: Go to the meeting, but multitask on your laptop while nodding occasionally. (The hamster wheel spins faster).

• Second-Order Fix: Send a note asking, “What specific input do you need from me?” If they can’t answer, you don’t go. (Stepping off the wheel).

If you feel stuck, it’s usually because you’re trying to run faster inside the nightmare. You’re trying to be a “better” employee within a broken system, instead of changing the rules of the system entirely.

The Jedi Mind Trick (Reframing)

So, how do we wake up? We have to do something the book calls Reframing.

I call it “lying to your brain until it chills out.”

Reframing means changing the context of the problem so the “facts” mean something totally different.

The book gives a great example of a perfectionist employee. This guy was terrified of making mistakes. He checked his work ten times. He was miserable and slow.

The therapist didn’t tell him to “relax.” That’s First-Order advice (and never works).

Instead, the therapist gave him a mission: You must intentionally make one small mistake every single day.

The employee was terrified, but he did it. He sent an email with a typo. He wore unmatched socks.

And guess what? The world didn’t explode. His boss didn’t fire him.

By framing the mistake as a deliberate assignment, the therapist took away the fear. The “mistake” stopped being a monster under the bed and became a pet Chihuahua he could control.

You can do this with your “clients” (aka your bosses).

If you have a stakeholder who micromanages you because they don’t trust you, the instinct is to push them away (First-Order).

The Second-Order Reframe: Overwhelm them with inclusion. Ask for their opinion on everything. CC them on every tiny thought. Flood them with “transparency” until they beg you to stop and just handle it yourself.

You change the frame from “Parent/Child” to “I am annoying you with my competence.”

The Bottom Line

Life isn’t a logical puzzle; it’s a weird ecosystem.

If you’re banging your head against a wall, buying a more expensive helmet isn’t the answer.

Stop trying to solve the problem. Instead, try to ruin the problem. Do the opposite. Stay awake to fall asleep. Fail on purpose to succeed.

Stop running in the dream.

Wake up.

Links:

1. https://europeanfamilytherapy.eu/paul-watzlawick

2. https://europeanfamilytherapy.eu/john-weakland

3. https://europeanfamilytherapy.eu/richard-fisch

4. https://www.amazon.com/Change-Principles-Problem-Formation-Resolution/dp/0393707067

Morning, CEO!

It’s December. The year is wrapping up.

My dad just hit day 233 of not smoking (go, Dad!), and I am currently sitting in a fortress of blankets trying to ignore the fact that I’m a 41-year-old introvert who has to interact with humans this holiday season.

Speaking of humans: they are terrible, aren’t they? They’re messy. They have “feelings.” They interrupt your deep work.

If you, like me, sometimes wish you could just upload your consciousness to the cloud and avoid small talk forever, let’s talk about a book that dragged me by the hair back to reality.

It’s called The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom.

1. The Optimization Trap (Or: Why Being Right is Lonely)

Meet Philip. Philip is a character in the book, but let’s be honest: Philip is me. And there is a non-zero chance that Philip is you.

Philip is a chemist who optimizes his life for zero pain. He loves Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who basically said, “Life is a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom, so the only winning move is not to play.”

Philip decides that relationships are inefficient. People are just walking bags of irrational needs. So, he isolates himself. He becomes a walking brain in a jar. He is technically “successful,” but he’s about as warm as a server room in Antarctica.

I relate to this hard. As an engineer, I love systems. I love logic. I love things that have a clear input and output.

People? People have undefined variables.

But here is the catch that Yalom throws at us: You cannot debug your life in isolation.

Philip eventually wants to become a therapist (ironic, I know). But his mentor, Julius, tells him he can’t do it unless he joins a therapy group. He has to sit in a room with messy, loud, emotional people.

Philip hates this. He tries to “solve” the group members like they are broken code. He quotes philosophy at them. He analyzes them.

And guess what? They hate him back.

The lesson for us, sitting in our home offices running our one-person shows? You can be the smartest person in the Slack channel. You can have the best data. You can have the perfect strategy.

But if you view your clients, partners, or peers as “inefficiencies” to be managed rather than humans to be understood, you hit a ceiling. Intelligence without connection isn’t leadership. It’s just a really fancy calculator.

2. The “Here and Now” Protocol

So, Philip is in this group, acting like a robot. He keeps talking about the past, or quoting dead philosophers. He is physically present, but mentally, he is in 1850.

Julius, the therapist, introduces a concept called the “Here and Now.”

The rule is simple: We don’t talk about your childhood trauma right now. We don’t talk about your office politics from last week. We talk about what is happening between us, in this room, right this second.

If you feel annoyed by me? Say it.

If you feel dismissed? Say it.

For Philip, this is a nightmare. It forces him to turn off his “Analysis Mode” and turn on his “Feeling Mode.”

I tried to apply this recently. I was in a sprint planning session that was going off the rails. I felt that defensive itch to pull up the contract. I wanted to quote the scope of work. I wanted to share my screen and point aggressively at Jira tickets.

Instead, I tried the “Here and Now.” I looked at the product lead and realized they weren’t trying to be difficult. They were panicking about their quarterly review.

Instead of dazzling them with project management logic, I said, “It feels like there’s a lot of pressure to ship this specific feature by Q4, or heads are going to roll. Is that the real driver here?”

The wall came down. We didn’t need a Gantt chart; we needed to acknowledge the stakes.

As an “Agency of One,” your superpower isn’t your productivity. It’s your empathy. An LLM can optimize a schedule, but it can’t feel the panic hiding behind a feature request.

Stop trying to be a better computer than the computer. Be the human in the loop.

3. Vulnerability is the API for Trust

The climax of the book involves a woman named Pam.

Years ago, Philip seduced Pam, then ghosted her because he was “optimizing his life” and didn’t want attachment. Classic Philip.

Now, they are in the same group. Pam is furious. She wants to destroy him.

But eventually, the anger burns out, and something else emerges.

In a pivotal moment, Philip admits he feels unlovable. He drops the shield. He admits the fortress is empty.

And Pam, instead of stabbing him, says something that floored me: “Philip, I could have loved you.”

Oof.

She didn’t say “I forgive you.” She acknowledged the potential that was lost because he was too afraid to be vulnerable.

We spend so much energy building armor. We call it “professionalism.” We call it “expertise.” We call it “maintaining boundaries.”

But armor is heavy. And armor keeps the good stuff out, too.

In the book, Philip finally heals not because he found the perfect philosophical argument, but because he let someone see his cracks.

For us? Vulnerability is a business asset.

Admitting “I don’t know the answer to that yet,” or “I’m struggling with this part of the project,” or even just “I’m having a rough Tuesday” doesn’t make you look weak. It makes you look trustworthy.

AI hallucinates confidence. Humans build trust through honesty.

To recap:

1. Don’t be a Philip. You can’t optimize your way out of the human condition.

2. Stay in the “Here and Now.” Read the emotional data in the room, not just the spreadsheet.

3. Drop the Armor. Vulnerability is the highest bandwidth connection you have.

Go forth and be a person today. The machine can handle the rest.

Links:

1. https://www.yalom.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Schopenhauer-Cure-Novel-Irvin-Yalom/dp/0060938102

Morning, CEO!

Let’s talk about the absolute worst way to fall asleep: Trying really, really hard to fall asleep.

You lay there. You command your brain to shut down. You scream “RELAX!” internally at your own eyelids.

And the result? You are wide awake, staring at the ceiling, calculating how many hours of misery remain until your alarm goes off.

This isn’t just you being bad at sleeping. It’s a cognitive glitch that ancient Chinese philosophers were trying to debug 2,000 years before melatonin gummies existed.

Today, we’re looking at Edward Slingerland’s book Trying Not to Try. It’s not about doing nothing. It’s about how to stop strangling your own success.

1. The “Try-Hard” Problem

We all know that person at the networking event.

They are making perfect eye contact. Their handshake is calibrated to the exact millinewton of pressure. They have a rehearsed anecdote about “synergy.”

And they are completely terrifying.

Why? Because they are “trying.” You can smell the effort.

In ancient China, the goal was Wu-Wei (effortless action). Think of a jazz pianist improvising or a butcher slicing meat without looking. They aren’t lazy; they are in a state where high skill meets zero conscious effort.

Here is the science part (because I need charts to understand feelings):

We have two systems. System 1 (Hot) is fast and automatic. System 2 (Cold) is slow and controlling.

Most of us spend our careers letting System 2 bully System 1. We have a “Smoke Alarm” in our brain scanning for errors, and a “Firefighter” trying to fix them. When both are running, you are awkward. You are slow. You are the person calculating how to be funny instead of just being funny.

I used to think being a professional meant keeping the Firefighter awake 24/7. But true mastery—whether in strategy or coding—happens when you shut the Firefighter up.

You have to try very hard (training) so that you can eventually stop trying (mastery).

2. Why Your “Vibe” is an Asset

Let’s talk about your “De.”

No, not the thing you get on a report card. In early Chinese thought, De translates to “Virtue,” but it’s actually more like “Charismatic Power.”

It is the superpower of Wu-Wei.

When you stop micro-managing your own personality (System 2) and let your trained instincts (System 1) take over, people trust you.

Think about a politician reading a teleprompter. Every hand gesture is scripted. You don’t trust them. They have zero De.

Now think of the leader who goes off-script, maybe stumbles a word, but speaks from the gut. You follow them into battle. They have massive De.

As you build your own enterprise, remember this: Artificial Intelligence is pure System 2. It is pure calculation. It has zero De.

Your clients and bosses aren’t hiring you just for the output; they are hiring you for the judgment that comes from your Hot Cognition.

If you try to act like a computer—perfectly logical, emotionless, rigid—you are competing with AI on its home turf. You will lose.

Your competitive advantage is your ability to be effortlessly, spontaneously human.

3. Four Ways to shut up the “Firefighter”

So, how do we actually achieve this “effortless” state without just taking a nap?

The book outlines four ancient philosophers who are basically the Board of Directors for your brain. They all want Wu-Wei, but they argue about how to get there.

Director 1: Confucius (The Grinder)

• The Strategy: Fake it ‘til you make it.

• The Vibe: Carving rotten wood into a statue.

• Use when: You are learning a new skill. You force the habits. You memorize the scripts. You grind until the unnatural becomes natural.

Director 2: Laozi (The Minimalist)

• The Strategy: Unlearn everything.

• The Vibe: Return to being a baby.

• Use when: You are over-thinking. Stop reading business books. Stop optimizing your calendar. Just sit there. Trust your gut.

Director 3: Mencius (The Gardener)

• The Strategy: Nurture the “sprouts.”

• The Vibe: You are already good; just add water.

• Use when: You feel a spark of excitement. Don’t force it (Confucius) or ignore it (Laozi). Just gently encourage the natural inclination.

Director 4: Zhuangzi (The Surfer)

• The Strategy: Lose your mind to find it.

• The Vibe: Ecstatic flow.

• Use when: You are in the crisis zone. Forget “good” and “bad.” Forget the outcome. Just ride the wave.

I used to only listen to Confucius. I thought suffering was the only path to value. Now, I try to rotate the Board members depending on the problem.

The Punchline

We are trained to believe that “Agency” means “Control.”

But the highest level of agency is actually Trust.

Trusting the years of experience you’ve banked. Trusting your gut over your spreadsheet. Trusting that if you stop strangling the steering wheel, the car will drive smoother.

Stop trying so hard to be the CEO. Just be the one who knows where the ship is going.

Links:

1. https://www.edwardslingerland.com

2. https://www.amazon.com/Trying-Not-Try-Science-Spontaneity/dp/0770437613