Friday Forward

When every hardship is removed, so is the reason to show up A few realities about the world today won't make the news. On balance, there's less killing and less physical harm than at almost any point in history. There's also more wealth, physical safety, and abundance. Overall, people are more comfortable than at any time in human existence. And yet, birth rates in the United States keep setting record lows, and the same is true in most other developed countries.

I've wanted to write this one since I started the premium side of Friday Forward, because it's not something I'd share with the general public. Over the last few years, I have found myself let down by multiple leaders I knew personally and held in high regard. Each case came down to a lack of integrity, disregard for others, or extremely poor judgment. In most cases, their behavior contradicted the very principles they espoused in public.

Jess Ekstrom was in college when her family lost everything in the Bernie Madoff fraud scandal. On top of it all, Madoff was family: Jess’ mother's uncle. Years later, Jess visited Madoff in prison; he was incarcerated only about 45 minutes from where she was living, and she was curious how he might explain himself. She expected him to describe his actions in an elusive, complex way she would not understand.

In early 2021, I had a long series of doctor’s appointments. I left each one not with a diagnosis, but with another referral for another test. I felt something was wrong with me and was increasingly frustrated that no doctor could tell me what it was. By that point, I’d felt horrible for the better part of eighteen months. Health and vitality is one of my core values; but core values must describe who you are, not who you want to be, and I was certainly not feeling healthy.

Below is the on-demand replay of the AI training session for anyone who missed it live or wants to revisit it. It's included in a Premium Subscription to Friday Forward. Included is a full replay, a timestamp index so you can jump straight to any section, the key slides from the session, and every link and tool I shared. The Elevate Club Q&A session is next Tuesday, September 22 at 11:30 AM ET. It's one hour, private, and the extended version of the Q&A.

As I've written before, I'm no fan of conspiracy theories. I'm willing to be fooled every now and then rather than go through life suspicious of everyone and everything. Unfortunately, conspiratorial thinking has arguably never been more prevalent. The truth is that many conspiracy theories start as attempts to explain occurrences that are simply unlikely coincidences. I had one of these situations last week in my basement. We've been considering eliminating our home landline.

Pretty early in our company’s history, I realized the value of a quarterly offsite. The earliest ones were at the dining room table of my parents’ house in Vermont. We’d open with a review of the previous quarter, discuss a bunch of issues, and always rush through planning for the next quarter because we consistently ran out of time.

Back in July, I spent four hours on a 100-degree day assembling a nine-drawer IKEA-style dresser for my daughter’s move into her first apartment in New York. This was after unloading an overloaded pickup truck that my wife and I had loaded ourselves and driven to the city.

In November 2023, days before Argentina’s election, 108 prominent economists worldwide signed an open letter in The Guardianwarning about presidential candidate Javier Milei. These experts predicted Milei’s proposed economic policies, which included radical cuts to government spending, deregulation, and opening trade, would cause “devastation” for the Argentine economy, deepen poverty, and worsen inflation. Milei won anyway.

For two years I used AI the way most people do. I put things into the box, asked questions, wrote prompts, and then took the answers and used them in my work. It saved me time, but it never changed how I work.