Friday, September 25th, 2026
Housekeeping first. Last week's show was The Office. This week's show is its direct spinoff, same documentary crew, same creator. I noticed. I'm doing it anyway and I'll tell you why when we get there.
Now the theme, which picked itself around Tuesday.
The book is a guy telling you to burn the script. The track is called It Is Written, which argues the exact opposite, and I've had it on all week because of that tension. The articles are about people walking out of the corporate script, people whose whole identity was the first act, and a founder who followed every rule correctly and built something nobody can buy. The podcast is Oprah on the small voice underneath all of it.
Same question under everything. Who wrote the plan you're running, when did you last read it, and would you sign off on it today.
Grab a drink. Let's get into it.
Book of the Week
Expectations first, because that's how you get the most out of it.
This is not a beautifully crafted book. Self-published, uneven editing, and a title with three characters of punctuation in it that exist to get past a filter. If you need polish, skip it and I won't be offended.
What it is, and this is rarer than good editing, is honest about where it came from. McCarthy wrote it between work shifts. Raising kids, punching a clock, paying bills, climbing out of debt. Not from a stage, a mastermind, or a beach in Bali, and he says that up front.
Which matters, because the problem with almost every book on this shelf is that the author solved their problem ten years ago and is describing the solution from an altitude where they can't remember what the bottom felt like. The advice comes out technically correct and emotionally useless, written by somebody who's forgotten the specific texture of opening a bank app and closing it immediately.
McCarthy hasn't forgotten. That's the whole value proposition and it's enough.
The core argument is in the title. You're running a script. Not a metaphorical one, an actual set of rules about what success looks like, what you're supposed to want, what a responsible person does. You didn't write it. You absorbed it from parents, a town, an industry, whoever was in the room when you were nineteen. Then you spent two decades optimizing hard against goals you never chose.
His list of the ways this shows up is the part that got me, because it's unflattering and specific. Numbing out with scrolling, spending, drinking, distraction. Chasing the neighbors. Sacrificing who you are to protect an image that was never yours.
I read that list on a Sunday and went three for five, which is not the score I'd have given myself the day before.
It's weakest where every book in this category is weakest. The practical chapters are lighter than the diagnostic ones, and if you want a system you'll leave hungry. It's strongest in never telling you your situation is your fault in the smug way, and never telling you it'll be easy.
Read it in an afternoon. Take the inventory. Ignore what doesn't land. It's the book this week because it's the cleanest statement of the thing every other pick circles: somebody handed you a plan and you've been treating it as physics.
Get it here: F*ck The Script on Amazon
Three Articles Worth Your Time This Week
Article 1: How to Reinvent Yourself as a Second-Act Entrepreneur
Source: BusinessesForSale.com
This earns its place on data rather than inspiration, which in the reinvention genre is close to unique.
The hook is Richard Hand, twenty years in financial services and consulting, done with corporate life, who buys a business instead of starting one. Fine story. The reason to read it is the survey underneath. BusinessesForSale ran their Ownership Economy Index across UK adults this year and three numbers stopped me.
Sixty percent said corporate careers are less secure than they used to be. Fifty-eight percent of people aged forty-five to fifty-five agreed that workers are increasingly turning to business ownership after leaving corporate roles. And this one: seventy-six percent believe workers over fifty struggle to find new jobs, with fifty-seven percent saying over-fifties face significant barriers to progressing at all.
Sit with that last pair, because it reframes the whole conversation. We talk about entrepreneurship after fifty as a brave choice. Three quarters of people surveyed think the alternative door is closing. That's not a leap of faith, that's the only remaining exit, and calling it courage is a flattering way to describe having your other options taken off the table.
The article's own advice is the part I'd underline. Run towards, not away from. Without a real plan you're not escaping insecurity, you're trading one flavor of it for a version you personally guarantee with your house. Leaving a script isn't the same as writing one.
Read it here: How to Reinvent Yourself as a Second-Act Entrepreneur
Article 2: Being an Entrepreneur, September 2026
Source: MI6 Agency
A roundup rather than a single essay, which normally I'd skip, but it carries two ideas about scripts you didn't know you were following.
The first is from Paul Hogendoorn and he calls it vision inversion. It happens when the people you depend on put the vision for their own role ahead of the vision for the company. It's almost undetectable, because everyone can honestly say they share the same goal. The disagreement is about which one comes first, and nobody says that out loud because nobody's aware they're doing it.
His example is brutal in how ordinary it is. He hired a gifted technology leader, twice, whose stated ambition was to build a small high-performing team. Good ambition, attached to a company that needed to scale fast, and the cost wasn't money, it was time, market position, and customers who went elsewhere. Among the rank and file this is harmless. Among direct reports, board members and co-owners, he argues it's fatal.
I've been on both sides of that. I've been the guy optimizing for the shape of work I wanted while telling everyone I was serving the mission. I didn't lie. I never checked the order.
The second is from Matteo Turi, a CFO and board director, and it's for anyone who thinks they'll sell someday.
The founder trait most often mistaken for value is being indispensable. Buyers read it as concentration risk. His distinction is between income and transferable earnings, and the line that does the damage is that a business paying the owner well but unable to reproduce results without them has built a valuable job, not a valuable company.
He walks a four million dollar services firm that looks great until diligence finds three things. Top five customers won personally. Pricing judgment living in the owner's head. Core methodology never written down. The buyer doesn't walk, it protects itself with earnouts and handcuffs, so you sold the company and kept the job, except now somebody else sets your calendar.
Read it for those two.
Read it here: Being an Entrepreneur, September 2026
Article 3: Why the Next Chapter Breaks Most Exited Founders
Source: Annie Wright
Fair warning: it's written by a therapist and it leans on Jung. If that's not your register you'll bounce off the first third. Push through, because the argument is worth more than its packaging, and I say that as somebody whose default reaction to that vocabulary is to close the tab.
It's about founders after an exit, but it applies to anybody who finishes the thing that organized their first act. A business sold. A career ended. A role you held so long it stopped being a role.
Her claim is that these people treat what comes next as a career planning problem. What should I build. What's the next venture. And her argument is that's the wrong question by category. It's not a planning problem, it's a developmental one. The right question isn't what should I build next, it's who am I now and what does that person want.
Those sound identical if you read fast. The first assumes the person asking is unchanged and just needs a destination. The second accepts that the thing you finished also finished a version of you, and that building the next one on the old operating system produces an expensive repeat.
What I keep returning to is her point about what organized the first act to begin with. Drives, wounds, external validation. Those built something real, which is exactly why nobody examines them. It worked. You can run a whole career on proving something to somebody who isn't paying attention, and from outside it looks identical to a career run on actually wanting the thing. It doesn't feel identical, and the difference only shows up when you arrive.
I'm mid-rebuild, not post-exit, which is a different chair. But I recognized enough to be uncomfortable, and I've been circling one question all week: how much of what I'm building is a want, and how much is an argument I'm still having with 2022.
Don't read this mid-execution. Read it on a Sunday.
Read it here: Why the Next Chapter Breaks Most Exited Founders
Podcast of the Week
Oprah Winfrey, The Life Lessons That Changed Everything, On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Rotating off Modern Wisdom as promised. Dropped September 16th, runs about an hour and twenty-seven minutes.
Straight about my starting position: I'm not the target demographic for this show and I've bounced off Shetty before. He got out of the way on this one, which is the hardest thing an interviewer does, and the result is the best long-form Oprah interview I've heard.
There's material early on about her childhood in Mississippi that she handles directly and that I'm not going to summarize for content. Listen to it or don't. What I took from it is operating material, in three pieces.
The first is what she calls the still small voice. Her framing is less mystical than you'd expect. It's closer to a discipline of noticing the quiet reaction before the loud one arrives, then treating that first quiet reaction as data rather than noise. She's explicit that it took decades to trust, and that the tuition was a series of times she overrode it and was wrong.
I know that feeling precisely. The first read is almost always right and almost never the one I act on, because it arrives without a justification attached and I've trained myself to require one.
The second is around the hour mark, on protecting stillness. This isn't a morning routine bit. It's a woman with more demands on her calendar than almost anyone alive describing the architecture she built to keep unstructured time, and treating that time as load bearing rather than as a reward.
The third is legacy, reframed in a way I hadn't heard. Not a monument or a body of work, but the effect you had on individual people who'll never be in a headline. She cites Maya Angelou on it and that's the section I'd go back to.
Track on Repeat
It is Written, Nahko And Medicine For The People, from HOKA, 10th Anniversary Edition
The anniversary edition dropped September 16th. The original is from 2016, which means this song has been out a decade and I got through all ten years without hearing it.
Five minutes and sixteen seconds, and it builds slowly enough that if you're skimming you'll bail at ninety seconds. The whole thing lives in the back half.
Here's why it's here, and it's the reason the week has a theme at all.
The book this week says burn the script. The song is called It Is Written. Those two things sit in complete opposition and I've been holding both all week without resolving it, which is usually a sign something real is going on.
There's a version of "it is written" that's a cage. The one where your ceiling was decided by where you were born and what your father did and you're serving the sentence. That's what McCarthy is telling you to burn.
And there's a version that's the opposite. Where you stop negotiating over whether you're allowed to want the thing, the deciding is done, and the only question left is execution. Anybody who's committed to something knows that feeling and knows it isn't a limitation. It's the moment the noise stops.
Same three words, opposite meanings, and the whole difference is who's holding the pen.
One thing I'd flag on the record: it sounds like it was made by people in a room rather than assembled on a grid. The anniversary mix is warmer and the low end sits better.
It's not a hype song and it won't get you through a set. It's a thinking song, which is a category I need more of.
Listen here: It is Written, 10th Anniversary Edition on Spotify
Show of the Week
The Paper, season two, on Peacock
Right. The thing I flagged up top.
Last week I sent you The Office. This week I'm sending its spinoff, and I only saw the connection after I'd decided on both. Season two premiered September 9th and I finished it over two nights, so the timing chose for me. Once I saw it, the pairing turned out to be the sharpest thing in the roundup.
The Office is about a container that's arbitrary. Scranton, paper, a dying industry, nobody chose it, and the show's quiet argument is that the container didn't matter because the people in it did.
The Paper is about people trying to rewrite the container on purpose, which is much harder.
The setup: same documentary crew, twenty years later, pointed at the Toledo Truth Teller, a historic Midwestern paper in visible decline. Ned Sampson, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is the new editor-in-chief. His qualification is that he used to sell toilet paper for a company called Softees. He's completely sincere, almost entirely unequipped, and trying to restore the paper to a version of itself that stopped being possible about fifteen years before he got there.
Season two picks up after the staff wins an Ohio Journalism Award, which is the genuinely interesting premise, because now they've had a real success and have to decide what it means. Sabrina Impacciatore is extraordinary as Esmeralda, the editor Ned replaced, still there and still magnificent about it. Oscar Nuñez carries over from Dunder Mifflin as head accountant, somehow on the arts and leisure beat.
The thing that makes it fit this week is Ned. He's running an old script about what a local paper is supposed to be, with total conviction, in a market that dissolved. The show is generous about it rather than cruel, which is the Greg Daniels signature, but it never pretends he's right.
Watching a sincere person pour everything into a plan written for conditions that no longer exist is funnier than it should be, and it lands harder than season one did.
If you haven't seen season one, start there. Ten episodes, it moves.
Watch it here: The Paper on Peacock
Resources Section
Podcast: Oprah Winfrey, The Life Lessons That Changed Everything, On Purpose with Jay Shetty (Spotify)
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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