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👋 Welcome to the 147th issue of Open Loops, a weekly letter on clarity, growth, and building a life that feels like yours.
My name is Reza, and each week I share what I'm reading, building, and working through to help you turn confusion into conviction in life and work .
☁️ On my mind
There's a genre of self-improvement that treats your body and mind like a dashboard. Track the sleep. Manage the dopamine. Optimize the cortisol curve...
And I think a lot of it is useful. I'm not knocking the science. But there's something it fundamentally misunderstands about what it means to be well.
It treats you like a closed system. As if the right inputs will produce the right outputs, regardless of context, regardless of connection, regardless of whether anyone's actually in the room with you.
But people don't flourish in isolation.They flourish in relationships.
In the slow work of learning emotional intelligence. In being someone worthy of love, not because you earned it, but because you're willing to receive it. In asking for care, not just providing it. In committing to something beyond your own progress.
That's the part the dashboard can't measure.
🔗 4 links
Half the people whose choices look crazy to you are playing a different game than you are. Most of what feels like disagreement is a marathon runner yelling at a powerlifter. Hard to unsee once you see it.
only a few decisions actually shape your life, and taking a week or two to deliberate on the big ones isn't a big deal at all. A permission slip for going slower than the timeline you've imposed on yourself.
Lisa Olivera, writing letters to her younger self. "You are forever becoming. There is no landing place, no arrival."
We'd all be happier living closer to our friends, and we keep optimizing for career, partner, parenting instead, until the friendship gets thinner than any of those things can hold.
💬 One quote
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
📚 One book
This week's book is Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. I just published the bookshelf note for this one, and it rearranged something in me.
It's a transcription of a retreat de Mello gave, and it reads like someone grabbed you by the collar and said: you're asleep, and everything you call suffering is proof.
He was a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, and the whole book has the energy of him talking to a room full of people who came looking for comfort and instead got shown they don't need it. The core argument is simple: you're unhappy because you're clinging to illusions you were programmed to believe as a child, and the moment you see them clearly, they dissolve.
It's quickly become one of my new favorites, sitting right next to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius on the small shelf of books I actually return to. They're doing the same job from different angles. Marcus is the inside of a mind disciplining itself in real time. De Mello is the voice of someone outside that mind, pointing at the strings being pulled and asking you to look. One is the practice. The other is the wake-up.
A few ideas from the book:
You're not depressed, you're experiencing a depression. The feeling isn't you. It's weather. You're the sky.
What you're aware of can't control you. What you don't see runs your life.
Nobody ever rejects you, they reject their image of you. The same goes for acceptance.
Happiness is your default state. You don't need to add anything. You need to drop things.
→ Check out my full bookshelf note on Awareness.
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❓ One question
What part of your life is only confusing because you're still trying to make it legible to people who aren't living it?
👋 Till next time
🤝 Should we work together?
This newsletter is where I think out loud each week. The rest of my work is with ambitious people and founders at inflection points:
Clarity Coaching for life and career decisions.
GTM advisory for startups that need a sharper story, cleaner strategy, and a launch with more shape.
✨ Get Foundation 33 for free
Foundation 33 is my curated list of 33 books for clarity, identity, and building a life that feels like yours. A good place to start if you want a more intentional reading path toward your own clarity.
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