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👋 Welcome to the 142nd issue of Open Loops, a weekly newsletter on clarity, growth, and building a life that feels like yours.
Every week I sift through 100+ books, articles, podcasts, and (way too many) tweets to bring you the best in this newsletter.
Hey hey! 👋 It's been five weeks since the last issue. It's good to be writing again.
Two things pulled my attention away and led to the pause.
Firstly, back in Iran, my people have been fighting for a better life. When it's your home, you don't just follow along from a distance. You check your phone before you're fully awake. You call family and friends. You read about streets you grew up on in the news. I woke up anxious a lot of mornings and carried that weight through the day. Watching and being unable to do much is its own particular kind of hard.
Around the same time, I'd also been on the move. Since November, I've been working remotely, moving between cities on a kind of pilgrimage. Asking whether the life I'd been building in Toronto was actually the one I wanted.
Bali was one of the places I knew I had to experience along the way. This is where I'm writing from right now.
I had a hunch this island would offer something specific: what it actually means to simply be. To exist before you produce. To go back to the roots of being alive.
The hunch was right. The stillness here clears the noise until what actually matters rises back to the surface.
What kept coming back for me was this: the cycle of learning, sitting with it until it becomes yours, then sharing it in a way that helps others realize their most aligned self… that’s what I was born to do.
This newsletter is one of the ways I live it out. And it's never going to go away.
Iran's still on my mind every moment of everyday. Sharing my truth and writing this newsletter is too.
With that, let's jump into this week's musings.
The friction you feel when choosing yourself over external demands isn’t a bug; it’s proof you’re actually doing it.
Taking care of yourself should feel inconvenient to your obligations and the demands on you from the outside world. Because those things are not responsible for prioritizing you!
Everyone is going to ask of you what they need from you (such is our nature), and you need to know when to prioritize yourself, even if it is painful, inconvenient, or uncomfortable. That is your responsibility. That is how you show up authentically. That is how you protect your precious, one-of-a-kind energy.
And yes, you can do this and still be an amazing friend, lover, sister, son, partner, grandchild, employee, leader, founder, artist, whatever role you are engaged in. In fact, you can be a much better version of all of those things when you have genuinely tended to yourself.
Self-care that doesn’t disrupt anything isn’t self-care, it’s just efficient people-pleasing.
Dimming your success, downplaying your goals, pretending you don’t want more to avoid making others uncomfortable is the fastest way to be liked by everyone, but respected by no one.
The discomfort you feel when owning your ambition isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, it’s the friction of choosing alignment over approval. Notice who stays when you stop dimming.
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You move faster because everything connects. Built to scale, not stall.
If your expertise is real, your system should be too.
People occasionally wonder out loud when I'm going to
write another book. "I don't know," I say. They ask me what I've been up to lately. "Not much," I say. "Reading a bunch. Raising the boys." To an outsider, it sounds like l'm doing nothing. It looks like I'm doing nothing. But I feel very much like Corita: "new things are happening very quietly inside of me.
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.