Friday, November 6th, 2026
What's the first memory that comes to mind when you think about last year?
I'll bet it isn't an average Tuesday. It's a moment. A phone call, a conversation, a win, a loss, a night that ran late for a good reason. Twelve months of living, and your brain kept a handful of snapshots and tossed the rest.
That idea ended up running through every pick this week.
The book is about why certain moments stick and how to create more of them on purpose. The first article is about how easily those memories can get rewritten, especially now that AI can edit a photo in seconds. The second is a new study with a hopeful message for anyone over forty who thinks their past has already decided their future. The third is about what makes customers stick around, and it isn't the points program. The podcast is a forty minute shot of motivation about letting go of the time you've already spent. The song is about the simple, steady thing underneath all of it. And the show is about a man who keeps trying to outrun who he used to be, now with a midlife crisis to go with it.
Pour the coffee. Let's go.
Book of the Week
The Heath brothers have a gift for taking research that would put you to sleep and turning it into something you can use on Monday. They did it with Made to Stick and Switch. This one might be my favorite.
The question at the center of the book is simple. Why do some moments stay with us for the rest of our lives while most of our days blur together? And can you create those moments on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen?
Their answer is yes, and they boil it down to four ingredients. They call it EPIC.
Elevation. Moments that rise above the everyday. They break the script, raise the stakes, or appeal to the senses.
Pride. Moments when we feel recognized, hit a milestone, or show courage.
Insight. Moments when we suddenly see ourselves or the world differently. They call it tripping over the truth.
Connection. Moments we share with other people, especially when we struggle or celebrate together.
The book opens with a story that's hard to read without getting a lump in your throat. A school network in Houston called YES Prep holds a Senior Signing Day, built like the day star athletes announce their college picks. Except it's for every graduating senior. Each one walks on stage and reveals where they're going to college, in front of thousands of people, including the younger kids who are watching and thinking, that could be me. It's a simple event. It changes lives.
The other idea I keep coming back to is the peak end rule. When people remember an experience, they mostly remember the best or worst moment and how it ended. Not how long it was. Not the average. Which means most of us are putting our effort in the wrong places.
The Heaths also make a point I needed to hear. Fill the pits before you build the peaks. If the basics are broken, nobody cares about your grand gesture.
I wrote a whole tactical breakdown of how to use this with clients in Tuesday's letter. But honestly, the book is just as useful at home. Your kids aren't going to remember most of the meals you made. They're going to remember a few moments. It's worth asking which ones you're creating.
Get it here: The Power of Moments on Amazon
Three Articles Worth Your Time This Week
Article 1: Scientists are finding AI may make us remember things that never happened
Source: The Washington Post
If the book is about making moments stick, this one is about how fragile those moments really are.
Pattie Maes, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and her colleagues showed 200 people a set of 24 ordinary photographs. A wedding, a city street, a race, that kind of thing. After a break, some people saw the same photos again. Others saw versions that had been quietly altered with AI. Faces changed, people inserted into scenes, details added that were never there.
The research the article walks through points in an uncomfortable direction. When AI edits the record, people can end up remembering the edited version as if it really happened, and feeling confident about it.
Here's why I think every business owner should read this. We're about to spend a lot of time looking at AI generated images, AI summarized meetings, and AI rewritten history. Some of it is helpful. But your memory was never a perfect recording to begin with, and now it has competition.
Two takeaways I'm keeping. When something matters, write it down in your own words while it's fresh, before anyone, human or machine, tells you what happened. And be careful about using AI images of real events in your marketing. If people can't tell what's real, eventually they stop trusting you, too.
Article 2: Losing a little weight in midlife may help later heart health
Source: University College London
This one fits the podcast pick a little too perfectly.
Researchers at UCL used data from the 1958 British birth cohort, a group of people born in the same week in 1958 who've been tracked their whole lives. They looked at more than 6,000 of them and compared heart and metabolic health at age 44 and again at age 62.
What they found is worth reading if you're north of forty. People who carried extra weight and then lost at least five percent of it by around age 50, and kept it off for five years, ended up at 62 with cholesterol, blood pressure and inflammation levels that looked a lot like people who'd stayed at a healthy weight their whole adult lives. Meanwhile, the people who kept gaining through their fifties saw their heart health decline the fastest.
The researchers are careful. This is observational data, not a controlled trial, and it can't prove the weight loss caused the difference.
But here's the part I care about. Your past doesn't automatically decide your future. Not in your body, not in your business. A modest change made in midlife still counted. Five percent. Not a transformation. Not a total reinvention. Five percent, sustained.
That's the whole game in most areas of life. Small, kept.
Article 3: Customer Loyalty Index 2026, Global Edition
Source: SAP Engagement Cloud (formerly Emarsys)
Quick disclosure first. This report comes from a company that sells marketing software, so read it knowing they'd love for you to buy something. The numbers are still worth knowing.
It's the sixth year they've run the survey, and this time it covers more than 10,000 consumers around the world. They boil their findings down to one equation. Trust plus control plus autonomy equals loyalty.
Three numbers jumped out at me.
60 percent of consumers say they're more loyal to brands that make them feel personally valued.
33 percent say they now trust an AI assistant to complete purchases for them.
30 percent say they've already switched away from a brand they were loyal to because of how it uses AI. Among Gen Z, it's 45 percent.
Put those together and you get a clear picture. People will hand more of their shopping to machines. But the thing that keeps them loyal is still feeling like a human being on the other side noticed them. And if your AI makes them feel processed instead of valued, a lot of them will leave.
For a small business, that's actually good news. Feeling personally valued is the one thing a giant company has the hardest time faking. It's exactly what Tuesday's letter was about.
Podcast of the Week
What Happens When You Stop Letting Your Past Decide Your Future, Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero
If you've ever had a motivational speech pop up on YouTube right when you needed it, there's a decent chance Eddie Pinero was behind it. His channel and podcast, Your World Within, have been doing this for years. Powerful voices, music underneath, short sharp ideas you can carry into your day.
This episode dropped October 19th and runs about forty four minutes. It's built like a lot of his work, a compilation of speeches woven together around one theme. And the theme is one I think a lot of people need right now.
Your past may have shaped who you are. It doesn't get to decide who you become.
The heart of the episode is something economists call the sunk cost trap, even though it never really feels like economics when you're stuck in it. We hold on to careers, goals, habits, relationships and decisions because of how much time and energy we've already put in. Five years in this job. Three years building this thing. All that effort can't be for nothing, right?
The episode's answer is uncomfortable and honest. Staying on the wrong path doesn't give you that time back. It just costs you more of it.
What I like about this one is that it doesn't tell you to quit everything and move to Bali. It's not anti commitment. It's anti autopilot. The question it keeps pushing is whether you're staying because it's still right, or because leaving would mean admitting the last few years didn't go how you planned.
That second reason has kept me in a few places longer than it should have.
This is a good one for a long drive or a walk with no phone in your hand. It's also a good one to listen to right before you do your year end planning, so you go in with clear eyes instead of loyalty to old decisions.
Track on Repeat
Love That You're Mine, Hi-Rez and Jordan Meyer
This one isn't new. Hi-Rez and Jordan Meyer put it out back in February, and it runs a little over three minutes. It found me this fall anyway, which is how the best songs usually show up. Not when they drop. When you need them.
The title says most of it. Love that you're mine.
Not "love that you're impressive." Not "love what you do for me." Just gratitude that someone is in your corner and chose to stay there.
That's probably why it's been on repeat for me.
There's something disarming about a song that just says the plain thing out loud. It doesn't try to be clever. It doesn't hedge. It's just grateful.
I don't always do that well. Saying the simple thing. I'm better at building the system or solving the problem than looking at the people in my life and telling them, without any decoration, that I'm grateful they're there. This song is a three minute reminder to do it anyway.
Play it, then text somebody you love one sentence you'd normally leave unsaid.
Listen here: Love That You're Mine on Spotify
Show of the Week
Dexter: Resurrection, Season 2, on Paramount+ with Showtime
The best line in the marketing for this season is the one about the enemy Dexter didn't see coming. A midlife crisis.
Quick catch up if you've been away. Michael C. Hall has played Dexter Morgan, the forensics guy who's secretly a serial killer who only hunts other killers, for twenty years now. The original show started in 2006. After the New Blood revival, Dexter was shot and left for dead. Resurrection picked up with him waking up, recovering, and heading to New York City to find his son Harrison, who's carrying his own version of the family darkness.
Season two premiered October 30th on Paramount+ with Showtime, just in time for Halloween. Ten episodes, one a week on Fridays, with the finale on New Year's Day.
This time Dexter is caught between two killers. Brian Cox, the Succession star, plays a notorious murderer with decades of kills behind him. Dan Stevens plays a young one terrorizing New York in a way nobody's seen before. Uma Thurman is back, and so is Desmond Harrington as Joey Quinn, a familiar face for longtime fans.
And Dexter is getting older. The teaser literally has him at the eye doctor. The old version of himself, the one with the whole police department's resources and perfect reflexes, isn't available anymore. He's got to be a role model for his son while running the same old patterns with a body and a life that can't keep up with them.
Obviously, I'm not endorsing the hobby.
But there's a real question underneath it. What do you do when the version of you that got you here can't take you any further? A lot of men in their forties are asking it, even if they're not hiding anything in a freezer.
Watch it here: Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 episode schedule
Resources
Article 1: Scientists are finding AI may make us remember things that never happened, The Washington Post
Podcast: What Happens When You Stop Letting Your Past Decide Your Future, Your World Within (Spotify)
This week's free kit: The Peak Moments Kit
Go make one moment this weekend somebody will still remember next year.
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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