Open Loops #128

👋 Welcome to the 128th issue of Open Loops, a weekly newsletter exploring ideas at the intersection of building and being.

My name is Reza and each week, I sift through 100+ books, articles, podcasts, and (way too many) tweets to uncover timeless, actionable insights to help you think clearly, live intentionally, and build momentum.

In the early 1900s, the streets of Delhi were crawling with cobras. They slipped through homes and markets, terrifying the city.

To solve the crisis, British officials launched a bold plan: pay citizens for every dead snake. It was simple, measurable, and fast.

For a while, it worked. Dead cobras piled up at government offices, and the city began to breathe again.

Then came the unintended consequences.

Locals started breeding cobras to earn more rewards. Small farms appeared on the city’s edge, each one filled with coiled profit.

The bounty system had created a new economy.

When the government finally ended the program, breeders released their now-worthless snakes.

The population exploded. A clever fix became a disaster.

This story captures the essence of second-order thinking: the ability to see beyond the first consequence of a decision.

Most people stop at “What will this do?”

Second-order thinkers ask, “And then what?”

We fall into this trap every day. We chase quick wins in business, habits, and relationships, solving for the moment while setting up new problems for the future.

The real skill isn’t speed, it’s foresight. The patience to see how one move shapes the next.

Quick fixes feel productive, but the real win is building something that keeps working long after you’ve stopped thinking about it.

The ultimate success metric is whether you get what you want out of life.

But that’s harder than it sounds because it’s easy to try to copy someone who wants something you don’t.

It’s possible to be humble and learn from other people while also recognizing that the best strategy for you is the one closest aligned with your unique personality and skills.

A few things happen when you do.

• You do your best work and have the most fun when you’re not burdened by fear that someone else thinks you’re doing it wrong.

• You measure how you’re doing against your personal benchmarks, which can both push you to your potential and prevent you from chasing someone else’s.

• You have a much better shot of getting what you want out of life. Which, again, is all that really matters.

You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love?

I stumbled on this episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, where he interviews Emma Watson, and honestly, I didn’t expect to enjoy it this much. As much as I loved Harry Potter growing up, I’ve never been a die-hard Emma Watson fan.

But this conversation hit me. It reminded me that beneath all the roles, titles, and identities we build up, we all share the same human needs: to be seen, to feel safe, to be at peace with ourselves, and to live in alignment with our truth.

The part that stayed with me most was when she talked about learning to listen to her body (really listen), instead of using wellness practices as a way to keep going down the wrong path.

I eat well, I do yoga, I meditate... but I think I was using those as a way of mitigating how much stress I was under, instead of what they’re really for: compasses pointing toward our truth.

My body was trying to tell me something, and I didn’t want to ignore it anymore. It didn’t matter how many retreats I went on or how much yoga I did... I just had to start listening.

That part hit like a mirror.

So many of us use “healthy habits” as armor to cope, to numb, to sustain what’s not serving us, instead of tuning in to what our bodies are quietly trying to say.

Real wellbeing starts when we stop trying to fix ourselves and start trusting ourselves.

Let your mind be bored.

Do your own thinking. It’s a new age and the addictions we are most vulnerable to are stealthily concealed, beckoning our fingertips to refresh them just oneeeee more time, because surely that will be when we find the satisfying thing that makes us want to put our phones away… somehow it never does, though, does it?

This newsletter is my creative outlet. When I’m not writing it, or working out, I help founders and their early teams bring clarity and structure to the chaos of building early-stage brands. If you’re a founder navigating GTM, you can lean more here.