In partnership with
Lovely Human,
We were raised on the gospel of self-reliance. Trust me I know;-)
Figure it out. Do not be a burden. Do not look weak. Do not need help. We are all grit.
Here is the data:
Top performers do not work alone. Ever. They have a coach or a circle of truth tellers the same way a tennis pro has a coach. Someone in the loop, with the playbook, who can call out the blind spot in real time. They change coaches every 18 to 24 months because the version of them that needed Coach A is not the version that needs Coach B.
And please note I am not talking about a fluffy get to know yourself coach who has never actually done what you are doing at this moment. I am talking about those who have been in your shoes operationally.
The right coaching is a thinking partner whose only job is the part of your work you cannot see clearly because you are inside it.
If you are reading this and your private answer is "I should probably get one but I have not made the time," I want to be honest with you. You are not too busy. You are too proud or just too darn in the mud and afraid to show how vulnerable you are at this moment.
And the cost of that pride at this stage of your career is not lost potential. It is lost compound. Every quarter you decide alone is a quarter you compounded the wrong call.
The Anthropic founders have coaches. The OpenAI team has coaches. The Plaid CEO has a coach. The Notion CTO has a coach. They are not weaker than you. They are smarter about the math.
So this week, I want you to do one of two things.
If you have a coach you love, send them a thank-you note. Tell them what they unlocked for you. Coaches are scaffolding, and scaffolding deserves to know it is holding the building up.
If you do not have a coach, stop reading right now and message one person whose career you respect. Ask them who they pay to think with. Not who they admire. Who they pay.
You will be surprised how fast the answer comes back.
The people at the top of the mountain did not get there alone. They paid a sherpa.
Stop confusing your refusal to ask for help with a virtue.
It’s the most expensive habit on your P& L.
Smart starts here.
You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.
AI Updates
A dataset on real human behavior, not scraped text. License it to train your LLM or feed your AI agent’s context graph . Worth a peek.
1 - Basis Theory just made AI agents legitimate buyers.
The next year of e-commerce is not humans clicking checkout buttons. It is your agent doing it for you, and someone has to make that safe.
2 - Anthropic just put coaches in every cubicle on Wall Street.
Ten ready-to-run finance agents shipped this week, plus Moody's data on 600 million companies embedded directly into Claude.
3 - Mayo Clinic's REDMOD model detected pancreatic cancer up to three years before any human radiologist did.
Pancreatic cancer is the silent killer because it shows almost nothing until it is terminal. An AI quietly reading scans buys patients three years of warning.
4 - Peter Thiel just bet $140M that the future of AI compute lives at sea.
Panthalassa's pitch: massive floating orbs harvest wave power, run AI inference on the spot, transmit results via low-Earth-orbit satellites, and use cold ocean water for cooling.
5 - Patrick Collins is asking the question nobody on AI Twitter wants to answer: what does this cost in water?
The conversation in your boardroom about your AI strategy is also a conversation about your water strategy.
6 - Ink & Switch is the research lab quietly rebuilding the future of software around how humans actually think.
Read their "Malleable Software" essay if you have any opinion about what AI should give back to people, not take from them. This is the research the rest of the industry is about to copy.
Lovely Humans in our Community
Be careful who you invite for “a quick chat” in our community. Felix Lee will ruin your calendar…
Leadership Stories
1 - Even Plaid, Notion, Figma and Instagram founders pay for coaches. Why don't you?
Titan is the coaching network for Series A to Series C founders. They interviewed 1,600 coaches and selected 48. Their thesis: top founders change coaches every 18 to 24 months because the version of you that needed Coach A is not the version that needs Coach B.
2 - reMarkable just launched Paper Pure, and it is a quiet rebellion against your laptop.
A black-and-white paper tablet built for thinking. It is a tool that does not interrupt you. Worth the watch.
3 - McKinsey just dropped a 74-page report on what 10,000+ executives are actually doing right now.
The headline finding: human-centric leaders drive 56% higher employee satisfaction and 42% better decisions.
4 - HBR's May piece on "supporting character" leadership is quietly subversive.
The argument: the best leaders right now are not the protagonists. They cultivate intellectual humility, ask better questions, and help their people connect work to values.
Quotes
The people at the top of the mountain did not climb it alone.
Coaching is not weakness. It’s math the best leaders already did.
Your refusal to ask for help is an expensive habit on your P&L.
Religious Focus this month- Taoism
We explore a unusual religion each month not to convert anyone to change believe , but to open up our vision board on how we all of us process joy, suffering, peace and this incredible journey called life.
In a small studio above a canal in Suzhou, a calligraphy teacher named Lin Wei watches her student fail for the seventh time.
The student is Mei Chen, a 38-year-old woman who left a finance career in Shanghai six months ago. She came to study calligraphy because her father, a master calligrapher, died in October without ever teaching her a single character.
Lin Wei sets down her tea.
"You are fighting it," she says.
"I am trying to be precise."
"Precision is not pressure. Precision is yielding to where the brush wants to go and arriving anyway."
Mei tries again. The line is still angry.
Lin Wei walks to the window.
"Look at the water," Lin Wei says. "What does the water do when it meets a wall?"
"It goes around it."
"And what does the wall do, eventually?"
Mei does not answer.
"It surrenders," Lin Wei says. "The wall always surrenders. Always.
Mei lifts her brush again. This time her shoulder drops. Her wrist softens. She lets the bristles touch the paper without forcing the line.
The character that comes out is not perfect.
Lin Wei smiles. "Now you have started."
This is the principle of 不爭, bù zhēng, non-contention. Taoism teaches that strength built on resistance creates more resistance, that the harder you push against a problem, the more you become the problem. Water is the model because water has no ambition and no grip, and yet it shapes the world more thoroughly than any general or any king.
For the senior leader, the founder, the parent, the teacher, the artist: ask yourself this week where you have been forcing a line. Where your wrist is locked. Where you are trying to dominate a situation that is asking you to listen.
Guiding question:
Where in your life right now are you the wall, and where are you the water?
Making the World a Better Place
1 - Iceland is asking UNESCO to recognize bathing as cultural heritage.
Their argument: the ritual of communal bathing in geothermal pools is not a tourist gimmick. It is a thousand-year practice of restoration, social glue and quiet leadership.
2 - Nuclear waste is reusable. France has been doing it for decades. Why isn't anyone else?
DW Planet A's reporter spends 14 minutes inside ORANO, the French company that recycles spent nuclear fuel on a commercial scale. The energy story we keep telling ourselves leaves out the part where the answer already exists, in another country, working at scale.
3 - Hawaii is building two permanent coral nurseries on the seafloor.
The REEFrame project, backed by a $9M NOAA grant and led by Conservation International Hawai'i, is one of the most ambitious reef restoration efforts ever attempted.
