Nobody talks about this one.

We talk about quality time. Acts of service. Words of affirmation. The five love languages have been downloaded, shared, and turned into a thousand Instagram carousels.

But there is a sixth one nobody named yet.

Removing someone's mental load.

Think about what it actually costs a person to carry decisions all day. What to have for dinner. Whether that invoice got sent. Which school form needs signing by Friday. What to say to the difficult client. Every one of those is a small tax on the brain. By itself, nothing. Accumulated across a day, a week, a year, it becomes a kind of quiet exhaustion that is very hard to explain to someone who is not carrying it.

The most considerate thing you can do for a person you love, work with, or lead is not always the grand gesture. Sometimes it is just making the decision they were going to have to make anyway. Booking the restaurant. Handling the thing. Removing the item from their list before they even knew it was there.

Decision fatigue is a love language.

It applies to your spouse. Your co-founder. Your team. Your parents. The person sitting across from you who has been holding more than you realised.

The highest form of consideration is not attention. It is reduction. Taking something off the pile. Making the mental load lighter without being asked.

This week is about building things. But underneath all of it is a quieter idea: the people who thrive longest, in business and in life, are almost always the ones who figured out how to protect the people around them from unnecessary weight.

Start there.

The story is Hamdi Ulukaya and Chobani.

Most people know the brand. Almost nobody knows what actually happened.

He grew up in a Kurdish village in eastern Turkey where his family were semi-nomadic sheep and dairy farmers. His mother made yogurt the same way her mother made it. He came to the United States in 1994 with broken English and no plan beyond studying. He ended up in upstate New York. He missed the yogurt he grew up eating. He could not find it anywhere in America.

In 2005 a piece of junk mail arrived at his small feta cheese factory. A former Kraft Foods plant was for sale in South Edmeston, a dying town in the Chenango County hills. Kraft had shut it down. The town was devastated. His lawyer told him: "Hamdi, what are you talking about? Kraft is closing the plant. They're looking for an idiot. You're the idiot."

He bought it anyway. With an $800,000 SBA loan. A personal guarantee. Ten percent down. He hired four of the workers Kraft had just laid off. He brought a master yogurt maker from Turkey. He spent two years perfecting the recipe before a single cup hit a shelf.

Chobani launched in 2007. Within five years it reached $1 billion in sales and became the best-selling yogurt brand in the United States. Greek yogurt went from less than half of one percent of the American yogurt market to over 50 percent market share.

In 2016, when the company was valued at $3 billion, he gave 10 percent of it to his 2,000 employees. The average grant per worker was $150,000. It was also a quietly brilliant move that diluted his private equity investor TPG's influence without a single confrontation.

Thirty percent of Chobani's workforce are refugees or immigrants. More than 20 languages are spoken on the factory floor. He has said: the minute they got the job, that's the minute they stopped being refugees.

He is now worth $13.7 billion. The town of South Edmeston still has its factory.

📚 Book | The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (2002)

Steven Pressfield spent most of his adult life broke. He drove trucks. He tended bar. He lived in a camper van. He tried to write and could not. Then he turned 52, sat down at a desk in a dingy apartment in Los Angeles, and wrote a novel called The Legend of Bagger Vance, which became a film starring Matt Damon and Will Smith. He had been trying to get there for thirty years. He knew exactly what had stopped him. He wrote The War of Art to name it.

The book has sold over a million copies. It is on the curriculum at West Point and on the Commandant's Reading List for the Marine Corps. Most people who recommend it frame it as a book for writers or creatives. They are wrong about the audience. This is a book for anyone who has something to build and has been finding reasons not to build it.

Pressfield names the enemy: Resistance. Not doubt. Not fear. Not a lack of talent or time or resources. Resistance. A specific force he argues lives inside every person who has ever decided to do something that matters. It shows up as procrastination, as distraction, as the sudden overwhelming urge to reorganize your calendar instead of making the call. It shows up as the version of you who reads about building something rather than the version who builds it.

The reason this book belongs in this issue is Hamdi Ulukaya. He did not fail to build Chobani because he lacked ability or capital. He found a piece of junk mail, picked it out of the bin twenty minutes after throwing it away, and called the number. That act, the second reach into the bin, is what Pressfield is writing about. The whole book is about whether you will reach back into the bin or whether you will let the junk mail sit there and walk away.

His lawyer called him an idiot. Every person around him had a reason to not proceed. Resistance had every argument on its side. He went ahead anyway.

Pressfield's central distinction is between the amateur and the professional. The amateur waits for conditions to improve. The professional shows up regardless. The amateur treats their creative work as something they will get to. The professional treats it as the job. Hamdi Ulukaya hired four of the workers Kraft had just laid off and spent two years in a run-down factory perfecting a yogurt recipe. That is not inspiration. That is professionalism in the Pressfield sense.

It is under 200 pages. It reads in an afternoon. Some people describe it as the book that finally made them do the thing they had been delaying for years.

🔧 Tool | The Immigrant Lens (a decision-making reframe, not software)

In October 2016, researchers Peter Vandor and Nikolaus Franke published a study in the Harvard Business Review titled "Why Are Immigrants More Entrepreneurial?" The central finding is not what most people expect. It is not that immigrants work harder, take more risks, or have superior skills. It is that cross-cultural experience measurably increases a person's ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunities that native-born peers overlook entirely. The mechanism is the absence of conditioning. People who arrive in a market without being raised inside it do not carry the invisible assumption that certain things are already solved, already owned, or already impossible.

The data behind this is striking. In the United States, immigrants make up approximately 13 percent of the population but account for 27.5 percent of all entrepreneurs. Around one quarter of all technology and engineering companies started in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012 had at least one immigrant co-founder. And across the 69 countries surveyed in the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the vast majority reported higher entrepreneurial activity among immigrants than among native-born citizens, especially in growth-oriented ventures.

This is what Hamdi Ulukaya demonstrated in 2005. He arrived in a country where yogurt had been industrialised into something he did not recognise. He did not know the market was mature. He did not know Dannon and Yoplait had the shelves locked up. He had tasted better and he could see the gap. That was not luck. That was the immigrant lens in direct operation.

The practical tool is a single question you ask before evaluating any market, product, or opportunity:

If I had arrived here six months ago and knew nothing about how this industry is supposed to work, what would I see?

Write down your single biggest assumption about why a market or idea will not work. Then write the name of the incumbent, the competitor, or the established player at the top of the page. Ask yourself honestly whether your assumption comes from evidence or from what that entity has spent years teaching you to believe.

If the assumption came from the incumbent, it is not analysis. It is conditioning. The immigrant sees the gap because they were never conditioned to look away from it.

No app required. No subscription. One question.

Source: Vandor, P. and Franke, N. "Why Are Immigrants More Entrepreneurial?" Harvard Business Review, October 27, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-are-immigrants-more-entrepreneurial

I want to sit with that for a second. Because I speak to founders every week. Dozens of them across the year. And almost all of them are busy. Genuinely, visibly, exhaustingly busy. Full calendars. Long hours. Inboxes that never hit zero. The kind of busy that gets worn like a badge because in this world, busy signals importance.

But there is a pattern I keep seeing that nobody talks about openly.

The founders who are spinning their wheels, the ones who are six months in and have nothing to show for it, twelve months in and still cannot explain what they are building or why, the ones who keep pivoting not because the market told them to but because they never felt the pull in the first place. Those founders are not failing because they are lazy. They are failing because they are busy doing things they do not actually care about.

And the stress they feel is not the good kind. It is not the stress of a person building something at the edge of their ability. It is the stress of a person who somewhere in the back of their mind knows they are pouring energy into the wrong thing and cannot stop.

The founders who are getting somewhere are almost always easy to spot. Not because they work harder. Not because they have a better product or more funding or a smarter team. They are easy to spot because when you ask them what they are building, something happens in their face. There is a quality of attention they have that other founders do not. They are not performing enthusiasm. They are not pitching you. They are just telling you about the thing they cannot stop thinking about.

That thing is a different fuel entirely.

Manson's point is not that you should work less. It is that the exhaustion you are carrying right now might not be a time problem. It might be a direction problem. You are not depleted because you are doing too much. You are depleted because most of what you are doing is not the thing.

The hard question. The one most founders will read this and immediately move past because it is easier to optimize a calendar than to answer it honestly:

Is what you are building the thing you cannot stop thinking about? Or is it the thing you convinced yourself made sense?

Because those two paths look identical in a pitch deck. They feel completely different at 11pm on a Wednesday when nobody is watching.

Jing Gao / Fly By Jing / Los Angeles, California

Jing Gao was born in Chengdu, grew up moving around Europe and Canada, and spent years answering to a name that was not her own. She went by Jenny because kids in her schools could not pronounce Jing. She made herself smaller to fit in. She did it for decades.

As an adult she returned to Chengdu and fell back into Sichuan food. The kind of food she had grown up with. Complex, electric, unapologetic. The kind of food the West had never properly understood or represented. She became obsessed. Not strategically. Not because she had identified a market gap or run a competitive analysis. She just could not stop thinking about it.

She started an underground supper club. She would travel to cities around the world with a suitcase full of Sichuan ingredients and cook for strangers. At every dinner, the moment people tried the chili crisp sauce she used as a base, something happened in their faces. She noticed it every time. She knew she was on to something.

In 2018 she launched Fly By Jing with a Kickstarter campaign. It became the most successful food brand launch in Kickstarter history at the time. Investors had told her Chinese food would not sell at premium price points. The New York Times featured her Sichuan Chili Crisp during the pandemic as home cooks looked for ways to make food feel alive again. The brand took off. It is now stocked in Whole Foods, Target, and major retailers across the United States.

In 2020 she changed her name back from Jenny to Jing.

Her cookbook, The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp, won a James Beard Award.

The thing that gets most founders is that Jing was not building a hot sauce company. She was not optimizing a condiment category. She was doing the one thing she could not stop doing and she built a business around the gravitational pull of that obsession. She was not stressed. She was not spinning. She was entirely clear on the thing. Everything else followed.

That clarity is not a strategy. It is not something you find in a framework or a book. It is what Mark Manson was pointing at. You know what the thing is. The question is whether you are willing to admit it and go all in.

Sources: Fly By Jing, Here Magazine, South China Morning Post, Bristol Farms, James Beard Foundation.

Nobody burns out doing work they care about. They get tired. They get stretched. But they come back. Because the thing pulling them forward is stronger than the thing wearing them down.

Burnout is different. Burnout is what happens when you spend enough years being very productive in the wrong direction. When you are competent at something you do not care about and the world keeps rewarding you for it. When the calendar stays full and the results look fine from the outside and somewhere inside you something has gone very quiet.

The cruel thing about burnout is that it happens to capable people. People who are good enough at the wrong thing to keep going long past the point where a less disciplined person would have quit. You do not burn out by failing. You burn out by succeeding at something that was never yours to begin with.

Most people treat it like an energy problem. They take the holiday. They cut the meetings. They come back rested and within six weeks they are back in exactly the same place. Because they solved for the symptom and left the cause completely untouched.

The cure is not a holiday. The cure is a harder conversation. The one that starts with: is this actually the thing? Not is this sensible or well paid or what I studied for. Is this the thing I would do if the outcome was uncertain and nobody was watching.

If you are tired, rest. You have earned it.

But if you have been resting and coming back to the same heaviness, the same flatness, the same quiet dread on Sunday evenings, that is not tiredness anymore. That is information.

The question is not how do I get more energy. It is am I spending my energy on the right thing.

If yes, tiredness is just the cost of building. You pay it and move on.

If no, no amount of rest will fix it. Only honesty will. And that is the hardest and most necessary work you will do all year.

Better Outcomes to all…

-Faizan…