Hey everyone 👋 We're already into October, which means it's time for our weekly check in. What's one thing you pushed forward this week, big or small? Could be a client win, a tough problem you finally cracked, or just a step closer to a goal you've been chasing. I'll be reading every single one. Drop your gains below 👇

We go live in less than 40 minutes! AI Leadership, Not AI Fluency: how to run a company on AI without learning it, live with Kasim at 12pm CT / 1pm ET. It's FREE for this community 👇 https://paretotalent.com/founder-workshop Promo code: NONTECHNICAL100AZ See you there 🚀

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_DmnUVkPfB6HjLqHqNE4ReTB81witnx/view And if it got you thinking, this is where we take it further 👇 Ask ChatGPT for a random number between 1 and 25. Seriously, try it. It'll tell you 17. Now ask it how to grow your company. You'll get the same answer your competitor got this morning. Average, delivered with confidence. The machine doesn't know your vision. Yet. That's why I'm doing this in a room. The Leverage Room: two days with me and Christene Marie, October 15–16 at Genius Network in Tempe, AZ. 🧠 Day 1: we build your Anchor, the context AI needs to actually think like you. 🗺️ Day 2: we bring in your team's context and build the map of your business. 🤝 Two full days in the room with other founders who are figuring this out right now. What's included: 🍽️ Lunch both days, on us 🍷 Dinner Thursday night at AZ Social Hall, on us ☕ Breakfast every morning if you stay at the Embassy Suites right across the street (we have a group rate) The seat is $1,995. Because you're part of this community, you get 50% off with code NETWORKLEVERAGE50. And if you want to bring someone with you, they can use the same code. Grab your seat here: https://paretotalent.com/the-leverage-room See you in the room!

If you want to learn "AI Leadership, Not AI Fluency" this is for you! https://paretotalent.com/founder-workshop Promo code: NONTECHNICAL100AZ

The best business advice you ever received will now DESTROY your business. … In case you missed it… I’m writing a series about what happens when the rules of business change faster than businesses can adapt. AI has destabilized the environment and I’m trying to figure out what survives. I’ll drop the previous articles in the comments if you want to catch up. … In my last post, I argued that most of us are still building businesses optimized for stability while AI has pushed us into an increasingly unstable world. Here’s the best business advice any of us ever received, pre-AI: Focus. Niche down. Specialize. Choose “The One Thing”. Ignore distractions. Don’t succumb to “shiny object syndrome”. Go deep. Build the moat. Etc. etc. etc. It’s all the same thesis, just stated differently. And, in a pre-AI world, this was the greatest lesson an entrepreneur could possibly learn. For most of us, it was a lesson we learned the hard way and had to re-learn at regular intervals. The traditional entrepreneurial playbook looks something like this: Pick a market. Find your niche. Develop deep expertise. Build one great company. Hire specialists. Optimize operations. Increase margins. Build defensibility. Scale. Then spend years making that machine increasingly efficient. This is an extraordinarily effective strategy when the environment remains stable long enough for optimization to compound. You spend ten years learning an industry nobody else understands. You develop proprietary processes. You recruit highly specialized talent. You build distribution. You accumulate institutional knowledge. Every year the organism becomes more perfectly adapted to its environment. That sounds wonderful. Until the environment changes. Then something strange happens. The thing that made you great can become the thing that kills you. Your expertise becomes legacy knowledge. Your specialization becomes rigidity. Your optimized processes become expensive baggage.