There's a version of every week where the thing that slowed you down wasn't the market, the client, or the economy. It was you. Not in a dramatic way. In a small, boring, repeatable way that you'd rather not look at directly.
That's the thread running through everything I picked this week, and I didn't plan it. I noticed it Wednesday morning on a walk with Sheldon, going back through what I'd read and listened to, and realized all of it was circling the same drain. Fear wearing a disguise. Protection wearing a disguise. The version of yourself you built for a fight that ended a while ago.
Grab your coffee. Let's get into it.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
READING
I'm late to this one. It came out in 2014, half the people I know have read the whole saga twice, and I kept skipping it because science fiction on Mars sounded like a genre I aged out of around high school. I was wrong, and I want to be specific about why, because "fun read" undersells what this book is doing.
The setup. Darrow is a Red, the lowest caste in a color-coded society, mining helium-3 beneath the surface of Mars, believing his work is terraforming the planet for future generations. Then he finds out the surface has been livable for generations. Cities. Gardens. The whole thing was a lie designed to keep a labor class digging. His wife dies for saying so out loud, and Darrow gets recruited by a resistance that surgically transforms him into a Gold and sends him into the Institute, the brutal proving ground where the ruling caste is made.
So on the surface it's Hunger Games meets Ender's Game meets Lord of the Flies, and the pacing is relentless. Brown does not waste your time.
But here's what actually got me, and it's the reason this belongs in a newsletter about building things instead of a list of beach reads.
Darrow's whole problem is that the skills that made him extraordinary as a Red are the exact skills that get him killed as a Gold. He's the best Helldiver in the mines. Fast, fearless, trusts his hands and his willingness to go harder than anyone else. That's his entire identity, and it's an elite identity in the world he came from. Then he gets dropped into a world that runs on politics, alliances, and reading people, and every instinct that made him great starts working against him. He keeps trying to solve strategy problems with courage. He keeps winning fights and losing ground.
I've watched that exact movie in business more times than I can count. Watched it in myself. The scrappy operator who built something from nothing on sheer output, who then hits a level where output isn't the constraint anymore, and cannot for the life of him stop reaching for the tool that used to work. He doesn't need to work harder. He needs to become a different kind of operator. And the thing standing in the way isn't laziness. It's that the old identity is the thing he's proudest of.
There's a second layer that's just as useful. Darrow has to become a Gold in order to destroy the Golds, and the saga is haunted by whether you can wear the costume long enough to win without the costume becoming you. Anybody who's grown a business past the point where they recognize it will feel something there. Sometimes that's growth and sometimes it's drift, and the terrifying part is that from the inside they feel identical.
Read it for the story. It rips. But sit with what it's saying about the cost of an identity that's outlived its usefulness, because that bill comes due for most of us and almost nobody sees it coming.
Get it here: Red Rising by Pierce Brown on Amazon
THREE ARTICLES WORTH YOUR TIME
ARTICLES
Article One: 3 Ways Leaders Are Self-Sabotaging (And How to Stop)
Source: CEOWORLD Magazine
Short piece, and I almost skipped it because the headline reads like every other leadership listicle on the internet. Then I hit one line I've been chewing on ever since: fear often masquerades as prudence.
That's the whole thing. The article opens with a founder who delayed a launch for months because he wanted everyone's approval, and by the time he moved, competitors had taken the gap in the market. The point being that this founder never once experienced himself as afraid. He experienced himself as careful. Diligent. Getting alignment.
I know that man. I've been that man. The stalling doesn't feel like stalling from the inside, which is exactly what makes it so effective at killing things. Nobody writes in their journal "today I let fear run the company." They write "we need more data before committing."
The fix it offers is almost stupidly simple, which is probably why it works. Name the fear. Not process it, just say what it is out loud. "I'm worried this will flop and people will think I don't know what I'm doing" is a sentence you can evaluate. "We should wait for Q3 numbers" is not, because it's already wearing the costume of good judgment.
I've started asking myself one question before any decision I've moved twice. If I had to defend this delay to someone who had my interests at heart and no patience for me, what would I say? Usually the answer is embarrassing, and usually I move that week.
Article Two: AI for Small Business, the 2026 Adoption Report
Source: Thryv
This one earns its place because it puts a number on something I've been arguing with clients about all year, and the finding is the opposite of what most people assume.
The report's core conclusion is that adoption is no longer the differentiator. Implementation is. Almost everybody has AI in the building now. Very few have it in the work. And the businesses seeing real gains aren't the ones with the most advanced tools or the biggest stack. They're the ones who took one actual business problem and applied something to it in a way that stuck.
That distinction sounds small. It isn't. Adoption means you have a subscription. Implementation means a specific person does a specific thing differently on a specific day, and there's a process behind it that survives that person having a bad week.
I see the gap constantly. Owner buys the tools, runs a few impressive demos for the team, and three months later nothing about how the business runs has changed. The tool didn't fail. It never got attached to a workflow. It was a purchase, not a change.
The report also lands on something I've been saying in different words for two years. The framing that wins isn't AI as a replacement for people. It's AI as the thing that creates capacity so people can do the work that actually needs a human.
Read it with a pen, and be honest about which category you're in. Most of us are further toward adopted and further from implemented than we'd like to admit.
Read it here: AI for Small Business: 2026 AI Adoption Report at Thryv
Article Three: Keeping Your Word, The Commitment That Defines Leadership
Source: Sandler
This is the one that hit hardest, and it's the shortest of the three.
The premise is integrity as a leadership trait, which sounds like the sort of thing you nod at and forget. But it takes a turn halfway through into territory I wasn't expecting, and it's the part about self-trust.
The argument goes like this. Every time you break a promise to yourself, skipping the workout, delaying the hard conversation, avoiding the uncomfortable task, you send yourself a message that your word doesn't mean anything. And you're the one receiving it. Do that enough times and confidence erodes, momentum stalls, standards quietly drop, and none of it looks like a crisis from the outside because none of the broken promises were public.
Then it offers the fix, and I love how unglamorous it is. People ask how to rebuild confidence. The answer is to start keeping small promises to yourself again. Not big ones. The walk. The one email. The thing you said you'd do by Thursday.
I've been running a version of this on myself since spring, mostly by accident. One commitment I refused to negotiate on, small enough that no honest excuse was available. What surprised me wasn't that keeping it felt good. It's that keeping it made unrelated things easier. The bank account of self-trust is one account. You can't overdraw it on the workout and expect a full balance for the sales call.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK
LISTENING
Joe Hudson coaches executives at SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, and Apple, and he's the guy behind Art of Accomplishment. So when he talks about self-sabotage, he's not talking about people who can't get out of bed. He's talking about people at the absolute top of their fields who are still, quietly, in their own way.
That framing alone made the episode worth it. There's a comfortable lie floating around that self-sabotage is a problem for people who haven't made it yet, and that success burns it out of you. Hudson's career says otherwise. The pattern doesn't disappear when you get good. It gets more expensive and better disguised.
The part I've replayed twice is his take on why we do it. His argument is that self-sabotage isn't a bug in the system, it's an old protection strategy that's still running long after the threat it was built for is gone. Some version of you, at some point, learned that shrinking or stalling or picking the fight was the safest available move. It probably was, then. The strategy worked. And then it kept running, because nothing ever told it to stop.
What I appreciate is that he doesn't turn that into an excuse. The framing isn't "you're not at fault so relax." It's closer to "you're not broken, you're outdated," which is a far more useful diagnosis because it implies a specific job. You don't need to fix yourself. You need to retire a strategy.
Rich Roll is a good interviewer for this material because he keeps pushing on the practical side. Fine, what do I actually do Monday morning.
Worth listening to twice. The first pass you'll agree with everything. The second pass you'll start recognizing yourself, which is the point and also the uncomfortable part.
Listen here: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Life on Spotify
TRACK ON REPEAT
LISTENING
Cody Jinks is one of the more interesting operators in music, and I mean operator literally. Fort Worth guy, came up in the metal and punk scene, switched to country, got told repeatedly it wouldn't work, and then built one of the most loyal audiences in the genre almost entirely outside the Nashville machine. He manages himself. He owns his catalog.
Know It All is off In My Blood, and when he posted it he framed it with one line: we try to do it the right way.
That's the whole song. It's got that unhurried Jinks delivery, the kind where you can tell the guy has nothing to prove and knows it. There's a flavor of confidence in outlaw country that doesn't exist much anywhere else, where the swagger isn't about being the best, it's about having already decided what you're willing to trade and what you're not.
I've had it on during morning walks all week. Not a hype track, not background music either. It sits somewhere in between, which is exactly the tempo I want when I'm working something out.
The reason it fits this edition: the title is a joke on itself. The song isn't about knowing it all. It's about the gap between who people think you are and what you're still figuring out, and about doing the work the right way anyway because that's the only version you can live with. There's a stubbornness in Jinks' catalog that reads as ego from the outside and integrity from the inside, and that distinction is worth more than it gets credit for.
Fair warning if you're new to him: he's got rough edges, lyrically and otherwise. That's the deal.
Listen here: Know It All by Cody Jinks on Spotify
SHOW OF THE WEEK
WATCHING
I did not expect to put a Mindy Kaling basketball comedy in this newsletter, and yet here we are.
Kate Hudson plays Isla Gordon, the only sister in a family that owns the Los Angeles Waves, a fictional franchise that is very obviously not the Lakers in the same way AFC Richmond is very obviously not a real club. She's spent her whole life outside the family business despite knowing it better than her brothers do. Then the oldest brother flames out publicly, goes to rehab, and appoints her president on his way out the door.
Season one is her proving she belongs. Season two, which dropped in April, is better, because the premise flips. She's not the underdog anymore. She's the one with the target on her back, her brother is back from rehab insisting he doesn't want his job, and every misstep she makes is quietly getting collected as ammunition by someone who shares her last name.
It's funny and it's fast. Ray Romano turns up as the new head coach and is very good. Jeanie Buss produces, so the front-office texture has more truth in it than a comedy needs.
But here's why it's in this edition. The show is sharp about a specific kind of self-sabotage that comes from having been underestimated for a long time. Isla's biggest problem isn't the board or her brothers. It's that she spent so many years building a case for why she deserves to be there that she can't stop making the case after she's already in the chair. She over-explains. She over-proves. She makes decisions to demonstrate something rather than because they're right.
Anybody who spent a long stretch being told they weren't ready knows that reflex. You get the thing and you keep auditioning for it. Underneath all the jokes, the show is honest about how expensive that is, and how the people around you can smell it.
Easy watch, sneaky depth.
Watch it here: Running Point on Netflix
RESOURCES | EVERYTHING LINKED IN ONE PLACE
Track: Know It All by Cody Jinks
Show: Running Point on Netflix
That's the week. If one of these lands, tell me which one. I read every reply.
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
TOOLS I ACTUALLY USE
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Make.com for automating the workflows that keep this operation running without me touching them.
Galaxy.ai for running every major AI model from one login instead of paying four subscriptions.
Fathom.video for meeting notes that actually capture what was said and what got committed to.
Buffer for scheduling social so I'm never posting live.
Beehiiv for publishing this newsletter and the rest of my properties.