Open Loops #130

👋 Welcome to the 130th 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.

Once we have mastery over our feelings, our fear of life diminishes.

We feel a greater self-confidence, and we are willing to take greater chances because we now feel that we can handle the emotional consequences, whatever they might be.

Because fear is the basis of all inhibitions, mastery over fear means the unblocking of whole avenues of life experience that previously had been avoided.

The world can only see us as we see ourselves.

Carl Jung said that the healthy personality is equally balanced between work, play, love, and an aspect of personality called spirituality, which we could also define as the search for meaning and value.

People hear you on the level you speak to them from. Speak from your heart, and they will hear with theirs.

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. Vladimir Nabokov published his first poetry collection at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

If we fail to allow children continuous contact with the world, we risk them coming to see their own lives as mere abstractions.

The purpose of education is to develop agency within a child. Purposeful work and achieving mastery are tools to getting there. They aren’t the results of learning and imagination, it’s the other way around—learning is simply the consequence of doing.

If you aren’t able to sit down and execute, you might as well take a break to gain clarity on how to best execute.

If you were honest with yourself, you’d realize that you’re sitting down to work for 4 hours but are kinda just bouncing around between ideas and tasks. You aren’t really doing anything productive.

If you don’t provide your mind with the resources (ideas and clarity), your work will slowly suffer, and you’ll waste most of your life at your desk.

Most people would be much more productive if they took a day off. But they hate doing that.

The magic you’re looking for is hiding in the rest you’re avoiding. Take a day off. Hell, take two days off.

Allow yourself to be bored until the right amount of clarity forms and you can’t help but work. That’s when you knock out 6 months of work in 6 weeks.

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.