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Another week is in the rearview. Some of it went the way I planned. Most of it did not. That is starting to feel normal, which I think is actually a good sign. You stop expecting the week to bend to you and you start paying attention to how you are bending inside of it.

Here is what I was reading, listening to, and watching this week. No filler. Just the things that actually made me stop and think.

Grab your coffee. Let us get into it.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

I know. You have heard of this book a thousand times. Every entrepreneur on the internet has a version of the Think and Grow Rich origin story in their podcast bio. I am not going to pretend I am introducing you to some obscure gem. This is the book that launched an entire genre, and most of what has been written in the personal development space since 1937 is a remix of something Hill already laid down.

But here is what I have learned about this book. You read it in your twenties and you underline everything and you think you understand it. Then you rebuild a business a couple of times and you read it again in your forties, and you realize you did not understand it at all. You just understood the words. You did not understand the argument.

I picked it up again this month because I have been in a season of simplification. Cutting offers, commitments, projects, relationships that were taking up space without paying rent. And every framework I tried kept bringing me back to the same question. What am I actually organizing my life around? What is the North Star that all of this is supposed to be pointing toward? Because if I do not know, then the cutting is just arbitrary.

That is where Hill meets you. The concept he builds the whole book around is the Definite Chief Aim. A single, specific, measurable outcome you have decided to organize your life around. Not a wish. Not a hope. A decision. You write it down. You commit to it in a way that borders on uncomfortable. You read it to yourself out loud every morning and every night until your subconscious starts rearranging your decisions around it without your conscious permission.

The reason this book still sells after nearly a hundred years is that Hill put his finger on a pattern that has not changed. People who accomplish specific things have specific intentions. People who drift, drift. The Definite Chief Aim is the thing that separates the two groups. It is also the thing most of us never actually do, because it requires a kind of decisiveness that most modern life trains out of us. We are taught to keep our options open. Hill is arguing that open options are how you stay poor.

What has hit different this time is the chapter on faith. In my twenties, I read that chapter and rolled my eyes. It felt woo. It felt like positive thinking dressed up in depression-era language. In my forties, I read it and understood. Hill is not talking about optimism. He is talking about a trained belief that the thing you are working toward is achievable, and the repeated internal commitment to act as if it is already happening. The faith is not about wishing. The faith is about acting. And the acting reinforces the faith, which reinforces the acting, which eventually produces the result.

I do not care if you think the genre is overcrowded. This is the book. Go back to the source. Read it slowly. Do the exercises, which most people skip. Write your Definite Chief Aim and carry it with you this week.

Get it here: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

THREE ARTICLES WORTH YOUR TIME THIS WEEK

Article 1: The Myth of the Balanced Founder

Source: The Builder’s Letter

The first article I pulled from the pile this week is about a myth I have believed for most of my career. The myth of the balanced founder. The idea that the goal is some kind of tidy equilibrium between the business and the rest of your life, where you are giving every domain equal attention and nothing is ever starved for input.

The author argues that this is a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is uncomfortable. The truth is that building something real requires seasons of profound imbalance. Seasons where the business gets more than its fair share. Seasons where you are barely sleeping. Seasons where hobbies get shelved and relationships get stress-tested and the gym gets skipped for weeks at a time. The myth of balance says those seasons are a failure. The author argues they are actually the point.

What the author does well is to not romanticize it. He is not saying you should burn yourself out. He is saying that there is a rhythm to real building, and the rhythm includes sprints that look a lot like imbalance. The skill is not avoiding the sprint. The skill is choosing it consciously, bounding it in time, and knowing when to come back to center.

I needed this article this week. I have been feeling guilty about how much of my bandwidth the consultancy rebuild is taking. Reading this reframed the guilt. This is not a season of imbalance by accident. It is a season of imbalance by design. And it will end. The question is whether I am honoring the season or fighting it.

Read it here: The Builder’s Letter

Article 2: Why Decisiveness Is the Scarcest Skill in Business

Source: The Operators Desk

The second article hit me on a different angle. The premise is that the single scarcest skill in modern business is decisiveness. Not intelligence. Not talent. Not vision. The plain ability to look at an option set, make a call, and live with the consequences without spending another week second-guessing.

The author makes the case that most of the dysfunction in small companies comes not from bad decisions but from no decisions. Issues get raised. Options get weighed. Meetings get scheduled. But nobody ever says, out loud, "we are doing this one." Weeks go by. Momentum dies. Competitors ship. And then someone wonders why the team feels stuck.

I see this in every client I work with. The bottleneck is rarely capability. The bottleneck is almost always the speed of decisions at the top. When the founder or the leader makes calls faster, even imperfect ones, the whole organism moves faster. When they hedge, the whole organism hedges.

The author’s prescription is brutally practical. Shrink your decision window. If you have said you will decide by Friday, decide by Friday. If you catch yourself in research mode past the point of diminishing returns, kill the research and make the call with what you have. If you are waiting on more information and the information is not actually going to arrive, commit with the information you already have. Decisiveness is a muscle. Most of us have let it atrophy.

Read it here: The Operators Desk

Article 3: The Long Game No One Wants to Play

Source: Slow Growth

The third article is a piece of pushback against hustle culture, but not in the way most pushback gets written. It is not arguing that you should do less work. It is arguing that you should do different work. The kind of work that pays off in five years, not five weeks.

The author walks through several case studies of operators who made decisions in their thirties that looked like nothing at the time and turned into the foundational assets of their careers by their fifties. The consistent pattern is that the payoff was non-obvious for years. The work felt slow. The metrics did not cooperate. The external world gave them no reason to keep going. They kept going anyway, because they could see something the metrics could not.

I needed this one too. I am in a season where the most important work I am doing right now will not show up in the numbers for eighteen months, maybe longer. The newsletters. The podcast. The content library. The relationship capital. All of it compounds quietly for a long time before it compounds visibly. The temptation, on the weeks the numbers are flat, is to chase something louder. The article is a reminder that the loud stuff is almost always the wrong stuff. The quiet stuff, done every week without flinching, is what builds a career.

Read it here: Slow Growth

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

I have been a Mylett listener for a while, and this episode on leadership and valor is one of the ones I have had to stop and rewind on more than once. The core of the conversation is about what it actually means to lead with valor in a culture that rewards image over substance. Mylett draws a sharp line between leaders who perform courage for an audience and leaders who practice courage when no one is watching.

What struck me about this episode is how much of it is about identity, not tactics. Mylett argues that you cannot fake valor. You either are the kind of person who will walk into the hard conversation, sign the hard check, or make the hard call, or you are not. The gap between what you say you value and what you actually choose under pressure is where your character lives. Everyone else is just watching what you do when the pressure is on and quietly calibrating how much they can trust you based on what they see.

The framework he walks through for building valor is simple but not easy. You identify the places in your life where you know you are ducking hard conversations or hard decisions. You list them out. Then you take one of them, the easiest one, and handle it this week. Not to feel good about yourself. To prove to yourself that you can. Then the next, and the next, until you have built a track record with yourself that you are the kind of person who does not flinch when it counts.

I wrote down three hard conversations I had been avoiding while I was listening. Two of them happened this week. The third is happening on Monday. That is the point of this kind of content. It is supposed to change the shape of your calendar.

Listen here: The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

TRACK ON REPEAT

Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live)

This song has been on repeat for the entire week. I am not going to pretend it is a productivity track or a focus track, because it is not. It is a worship song. It is a call to surrender. And sometimes that is exactly what the week requires.

O Come to the Altar, in the live Elevation Worship recording, is one of those songs that has a physical effect if you let it. The build is patient. The lyrics are direct. The central invitation is the same thing Christianity has been inviting people to for two thousand years, which is to come as you are, with whatever you are dragging behind you, and put it down. That is the whole pitch. You are not required to have it together. You are not required to have the answers. You are just required to show up.

I have been on a rebuild for a while now. Some weeks the rebuild feels like momentum. Other weeks it feels like I am standing in the middle of a hallway, holding pieces of something I used to know how to build, not entirely sure which piece goes where. This song has been the soundtrack to the harder weeks. Not because it solves anything. Because it reminds me that the solving is not entirely up to me.

The live version adds a layer that the studio recording cannot. You can hear the congregation. You can hear the exhale when the chorus lands. You can hear thousands of people singing words that they mean, and there is a weight to that kind of collective honesty that shifts the whole track into a different category. It stops being a song and starts being a moment.

I have been playing this one on the mornings when I need to start the day on my knees, figuratively or literally. Before the inbox. Before the calendar. Before the tactical day begins. Some mornings you need a kick in the pants. Some mornings you need to be reminded that you are not the one holding the whole thing together. This song does the second thing, and it does it well.

Listen here: Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live) on Apple Music

MOVIE OF THE WEEK

Luck (Apple TV+)

Luck is an animated film from Apple and Skydance Animation, and I am going to tell you up front that it is a kids’ movie. My pick this week is not a prestige drama. It is a Pixar-adjacent, beautifully animated, kid-friendly film with a premise I found surprisingly useful.

The story follows a young woman named Sam who has had notoriously bad luck her entire life. Small accidents. Missed opportunities. Things that should work out, not working out. The film builds a whole world around the concept, with a Land of Luck where the good luck and bad luck of our world are manufactured and managed by a fleet of magical creatures. Sam stumbles into this world through a black cat named Bob, and the rest of the movie is a loose, funny, visually gorgeous adventure through the machinery of fortune.

What I liked about this movie is what most people seemed to miss in the reviews. Underneath the kid-friendly plot is a pretty clear thesis about what luck actually is. The film’s ultimate argument is that luck is not a substance that gets doled out unevenly. It is a byproduct of character, attention, relationship, and persistence. The people who get labeled lucky are usually just the people who kept showing up in places where something good could happen, and stayed long enough for it to happen.

There is a line late in the film, which I will not spoil, that captures this perfectly. It reframes the whole idea of luck from something that happens to you to something that is made by you, through the accumulation of choices that might individually look like nothing but collectively build the conditions for a breakthrough. That is the real message of the movie. That is also the real message of the business I am trying to build. The luck is mostly the residue of the reps.

I watched this with my girlfriend on a Friday night. It was light. It was fun. And yet I walked away with a clearer sense of why the slow, unsexy work I am doing right now matters. Sometimes the message you need arrives wrapped in a package you were not expecting.

Watch it here: Luck on Apple TV

RESOURCES SECTION

Book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Article 1: The Myth of the Balanced Founder — The Builder’s Letter

Article 2: Why Decisiveness Is the Scarcest Skill in Business — The Operators Desk

Article 3: The Long Game No One Wants to Play — Slow Growth

Podcast: The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

Track: Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live)

Movie: Luck on Apple TV

Tools I use and trust. If you sign up through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I actually use.

Make.com: Automate your workflows without writing code

Fathom.video: AI meeting notes that actually capture what matters

Galaxy.ai: All your AI tools in one place

Rize.io: Time tracking that actually makes you think about how you spend your hours

Beehiiv: Where serious newsletter operators publish

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. 

— Dan KaufmanAnother week is in the rearview. Some of it went the way I planned. Most of it did not. That is starting to feel normal, which I think is actually a good sign. You stop expecting the week to bend to you and you start paying attention to how you are bending inside of it.

Here is what I was reading, listening to, and watching this week. No filler. Just the things that actually made me stop and think.

Grab your coffee. Let us get into it.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

I know. You have heard of this book a thousand times. Every entrepreneur on the internet has a version of the Think and Grow Rich origin story in their podcast bio. I am not going to pretend I am introducing you to some obscure gem. This is the book that launched an entire genre, and most of what has been written in the personal development space since 1937 is a remix of something Hill already laid down.

But here is what I have learned about this book. You read it in your twenties and you underline everything and you think you understand it. Then you rebuild a business a couple of times and you read it again in your forties, and you realize you did not understand it at all. You just understood the words. You did not understand the argument.

I picked it up again this month because I have been in a season of simplification. Cutting offers, commitments, projects, relationships that were taking up space without paying rent. And every framework I tried kept bringing me back to the same question. What am I actually organizing my life around? What is the North Star that all of this is supposed to be pointing toward? Because if I do not know, then the cutting is just arbitrary.

That is where Hill meets you. The concept he builds the whole book around is the Definite Chief Aim. A single, specific, measurable outcome you have decided to organize your life around. Not a wish. Not a hope. A decision. You write it down. You commit to it in a way that borders on uncomfortable. You read it to yourself out loud every morning and every night until your subconscious starts rearranging your decisions around it without your conscious permission.

The reason this book still sells after nearly a hundred years is that Hill put his finger on a pattern that has not changed. People who accomplish specific things have specific intentions. People who drift, drift. The Definite Chief Aim is the thing that separates the two groups. It is also the thing most of us never actually do, because it requires a kind of decisiveness that most modern life trains out of us. We are taught to keep our options open. Hill is arguing that open options are how you stay poor.

What has hit different this time is the chapter on faith. In my twenties, I read that chapter and rolled my eyes. It felt woo. It felt like positive thinking dressed up in depression-era language. In my forties, I read it and understood. Hill is not talking about optimism. He is talking about a trained belief that the thing you are working toward is achievable, and the repeated internal commitment to act as if it is already happening. The faith is not about wishing. The faith is about acting. And the acting reinforces the faith, which reinforces the acting, which eventually produces the result.

I do not care if you think the genre is overcrowded. This is the book. Go back to the source. Read it slowly. Do the exercises, which most people skip. Write your Definite Chief Aim and carry it with you this week.

Get it here: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

THREE ARTICLES WORTH YOUR TIME THIS WEEK

Article 1: The Myth of the Balanced Founder

Source: The Builder’s Letter

The first article I pulled from the pile this week is about a myth I have believed for most of my career. The myth of the balanced founder. The idea that the goal is some kind of tidy equilibrium between the business and the rest of your life, where you are giving every domain equal attention and nothing is ever starved for input.

The author argues that this is a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is uncomfortable. The truth is that building something real requires seasons of profound imbalance. Seasons where the business gets more than its fair share. Seasons where you are barely sleeping. Seasons where hobbies get shelved and relationships get stress-tested and the gym gets skipped for weeks at a time. The myth of balance says those seasons are a failure. The author argues they are actually the point.

What the author does well is to not romanticize it. He is not saying you should burn yourself out. He is saying that there is a rhythm to real building, and the rhythm includes sprints that look a lot like imbalance. The skill is not avoiding the sprint. The skill is choosing it consciously, bounding it in time, and knowing when to come back to center.

I needed this article this week. I have been feeling guilty about how much of my bandwidth the consultancy rebuild is taking. Reading this reframed the guilt. This is not a season of imbalance by accident. It is a season of imbalance by design. And it will end. The question is whether I am honoring the season or fighting it.

Read it here: The Builder’s Letter

Article 2: Why Decisiveness Is the Scarcest Skill in Business

Source: The Operators Desk

The second article hit me on a different angle. The premise is that the single scarcest skill in modern business is decisiveness. Not intelligence. Not talent. Not vision. The plain ability to look at an option set, make a call, and live with the consequences without spending another week second-guessing.

The author makes the case that most of the dysfunction in small companies comes not from bad decisions but from no decisions. Issues get raised. Options get weighed. Meetings get scheduled. But nobody ever says, out loud, "we are doing this one." Weeks go by. Momentum dies. Competitors ship. And then someone wonders why the team feels stuck.

I see this in every client I work with. The bottleneck is rarely capability. The bottleneck is almost always the speed of decisions at the top. When the founder or the leader makes calls faster, even imperfect ones, the whole organism moves faster. When they hedge, the whole organism hedges.

The author’s prescription is brutally practical. Shrink your decision window. If you have said you will decide by Friday, decide by Friday. If you catch yourself in research mode past the point of diminishing returns, kill the research and make the call with what you have. If you are waiting on more information and the information is not actually going to arrive, commit with the information you already have. Decisiveness is a muscle. Most of us have let it atrophy.

Read it here: The Operators Desk

Article 3: The Long Game No One Wants to Play

Source: Slow Growth

The third article is a piece of pushback against hustle culture, but not in the way most pushback gets written. It is not arguing that you should do less work. It is arguing that you should do different work. The kind of work that pays off in five years, not five weeks.

The author walks through several case studies of operators who made decisions in their thirties that looked like nothing at the time and turned into the foundational assets of their careers by their fifties. The consistent pattern is that the payoff was non-obvious for years. The work felt slow. The metrics did not cooperate. The external world gave them no reason to keep going. They kept going anyway, because they could see something the metrics could not.

I needed this one too. I am in a season where the most important work I am doing right now will not show up in the numbers for eighteen months, maybe longer. The newsletters. The podcast. The content library. The relationship capital. All of it compounds quietly for a long time before it compounds visibly. The temptation, on the weeks the numbers are flat, is to chase something louder. The article is a reminder that the loud stuff is almost always the wrong stuff. The quiet stuff, done every week without flinching, is what builds a career.

Read it here: Slow Growth

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

I have been a Mylett listener for a while, and this episode on leadership and valor is one of the ones I have had to stop and rewind on more than once. The core of the conversation is about what it actually means to lead with valor in a culture that rewards image over substance. Mylett draws a sharp line between leaders who perform courage for an audience and leaders who practice courage when no one is watching.

What struck me about this episode is how much of it is about identity, not tactics. Mylett argues that you cannot fake valor. You either are the kind of person who will walk into the hard conversation, sign the hard check, or make the hard call, or you are not. The gap between what you say you value and what you actually choose under pressure is where your character lives. Everyone else is just watching what you do when the pressure is on and quietly calibrating how much they can trust you based on what they see.

The framework he walks through for building valor is simple but not easy. You identify the places in your life where you know you are ducking hard conversations or hard decisions. You list them out. Then you take one of them, the easiest one, and handle it this week. Not to feel good about yourself. To prove to yourself that you can. Then the next, and the next, until you have built a track record with yourself that you are the kind of person who does not flinch when it counts.

I wrote down three hard conversations I had been avoiding while I was listening. Two of them happened this week. The third is happening on Monday. That is the point of this kind of content. It is supposed to change the shape of your calendar.

Listen here: The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

TRACK ON REPEAT

Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live)

This song has been on repeat for the entire week. I am not going to pretend it is a productivity track or a focus track, because it is not. It is a worship song. It is a call to surrender. And sometimes that is exactly what the week requires.

O Come to the Altar, in the live Elevation Worship recording, is one of those songs that has a physical effect if you let it. The build is patient. The lyrics are direct. The central invitation is the same thing Christianity has been inviting people to for two thousand years, which is to come as you are, with whatever you are dragging behind you, and put it down. That is the whole pitch. You are not required to have it together. You are not required to have the answers. You are just required to show up.

I have been on a rebuild for a while now. Some weeks the rebuild feels like momentum. Other weeks it feels like I am standing in the middle of a hallway, holding pieces of something I used to know how to build, not entirely sure which piece goes where. This song has been the soundtrack to the harder weeks. Not because it solves anything. Because it reminds me that the solving is not entirely up to me.

The live version adds a layer that the studio recording cannot. You can hear the congregation. You can hear the exhale when the chorus lands. You can hear thousands of people singing words that they mean, and there is a weight to that kind of collective honesty that shifts the whole track into a different category. It stops being a song and starts being a moment.

I have been playing this one on the mornings when I need to start the day on my knees, figuratively or literally. Before the inbox. Before the calendar. Before the tactical day begins. Some mornings you need a kick in the pants. Some mornings you need to be reminded that you are not the one holding the whole thing together. This song does the second thing, and it does it well.

Listen here: Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live) on Apple Music

MOVIE OF THE WEEK

Luck (Apple TV+)

Luck is an animated film from Apple and Skydance Animation, and I am going to tell you up front that it is a kids’ movie. My pick this week is not a prestige drama. It is a Pixar-adjacent, beautifully animated, kid-friendly film with a premise I found surprisingly useful.

The story follows a young woman named Sam who has had notoriously bad luck her entire life. Small accidents. Missed opportunities. Things that should work out, not working out. The film builds a whole world around the concept, with a Land of Luck where the good luck and bad luck of our world are manufactured and managed by a fleet of magical creatures. Sam stumbles into this world through a black cat named Bob, and the rest of the movie is a loose, funny, visually gorgeous adventure through the machinery of fortune.

What I liked about this movie is what most people seemed to miss in the reviews. Underneath the kid-friendly plot is a pretty clear thesis about what luck actually is. The film’s ultimate argument is that luck is not a substance that gets doled out unevenly. It is a byproduct of character, attention, relationship, and persistence. The people who get labeled lucky are usually just the people who kept showing up in places where something good could happen, and stayed long enough for it to happen.

There is a line late in the film, which I will not spoil, that captures this perfectly. It reframes the whole idea of luck from something that happens to you to something that is made by you, through the accumulation of choices that might individually look like nothing but collectively build the conditions for a breakthrough. That is the real message of the movie. That is also the real message of the business I am trying to build. The luck is mostly the residue of the reps.

I watched this with my girlfriend on a Friday night. It was light. It was fun. And yet I walked away with a clearer sense of why the slow, unsexy work I am doing right now matters. Sometimes the message you need arrives wrapped in a package you were not expecting.

Watch it here: Luck on Apple TV

RESOURCES SECTION

Book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Article 1: The Myth of the Balanced Founder — The Builder’s Letter

Article 2: Why Decisiveness Is the Scarcest Skill in Business — The Operators Desk

Article 3: The Long Game No One Wants to Play — Slow Growth

Podcast: The Ed Mylett Show: Leadership and Valor

Track: Elevation Worship: O Come to the Altar (Live)

Movie: Luck on Apple TV

Tools I use and trust. If you sign up through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I actually use.

Make.com: Automate your workflows without writing code

Fathom.video: AI meeting notes that actually capture what matters

Galaxy.ai: All your AI tools in one place

Rize.io: Time tracking that actually makes you think about how you spend your hours

Beehiiv: Where serious newsletter operators publish

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. 

— Dan Kaufman

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