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👋 Welcome to the 161st 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.
🇲🇽 I’ll be in Mexico City next week! It’s on of my top 5 cities to spend time in, and I’m super excited to go back. If you’re from there or happen to be in town, I’d love to meet up.
Let’s dive in!
🔗 5 links
Write down the tiny things: the afternoon light, a funny sentence, a conversation you want to remember. A day becomes easier to remember when you record something specific about it. Ayushi Thakkar has a lovely collection of ways to give ordinary days more texture.
You can take responsibility for something that wasn’t your fault. Seth Godin separates the question of who caused a problem from who’s willing to help with it.
In fact, being an adult involves taking responsibility for things that we could point out are not our fault.
A long phone call, a reading group, a Sunday walk. Each offers a different kind of company. Notice which ones leave you feeling more like yourself, then make room for them again. A regular invitation can become a place to belong.
Ava’s signs that she’s feeling more at ease:
Replying to texts takes less effort.
She can sit with an unoccupied evening.
She wants to make things again.
What are your own signs? Her personal inventory makes a good starting point for noticing them.
A job gives the week a shape: somewhere to be, people to see, a reason to get going. Losing it can unsettle all three at once. Rob Henderson’s essay is worth reading when you’re thinking about what work adds to your life beyond the payslip.
🧵 From Threads this week
💬 One quote
Sometimes it takes absence to value presence, noise to appreciate silence, and sadness to know happiness.
Some teams never seem to stop moving. They're on Attio, the agentic CRM.
Every customer signal is captured in one shared context layer, always current and compounding. Agents and workflows build pipeline, chase every buying signal, and move deals forward, an always-on revenue engine running alongside your team.
With Attio, you’ll get:
Leads automatically prioritised and routed to the right rep
Expansion and risk signals caught the moment they land
Follow-ups written in your voice, already there when you arrive
Teams like Parallel, Turbopuffer, and Wordsmith build on Attio. Are you one of them?
📚 One book
If there’s one thing you should remember from this book, it’d be:
The position lives in the customer’s mind. People understand what you offer through categories and comparisons they already know. Ask five customers how they’d describe your product to a friend. The words they reach for tell you which position you actually hold.
Here’s another three:
Being first creates a mental shortcut. The first credible name in a category becomes a reference point. A narrower category you can truthfully own gives people an easier way to remember you.
Consistency lets a position accumulate. An association strengthens through repetition. Look at your last ten messages: would someone come away with the same central idea, or ten different ones?
Focus depends on sacrifice. Every extra audience or promise asks people to remember more. Choose who the offer is for, what it does best, and what falls outside it. Dropping a secondary claim can make the main one easier to grasp.
→ Read my full bookshelf note on Positioning.
❓ One question
What’s something you’ve changed your mind about lately?
Till next time 👋
🤝 Should we work together?
Outside the newsletter, there are two ways to work together: Clarity Coaching for life and career decisions, and GTM advisory for startups that need a sharper story, more focused 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.