He tore the page in half, threw it down the table at her, and walked out. Brad Stone documents the scene in Amazon Unbound. The room sat in silence for a while after.

That is the brutal cousin of a gentler practice at the same company, one that eventually produced AWS, the Kindle, and Amazon Prime before a single line of code existed for any of them.

Before anyone builds a new product at Amazon, someone writes the press release for it first, as if it already shipped and already won. The process has a name inside the company: Working Backwards, documented in detail by former Amazon VP Colin Bryar, who ran it for years.

Five steps, in order, before any building starts.

1. Write the press release, as if the product already launched.
2. Write the FAQ, every hard question a skeptical customer would ask.
3. Write the user manual, exactly what the experience feels like.
4. Circulate it in a silent meeting. Everyone reads in the room. Nobody presents, nobody pitches.
5. Only greenlight it if the room is convinced by the document alone.

The mechanism underneath this is simple and easy to miss. A charismatic pitch can survive a weak idea. Tone, confidence, and delivery carry it across the room. A document read in silence has none of that. It either holds up on the page or it does not.

Bryar has been open about the failure rate. Most PR/FAQs, including several of his own, never became real products. The process is not designed to protect ideas. It is designed to kill the weak ones cheaply, before they cost anything more than an afternoon.

The next time you are about to defend an idea out loud, ask whether it would survive being read in silence instead.

The best ideas do not need a pitch to carry them.

Would yours survive a silent room?

Harsh

I build businesses with extraordinary people. I share my learnings daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on this Sunday Email.

Most people wait for evidence before they commit. Proof first, then belief. But the people who actually build something new almost always run it backwards: belief first, proof later. They act like the thing is already true, and reality eventually catches up to them.

Marc Andreessen put it this way: “The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”

You can see it from the outside too. In 2008, Airbnb’s founders were broke, and every investor they’d pitched had passed. Nobody believed strangers would pay to sleep in someone else’s spare room. So they printed election-themed cereal boxes, “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain’s,” and sold a few hundred on the street for $40 each. It made them close to $30,000, barely enough to survive a few more months. It also proved something to themselves before it proved anything to anyone else: that people would pay for something Airbnb-shaped if you packaged it right.

I’ve tested the same mechanism on my own numbers, just without the cereal. I believe I’m the best at what I do: no one attracts talent and manages people in a way that actually lets them thrive quite like I can. I believed that long before I had any proof it was true. Since then, every year has been a record year, each one bigger than the last. Every market I’ve entered has turned profitable. More of the best people want to join the team, not fewer. Now I have the proof, so I am doing more because of it. But the proof came second. The belief came first.

Different scale, same order of operations. Belief doesn’t wait for proof. It creates the conditions proof needs to show up in.

What are you waiting for proof on, that you should just start acting like is already true?

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on this Sunday Email.

That’s the real flex: not impressing anyone else, but having that little version of you be proud of who you are today.

Warren Buffett has a test for this. He asks: would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the worst? Or be the world’s worst, but have everyone think you’re the greatest? He calls it the difference between an Inner Scorecard and an Outer Scorecard, whether you’re keeping score by your own standard, or by what the world thinks of you.

Your eight-year-old self is your Inner Scorecard. It doesn’t care what your LinkedIn says about you.

You can control what you think. You can control how you think. And therefore, over enough days, you can control who you become.

You may spend a lot of time in your own head. That’s fine, as long as it’s not egotistical. It should be a scientist’s relationship with your own mind. Always modifying. Always asking: how do I approach my own mind the way I approach my craft, so I’m sharper tomorrow than I was today?

You may not be able to control what happens to you. But you can control how you respond. And that response, repeated enough times, is what decides who you become.

Your mind has more leverage over your life than you’re using.

What would that eight-year-old think of you, right now, today?

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on this Sunday Email.

You can become a millionaire even if you start from 0, if you have these 6 qualities.

There are 4 broad studies that have happened to identify what are the common traits of people who become super wealthy without any inheritance, all by themselves.

1. Good Grades wasn’t a factor - There is absolutely no correlation between good grades in school and college and being super wealthy. Getting into good college is just like downside protection that you can get a job that pays well. But would not necessarily make you wealthy. So there is no upside potential by getting good grades.

2. Sports was a major contributor - A majority of the self-made wealthy played sports at a higher level while growing up, which leads them to handling wins and losses equally well. And they can get up again to compete even if they have been losing matches consistently for a while. And they know that every winning streak does not mean you will continue to win. So it teaches them emotional stability.

3. Parents were self-employed - Over 60% of such people came from parents who were self-employed in some way, which means their families did not think getting a job is the only metric of success. Growing up in an environment where entrepreneurship or being self employed is promoted leads to one building psychological muscle to take risks with business.

4. Their biggest skill was in sales - which is not necessarily selling products or services, but the art of convincing others. This could be convincing prospects to date you, or making people wanting to hang out with you, or in a debate be able to convince people of your opinion positively.

5. Their decision making comes more on gut feel than pure analysis - which means they are comfortable taking decisions even when adequate data is not available. And can perform in uncertain situations and deal with ambiguity on what should you do next, without needing a superior to order you.

6. They have strong internal locus of control - which means if anything went wrong, they did not sit blaming others or build a victim mindset. But always took responsibility on themselves.

Source: CA Sarthak

When I heard the above, I went down the list to identify which of these qualities I had.

1. Grades - I had good grades in subjects I found interesting. For the rest, I did just enough to do as well as required.

2. Sports - has been a central pillar in my life. I played cricket at a professional level as a teenager in England. I continued to compete in my city into my 40s. I have learnt more about positive self-talk, emotional control, winning, losing and teamwork from cricket than anything else. Sports teaches you about yourself and working with others to achieve a common goal.

3. Self-employed parents - My parents were entrepreneurs. They worked together to earn a living through their ideas and initiatives. They never had a paycheck, so I experienced the ups and downs of not having consistent monthly income. But I also saw their chutzpah to create their own path, which they did successfully. I am also an entrepreneur, even when I work with a company that is not my own. It is the mindset of ownership, responsibility and initiative that makes me one.

4. I sell - but the way sales is defined here is not just about products and services. It is about selling a shared vision to achieve common goals. Because I believe in what I do, I create the conditions for win-win scenarios. I sell a winner’s mindset. I sell hard choices. I sell financial independence so that you can do more of what you are built to do. I sold my wife on marrying me. I sold the vision of a family. I sell health. I sell my team on achieving greatness. Everything you do is sales.

5. Gut feel - Intuition is data in the form of pattern recognition. I often feel what the right decision is after a good night’s sleep. I agree with Jeff Bezos, who believes that while data is essential for running an organization, the most important and high-impact decisions in business and life are made using intuition, gut feeling, and heart rather than spreadsheet analysis.

6. I take responsibility - the world does not owe me shit. My parents have done a great job in educating me; they don’t owe me shit either. I own every failure. And I share every success. What did I do wrong? What can I do better? What now? There is a lot of power in having an internal compass instead of using an external barometer.

I am self-made. So the above 6 qualities seem to have worked for me.

Do you have these 6 qualities too? And if you don’t, what can you do to acquire them?

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Robert Brovdi is one of the most wanted men in Russia. I’m writing about him because of what he said about why they’re succeeding.

He said it comes down to his training in mathematics and his years as first violinist in a folk orchestra. Attaching survival and military operations to “collective intelligence” isn’t something you find in history books.

His first drone purchase was for his kids, back when he was still a businessman. Then he became a soldier, and the inability to see the men trying to kill him and his unit drove him to send up that same civilian drone. First it watched. Then it guided artillery. Then it guided intelligence. Then it guided weapons. A small group became a system. That system became a force. And the grain trader became commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces.

Listen to how he ties his upbringing in maths and music to what he built:

This isn’t a war story. It’s a pattern.

Steve Jobs used to tell it about himself: dropping into a calligraphy class at Reed College with no career use for it, purely because it pulled at him. Years later, designing the first Macintosh, that one useless class became the reason personal computers got real typography. He didn’t plan it. He couldn’t have said why at the time.

Brovdi didn’t plan for a maths education and a seat in a folk orchestra to become the operating system for a drone force either.

The mental model underneath both: work at the intersection of what pulls your interest and what you’re actually talented at, even when no one, least of all you, can say why yet. You’re not building a résumé. You’re building a toolkit whose use you can’t see yet.

I have my own version of this.

In business school, I wanted a seat on the Barcelona exchange, not for any strategic reason, just pure interest in the city and the language. Everyone wanted it. The seats were limited, and I didn’t win one. So I went to the people who made the decision and asked what it would take to get it the following year. Then I spent that summer studying Spanish in Mexico.

The next year, I was one of three people chosen to go to ESADE, one of the most prestigious business schools in the world.

I didn’t know it then. But I believe that’s what shaped me: it’s where I learned that if I really want something, I can go get it.

Three different people. Three different decades. Same operating principle: follow the interest before you know what it’s for. The knowing comes later, if it comes at all.

So think about the success you've had, no matter how small. Can you trace it back to some interest you followed long before you understood why?

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Even if you don’t see yourself as an entrepreneur or creator, this essay is relevant to you. Because you will have to become one. You will have to figure out what you sell and how you sell it. You will have to create value to survive. To be given an opportunity to create value, you will have to be trusted by your partners, employers and employees. For example, trust is the one thing that can’t be copied, faked, or downloaded. It has to be earned. Trust is the reason why a company will pay you a million dollars even when knockoff solutions are ready to offer a solution for a tenth of the price. There are eight other things that you should keep in mind. Kevin puts it better than I can, a few paragraphs down.

This essay is one of the most useful things I have read this year. Everyone making anything should read and re-read it.

Enter Kevin…

In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy. That friction worked as a constraint to limit the propagation of copies. If you wrote a book or developed a photograph or carved a statue, it took trouble to reproduce it. We invented a legal system whereby we would reward the creator of the book or the photo or the art or the music or the device by preventing others from reproducing copies of it without the creator’s permission. Creators were granted a temporary monopoly to make the only copies available via a copyright—the right to make copies. Selling legal copies became the livelihood of most creators.

In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone.

We now live in a digital age. If perfect reproductions of our best efforts as creators are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless, and stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.

Well, what can’t be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we purchase when we pay for something that could otherwise be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free in the eyes of the creator. Eight uncopyable values. I call these values “generatives” because they must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured in context of the exchange with the buyer. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, faked, replicated, counterfeited, banked, or reproduced. Instead the generative value must be generated uniquely, in place, in time. These generatives are what are sold, not the copies that carry them.

Eight Generatives Better Than Free

1. Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, the second it is produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via streaming or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. You might pay for a writer’s timely newsletter to get their insights that later appear for free on the web. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often devalued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.

2. Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room — as if it were performed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, no ads). Aspirin is practically free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA would be very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time-consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset and will be reluctant to switch and start over.

3. Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free; the software manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. Consultants make their living doing exactly that. For instance, for 25 years the for-profit company Red Hat has been selling support, training, consultation for enterprises using Linux and other free open source software. The copy of the code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to a user only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting a copy of your DNA is not free, but soon it will be. In fact, I’d bet that pharmaceutical companies will eventually PAY you to get your genes sequenced because they can sell targeted drugs to you that don’t work for everyone. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.

4. Authenticity — You might be able to grab an app for free, but you might like to be sure it is bug-free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was, indeed, actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.

5. Accessibility — Free doesn’t mean it is easy to get. A clearinghouse that can offer otherwise free material in a format that we find easy to use will get our money (Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc.). We want our particular music (remember my tastes), at any time, anywhere in the world. Ditto for books and blogs and movies and apps. In fact, ownership is overrated. Even free stuff has to be stored, backed up, and tended to keep it accessible. An agency can do that for a fee. It works with us to keep everything in order, at our fingertips, with a uniform and dependable interface and therefore acts as a generative force for the copies.

6. Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a phone. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res 16K on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. That hardcover book is embodiment. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same physical room? Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new, insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have and will have to move their bodies to. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. The book is free; the bodily talk by the author is expensive. The movie is free, but the toy merch is expensive. This formula is a common one for many creators.

7. Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if (1) it is very easy to do, (2) it entails a reasonable amount, and (3) they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. The advent of Patreon, a reliable platform that enables fans to easily, dependably, and satisfyingly pay for free stuff is a great boon to creators. I run two different Substack newsletters that are free. But many readers pay for it (via the easy subscription mode) just because they want to establish a connection with me — by directly supporting me. I thank them personally.

8. Findability — A price of zero does not help direct attention to a work. In fact “free” may sometimes make it easy to ignore. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless to the world. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of movies, millions of apps, millions of agents, millions of everything all demanding our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable. We pay the big aggregators like Netflix (and some users, like me, pay YouTube) in part to help us find good free stuff, which is why creators hook up with them. Right now the technologies of findability favor the economic interests of the big aggregators, rather than the creators, who only get a fraction of what the audience spends on their work. Alternatives like my 1,000 True Fans model can help, but are still constrained by the difficulty of findability. One of the promises of AI is that it could enable a more decentralized matchmaking function that would connect the creator who has a one-in-a-million interest with the thousand possible fans in the world with the same one-in-a-million interests.

***

In short, money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution to the demise of the copy because they are attention magnets. Ads have almost been the ONLY solution to the conundrum of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. Ads do work, but I think they are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.

Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies. These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not dependent upon the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse. These generatives are very human skills, by the way, which AIs are not very good at – yet.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and the bestselling author of books including What Technology Wants, The Inevitable, and Excellent Advice for Living. Explore his work at KK.org, subscribe to his KK Substack, or follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram and on YouTube. Kevin’s most recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show explored his life philosophy, optimism, advice for younger generations, and more.

***

Back to me, Tim:

To make this concrete and provide a dose of inspiration, here are a few friends and past guests who each embody at least one principle brilliantly.

1. Brandon Sanderson. His “Four Secret Novels” Kickstarter raised $41.75 million, making it the most-funded campaign in Kickstarter history. Fans paid extra for backer-first releases, lavishly illustrated premium leather-bound hardcovers, swag boxes, and a yearlong experience. For a deep dive on Brandon’s business, check this out.

2. Ben Thompson (Stratechery). The tech news is free everywhere; subscribers pay $15 per month for his interpretation. Stratechery was an explicit inspiration for Substack and an early proof that a one-person publication could scale through paid subscriptions.

3. Maria Popova (The Marginalian). Since 2006, The Marginalian has remained free and advertising-free, supported by reader patronage. Its value is Maria’s trusted curation, synthesis, and ability to draw unexpected connections across literature, science, philosophy, and art.

4. Derek Sivers. He says he replies to every personal email and sells his books directly from his own site, including every digital format with a purchase and pricing additional paper copies close to cost. The words are easy to share; the direct relationship with Derek is scarce.

5. Ryan Holiday (Daily Stoic). The free Daily Stoic email reaches roughly one million subscribers. Its paid offerings include physical coins and medallions, challenges, courses, memberships, signed and leather-bound books, and an actual bookstore, The Painted Porch.

6. Seth Godin. More than 10,000 free blog posts built the trust. Books, talks, courses, and the cohort-based workshops he pioneered turned those freely available ideas into deeper, participatory experiences.

7. Boyd Varty. His books and free podcast distribute his ideas inexpensively; the scarce offering is a five-day Track Your Life retreat at Londolozi, including wildlife-tracking expeditions, personal coaching with Boyd, and work with master trackers. You cannot download that.

8. Matt Mullenweg. WordPress is free and open-source. Automattic—the company behind the hosted WordPress.com service, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other products—provides paid hosting, security, commerce, support, and other services around an open ecosystem. It is a modern version of “software, free; the software manual, $10,000.”

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Both problems come from the same missing ingredient. A quest. One clear direction you have decided is worth everything else you could be doing. Without it, you either see no path forward, or you see too many and cannot choose between them.

A quest does not have to be building a company or breaking a record. It could be being the best father, the best musician, the best neighbor. What matters is that you have picked one thing and decided everything else bends around it.

But Hormozi’s rant raises a harder question. What do you do when you genuinely do not know what your quest is.

I think the answer is that you cannot think your way to it. You have to go find it. Try things you are curious about, notice what still holds your attention after the novelty wears off, and pay attention to what you are good at that other people seem to struggle with. None of that happens sitting still. It only happens by doing something badly first and seeing what the doing teaches you.

Ed Sheeran said something similar when asked how he became good enough to fill stadiums.

That is the part nobody wants to hear. The people who look like they found their quest early did not skip the rubbish phase. They just did not stop during it.

This is the part I would say to anyone who feels behind. Not knowing your quest yet is not the same as being lost. It just means you are still in the tinkering phase, and the tinkering phase does not resolve itself from a desk. It resolves out in the world, one attempt at a time.

So here is the question I am sitting with this week. If you already have a quest, are you actually moving toward it, or just thinking about it. And if you do not have one yet, what is the smallest thing you could try this week to find out what pulls at you.

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Carse split every game into two kinds. A finite game has known players, fixed rules, and an end. Someone wins, someone loses, and it’s over. An infinite game has no such ending. Simon Sinek picked this up decades later and applied it to business: known and unknown players, rules that keep changing, and no finish line. The only real objective is to keep playing.

I realized I had been treating the bad month like a finite game, something that could be lost for good. But I haven’t made it this far because I had been chasing quick wins. My success has been the result of consistent, relentless progress. The compounding over decades has been possible because I love playing the game I am damn good at. That reminder shifted my mindset from “I am losing what I could have made this year” to “let’s see what you’re capable of, Harsh.” The money is a byproduct. It takes care of itself.

It wasn’t only true of one bad month. The same split runs under everything I do.

On business

“Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.”

A quarter is finite. A revenue target is finite. Beating a competitor this year is finite. The business itself is not. There is no year in which it gets declared won. Every finite result you chase sits inside a longer game, and the only real objective of that longer game is that the business still exists, still adapts, and still deserves its customers, long after this quarter is forgotten.

On craft

I feel this most directly in writing every week. There is no version of this newsletter that gets won. A strong Sunday proves nothing about the next one. The only real goal is to still be reading, still be thinking, and still be showing up to write down what I learned, years from now. Some weeks that looks like progress. Some weeks it just looks like showing up. Both count toward the same game.

On health

Training for one event is finite. It has a date and a result. Staying strong enough, mobile enough, and healthy enough to keep doing what you love as the years pass is not something you win once. You only keep playing it, or you stop.

On relationships

A wedding is finite. It has a date, a guest list, and an end. A marriage is not. There is no version of it where one person wins and the game is over. The only real measure of a good one is whether both people are still choosing, today, to keep playing.

Carse’s harder point is the one most people skip past. A finite player plays to end the game. An infinite player plays to keep it going.

So here is the question I am sitting with this week: the next time something goes against me, will I remember I’m playing an infinite game, or will I mistake it for a final score?

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Model 1 - The Bedrock

Take a simple idea and take it seriously. Go all-in or it just doesn’t work.

Model 2 - Truth vs Trust

At the tight end of the graph you have extreme truth leading to extreme trust. This is where Jesus and Buddha hang out. Thats aspirational. Life is more convenient with the white lies. Get rid of them.

A personal example of what this means:

A business example of what this means:

Model 3 - Belief Comes Before Capability

This is a very important model to keep in mind when you are embarking on something new. If you really want something, it doesn’t matter what you know or what your expertise is, you got to first believe that it’s going to happen.

Model 4 - Heads I Win; Tails I Don’t Lose Much

Jeff Bezos defines asymmetric bets as high-upside, low-downside opportunities where potential gains exponentially outweighs risks, allowing for 1000-run returns compared to the 4-run maximum in baseball. Look for such opportunities where you either win big or you don’t lose much.

Model 5 - Be a Shameless Cloner

Cloning is a very powerful mental model. You do not need to come up with anything new. The world can accommodate multiples of the same thing. Just copy!

Model 6 - Use Hacks to Improve Yourself

Make a list of your friends and categorize them on who is better than you and who is worse than you. Then delete everyone on the worse category from your life.

Don’t care about loyalties. This model is difficult because you got to be a harsh grader. But when you delete someone, you have room for someone else who can make you better.

Model 7 - Hiring Hacks

Model 8 - Incentives are More Powerful Than You Think

Humans are very heavily driven by incentives.

Book recommendations:

• Copy This!: Lessons From A Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turmed A Bright Idea Into One Of America’s Best Companies

• Les Schwab Pride in Performance: Keep It Going

Model 9 - You Can Start a Business with No Capital

You don’t need money to start, run or be successful in business. Out of 1 million businesses that start in the US every year, only 1% get funding. The economy runs on the remaining 99%.

Model 10 - Pursue Quality Intensely

Book recommendation: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This book will show you the power of bringing extreme quality into everything you are doing, which will give you a big leg up in life.

Model 11 - Focus on Durable Moats

A great business is easier to build than a shoddy one.

Do what’s harder upfront by playing the long game, never thinking of an exit and making it your life’s work.

Model 12 - The Purpose of Business is Not to Make Money

The purpose of business is to deliver a great product or service to humanity. If you do that, then money is a natural side effect.

Model 13 - Outsource Everything that Can Be Done by Someone Else for Less than $100/hour

Put a value on your own time. Almost everything you want done can be done for $100 or less.

Only try to work on things that you are intensely excited about.

Try to have a team that can work on the rest.

Model 14 - Your Customers Will Tell You What To Focus On

Whatever you tell your customers you want to do, will not be correct. But if you listen, they will educate you on what their real pain is.

Model 15 - Two to Three Players Will Own 80-90% of the Market

It doesn’t matter whether the industry is paperclips or airplanes.

If it is a $10 billion market, if you say that you will take 2% of it, you will fail. It shows that you haven’t done the segmentation.

But if you say that your offer is so good that you can take 70% market share, then you have a chance.

Model 16 - Go All-In On No Brainers

For example - If a 1 hour podcast gives you better insights than a 20-hour book read, then go all-in and listen to as many podcasts as you can. It’s a highly efficient way to learn.

Model 17 - Introduce Randomness In Your Life

We sensor what we do. It narrows what data we take in. Introducing randomness broadens our perspective.

Other Models That Were Not Talked About

1. Fast is Slow

2. Take the Road Less Traveled

3. No Calibration in Reciprocation Tendency

4. Assume everyone is wearing an “I’m Important” sign

5. Influence from Association Tendency

6. Social Proof Tendency

7. Contrast Misreaction Tendency

8. Availability Misweighting Tendency

9. Focus on Being Kind vs. Being Right

10. To Be Interesting, Be Interested

11. Clone The Little Things

12. 99% of Success Is Just Showing Up

13. Attend As Many Funerals As You Can

14. Ask God Google The Day You Will Die And Plan Accordingly

15. To Encounter Misfortune and Overcome It Is Good Fortune

16. What you will do tomorrow, do today; What you will do today, do now

17. Your kids will learn from your actions, not what you tell them

18. Be an optimist

19. Take a nap every afternoon

20. Make no small plans

21. The sky is the limit if you do not care who gets the credit

22. Underpromise and Overdeliver

23. When you are young, have friends who are older. When you are old, have friends who are younger

24. Understand compounding

25. Spend less than you earn

26. Play infinite games

27. Read a lot

28. Only work for and with people you like, admire and trust

29. Be a generous tipper

30. Fish and Guests stink after Three Days

31. Do not die at 25 and get buried at 75

32. Get your music out

33. Learn from the Eminent Dead

These 3 books are better than any college degree:

1. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

2. Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion

3. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier

Top 3 Posts from the week on LinkedIn and WhatsApp

• Your spouse is the single most important business decision of your life. Nothing else comes close.

• Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. I have not heard a more honest career rule in a decade.

• Everything is sales. The sooner you accept it, the better your career becomes.

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

On work

• Don’t aspire to glory. Aspire to work. Be useful. A measure of success I’d say is how many useful things you can get done. A useful life is a good life. The target is not status, recognition, or wealth. The target is useful output.

• Are you contributing more than you consume? Try to have a positive net contribution to society.

• Business exists for service. Money comes naturally as the result of service. If someone is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard.

• Have a grow-the-pie mindset. People who do things that are morally questionable often have a zero-sum mindset. They think that to have more pie they need to eat someone else’s portion. The game is not zero-sum. The game is to grow-the-pie.

On finding your path

• Find the overlap of your talents and interests. Even if you are the best of the best, there is always a chance of failure. So it is very important that you really like what you are doing. If you like what you are doing, you think about it even when you are not working.

• Read broadly and meet broadly. Try to learn a little about a lot of things. How else would you know what you are really interested in if you do not explore? Also try to talk to people from all walks of life.

• Actively seek out negative feedback. When friends get a product I tell them: “don’t tell me what you like. Tell me what you don’t like.”

On thinking

• Break it down. First principles boils things down to the most fundamental truths. What are we sure as possible is true? And then reason up from there. Most people reason by analogy. They do what others have done before.

• Reduce the requirements. Start by reducing the number of requirements. The common mistake is to optimize the thing which should not exist. First principles forces a harder question: why does this exist at all?

• Add back. If you are not forced to add back 10% of what you deleted, you are not deleting enough.

On execution

• Scale the problem. Push assumptions to their limits to find where they break. What if our volume was 1 million units a year. Is it still expensive? If it is still expensive, then volume is not the problem.

• Run things in parallel. Any given thing can be sped up. Put as many elements in parallel as possible. Try not to serialise dependencies.

• Speed up what should exist. Never optimise what should not exist in the first place.

• Automate last.

On courage

• It is normal to feel fear. If you just accept the probabilities then that diminishes the fear. But fear does not go away. Accepting the odds shrinks it. “When I started SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10%. I accepted that I would probably lose everything. But maybe we could make progress.”

• Let your troops see you in the fight. Show up, visibly, and the people around you follow. “I was sleeping on the factory floor under my desk for 3 years straight so that during shift change the entire team could see me. They knew I was there. And that made a huge difference.”

Which principle resonated with you the most?

For me it was the first - Don’t aspire to glory. Aspire to work. I love what I do. I love working with my teams. I love waking up everyday with problems to solve. I love playing the infinite game of life. It's not always fun. Sometimes I wake up anxious. Sometimes I cannot sleep. Sometimes I worry about my family and my future. There is always the money worry. But I always find a way to keep moving forward.

Follow the principles above to keep moving forward.

Best,
Harsh

I share extraordinary ideas I’m learning as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

They’ve been good bets he didn’t make.

The costly mistakes were not the bad bets. They were the good bets that weren’t taken. The businesses that were understood, could be seen clearly, were known to be valuable, and not acted on.

He understood the business. He knew it was outstanding. He just didn’t want to pay the price. And he calls that the most expensive mistake of his career, repeated over and over again.

You know what to do. You can see it clearly. And you sit there, unable to act.

Here is Munger sharing a story that drives home how much omissions can cost.

$200 million!

Not because he made a bad investment. Because he didn’t make a big enough good one.

I think this goes beyond investing.

• The business you knew was exceptional, but moved on slowly just in case you were wrong.

• The person you could see was great, but you did not pay enough so he left.

• The decision you made correctly in your head, then executed at tenth the scale.

Same error every time.

The question I sit with now isn’t just: am I right? It’s: if I’m right, am I acting at the right scale?

A small bet on something you understand fully isn’t prudence. It’s a more comfortable version of sucking your thumb.

Best,
Harsh

I share what I’m learning as a business builder. Extraordinary ideas, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

“Another thing that’s interesting is how little turnover we have. The number of managers that we’ve had to replace in the last ten years are very few. We don’t have a retirement age… Without a retirement age, and with people working because they love their jobs, we get long tenure out of our managers. They like the money as well, but their primary motive is that they really like accomplishing what they do in their jobs… I would argue that’s a huge plus.”

“We have no human relations department, no legal department, no investor relations, no public relations, we don’t have any of that. We’ve got a bunch of all-stars out there running businesses.”

Buffett’s starting point is simple: get very good managers, let them stay a very long time, and don’t build a big headquarters to manage them.

“Some people bat left-handed, some people bat right-handed. Some people stand deep in the batter’s box, some crowd the plate. They all have different styles. And the styles of our managers have proven successful in their own businesses. So, we don’t try to superimpose any system from above… We like paying for performance. That is kind of a fundamental tenet.”

“We don’t have a headquarters culture that’s forced on the operating businesses. The operating businesses have their own cultures. And in every case I can think of it’s a wonderful culture. We just leave them alone.”

Different managers run their businesses in different ways. As long as the record is good, Berkshire does not try to standardise style. The one thing they are explicit about is paying for performance, and only for what is under the manager’s control.

“There are more problems with having the wrong manager than with having the wrong compensation system. It is enormously important who runs Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, or American Express; any compensation sins are generally of minor importance compared to the sin of having somebody that’s mediocre running a huge company.”

“You need a lot of good operating managers, and you need somebody at the top who allocates capital well and who makes sure you’ve got the right operating managers.”

The main risk is not the pay plan. It is having the wrong person in charge of a valuable business.

“The important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. The second thing we do is allocate capital.”

“Our managers know their businesses and they know how to run them. And if they didn’t, we’d do something about the manager, we wouldn’t try and build a bunch of systems.”

Once they have the right people, Berkshire’s job is to leave them alone to run their businesses and to allocate capital from the top, not to design more processes.

“I think culture has to come from the top. We work all the time at trying to behave with other people as if our positions were reversed.”

“Almost every business has problems, and we’d just assume the manager would tell us about them… We give very little advice to our managers, but one thing we always do say is to tell us the bad news immediately.”

Culture, for them, is how the top behaves and how problems are handled: treat people fairly, and surface bad news quickly.

On Monday

If you work with managers (or are one), pick one business you’re involved in and write down:

• Who is actually running it today?

• Is the main issue here the “system”, or is it the person in charge?

• Are they being measured and paid on what they truly control?

• Do they feel trusted to run it in their own style, and to bring bad news early?

Buffett and Munger’s view is clear: talent is scarce, styles can differ, and the biggest leverage is getting the right managers in place and then not telling the .400 hitters how to swing.

Best,
Harsh

I share what I’m learning as a business builder.

Newsletter: Sunday Email
More during the week: WhatsApp Community | LinkedIn

“One thing I would bet my life on is that over a fifty-year period, not only will Berkshire do considerably better than gold, but common stocks as a group will do better than gold, and probably farmland will do better than gold.”

Then he explained why:

“If you own an ounce of gold now and you caress it for the next hundred years, you’ll have an ounce of gold a hundred years from now. If you own a hundred acres of farmland, you’ll also have a hundred acres of farmland a hundred years from now and you’ll have taken the crops for a hundred years and sold them and presumably bought more farmland in the process. It’s very hard for an unproductive investment to beat productive investments over any long period of time.”

Gold just sits there.
Farmland produces for a century and lets you reinvest along the way.

He draws a clear difference between productive and unproductive assets:

“Anytime you buy an asset that can’t produce anything, you’re simply betting on whether somebody else will pay more for it in the future. That’s different from assets that you can value based on what they will produce, what they will deliver. You buy a farm because you expect a certain amount of corn, soybeans, cotton, whatever it may be, to come your way every year. And you decide how much you will pay based on how much you think the asset itself will deliver over time. Those are the assets that appeal to me and Charlie.”

That’s the core insight:

• Productive assets can be valued by what they deliver over time.

• Unproductive assets depend on someone else paying more later.

Then he talks about how people react:

“It’s interesting: But if you say anything negative about gold, it arouses passions with people, which is kind of fascinating, because usually if you thought through something intellectually, it shouldn’t really make much difference what people say. The question is whether your facts are right and your reasoning is right. But you run into people who are really excited about gold … My dad loved gold. But he was tolerant, he could take a discussion of it. I find many people have trouble with it.”

Two more insights sit here:

1. You should be able to discuss your position without feeling personally attacked.

2. The only questions that matter are:

   • Are my facts right?

   • Is my reasoning right?

That’s how I think about my own investing now:

• Prefer assets that produce cashflows I can roughly estimate.

• Be wary of assets that only move because someone else is more excited or afraid.

• Hold positions because the facts and reasoning still make sense, not because other people agree.

On Monday

Look at what you own and, for each asset, write down:

1. Does this thing produce anything (cash, output, rights to a stream of earnings)?

2. Or am I mainly hoping someone will pay more for it later?

The first bucket is your productive assets.
The second is your speculation.

Buffett’s point is simple: over long periods, it’s very hard for the second bucket to beat the first.

Best,
Harsh

I build businesses with extraordinary people.
I share what I’m learning with people who build and run companies.

Newsletter: Sunday Email
More during the week: WhatsApp Community | LinkedIn

Twenty-two years. A rented shed in Ludhiana that became a proper building, then a second floor, then a small yard for loading. Three workers became thirty. The family had never been rich, but they had never been afraid.

When Suresh inherited it at thirty-four, he wanted to honor what his father had built. And he wanted more.

The expansion would double capacity. The bank would lend what he needed. His accountant sat across from him and went quiet.

“What if something goes wrong?”

“I’ve planned for everything,” Suresh said.

“You cannot plan for everything,” his accountant said. “That is exactly the point.”

Suresh signed anyway.

Eight months later, his largest buyer lost a European contract and needed ninety days before they could pay. They were apologetic. It wasn’t personal.

It didn’t matter. Suresh had ninety-one days of oxygen left.

He sold a machine to make payroll. Then another. Production slowed. Buyers left. On the day he handed the keys back to the bank, he walked through the factory floor one last time. He could still see where his father had laid the first bricks.

Suresh’s father had always kept three months of cash in reserve. Never touched it. Never explained it. He called it sleeping money. Suresh had kept the same amount. But the business was twice the size now. It covered sixty days, not ninety.

Warren Buffett, who has never borrowed beyond what he could easily repay, not once in sixty years, describes it this way:

Never drive a 9,800 pound truck over a bridge with a 10,000 pound capacity. Go find the bridge with a 15,000 pound capacity.

Suresh understood now what both men had known all along.

Every Sunday, one story. The kind that changes how you decide.

I'm Harsh. Subscribe here. Join my WhatsApp community. Find me on LinkedIn.

The cold call that started everything

In 2010, James Lawrence had completed exactly one full-distance triathlon. Not ten. Not five. One. That year, he cold-called Guinness World Records and asked about the record for most half-triathlons completed in a year. “No record has been set,” they said. He signed up for twenty-two.

He wasn’t ready. He had no obvious reason to believe he could do it. But he signed up, secured sponsorships, and completed twenty-two half-triathlons in 2010, becoming a certified Guinness World Record holder.

Two years later, stronger and hungrier, he went back. Thirty full-distance triathlons in one year. Another world record. Along the way, his kids told him they couldn’t spot him in race crowds. As a joke, he started wearing a cowboy hat so they could find him. The hat stuck. The nickname followed: the Iron Cowboy.

Then came 2015. Fifty full-distance triathlons in fifty days, across fifty states. He called it the 50.50.50. Physically brutal. Logistically nearly impossible. He finished.

What happened next was unexpected. Fortune 500 companies started calling. Audi. Nike. Red Bull. Microsoft. Toyota. In the year after the 50.50.50, Lawrence spoke at eighty events. For five years after that, he averaged sixty annually, in more than fifty countries. A man who had completed one triathlon a decade earlier was now advising the world’s most sophisticated organizations on what human beings are capable of.

He hadn’t planned this. He had planned the next record, the next race, the next goal that scared him enough to pursue. Each success created the conditions for the next one. The world record opened the door to coaching. The coaching built credibility. The credibility created a platform. The platform became a speaking career. The speaking career became a brand.

None of it was visible from the starting line. It never is.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend, Jayant. He is an internet celebrity, well on his way to a million followers. When he quit his job and started reading and writing, he had no idea how he would make money. He just knew he would figure it out. A year in, he still wasn’t earning from it. He kept writing anyway. Today he has more opportunities than he could have ever imagined. He calls it the luck surface area. The bigger and more consistent your output, the more luck finds you.

He then looked at everything I have written over the last few years and told me it amounts to seven books worth of content. “Keep going”, he said. Your luck surface area will expand in ways you cannot yet see.

I cannot see it from the starting line. James Lawrence couldn’t either when he made that first cold call to Guinness. That is the thing about compounding. You only understand it looking backwards.

Lessons

1. Start before you feel ready. Lawrence had completed one triathlon when he cold-called Guinness. Jayant quit his job before he knew how he would earn. The starting line never looks like the right time. It never is.

2. Consistency is the strategy. Lawrence planned the next race, not the speaking career. Jayant wrote the next piece, not the million followers. The destination is invisible from where you stand. The only lever you control is showing up.

3. You cannot see from the starting line what you are building. Compounding works in silence for a long time before it becomes visible. You only understand it looking backwards.

On Monday, do this

Pick one thing you will put out consistently for the next 90 days. Not perfectly. Just consistently. Start this week.

Reading obsessively. Building businesses. Sharing lessons learnt. Link to this newsletter, WhatsApp community, LinkedIn.

The few who move the many

Durant starts with an observation that would be impolite in a modern HR memo: practical ability is not evenly distributed. In almost every society, most of the competence, energy, and foresight ends up concentrated in a relatively small group.

That minority, almost by definition, captures more resources and more influence. Wealth follows ability, and then more ability flows to where wealth and leverage already are. Over time, you get a familiar picture: a small group at the top with outsized power, and a long tail of people whose individual impact is harder to see.

He doesn’t stop there. Left alone, this concentration keeps compounding until something breaks. When the gap between the few who have leverage and the many who don’t gets too large, history shows two recurring outcomes:

• Peaceful rebalancing through laws, reforms, and redistribution.

• Violent rebalancing through revolution, where wealth is not just redistributed but destroyed.

Durant’s point is not moral outrage; it’s pattern recognition. Ability and power concentrating is natural. Periodic correction is also natural. Ignore either side and you misread how groups behave over time.

Inside companies, the same structure appears in friendlier clothing.

A small percentage of people generate most of the sales, ideas, and decisions that actually move the business. A handful of products drive most of the revenue. A short list of customers drives most of the profit. If you map impact honestly, you’ll see your own minority.

At the same time, information, decision rights, and equity tend to flow toward a small leadership group. Some of that is necessary; you can’t run a company by committee. But if you compound that concentration without any designed rebalancing, you get your own version of the historical pattern:

• Quiet resentment that the upside is locked up.

• Politics as people try to get closer to the center.

• Sudden “revolutions”: mass departures, internal coups, or cultural backlash against “the top.”

History suggests a calmer approach. Don’t fight the existence of power laws. Accept that a minority will always drive most outcomes. Then design peaceful, regular ways to redistribute opportunity and upside before you’re forced into more painful resets.

That might look like opening new product lines for emerging leaders to own, broadening equity participation as the company matures, or rotating real decision authority on specific bets. You still bet heavily on your best people, but you also keep creating surface area for the next minority of high performers to emerge.

Durant’s lesson is not to flatten everything. It’s to remember that when the few hold too much for too long, the many eventually find a way to rebalance the game. As a founder or operator, you can either wait for that to happen to you, or you can build controlled rebalancing into how you grow.

Lessons

1. Ability and impact are naturally concentrated
   A small minority of people, products, and customers will drive most of your results. Pretending otherwise makes your planning blurry.

2. Power accumulates where ability and information meet
   Over time, decision rights, budgets, and equity drift toward a small group. Some centralization is necessary; total centralization is fragile.

3. Every system eventually rebalances
   If concentration grows unchecked, the many will eventually push back. In companies, that shows up as attrition, politics, and “revolutions” in leadership.

4. Healthy companies redistribute opportunity on purpose
   You can’t make outcomes equal, but you can keep widening access to meaningful problems, ownership, and upside as you grow.

On Monday, do this

• Map your internal power law. Identify the top 10–20 percent of people, products, and customers by impact. Make that explicit with your leadership team so you’re operating from reality.

• Spot dangerous concentration. Ask where decision power, information, and upside are overly concentrated in a few hands. Focus on one area that would hurt most if a single person left.

• Create one new ladder of ownership. Design a concrete opportunity (a new product, region, or initiative) that an emerging leader can fully own, with clear accountability and visible upside.

• Broaden upside slightly. Choose one mechanism this year to widen participation in success (a profit share on a key product, equity refresh for a broader group, or a transparent bonus tied to team results).

History’s pattern is clear: the few will always move the many, and the many will always, eventually, reshape the few. Builders who understand both sides can design companies that harness power laws without being broken by their corrections.

I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms into a billion dollar enterprise, bootstrapping a food startup and investing through Marcellus Investment Managers. I share my learnings as a business builder daily on my WhatsApp community. I also send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. You can find me on LinkedIn here.

Most people treat optimism as a vague feeling: glass‑half‑full, “it’ll all work out.” That’s incomplete. There are two parts that matter.

The first is how you feel: a quiet belief that tomorrow is worth betting on, and that your effort is not pointless. This is the hope and confidence piece. Without it, you won’t step into hard rooms, make long bets, or invest in people when the payoff is uncertain.

The second is how you think: the way you explain setbacks to yourself. Optimists don’t deny reality. They assume problems, but they see them as temporary and specific (“this plan failed, for these reasons”) rather than permanent verdicts (“nothing works, I’m done”). They separate what was bad luck from what they can change next time, and then they act on the part they control.

Ajay Banga is a good example of both.

Engine‑room optimism

Ajay grew up in India in the 60s and 70s. Basic infrastructure failed often enough that “Plan B and Plan C” weren’t management theories, they were daily life. Later, leading Nestlé for over a decade, he treated these issues as constraints to engineer around, not proof that nothing was possible. He was an optimist who still made sure the company achieved its mission.

The same pattern shows up in his career choices. At Citibank, he was one of the people who could have become CEO of a 250,000‑person bank. Instead of sitting tight and hoping luck crowned him, he left to run Mastercard, then a much smaller company. By the time he left Mastercard it was worth roughly three times Citi. In hindsight, the market caps make it look obvious. At the time, it was a risk.

Ajay’s frame is simple: life is “50% luck, 50% what you do with it.” You don’t control the cards, but “what you do control you better do something about.” That’s optimism in practice: humble about uncertainty, ruthless about agency.

I see the same thing in those I admire and try to emulate. Recently, I spent two weeks flying from Delhi to Singapore to Sydney and back to interview ten candidates. Overall I must have spent 50 hours to make a couple of hiring decisions. On paper, it’s excessive. But you only do that if you believe the right person can meaningfully bend the curve of the next few years. You accept all the things you can’t control about timing, and then you dramatically over‑index on the piece you can control: who is in the engine room with you.

Optimism, properly understood, is not blind cheerfulness. It’s the decision to keep your hands on the controls when it would be easier to sit back and comment from the aisle seat.

Lessons

1. Optimism is a bet on your own agency
   You assume the world will be messy and still act as if your effort can change the trajectory.

2. Optimism separates luck from responsibility
   “50% luck, 50% what you do with it” lets you acknowledge randomness without outsourcing your future to it.

3. Optimism plans for failure modes
   Power cuts and broken roads become reasons to build Plan B and Plan C, not excuses to stop trying.

4. Optimism values the work beyond the income
   Using your mind productively and contributing to society only makes sense if you believe the future is worth improving.

5. Optimism chooses the engine room over the armchair
   You’d rather roll up your sleeves and try to make a difference than sit outside and criticize how others are driving.

On Monday, do this

• Write down one area where you’re acting like a passenger.
  Decide on a concrete step that would move you closer to the engine room: a decision you’ve been avoiding, a risk you’ve been deferring.

• Run the “luck vs control” audit on your biggest problem.
  Two columns: what was bad luck, what is in your control. Stop spending attention on the first column. Design three actions from the second.

• Add explicit Plan B and Plan C to one critical initiative.
  Assume the power will go out: if this launch, hire, or deal fails, what will you do next? Write it down and share it with your team.

• Upgrade one complaint into ownership.
  Take one thing you’ve been criticizing in your company and propose a small experiment you will personally run to improve it.

• Invest one focused block into a “mother quality” decision.
  Use 60–90 minutes to over‑invest in talent, systems, or relationships in a way that only makes sense if you believe the future is worth compounding.

The world won’t suddenly become simple or fair. But founders and operators who feel the future is worth betting on, and think about setbacks as solvable constraints, will quietly own more of whatever comes next.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

Tradition as a safety system, not a prison

Durant makes a blunt claim: out of every hundred new ideas, ninety‑nine are worse than the old response they’re trying to replace. Customs, traditions, and laws are not random; they’re the residue of generations of trial and error. No single clever person, in one short life, sees enough edge cases to safely discard all that accumulated experience.

He compares a society to an individual. When you rip out someone’s memories, their sanity goes with it. Groups are similar. A sharp break with the past often creates collective neurosis: revolutions that start with idealism and end in terror, institutions that abandon every constraint and then wonder why chaos follows.

That doesn’t mean “never change.” It means treat tradition as a filter, not a fossil. The tension between old and new is the point. The young push with fresh ideas, the old resist with skepticism, and most bad ideas die in that struggle. The few that survive have actually earned their place.

You can see this in companies.

In the early days, you have almost no tradition. Everything is an experiment. Over time, some choices keep you alive: how you talk to customers, how you price, how you ship, how you run meetings. These become your “way we do things here.”

Then new people arrive. They bring playbooks from past jobs, trends from Twitter, frameworks from books. Some of that is genuinely better. Much of it just hasn’t been battle‑tested in your context.

If you, as a founder or senior operator, throw the doors open to every shiny idea, you unintentionally turn off the safety system. The “old guard” stops resisting because they assume nothing will stick anyway. The “new guard” stops doing the boring work of understanding why the existing system evolved the way it did.

Durant’s lens suggests a different posture: assume the current way of doing things is guilty of being right until proven otherwise. Not because it is perfect, but because it has survived contact with reality. Treat every proposed change as a hypothesis that must pass through a mill of objections, tests, and time.

That doesn’t make you conservative in the pejorative sense. It makes you responsible for continuity. Your job isn’t to protect the past for its own sake. It’s to protect the parts of the past that still work, while letting better ideas fight their way in.

The companies that navigate this well don’t worship tradition or disruption. They use both. They let the young prod the old. They let the old slow the young down just enough to keep the place from burning down.

Lessons

1. Most “new ideas” are downgrades
   The fact that something is different doesn’t mean it’s better. The existing way has at least one proof: it kept the company alive this long.

2. Resistance is a feature, not a bug
   Internal pushback to change is partly a safety mechanism. Forcing ideas to survive objections is how you avoid breaking what works.

3. Continuity is an asset
   Cultural norms, default processes, and “this is how we do it” store hard‑earned knowledge. Erasing them casually is a hidden form of technical debt.

4. Progress comes from tension, not purity
   You need both radicals and conservatives. The argument between them is how strong ideas emerge and weak ones die.

On Monday, do this

• List your “sacred defaults.” Write down 3–5 ways of operating that have clearly worked over time (how you sell, how you ship, how you hire). Treat these as the burden‑of‑proof areas: change allowed, but only with strong evidence.

• Create a simple trial path for new ideas. For any proposal that touches a sacred default, define: where it will be tested, for how long, and what metric must improve for it to stick.

• Institutionalize one skeptic. In key meetings, assign someone the explicit role of “argue for the status quo” so new ideas have to clear a real hurdle. Rotate the role so it doesn’t become personal.

• Archive the reasons for past choices. Pick one important process and document why it evolved that way. Share it with newer leaders so they argue against the real constraints, not a caricature.

In a world that celebrates constant reinvention, remembering why something has survived is a quiet advantage. The builders who win the next chapter won’t be the ones who change the most; they’ll be the ones who know exactly what to keep while they change what truly needs updating.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

The hidden job of a leader

History, the Durants argue, is not peaceful. Life is competition. When food is scarce, tribes fight. When power is at stake, factions fight. When markets open, firms fight.

But mature societies don’t become less competitive. They just get smarter about how they compete. They learn to cooperate inside the tribe so they can compete more effectively outside it.

War is their sharpest example. In peace, a city can afford to squabble. In war, those same people suddenly line up, take orders, and accept hardship. Not because they turned into saints overnight, but because the external threat makes internal coordination non‑negotiable.

The tribe doesn’t “get along” because it discovered empathy. It gets along because it wants to win.

Durant generalizes this: families, companies, parties, and nations cohere internally to increase their odds in external contests. Cooperation is mostly a tool and form of competition. We bind together in groups so our group can beat other groups.

You see this everywhere once you start looking.

Startups that see themselves as underdogs in a clear market fight rarely drown in internal politics. They don’t have time. There’s a scoreboard outside the building. Every engineer, sales rep, and operator knows which game they’re playing, and what “winning” looks like.

Mature organizations often lose this. The external game is fuzzy or feels already won. Revenue is fine, brand is strong, the castle walls look high. So the energy turns inward. If we’re not united against something out there, we quietly start competing in here: for credit, for status, for resources, for narrative control.

History would say this is not a moral failure. It’s just humans doing what humans have always done when the real enemy disappears: they nominate a new one, usually from the neighboring department. You see the same pattern across eras: once the outside invader or shared threat is gone, the factions that once cooperated often turn on each other. Remove external pressure and competition doesn’t vanish; it just moves inside the walls.

The uncomfortable implication: if you are a founder or senior operator, part of your real job is to define the war. Not in a macho way. In a clarifying way.

What game are we actually playing? Who or what are we trying to beat? On what field? By when?

If you don’t supply those answers, people will still compete. They’ll just compete with each other.

The leaders who last seem to understand this. They use cooperation as a designed tool: shared enemies, shared metrics, shared rituals, shared sacrifices. Not as feel‑good posters, but as competitive infrastructure. They give people something big enough out there to fight for so they don’t burn the company down in here.

Lessons

1. Cooperation is strategy, not sentiment
   Groups don’t cooperate because humans stop being competitive; they cooperate because coordination increases their odds of winning an external game. Culture and org design are tools for performance, not decoration.

2. When the external game is unclear, internal games multiply
   As soon as people can’t see a real, urgent contest outside the walls, they shift their competitive energy to status, politics, and turf wars. Misalignment is often a missing enemy, not missing values.

3. Your job is to define the war and the scoreboard
   Founders underestimate how much energy comes from a concrete opponent, problem, or target. People will endure a lot if they believe it clearly moves the group closer to winning.

4. Strong teams pick alliances to sharpen their edge
   We don’t cooperate randomly. We pick families, firms, and partners that increase our leverage in the real contest. Who you invite “inside the tribe” is a strategic decision.

On Monday, do this

• Name the game. In one sentence, define the primary competitive game your company is playing this year (for example: “Become the default X for Y in Z market before [year].”). Share it with your leadership team and force agreement.

• Clarify the enemy and the metric. In your next all‑hands, spell out the specific external opponent or constraint you’re organizing against (a problem, a category, a standard) and the one or two metrics that define “winning” this year.

• Kill one internal game. Identify one recurring meeting, process, or KPI that mostly optimizes for internal comfort or optics rather than external advantage. Change or remove it, and explain why in terms of the external game.

• Align rewards with the real war. Choose one visible reward (bonus, shout‑out, promotion criterion) and tie it explicitly to moving the external scoreboard, not to individual heroics disconnected from the team’s win.

History’s reminder is quietly optimistic: humans are wired to compete, but we’re also exceptionally good at organizing ourselves when the stakes are clear. If you keep your people pointed at reality outside the building, not at each other, you give them a better story to be part of and a better chance to win the next chapter.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

This week’s story zooms in on a simple shift Saurabh highlights: in fields like finance and education, the money is moving away from the people who run the models and towards the people who can still move humans.

Don’t Automate the Rainmaker

Imagine two young professionals in finance.

One becomes a fund manager, buried in research reports, models, and market data. The other goes into client-facing sales, sitting across tables from families and founders, persuading them to trust a particular fund with their life savings. For a long time, the prestige – and the pay – flowed to the person “running the money,” not the one “selling the money.”

AI is quietly inverting that.

Saurabh makes a simple observation: it is entirely plausible that an AI system can run a diversified Indian equity fund better than most human managers. Algorithms can scan more data, adjust faster, and stay unemotional. But that same system cannot yet walk into a multi‑millionaire’s home in Hyderabad, read the room, handle the subtle status games, soothe fears about volatility, and persuade them to wire $1 million into a new fund.

The manufacturing of financial products is getting automated. The selling of those products – the human, high‑trust, high‑stakes part – is where the value will pool.

The same pattern shows up in education. In the classroom of the near future, AI can grade homework, set custom practice questions, and even explain concepts at different difficulty levels. But it can’t look a restless 17‑year‑old in the eye and say, “I know you’re capable of more” in a way that lands. It can’t run a messy group project that teaches conflict resolution and leadership. So the teacher’s job migrates: less marking, more mentoring.

These are not small tweaks. They’re role rewrites.

For founders and senior operators, the mistake is to think, “AI will replace junior people, but my world stays the same.” In reality, AI is hollowing out entire layers of “respectable” cognitive work: analysts who mostly rearrange data, managers who mostly update decks, professionals whose day is spent inside tools rather than with people.

At the same time, it is amplifying the people who can do what AI can’t: hold trust, frame decisions, absorb complexity, and move others to act.

If you run a business, your leverage is no longer “we have smart people running spreadsheets.” Everyone will have that. Your leverage becomes: “we have machines doing the grunt work, and humans doing what only humans can do – selling, coaching, leading, solving weird problems in real time.”

The uncomfortable question is not “Will AI take my job?” It’s “Is most of my day spent on things a decent model could do cheaper, or on things that require trust, taste, and judgement?”

One side gets commoditized. The other gets paid.

Lessons

1. Production gets automated; persuasion gets rewarded.
   In fields like finance and education, the “making” of the product is getting handed to algorithms, while the hard, messy work of earning and keeping human trust is becoming the scarce, expensive part.

2. Tasks are automated, not entire roles – unless you cling to the wrong tasks.
   If your identity is tied to grinding through analysis, not to guiding decisions, AI won’t just “help” you. It will quietly make you irrelevant.

3. The most resilient careers sit at the intersection of brains and relationships.
   People who can understand complex systems and explain them simply to non‑experts will capture more value than those who only do one side.

4. Founders should use AI to free, not replace, their best people.
   The win is not cutting your top salesperson; it’s taking 30–50% of their low‑leverage work and giving it to a machine so they spend more time in front of humans.

On Monday, do this

1. Audit your own calendar for “AI‑bait.”
   Look at last week. Highlight every block that was data gathering, formatting, summarising, or basic follow‑ups. Ask: “Could a tool do 80% of this?” If yes, start testing one this month.

2. Redraw one key role around human‑only skills.
   Pick a role like sales, account management, or teaching. List the tasks that require trust, persuasion, or coaching. Explicitly redesign the role so that person spends more time on those, less on admin.

3. Change your next hire’s spec.
   For your next knowledge‑worker hire, add one non‑negotiable: evidence they can move humans, not just move information. That might be sales experience, teaching, community building, or leading teams.

4. Design one “AI shield” for yourself.
   Choose one human skill you’ll deepen over the next 12–24 months – e.g., high‑ticket sales, storytelling, negotiation, or coaching. Treat it as your personal hedge against being automated away.

P.S. If you enjoy seeing how real careers and leadership styles are built over decades, I recently spoke with Amrish Shah, Partner at Deloitte and a 37‑year veteran of India’s M&A tax landscape. We got into mentors, long-term client relationships, and how creative structuring turns a standard deal into a win‑win. You can listen here: mnacommunity.com/podcasts/amrish-shah/

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.