Open Loops #131

👋 Welcome to the 131st 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 bring you the best in this newsletter.

I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they'd never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don't need doing.

The moment you stop believing in the corporate fiction is the moment you can start using it.

Once you see it as infrastructure rather than identity, as a resource rather than a calling, everything shifts.

Your corporate role doesn't need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful.

Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.

The death of the corporate role doesn’t need to be seen as a crisis. It can be freedom to engage in more creative and aligned work.

Going small is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous.

Practice is more than just repetition of behavior—it’s a movement of energy that creates a fissure in us to reveal what’s within.

More movement, more revelation.

Among the many things we discover about ourselves when engaged in the practice of writing or dance or making music is how to live with meaning and intention, which is perhaps the most important discovery of all.

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.