Ever since I cut the chains of being an employee, I've had some tremendously unproductive days where I sit vacuously in front of my MSI laptop and freeze. There are so many potential things I can do to advance my projects, but I am the only one making the decisions for the projects. With limitless options on how to conduct my days sometimes I am still unproductive. I've spoken to other founders about this entrepreneur block... wondering if anyone else has experience with this and what you have done to remedy it?

If you have not listened to David's latest podcast on Michael Ovitz, you need to. It's amazing. Here are the high-leverage moves you can make today based on Ovitz's principles covered in the podcast: 1. Build Your Frame of Reference Starting Now Ovitz subscribed to 210 magazines. He looked at 200 images of art daily. He studied every filmmaker in history before signing directors. Your move: Pick your industry's history and study it systematically. If you're in real estate, read every major deal structure from the past 50 years. In software? Study every major acquisition and why it succeeded or failed. Commit 90 minutes daily to building your knowledge base. Set up feeds for 20-30 industry publications. Skim everything. Deep-dive on what matters. In six months, you'll spot patterns your competitors miss. 2. Show Up Before Everyone Else Ovitz arrived at 6 AM when everyone else showed up at 9. Those extra hours gave him access to 70 years of Hollywood history in file cabinets. Your move: Add two hours to your day, one before work, one after. Use it for deep work your competitors aren't doing. Study the industry. Read books. Build systems. This isn't about grinding. It's about information asymmetry. When you know what they don't, you win. 3. Stop Asking, Start Creating Context Rockefeller never asked Ovitz for money. He had a three-hour dinner about art, politics, and travel. Ovitz donated more than he planned. Your move: Stop pitching. Start building relationships where the decision becomes inevitable. Before your next big ask, whether it's a partnership, investment, or major sale, have three conversations that aren't about the deal. Make them want to work with you before you ever bring it up. 4. Do a Postmortem on Every Failure Ovitz lost the ninth-grade election. He spent two years analyzing why, rebuilding his social network, and practicing public speaking. He won the next two elections by wide margins. Your move: Take your last failure, lost deal, failed product launch, bad hire, and do a complete postmortem. Write down what went wrong, what you missed, and what you'd do differently. Then build the skills or relationships you lacked.

Please watch this video to understand the changes that are going to be made, and why! 1) Fanatics of Founders will be changing to Habit Engineer. Why? Because, in my efforts to follow Naval Ravikant's idea of "finding work that feels like play" (Episode #191) and Charlie Munger's idea of "finding a simple idea and taking it seriously", I have accepted the fact that I need to become a life coach, and teach the people I am serving how to engineer habits that ACTUALLY stick. This is what I am choosing to focus my life on, and as David has said recently... "if I had to simplify and distill what I've learned from this entire project - nine years, and almost 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs read to one word, that word...is focus." This is me focusing. 2) The mastery tracks from Founders episodes are GOING to continue! So if you've been enjoying those, don't leave. I organize my life into 5 different categories - Phyiscal, Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, and Financial. I will be organizing the mastery tracks in the Classroom category into those 5 sections as well, and start pulling from other sources than just the Founders podcast that I have found to be incredibly beneficial (books, movies, philosophers, influential thinkers, etc) and turning those into mastery tracks as well to help round out the idea of Ed Thorpe's to "optimize for life as a whole" in my own way. 3) Habit Engineer life coaching will be a tier that is available NOW! Contained in Habit Engineering (the life coaching system I developed with a 93% success rate) is the following process: 1. Teach them the overall system; the purposes - to build a character of integrity - To build their discipline muscle - To help them achieve any goal they set their mind to in life. 2. Identify which area of life they want to change the most in right now (physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, financial), and why? - How? ask them “what’s the #1 thing you want to change about yourself right now?”

This was in today’s WSJ and I had to share with the group. Chicago State University is running an experiment you don’t see often on a college campus anymore: They’re teaching students how to get rich, not “middle-manager comfortable,” but eight-figure wealthy. A group of mostly Black, working-class students are taking a “Mastering Wealth” class taught by Pete Kadens, an entrepreneur worth roughly $250 million. Instead of résumé tips, they’re setting explicit net-worth targets of $3M, $10M, $25M, even $50M, then building business plans to get there. These students are balancing jobs, bills, kids, and real-world stress. Yet they’re pitching startups, studying pain points, and learning from billionaires who drop in to speak. The goal isn’t incremental progress. It’s generational wealth. And it’s working. You can feel the shift in their expectations. Programs like this should exist everywhere. Not motivational fluff. Not “here’s how you dress for an interview.” But real wealth education for people who’ve never been told they’re allowed to aim big. Kadens is right: When someone in a poor neighborhood becomes wildly successful, the blast radius is huge. Jobs, confidence, role models, capital all of it spreads. We need more of this in the world. But Here’s the Trap I See Coming Ambition isn’t the enemy. Lack of focus is. Reading these stories, you see students chasing three, four, five business ideas at once; aromatherapy, counseling, real estate, publishing, cleaning businesses, tax prep, cannabis ventures, patents, franchising. It’s contagious optimism, but it’s also dangerous. Anyone who listens to Founders Podcast knows the pattern: Every great builder picked one thing, got world-class at it, and earned the right to expand later. Jobs didn’t build Apple and a side hustle. Nike didn’t start with shoes plus a cleaning company plus a tax-prep business. Bezos didn’t build Amazon and an aromatherapy brand on the weekends. The students in this class need the same message: