If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

​Sponsored by MyFitnessPal​: ​I've been using MyFitnessPal for years and it's one of the most useful apps on my phone. You can optimize your sleep, your schedule, your workflow, but if your nutrition is off, none of it performs the way it should. MFP is how I keep that piece dialed in. I log a meal in about 10 seconds, the database has everything in it, and it connects with whatever wearables or health apps you're already using. If you want one tool that quietly makes everything else work better, this is the one I'd start with. Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT for 15% off Premium.

Carl Lewis was the fastest man alive and he never ran at full speed. There’s a lesson in that for everything you’re doing right now.

There’s a story about Carl Lewis that changed how I think about effort.

Lewis won nine Olympic gold medals in sprinting. He was one of the fastest humans who ever lived. And if you watched his races, you’d notice something strange. At the 40-meter mark of a 100-meter sprint, he was almost always in last place or close to it.

A sprint coach spent a year studying this, trying to figure out how a guy who was trailing at the halfway point kept winning by the end. What he found was that Lewis wasn’t a slow starter. He was running the same way from start to finish. His breathing didn’t change. His form didn’t change. His face stayed relaxed the entire race.

Everyone else was doing the opposite. At the 50 and 60-meter mark, the other runners would start pushing for the finish. Their fists clenched, their jaws tightened. They were giving it everything they had, and that everything was slowing them down. The tension in their muscles from trying at 100% was working against the very speed they were chasing.

Lewis just stayed at 85%. Same form, same breathing, same relaxed face from the gun to the tape. And he breezed past all of them.

The sprint coach called it the 85% rule: if you tell most competitive athletes to run at 85% of their capacity, they’ll run faster than if you tell them to run at 100%. Because at 100%, the tension takes over. And tension makes you slower.

This isn’t just about running

I heard this story on a podcast a few years ago and it stuck with me because it put words to something I’d been feeling in my own work for a long time.

My best podcast episodes are never the ones I prepare the hardest for. The ones where I over-research, over-plan the questions, go in with a rigid structure in my head. Those feel tight. The conversation doesn’t breathe. I’m so focused on hitting every point that I miss the moments that would have made the episode great.

The best ones are the conversations where I know enough to be dangerous and then let the conversation go where it goes. Where I’m at about 85% of my preparation ceiling and the remaining 15% is room to be present, to follow a thread I didn’t expect, to listen instead of waiting for my turn to ask the next question on my list.

I think most people have a version of this. The presentation you rehearsed so many times that it came out stiff. The sales call where you followed the script so tightly that you missed the thing the client was telling you.

The harder you try, the more tense you get. And the tension crowds out the thing that makes you good.

The tension tax

There’s a book from the 1970s called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey that gets at the same idea from a different direction. Gallwey coached tennis for years and noticed something he didn’t expect: his players improved most when he coached them less. The more instructions he gave, the worse they played. The more he stepped back and let them play, the better they got.

His explanation was that we operate with two selves. There’s the conscious self, the one that’s trying, analyzing, correcting, overthinking every move. And there’s the subconscious self, the one that knows how to play because it’s absorbed thousands of hours of practice.

When you try at 100%, the conscious self takes over. It grabs the wheel and starts micromanaging every movement. The subconscious self, the one that’s actually skilled, gets pushed to the back seat. You’re performing worse because the part of you that’s trying is getting in the way of the part of you that knows.

I think about this when I see founders who are so deep in every detail of their business that nothing moves without them. They’re trying at 100%. They’re in every meeting, reviewing every decision. And the business runs slower because of it. The tension of maximum involvement is choking the thing they built.

Where 85% changes things

The 85% rule isn’t about being lazy or doing less for the sake of doing less. It’s about recognizing that the last 15% of effort you’re adding is usually tension, not value.

In my own work, the difference is obvious when I look back. Some of the best content I’ve published had a looseness to it that my most polished work doesn’t have. The polished version was technically better. The loose version connected more. And the best conversations I’ve had, on the podcast or anywhere else, are the ones where I know my points but I’m not performing them. I’m present enough to respond to what’s happening instead of what I planned for. That 15% of unused preparation is what leaves room for the thing you couldn’t have scripted.

Alan Watts put it in a way that stuck with me: “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” It sounds like he’s talking about meditation. He’s talking about everything. The water clears when you stop stirring it. The last 15% of effort is just stirring.

Why 85% is harder than it sounds

You’d think this would be easy. Someone tells you to try less hard and get better results. Who wouldn’t take that deal?

But most people can’t do it, and the reason isn’t discipline. It’s that being the person who tries hardest has become part of how you see yourself. You’re the one who outworks everyone. You’re the one who stays latest and prepares most and grinds when other people coast. That story matters to you. In some cases, it’s the main story you tell about yourself.

Dropping to 85% means letting go of that. Even if the results are better at 85%, you’d miss the identity. You’d look around the room and not be the hardest worker anymore, and something about that feels like losing even if you’re winning by every other measure.

I’ve noticed this in myself. There are days where I know I’m over-preparing for something, where I can feel the diminishing returns setting in, and I keep going anyway. Not because the extra work is making the thing better. Because stopping feels like I’m not taking it seriously enough. The effort is for me, not for the outcome. And that’s worth being honest about.

The hard part

The reason this is difficult for ambitious people is that we’ve been trained to believe more effort always equals better results. The entire culture around success is built on maximum output. Grind harder. Give 110%. Nobody ever gets a standing ovation for saying “I gave it 85%.”

But Carl Lewis did. Nine gold medals at 85%. While everyone around him was clenching their way to second place, he stayed relaxed and won.

The question I keep asking myself now is simple: where in my life am I clenching? Where would 85% actually get me further than the 100% that’s leaving me tight and performing below what I’m capable of?

The answer, every time I check, is more places than I’d like to admit. I think yours will be too.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Entrepreneur Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

Read more

The Idea

Nobody is going to find you on their own. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how much experience you have, or how much better your thing is than everyone else’s. If people don’t know your name, you don’t exist to them.

Daymond John kept coming back to this when we spoke last week. He started FUBU with a sewing machine in his mother’s house in Queens making wool hats that were fine but nothing that would blow you away. He wasn’t the best designer in New York and he knew it. But he also knew something that most of the better designers didn’t, which is that the person who gets seen first usually wins, and the gap between first and best almost never closes the way people think it will. So instead of perfecting the product, he drove to the Coliseum Mall and handed hats to whoever would take one. He figured out which rappers were coming through the city and got FUBU on them before anyone was paying for that kind of thing. By the time the bigger brands noticed what was happening, FUBU was already the name, and once you own the name it’s almost impossible for someone to take it from you. He turned that into $6 billion in global sales.

There’s a study from 1992 at the University of Pittsburgh that I think explains why this works. Researchers had four women attend a college lecture throughout a semester. One showed up zero times, one five, one ten, one fifteen. They never spoke to a single person, never introduced themselves, just walked in, sat down, and left. At the end of the semester, students rated the woman who showed up fifteen times as more likeable, more attractive, and more similar to them than the woman who never showed up. She just kept showing up.

Psychologists have a name for this, the mere exposure effect, and Daymond was doing this in Queens twenty years before I ever read about it. He got FUBU in front of people before it was anywhere close to finished, and by the time the quality caught up, he already had the name. Now this doesn’t mean you can show up with garbage and win. You can’t. People remember a bad experience just as easily as they remember a familiar face. But the people I talk to who are stuck, the founders and the creators who feel like they’re doing everything right and still not breaking through, they’re almost never stuck because the work isn’t good enough. They’re stuck because they’re invisible. And being invisible with a great product is a worse position than being everywhere with a good one, because the market can’t choose what it doesn’t know exists.

Quote

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” — Oscar Wilde

Wilde was arguably the first personal brand. He showed up to parties, gave interviews, made himself impossible to ignore, and he did all of that before most people had read a word he’d written. The reputation came first. The work followed it.

Question

How many people would pay for what you do if they knew you existed?

Listen

Daymond John: If Nobody Knows Your Name You’ve Already Lost. This is where the whole newsletter came from, and there’s a lot in it I couldn’t fit above. Daymond built FUBU from his mom’s house into a $6 billion brand, became one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank, and he talks about what he looks for when entrepreneurs pitch him, why the founders with the best offering often lose to the ones who are just everywhere, and what he’d do if he were starting from zero today with nothing but a phone.

Read

The Power of Broke by Daymond John. Daymond’s argument in this book is that having no money forces a kind of creativity that money actually prevents. FUBU didn’t win because it was the best streetwear on the market. It won because he had no choice but to put it in front of people using the only resource he had, which was himself. If any of this landed for you, this book is what it looks like when someone is actually living it with nothing.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my ​Podcast​, and connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​.

— Scott

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Start here > newsletter.scottdclary.com​

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​Sponsor: Huel​​

Here’s what nobody tells you about the days you eat like garbage: it’s never because you wanted to. It’s because you ran out of time, ran out of options, and picked whatever was closest. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s a logistics problem.

​H​uel Black Edition is the logistics fix. 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a full meal for under $5 — ready in 60 seconds flat. I keep one at my desk and one in my bag. When the schedule goes sideways, I don’t have to choose between skipping a meal and making a bad one. The decision is already made.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​​​​huel.com/scott​​​​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

John Morgan - Morgan & Morgan Founder ($2B/Year Revenue) | Billionaire Lawyer Says He Shouldn’t Be Rich

John Morgan is the founder of Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury law firm in the United States. Since founding the firm in 1988, he’s grown it to more than 1,000 attorneys and 6,000 employees operating in all 50 states, generating over $2 billion in annual revenue. A self-made billionaire, Morgan built the firm around its “For the People” mission — a commitment born from his own family’s difficult experience with the legal system after his brother was paralyzed in a lifeguarding accident.

Rachel Cruze - 2x #1 NYT Bestselling Author | The Trap That Keeps Most People Broke and Miserable

Rachel Cruze is a two-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, financial expert, and sought-after speaker who helps people build healthy relationships with money. Known for her practical, relatable approach, she teaches audiences how to break free from the trap of comparison, debt, and overspending that keeps so many people broke and miserable—guiding them instead toward financial peace, generosity, and lasting confidence with their finances.

Alex Morton - Bestselling Author & Featured in Forbes | Dorm Room to $75M by 33 and Why He Says Self Belief Is the Only Skill That Matters

Alex Morton is a bestselling author and entrepreneur featured in Forbes, known for building a $75 million business by the age of 33 after starting out in a college dorm room. Drawing on his own journey from student to self-made success, he now shares his story and insights with audiences worldwide, championing the idea that self-belief—more than strategy or circumstance—is the one skill that separates those who achieve extraordinary success from those who don't.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• ​Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)​

• ​10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)​

• ​Newsletter (321k Subs)​

• ​Social Media​

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

​Sponsored by MyFitnessPal​: ​I've been using MyFitnessPal for years and it's one of the most useful apps on my phone. You can optimize your sleep, your schedule, your workflow, but if your nutrition is off, none of it performs the way it should. MFP is how I keep that piece dialed in. I log a meal in about 10 seconds, the database has everything in it, and it connects with whatever wearables or health apps you're already using. If you want one tool that quietly makes everything else work better, this is the one I'd start with. Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT for 15% off Premium.

You already have the body of your last 1,000 meals, the mind of your last 1,000 conversations, and the bank account of your last 1,000 decisions.

What did you have for lunch yesterday?

Maybe you remember, maybe you don’t. It probably didn’t feel important. One meal, one choice, gone by 1pm. But that meal is one of the last thousand you’ve eaten, and your body right now is the sum of those thousand meals. Not one of them felt like it mattered in the moment. All of them are showing up in the mirror this morning.

Your bank account works the same way. Nobody goes broke in one afternoon. Nobody builds wealth in one paycheck. Your balance right now is the receipt for a thousand small financial decisions you made over the last few years. The subscription you forgot to cancel. The round you picked up when you shouldn’t have. The savings transfer you said you’d set up next month for twelve months in a row. None of them felt like decisions at the time. Together they’re the exact reason your account looks the way it does.

Annie Dillard wrote something that I come back to more than almost anything else I’ve read: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” It sounds obvious when you first hear it. Then you sit with it for a while and realize how much it explains about where you are right now and why you keep being surprised by it.

The receipt is always honest

People ask “how did I get here?” all the time. About their health, their money, their relationships, their careers. And I think most people ask it like it’s a genuine mystery. Like they went to sleep one night and woke up in a life they didn’t choose.

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The Idea

A psychologist named Richard Wiseman handed two groups of people the same newspaper and told them to count the photographs inside. The first group, people who described themselves as consistently lucky, finished in seconds. The second group, people who described themselves as consistently unlucky, took about two minutes. Same newspaper. Same task.

The reason was on page two. In huge print, taking up half the page, were the words “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Right next to it, in the same size, was a second message: “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The lucky people saw both messages almost immediately. The unlucky people flipped right past them because they were so focused on counting photographs that they never looked at anything else on the page.

Wiseman ran experiments like this for ten years at the University of Hertfordshire, studying over four hundred people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky. His conclusion, after a decade, was that the unlucky people weren’t actually unluckier. They were just too focused on the thing right in front of them to notice anything happening around it. The lucky people were more relaxed, more open, and they tended to see things that they weren’t specifically trying to find. What looked like luck from the outside was really just a different way of paying attention.

I sat down with John Morgan on the podcast this week. He founded Morgan & Morgan in 1988 and turned it into the largest personal injury law firm in the country. Over a thousand attorneys, six thousand employees, more than $2 billion a year in revenue, all fifty states. The episode is called Billionaire Lawyer Says He Shouldn’t Be Rich, and he means it. He genuinely believes a huge part of what happened to him was luck, and he’s suspicious of anyone who won’t admit the same. But the thing I kept noticing as he told the story is how much of what he calls luck looks a lot like what Wiseman found in his research. John started the firm because his brother was paralyzed in a lifeguarding accident and the family couldn’t get decent legal help, so none of the motivation was accidental. And the way he grew after that, the way he talks about noticing opportunities in markets that nobody else was paying attention to yet, he wasn’t getting lucky. He was reading the whole newspaper while everyone else was counting photographs.

Quote

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca

He wrote that as one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome, and he spent most of his later writing trying to explain to people that his fortune wasn’t random. Wiseman’s research, two thousand years later, is saying the same thing.

Question

When’s the last time you looked up from what you were doing long enough to notice something you weren’t looking for?

Listen

John Morgan: Billionaire Lawyer Says He Shouldn’t Be Rich. This is the conversation that’s been in my head all week. John started Morgan & Morgan after his brother’s accident, grew it into all fifty states, and spends over $400 million a year on advertising, which is more than most companies make in revenue. But what surprised me is how much of the conversation ended up being about the things that can’t be bought or planned for, the meetings that happened by accident, the timing that couldn’t have been engineered. He gives luck most of the credit, and I think that says more about how he sees the world than anything else in the interview.

Read

The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman. This is the book the newspaper experiment comes from. Wiseman spent ten years studying four hundred people and came away with something I didn’t expect, which is that you can teach yourself to be luckier by changing a few small things about how you move through your day. It’s not the usual self-help thing. It’s a psychologist showing you the data on why some people keep stumbling into opportunities and other people keep walking past them, and the gap between those two groups is a lot smaller than you’d think.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my ​Podcast​, and connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​.

— Scott

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

​Sponsor: Huel​​

Here’s what nobody tells you about the days you eat like garbage: it’s never because you wanted to. It’s because you ran out of time, ran out of options, and picked whatever was closest. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s a logistics problem.

​H​uel Black Edition is the logistics fix. 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a full meal for under $5 — ready in 60 seconds flat. I keep one at my desk and one in my bag. When the schedule goes sideways, I don’t have to choose between skipping a meal and making a bad one. The decision is already made.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​​​​huel.com/scott​​​​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Ronnen Harary - Spin Master Co-Founder & Chairman | How Two Friends With Zero Business Experience Built a $2.2B Toy Empire

Ronnen Harary is the co-founder and chair of Spin Master, the global children’s entertainment company behind PAW Patrol, Bakugan, Hatchimals, and the Rubik’s Cube. In 1994, alongside two co-founders, he turned $10,000 into a publicly traded powerhouse generating over $2 billion in annual revenue across 190+ countries — all with zero prior business experience. His book, No Experience Necessary, breaks down how curiosity and action-driven confidence beat conventional credentials. He also founded the Toy Movement, bringing toys to children in underserved communities, and the Ronnen Harary Foundation, supporting young people with learning disabilities.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• ​Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)​

• ​10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)​

• ​Newsletter (321k Subs)​

• ​Social Media​

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

​Sponsored by MyFitnessPal​: ​I've been using MyFitnessPal for years and it's one of the most useful apps on my phone. You can optimize your sleep, your schedule, your workflow, but if your nutrition is off, none of it performs the way it should. MFP is how I keep that piece dialed in. I log a meal in about 10 seconds, the database has everything in it, and it connects with whatever wearables or health apps you're already using. If you want one tool that quietly makes everything else work better, this is the one I'd start with. Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT for 15% off Premium.

You’re warm, patient, and generous with people who don’t matter. The people who matter most get what’s left over.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re at a dinner, a work event, a party. You’re sitting next to someone you just met. And for the next hour or two, you’re the best version of yourself. You’re asking questions, following up on things they said ten minutes ago, laughing, making them feel like the most interesting person in the room. You’re all there.

Then you leave. You check your phone. Someone you love sent you a text while you were gone, asking a simple question. You type back one word and don’t think about it again.

Two hours of your best self for someone you’ll probably never see again. One word for someone who’s been in your corner for years.

We all do this. I do it. I catch myself doing it more than I’d like. And the strange part is that it doesn’t feel like a choice while it’s happening. You don’t decide to bring less energy to the people who matter most. You just do, and it’s so natural that nobody questions it until someone close to you gets tired of always getting the version of you that’s already been spent.

The way you show up for a first impression versus the way you show up for a Tuesday night at home. The way you listen when you’re trying to earn someone versus the way you listen when you’ve already got them. Same person. Completely different effort. And the effort goes in exactly the wrong direction.

Why strangers get your best

The answer is simple and it’s worth sitting with for a second. Strangers can leave.

The person at the dinner could have turned to talk to someone else. The new client could have gone with a competitor. That uncertainty, even when it’s small, is what makes you show up. You bring energy because you’re not sure the person will stick around.

The people who love you already stuck around. And somewhere along the way, that safety started working against them. Your brain treats their loyalty like permission to coast. They’re not going anywhere, so the effort gets redirected to wherever the outcome is still up in the air.

I think about this as the safety tax. The people closest to you pay it every day, and the price is that their loyalty earns them less of you, not more. The worst part is that from your side, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything wrong. You’re being “comfortable.” You’re being “yourself.” But the gap between comfort and carelessness is a lot smaller than we like to think, and the people on the other side of it can feel the difference even when they can’t name it.

What they see that you don’t

Someone who loves you watches you be warm and funny and present for a room full of people you just met. Then the two of you leave and you go quiet. You’re tired. You’re scrolling. You give half-answers to real questions.

They won’t say “you’re nicer to strangers than you are to me” because it sounds petty even when it’s true. So it comes out in other ways. In a fight about something that seems small but carries the weight of months of feeling like they come last.

From your side, you’re just unwinding. You were “on” for two hours and now you’re home with the person you don’t need to be “on” for. That feels like trust.

From their side, it looks like they’re the one place you’ve decided you don’t need to try.

Why we keep doing it

Alain de Botton wrote something about this that I keep coming back to. He said we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, but it’s only with the people we love most that we allow ourselves to be unreasonable. His take is almost generous. He frames it as a sign of deep trust. You’re only that unguarded with someone you believe won’t leave.

There’s truth in that. But I think there’s a simpler thing happening too. We stop trying because we can afford to. Strangers carry the risk of walking away. The people who love us carry a near-guarantee of staying. And most of us, without meaning to, send our best energy wherever the risk is highest instead of wherever the love is deepest.

That’s worth noticing. Not because it makes you a bad person. It doesn’t. It makes you a normal person. But noticing it is the first step toward deciding you don’t want normal to be the standard for how you treat the people who chose you.

This shows up at work too

The new hire gets your patience for six weeks. A year later they get one-line messages and an expectation to figure things out on their own.

Your longest client gets slower replies than the new prospect. The prospect gets the thoughtful proposal while the loyal client gets the recycled deck. The people who believed in you first end up getting the least from you, because their commitment made them feel safe, and safe means less effort.

What I’m working on

I don’t have a framework for this. I just have a question I’ve been asking myself when I catch the pattern happening.

If this person could leave as easily as a stranger, would I show up any differently right now?

If the answer is yes, then the only thing standing between them and my best is the fact that they chose to stay. And I don’t want to be someone who gives people less for choosing me. I think most of us don’t want that. We just haven’t noticed how often we’re doing it.

The people who love you deserve at least what the strangers get. Probably a lot more. And the only thing it costs is paying attention at the moments when you’re most tempted not to.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

Read more

The Idea

Most of the founders I’ve had on the podcast will tell you the same thing if you ask them honestly, which is that the hardest part of building a company isn’t the part where nothing is working. It’s the part where things are working and you still feel like you’re behind.

Dave Ramsey got into this on the podcast last week. The episode is called Why Most Entrepreneurs Are Miserable Running Their Own Companies, and I expected him to talk about the grind, the hours, the early years. He did, but the thing that stuck with me is bigger than that. Dave had $4 million in real estate by 26. By 28 he was bankrupt and the sheriff was at his door trying to take his daughter’s crib. He rebuilt from there into a company doing $300 million a year with 1,100 employees and 18 million people listening every week. And what he kept coming back to is that even while he was building all of that, the thing that made him miserable wasn’t the difficulty. It was that he was always looking at how far he still had to go instead of how far he’d already come. And the further along he got, the worse it felt, because the target kept moving.

There’s a study from Cornell that I think explains what Dave was describing better than anything I’ve read. In 1995, a group of psychologists went back through footage of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and watched the faces of the medalists on the podium. Gold medalists looked happy, obviously. But between silver and bronze, the bronze medalists consistently looked happier than the silver medalists who’d finished ahead of them. They ran the same analysis across every Olympics from 2000 to 2016 and it held up every time. The reason is that silver medalists think about the gold they almost won, and bronze medalists think about how close they came to going home with nothing. The person who did better feels worse because they’re looking in a different direction.

I think that’s what happens to a lot of people who start companies or pursue anything ambitious. You go in as the bronze medalist, looking back at where you came from, grateful for the shot. And somewhere along the way you become the silver medalist, looking at everyone who’s further ahead, and the thing you’ve built stops feeling like an achievement and starts feeling like a gap. Dave told me the weight finally lifted when he stopped measuring himself against where he thought he was supposed to be. He didn’t say it like advice. He said it like something that took him years to figure out and he wished he’d learned it earlier.

Quote

“No man is happy who does not think himself so.” — Publilius Syrus

He was a freed slave in ancient Rome who ended up becoming one of the most quoted writers of his era. That line is two thousand years old and the Olympic research landed on the same idea with a camera and a podium.

Question

When you think about where you are right now, are you measuring from where you started or from where you think you should be?

Listen

​Dave Ramsey: Why Most Entrepreneurs Are Miserable Running Their Own Companies​. This is the conversation that got me thinking about all of this, and there’s a lot more in it than what I covered above. Dave talks about the early years when he was doing everything himself and it felt like a treadmill that never turned off, and he gets very specific about what actually changed for him, not just financially but in how he thought about what he was building. If you’ve ever been in the middle of something you chose and wondered why it doesn’t feel the way you expected it to, this one is worth your time.

Read

​The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz​. Schwartz uses the bronze medalist research as one of his main examples and builds a much bigger argument around it about how more options and more ambition actually make people less satisfied with what they end up with. It changed how I think about why some people can build something genuinely impressive and still feel like they’re losing.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my ​​Podcast​​, and connect with me on ​​YouTube​​ / ​​Twitter​​.

— Scott

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

​Sponsor: Huel​​

Here’s what nobody tells you about the days you eat like garbage: it’s never because you wanted to. It’s because you ran out of time, ran out of options, and picked whatever was closest. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s a logistics problem.

​H​uel Black Edition is the logistics fix. 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a full meal for under $5 — ready in 60 seconds flat. I keep one at my desk and one in my bag. When the schedule goes sideways, I don’t have to choose between skipping a meal and making a bad one. The decision is already made.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​​​​huel.com/scott​​​​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Naveen Jain - Billionaire Founder of Viome, Moon Express & Author of Counterintuitive | He Quit Microsoft With No Plan and Built a $40B Internet Company

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and technology executive best known as the founder of InfoSpace, which he built from six employees into one of the largest internet companies in the American Northwest during the dot-com era, reaching a peak market capitalization of $31 billion. In 2003, he left InfoSpace to launch Intelius, one of the first companies to offer public records information to consumers, growing it to over $150 million in annual revenue and 500 employees before its sale in 2015. He co-founded Moon Express in 2010, where he serves as executive chairman and which became the first private company approved by the U.S. government to land on the lunar surface, and founded Viome in 2016, where he is CEO applying AI and RNA sequencing to precision health.

Ruben Hassid - Author of “How to AI” | The #1 AI Teacher (Billions of Views) Explains Who Survives and Who Doesn’t

Ruben Hassid is the writer behind "How to AI," a Substack newsletter with over 805,000 subscribers, ranked #1 in Education and one of the fastest-growing AI newsletters in the world. With 890K+ LinkedIn followers and billions of views on his content, which teaches people how to use AI, Hassid has become one of the most prominent voices in practical AI adoption. He consults Fortune 500 companies on how to actually implement AI, and his guides have built a massive following of professionals who want to use the tools, not just talk about them.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• ​Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)​

• ​10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)​

• ​Newsletter (321k Subs)​

• ​Social Media​

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

You sent the text. They didn’t reply. You know exactly what it means. Except you don’t, and the story you invented is doing more damage than whatever they actually meant.

You sent a message to someone you care about. A friend, a colleague, a partner. Something that mattered to you. Maybe you put yourself out there a little. Maybe it was just a question that needed an answer. Either way, you hit send and then you waited.

They didn’t respond.

An hour passed. Then a few more. Then a day. And somewhere in that silence, you started writing. Not on paper. In your head. A story about what the silence meant.

They saw it and chose not to reply. They’re pulling away. They don’t value you the way you value them. They’re upset about something you did last week and this is the punishment. The thing you said at dinner crossed a line and now they’re creating distance. You know what this is. You’ve seen this before.

By the time they text back the next morning with “sorry, crazy day, what’s up?” you’ve lived inside a narrative for 18 hours that had nothing to do with what happened. What happened was their phone died, or their kid threw up, or they read your message while boarding a plane and forgot. The explanation was boring. Your story was a novel.

You didn’t experience the boring explanation for those 18 hours. You experienced the novel. Your body responded to the story you wrote, not to the thing that happened. The tightness in your chest, the confrontation you rehearsed in the shower. All of it was real, and all of it was based on fiction.

The Razor

There’s an old principle in philosophy called Hanlon’s Razor. The original version is blunt: never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. The version that fits daily life is softer: never assume it was on purpose when it’s explained just as well by someone being busy, distracted, or having a bad day.

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The Idea

In the 1970s, banks started installing a machine built to do a bank teller’s job. By the mid-90s there were hundreds of thousands of ATMs in America, and everyone assumed the teller was finished. The bank managers buying the machines assumed it too.

The opposite happened. Teller employment went up. Around 485,000 tellers in 1985, about 527,000 by 2002. The machine that automated the job created more of the jobs.

An economist named James Bessen figured out why. ATMs cut the number of tellers a branch needed from about 21 to 13, which made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened 43% more of them. And the work itself got better. The machine took the cash counting, the most repetitive part of the day, and the tellers who moved to what was left became relationship people. Advising customers, solving the weird problems, selling. Bessen said the ATM basically turned the teller into a marketing person.

This story has been stuck in my head since a conversation on the podcast last week. Ruben Hassid teaches millions of people how to use AI, he built the fastest-growing newsletter (How to AI) on Substack doing it, and halfway through the conversation he said something that took me right back to the tellers. AI is not making all of us better, he said, it’s making mediocre much better. He doesn’t pay his lawyer to write contracts anymore, AI does that in seconds. He pays his lawyer to find the gaps, the stuff that isn’t inside the AI. The contract is the cash counting. The judgment is everything else. Same story, fifty years later. The tellers who did fine were the ones who figured out early which part of the job the machine was going to take, and got good at the other part before they had to.

Quote

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler

He wrote that in 1970, the same decade ATMs started showing up in banks. The tellers who survived were the ones who unlearned cash counting and relearned relationship building. Fifty years later, same test, different machine.

Question

What’s the cash counting in your job, and what would you do with your week if a machine took it off your plate tomorrow?

Listen

​Ruben Hassid: The #1 AI Teacher (Billions of Views) Explains Who Survives and Who Doesn’t​. The lawyer example is the part I built this newsletter around, but the conversation goes a lot further than that. Ruben has this idea of “clickers,” the people who open a new tool and just start hitting buttons and trying stuff, versus the people who sit there staring at the screen wondering if it’s safe to touch anything. He says that’s the whole gap right now. If you’ve been meaning to figure this stuff out, this is the episode to start with.

Read

​Learning by Doing by James Bessen​. This is the book the teller story comes from. Bessen studied every major technology wave back to the power loom and found that the money never showed up when the machine was invented. It showed up years later, once ordinary people learned to use it, and it went disproportionately to the ones who started learning early. He wrote it in 2015 and it reads like it was written for right now.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my ​​Podcast​​, and connect with me on ​​YouTube​​ / ​​Twitter​​.

— Scott

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If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

​Sponsor: Huel​​

Here’s what nobody tells you about the days you eat like garbage: it’s never because you wanted to. It’s because you ran out of time, ran out of options, and picked whatever was closest. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s a logistics problem.

​H​uel Black Edition is the logistics fix. 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a full meal for under $5 — ready in 60 seconds flat. I keep one at my desk and one in my bag. When the schedule goes sideways, I don’t have to choose between skipping a meal and making a bad one. The decision is already made.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​​​​huel.com/scott​​​​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

​Jon Ostenson - FranBridge CEO & Author of Non-Food Franchising | Why Smart People Buy Franchises Instead of Starting Companies​

Jon Ostenson is the CEO of FranBridge Consulting and author of *Non-Food Franchising*, where he has established himself as a leading voice in the franchise industry. Drawing on his background as a former Inc. 500 franchisee and multi-brand franchise owner, Jon helps executives, entrepreneurs, and investors explore non-food franchise opportunities as a smarter alternative to building a business from scratch. Through FranBridge, he has guided hundreds of clients toward franchise investments that offer proven systems, reduced risk, and scalable growth — making the case that for smart, driven professionals, buying into a franchise is often a more strategic path than starting a company independently.

​Haresh Bhungalia - Serial Entrepreneur (3 Exits) | He Made $0 For 4 Years. Then Built $450M in Companies.​

Haresh Bhungalia is a serial entrepreneur who has built, scaled, and exited companies generating over $450 million in enterprise value. He founded his first company at 25, grew it to 650 employees, and sold it to a private equity-backed platform. He then took over as CEO of Casepoint and turned it into the dominant enterprise eDiscovery platform trusted by the U.S. Department of Defense, Fortune 500 companies, and the SEC — scaling it to 500+ employees before successfully exiting to Thoma Bravo, one of the world’s largest software private equity firms.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• ​Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)​

• ​10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)​

• ​Newsletter (321k Subs)​

• ​Social Media​