👋 Welcome to the 141st issue of Open Loops, a weekly newsletter on clarity, growth, and building a life that feels like yours.
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.
What kind of person do you feel safe with?
Who makes you feel at home in your skin?
Whose presence feels like a deep exhale, not because they're perfect, but because they’re kind, because they listen, because they don’t make you feel small for feeling too much?
Become that.
Become the person who doesn’t wait for the right moment to say something nice. Become the person who notices not just the big things, often invisible wins.
Because think about the people you love the most. The ones who feel like sunlight in human form. The ones whose presence makes your shoulders drop.
They probably didn’t do anything big, right?
They just showed up consistently. Gently. Without performance.
They didn’t try to fix you.They didn’t get weird when you were quiet.
They didn’t look at their phone every two minutes while pretending to care.
They made you feel like you mattered just by how they looked at you.
All writing begins with a cosmology of the self. The structure of your internal universe that flows into everything you create.
Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind.
Underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to.
If a competent CEO got to run your life for a day, what is the first thing they would eliminate?
Only the truth which was acquired by your own thinking, through the efforts of your intellect, becomes a member of your own body, and only this truth really belongs to us.
If you aren't grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.
Till next time 👋
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My curated list of the 33 books that shaped how I think about identity, direction, and building a life that feels like your own.