Hey Folks!

I'm writing from Boulder where I’ve been all week for quarterly team offsite, 3 x masterminds, and waaay too little sleep. My son Everett (14) came with me which has been a treat. Late send, and I am very ready to be home. A couple things on my mind…

1. How To Network In A Live Room: I discovered this maybe 10 years ago on a trip to NY. I missed my flight home one night, so I had an evening to burn and went to a startup meetup. Since I hadn’t planned to be there, I decided to just have fun and connect with people with zero expectation of getting anything useful out of it. It turns out I got more meaningful value from that meetup than I ever had from an event I went to strategically. So when I go to live meetups (like all week this week), the strategy is simple: have fun, and be as helpful as possible to everyone in the room without discrimination. In practice that means getting genuinely curious about what someone is working on, and then asking myself if I can introduce this person to someone else in this room, or someone in my network, or send them something that helped me with the same problem? That’s kind of it. If nothing else, you have fun.

2. Call Me Captain Kirk: Had this conversation 4x this week. I was in a dark place 14 months ago or so around AI - reading and listening to a lot of doomers, feeling scared I'd be replaced as a digital marketer and entrepreneur. At some point I made a turn (may have written about it here) where I accepted that the worst-case scenario is horrible and outside my control, so I might as well believe and act on the best-case scenario: through AI, we're all Captain Kirks now with an infinite crew on our Starship Enterprise - free to explore, build companies, products, art, music, whatever. That's a genuinely exciting opportunity. Will there be a AI's that do what I do? For sure. But that doesn't stop me from going on adventures with my crew of robots. Agree/disagree? (Repeat from earlier newsletter bc it keeps coming up.)

3. No One Benefits From An Anxious Leader: My buddy Brian articulated and embodied this this week, and I think it’s true in the home and in business. Anxiety can obviously be useful as a signal. Something is off, pay attention. But sitting in it only creates more problems downstream. There is zero benefit to your family in you marinating in anxiety, and zero benefit to your business. So: If there’s a lot of chaos in your home or your organization right now, before you try to address the chaos, ask yourself: am I a calming and confident presence for these people? If the answer is no, address that first. As leaders, staying calm and staying in reality is what gives us a chance at making much better decisions. As they say in Dune, “Fear is the mind-killer.”

That’s it for this week! If you resonate w/ any of these, would love to hear your thoughts!

Best,

Blake

P.S. Our book comes out October 13! We're putting together a small group of people to read it early and post a review on launch day - you'd get a free digital copy in a couple weeks. If you want in, reply with "in" and I'll add you.