📣 I enjoy finding truth and education in humor. 🟢 See all 10 live in the classroom now: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/classroom/b5143824?md=367fe0cb353f44f28e1eb493dbe40054 ❓Did you learn something new? If you have a better one comment it below 👇

Okay, so. Yesterday in my last post I said the next post would explain where I've been. Grab your coffee. Or the whiskey. This one earns it. I'm usually the loud one in here. The 1 AM experiments, the folder systems, the posts that run longer than some of your contracts. Then about a month ago I went quiet, and quiet is not my natural state. My natural state is "please, someone make him stop." June 24 was the day the wheels came off. That morning I sat down and let our project manager go. If you've never had to do it, no amount of business books prepares you for the part where there's a real person on the other side of the screen and you're the one changing their whole year. One of those conversations you rehearse in the shower for a week and it still comes out sideways. We handled it with as much care as we could, offered the strong recommendation he honestly earned, and it still sat on my chest the rest of the day. Except the day wasn't done. A few hours later, the strongest CMO on my team gave me a 30-day notice. Same. Day. Two seats gone before dinner. Every founder in here knows the math that starts running in your head at that moment, and none of it is about marketing. ******************************************* Then it got personal. ******************************************* My wife was two weeks past her due date with our newest baby. If you've lived a two-weeks-past-due house, you know the whole family walks around holding its breath. When labor finally started, the plan was a peaceful home birth. What we got was a chaotic ambulance ride and four days in the NICU. Not because the baby needed it. Because the medical system is run by insurance companies and litigation attorneys, and "healthy baby" apparently isn't a discharge criteria anymore. Four days of asking strangers for permission to take home our own healthy kid. When we brought up leaving against medical advice, the not-so-subtle response from the doctors included the words "child protective services." We're not talking about a sick baby.

Despite all the ai hubbub and second brains someone asked what I read and IF I read at all anymore. The answer is most certainly YES. You can make connections that might be missed by a million questions with AI by diving into books and reading your self. Some books may not even have most of their pages on the web especially older ones and those are often my favorite. Here are 4 of my current favorite readings to prepare me for the future (by looking at the past) 1. Mythical Man Month (1972 by Fred Brooks) 2. Psychology of Computer Programing (1971 by Gerald M Weinberg) 3. Augmenting Human Intellect (1962 Douglas Engelbart) 4. The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023 by Rick Ruben) Rick Rubens book is just great in general for business and creative acts.

This is part 2. Part 1 is the month that broke me, and this one hits different if you've read it: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/why-its-been-so-quiet-from-my-crazy-loud-corner-of-the-world Go ahead. I'll wait. ------------------------------------ Okay, on with the story (And a warning, this one is a little longer than my usual, which already tend to be a little long. It's because I'm getting into the real details of the business system I run on, and I want to provide value, not just fluff) My team benched me. Last week of June, a few days after we got home from the NICU, they told me to take three days off. Not suggested. Told. I was a royal mess at home, my family needed me all the way there instead of half there, and everybody could see it except me. Then they went ahead and had the meetings without me. Last post ended on a claim and I promised I would deliver receipts. I said if I didn't have a system, a team trained to run inside it, and accountability to keep us honest, I'd be updating my resume right now instead of chasing more clients. Okay, so this post is the receipt. It's what that actually looked like, for a month straight. ------------------------------------ First, what the thing even is ------------------------------------ We run on EOS. Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's a way of running a company that a lot of small and mid-size businesses use, and it is way less exciting than it sounds, which is exactly why it works. There are six pieces to it. The official names are Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction. In regular human: 1. Vision. Everybody knows where the company is going and how it gets there. 2. People. Right people, right seats, and everybody knows exactly what they own. 3. Data. A handful of numbers you look at every week so you see trouble before it's trouble (in a perfect world). 4. Issues. A running list of what's broken, opportunities, questions, etc, all worked in order, with things actually coming off it.

Ai is getting pretty good these days is this ai or real?