200 Reps.

Here’s something I’ve noticed, in the gym and in business:

The strongest person in the room is rarely the loudest. They’re often the most helpful. The most secure. They aren’t there to prove anything they just love the work.

That confidence? It doesn’t appear overnight. It’s earned. Rep by rep. Week by week.

This is the 200th consecutive edition of this newsletter. Not a flashy milestone, but a quiet one. It simply means showing up, again and again. If I can do that, you can, too.

That repetition, in your work, in your mission does something powerful. It slowly strips away the need to be seen as the strongest, and lets you focus on becoming stronger. It builds a foundation of genuine security. The kind that lets you lift others up instead of competing with them. Just like the strongest person in the gym..

So here’s to your next rep. And the one after that. Keep showing up. The confidence, and the capacity to lead with generosity, will follow.

Let me tell you how you handle an outcome, especially a bad one reveals everything.

It shows what you’re made of when the plan evaporates. It’s the difference between a footnote and a legacy.

Consider a young man named Frederick Smith.(Founder of FedEx). His first attempt at revolutionizing shipping didn’t target packages. It targeted checks.

In 1970, a check from New York to Los Angeles took ten days to clear. Physical paper had to crawl across the country by truck. This created “float” billions of dollars, in limbo, useless.Smith saw a bottleneck. He designed a surgical fix: apply the hub and spoke model of airlines to banking. Small jets would collect checks nightly, fly them to a central hub, sort them under fluorescent lights, and return them by morning. Ten days became one.

He incorporated Federal Express Corporation. The name was a deliberate feint“Federal” would suggest authority, synergy with the Federal Reserve.He acquired two Falcon jets. The price was right; the aviation industry was in a depression.He presented his solution to the Federal Reserve. They were impressed. They were intrigued.

Then they said no.

Politics. Turf. Inertia. The Fed in Kansas City wouldn’t coordinate with the Fed in St. Louis. The door slammed shut.Here is the outcome: Smith now owned two empty jets. He carried $3.6 million in debt. He had no customer. The entire premise of his venture was invalidated.This is the crucible. This is where most stories end. The logical move was to sell the assets, cut losses, and walk away.

But Smith did not see a dead end. He saw a detour.

The rejection, he realized, was a liberation. It freed him from a single client. It forced his vision to expand. If he could move checks overnight, why not anything? Why not the world?He looked at his two idle jets and his mountain of debt and saw not ruin, but raw materials. The outcome was not a verdict; it was a question. What will you build now?

He built FedEx.

You will face your version of those empty jets. A deal will collapse. A launch will flop. A partner will walk away.The outcome itself is neutral. Your reaction to it is what writes the next chapter.Do you see a full stop? Or do you see a ruthless, unplanned opportunity to pivot toward something far grander than your original, cramped design?

The market doesn’t reward the perfect plan. It rewards the resilient mind.

You know WD-40 as the can in your garage that fixes squeaks and loosens bolts.

You likely didn’t know it was invented to protect nuclear missiles.In the 1950s, the Atlas missile’s thin steel skin was corroding in the damp storage bunkers. A small team was tasked with creating a water displacing compound to stop the rust.

They failed 39 times.The 40th attempt worked. They called it “Water Displacement, 40th Formula.”Mission accomplished. Missiles saved. Story over?

Not quite.

The engineers noticed workers sneaking the formula home to fix hinges and protect tools. They saw a bigger idea: What shields a missile could shield anything. So they bottled it. In 1958, they sold it to the public.

Today, the missiles are retired. But that 40th attempt sits in millions of toolboxes worldwide.

The lesson isn’t just persist. It’s: Pay attention to how people misuse your solution. The best pivot might be happening right under your nose.

This week, I wanted to share things that have helped me do better, a concept called opening the door wider. This is not a framework, its a thought process. Here’s a deceptively simple rule that quietly shapes the trajectory of every growing team and business:

Curiosity and judgment can’t live in the same breath.

When you approach a new idea, a piece of feedback, or a market shift with immediate judgment “That won’t work,” “We’ve tried that,” “That’s not our problem” you do something irreversible. You close the door. The conversation ends where it began.

Curiosity, on the other hand, asks a single, powerful question before anything else: “Tell me more.”

It doesn’t agree. It doesn’t disagree. It just opens the door wider.

This isn’t just a “soft skill.” It’s a scaling mechanism. The businesses that scale sustainably are learning machines. And you cannot learn while you are judging. Judgment is the end of the line. Curiosity is the open road.Think of your last team meeting. When an unconventional suggestion was made, did the room lean in with “How might that work?” or shut down with “Here’s why it won’t”?

That moment, repeated across hundreds of decisions and interactions, is what quietly determines your capacity for innovation and adaptability. It’s the boring, daily habit that either compounds into a culture of discovery or a culture of stagnation.

The practice is simple, but not easy: Suspend your verdict. Just for a moment. Just long enough to truly explore. It sounds boring but it makes your outcomes any thing but!

Lead with a question, not a conclusion. You might just find that the most scalable thing you can build isn’t a feature or a funnel it’s an environment where curiosity always gets the first breath.

Surveys that people put up. Here is one. Some one asked Twitter, what sub $500 purchases made them happier or improved peoples lives. Then they listed the answers they got sorted by votes. Here are a couple of lessons to draw from this. Your following may not be large enough to do such open polls, so use the reach others already have.

Also this is a wealth of ideas of what actually makes people happy in relation to the product or service they bought. Scroll through the list, see if your idea, service, product could plug in to peoples happiness quadrant. If it can then you know have a winning idea/product. If it doesnt you have the ability to figure out what really does well with consumers. There are 100s of these surveys done across Twitter, look for them using keywords, thank me later. This is the fastest way to getting real world data on real world products and services and also identifying emerging trends.

I am writing this newsletter on the 1st of Dec as a personal milestone to get the 200th rep in, on the first day of December. I feel December is a clock. You can almost hear the year evaporating. And in that sound is a reminder of the first principle: you don’t have time, you are time. When it runs out, you run out. Everything else, your knowledge, your content, your relationships is simply the shape your time briefly chose before it moved on.

This is why you must stop giving your knowledge away in moments that disappear. Start encoding it. Insight that dies inside a meeting or dissolves inside a Slack thread is wasted. Knowledge needs to become a product: something tangible, purchasable, and capable of doing its job without your presence.

The same shift applies to what you publish. Stop creating content just to create it. Start planting assets. A post is a breath; it fades the moment it arrives. An asset is a seed. It grows quietly, often when you’re not looking, and sometimes long after you’ve forgotten planting it. If something you make cannot be found, bought, referenced, or built upon a year from now, it wasn’t value. It was noise.

This is not a new to do list. It’s a change in physics. You are not simply a founder moving blocks around on a calendar. You are an architect of moments, and the real work is to construct structures that time cannot easily dissolve.

December is listening. And it’s asking what you will leave behind.

Stop selling your time. Start multiplying its echo. Let your hours escape the hourglass and continue working while you are sleeping, thinking, or completely done because that is how entrepreneurs make time their ally instead of their cost.

There’s a piece of advice I used to ignore: “Spend money on experiences when you’re young, not just when you’re rich.”

It sounded like a luxury something for people who already had it easy. That wasn’t me. Like most founders, every win was hard earned. But over time, I realized the point wasn’t to spend more. It was to spend differently and to spend now, in proportion to what you have, on things that change your trajectory. When you’re building something, your perspective is your most valuable asset. And that’s shaped by what you expose yourself to.

So if you can, direct a meaningful slice of whatever you have toward:

1. Travel
Not luxury resorts, but movement. See how people live and work somewhere else. Context is a silent teacher. A train ticket can be worth more than a new laptop.

2. Seminars & Gatherings
The right conference isn’t an expense it’s a portal. Meet people outside your bubble. A conversation in a hallway can redirect your thinking for years. I once used a big chunk of a freelance check to attend a one day event where I got my first real long term contract(side hustle that went on for 3 years).

3. Books
Ideas are leverage. You can borrow the thinking of someone who’s spent decades figuring something out for $20. I’ve bought used books that later shaped entire product decisions.

This isn’t about indulgence. It’s about acceleration.

Money saved is important. But money invested in who you become compounds differently.

Don’t wait until you “have enough.” Start where you are. Spend intentionally on what expands you.

Because the you that builds the future depends on the you that’s investing in it today.

Bonus! Thought of the week

Years ago, when I didn’t have much money to buy real presents for the people who mattered, mentors, professors, those who had guided me, I tried something different.

Instead of a gift I couldn’t afford, I gave what I did have: my attention and effort.

I sent simple cards that read: This entitles you to 24 hours of my time in the coming year. Need help hauling junk, clearing a garage, fixing a computer, making a meal, or watching the kids? I’ll swap a day of mine for a day of yours.

It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t a gimmick. It was real.

And to this day, every single person who received that card still remembers it. Not because I did all the tasks, many never called it in, but because the offer itself meant something. It said: You’ve added to my life. Here is my time in return.

When you’re early in your journey, time is often the most meaningful currency you possess. Investing it intentionally in others doesn’t cost much, but it can yield a lifetime of goodwill.

Sometimes the best gift isn’t what you buy. It’s what you’re willing to give of yourself.

Wishing you a season of meaningful exchange and a new year filled with returns on the time you invest.

Contrarian Take:

Do what you must, do what you should, not what you think others expect. Stick to your guns. You will do better.