Open Loops #132

👋 Welcome to the 132nd 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.

There’s a version of you that already has the clarity you’re looking for.

They’re not in the future.

They’re underneath the noise: distraction, fear, and self-doubt.

You don’t build them. You uncover them.

It’s like having abs. They’ve always been there, just hidden by layers that don’t belong.

Clarity works the same way.

You don’t create it by adding more... more goals, more input, more advice.

You find it by removing what’s in the way.

The hard part isn’t becoming someone new.

It’s remembering who you were before the world got loud.

Your job isn’t to “become” them.

It’s to return to them.

The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.

What you see is all there is. The mind builds complete stories out of incomplete facts, leaving no room for what’s missing. We mistake coherence for truth — and confidence for accuracy — simply because the story makes sense to us.

We constantly overestimate how much we understand about the world and underestimate the role of chance. Success and failure are rarely perfect reflections of skill — they are influenced by randomness far more than our narratives allow.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is through repetition. Familiarity breeds acceptance — what’s repeated starts to feel true.

This is why political slogans stick, why ads work, and why your own self-talk shapes your reality. Repeat anything enough (a lie or a belief), and your brain starts filing it under “fact.” That’s both terrifying and empowering, depending on what you choose to repeat.

The less concerned we are with our identity, the more we can think from first principles.

Also, perhaps paradoxically, the less we judge ourselves, the less we judge other people, because when we judge other people we’re always comparing them with us, or how we’d like to be.

If you don’t know what you want, you’ll be told what you want and you’ll believe 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.