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👋 Welcome to the 148th 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
Hunches are fast.
They show up in the shower, in someone else's sentence, in the moment before you say yes to something you don't actually want. And then they're gone.
The mistake is waiting for them to come back louder, when they always come back exactly the same… fast, quiet, and almost gone by the time you noticed.
The biggest changes I've ever made started as the smallest internal pull. Each one looked obvious afterwards. Each one was a near-miss in the moment.
🔗 3 links
The people who get the most done don't have better judgment. They've just made being wrong cheap enough to move anyway.
The real cost of staying in work that drains you isn't the boredom, it's the slow erosion of the part of you that used to care.
One I keep coming back to: 34 lessons from 34 years. It reads fast and sits with you slow.
❓ One quote
To listen, there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention.
📚 One book
This week's book is Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek. I came to it skeptical, the title sounds like a LinkedIn quote nobody thinks about twice. What changed my mind is that Sinek doesn't argue leadership as a virtue, he argues it as biology: a team pulls together or falls apart based on whether people feel safe from each other.
After years around founders, I've watched it go both ways. The teams that felt protected took bigger risks and recovered faster, and the ones that didn't spent their best energy watching their own backs.
A few ideas from the book:
Leadership has almost nothing to do with your title. You can outrank everyone and lead no one, or hold no authority and lead the whole room.
When people feel they have to guard against their own team, they stop facing the competition. All that survival energy turns inward.
Burnout isn't usually about workload. It's about how little say people have over how they work. Hand someone the decision, not just the task.
If the leaders above you won't protect people, protect them sideways. The culture you're waiting for starts the moment someone stops waiting.
→ Check out my full bookshelf notes on Leaders Eat Last
Bad news is good business. We never bought in.
Every morning, financial news follows the same script. Headlines panic, coverage catastrophises, and somewhere inside the noise is the story that actually matters — the one that tells you where the opportunity sits, not just where the fear is pointing.
Most sources have stopped looking. The alarm is easier to sell.
The Daily Upside was created by Wall Street insiders for readers who crave real insight over recycled anxiety. Five minutes of global business and finance, before the noise sets the agenda — just the facts, context, and analysis your decisions need.
Join 1M readers — including managing directors and principals at some of Wall Street’s largest institutions — who trust The Daily Upside to filter through the chaos.
The upsides are always there. We’ll find them before breakfast.
❓ One question
What's a small experiment you've been putting off because you wanted it to be a confident plan first?
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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