A few weeks ago, I shared that I’d listened to a podcast presenter talk about how sound neural entrainment can reduce distractibility and help you get into your flow state. He mentioned Brain.fm, and I signed up for a free trial.

It’s been two weeks, and I really like the product. It’s hard to explain, but when I turn on the service, I definitely feel more in the zone and more productive. I focus faster than usual and knock out my to-do list like a champ.

I’ve noticed a few things, though. The first is that I need to remember to turn on the service! I don’t consistently remember, but when I do, I’m glad. I need to work toward making turning it on part of my normal work habits. The other thing I’ve noticed is that I get the most impact when I use earphones. When I let it play over the speakers on my computer, it doesn’t have the same effect. I think the earphones block out all other background noise so the rhythm of the music is all I hear.

Overall, I’m a fan so far. I’ll keep testing it for the rest of the month.

Today I had a good conversation with a friend who’s an entrepreneur, and he said something that stuck with me. We were talking about his new venture, and I mentioned plans he could make for the future when his company is successful. He shared that he doesn’t want to think like that. He wants to stay hungry and consider only what he needs to do here and now. He believes that in the early stages, thinking too far ahead increases your chances of failure and demonstrates a lack of humility. Once he becomes successful, then he can expand his plans.

This is an interesting take, and after thinking about what he said, I agree. It’s what I did when I started my company. I was hungry and focused on surviving. All my energy went toward staying alive and moving the company forward. Only after I knew we wouldn’t die did I start thinking more about what decisions I should take to scale to company further.

My takeaway from my chat with my friend is that there’s a time and place to plan far into the future. And it’s not when the future is highly uncertain.

As I shared yesterday, for the past few weeks, I’ve been working with entrepreneurs to set up an accountability group. Once a month for a few hours. The expectation is high commitment and open sharing so they can learn from one another and solve their individual problems faster. Think EO or YPO forums.

One of the things we’re working on is setting up an accountability structure. Each person chooses two or three things (a mix of business and personal) they want to be held accountable for. At each month’s meeting, they’ll report on each item and explain why it is or isn’t moving in the desired direction. The idea is that no one wants to tell their peers they didn’t do what they said they were going to do.

One thing I’ve noticed from talking with several founders is that many of them think in terms of goals. I want to increase revenue by X percent by the end of the year, or I want to weigh X pounds by the end of the year. But we can’t really track that every month. And achieving a goal isn’t 100% within the entrepreneur’s control: they can do everything right and still not realize the desired outcome.

What I’ve settled on is that each person defines the goals or outcomes they want for the year (e.g., I want to weigh 150 pounds) and then identifies the actions they can do every month to move toward them (e.g., 16 cardio sessions a month). They can easily quantify and report to the other group members how many cardio sessions they did in a given month. If they didn’t meet their metric of 16, they have to explain why, and what they’ll do to get things back on track for the next 30 days.

Defining the desired outcome and pinpointing the actions they should be held accountable for feels like the right approach to accountability. Can’t wait to see this in action.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with entrepreneurs to set up an accountability group. Once a month for a few hours. The expectation is high commitment and open sharing so they can learn from one another and solve their individual problems faster. Think EO or YPO forums.

One thing I wasn’t sure about was the meeting type. I knew what I wanted to aim for, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I was pretty sure I would get pushback about mandating in-person meetings and would have to settle for a hybrid approach (some people would attend in person, and some via Zoom). I was dead wrong. None of the CEOs want to do hybrid. They all want in-person. In fact, two went so far as to tell me that the quality of the meetings will be lower and participation won’t be as good if some people attend virtually. They shared that part of the reason the group appeals to them is in-person nature, because it will force everyone to be 100% focused and present during the meeting.

I suspect that these founders have high standards and want to be part of a group of peers who all have high expectations of one another around participation and accountability. Iron sharpens iron, and these founders want their blades sharpened by peers.

Can’t wait to get this group off the ground!

A friend recently shared with me that he’s considering attaching a nonprofit arm to his start-up. He laid out a host of strategic reasons why this makes sense and described the types of funds available from government, academic, and enterprise companies to support nonprofits that are focused on increasing entrepreneurship. As he spoke, I realized that I know nothing about nonprofits and haven’t considered the strategic benefits of a for-profit organization having a nonprofit arm.

I did a few high-level searches and learned that more for-profit organizations than I realized have strategically created nonprofit sibling organizations. I spoke with a buddy about this, and he pointed out that a prominent entrepreneurs we know recently seeded a nonprofit that will support the vision and mission of his latest for-profit project by raising money from corporate sponsors and getting government grants.

I have a massive knowledge gap in this area and need to learn more about the for-profit/nonprofit strategies others have used to support their mission.

I listened to a podcast about focus and productivity on YouTube today. One thing it talked about was a method of bringing distractibility down while helping to bring you into flow, or a state of increased focus. The presenter went on to talk about something called “neural entrainment,” which I’d never heard of. Apparently, it can occur when “something that’s rhythmic [harmonizes] with brain waves, which forces you into a state of more focus.” It could be triggered by movement, motion, or sound.

Sound neural entrainment caught my attention because it reminded me of conversations I’ve had with some of the most talented people I’ve worked with about their work style. Several of them listen to certain types of rhythmic music (no voices) when they’re doing focused work. This pattern jumped out to me every time I heard it because I don’t listen to music when I work.

After listening to this video, I now realize that those people may have been leveraging neural entrainment (whether they knew it or not). This made me want to try it. Luckily for me, the video mentioned Brain.fm, a company focused on playing music that’s personalized  (based on neuroscience) that helps you focus intensely. Think Pandora or Spotify, but meant to help you focus. I did some research, and it seems that Brain.fm works especially well for people with ADHD.

I’m always looking for ways to improve, and this neural-entrainment idea sparked my curiosity. So, I signed up for a 30-day trial of Brain FM. I can’t wait to see if the platform helps get me into a state of focus more easily and keeps me there. If you’re interested in listening to or watching the entire video, you can check it out here.

I had a chat with a friend who shared a story with me. An entrepreneur needed someone to build an MVP of the software she needed. She was connected with a developer who knew AI like the back of his hand. He agreed to build the app for $10,000. Over a weekend, he vibe coded her MVP in six or eight hours. The entrepreneur was happy to finally have a working MVP she could demo with customers and immediately started reaching out to potential customers.

One school of thought around this was that the developer charged the entrepreneur too much. Ten thousand dollars for something he did on the couch while he was doing other things might sound slightly predatory. Especially when you consider that he was paid $1,200 to $1,500 an hour. Some would say he was taking advantage of the entrepreneur.

I have an different perspective. What matters is the output and how quickly it can be created. What the developer got paid for was his skill and expertise, which allowed him to move faster than others. His expertise allowed him to charge based on the value of what he created, not the effort put into the creation process. As for this entrepreneur, I’d imagine she was happy to pay the $10,000 for two reasons. First, she got the app she’d been struggling to build lightning fast, in three or four days. Second, she knew she could sign up customers who want what her software offers and can generate way more than $10,000 in gross profit.

With AI moving so fast, many people don’t know what’s possible or how to use all the AI tools. Skill and expertise in knowing what tools exist, what they can do, and how to use them are highly valued now. But as more people learn these skills and tools, the value of that expertise will go down. Developers and others with this skill set won’t be able to charge as much to build products quickly by leveraging their AI expertise. The market will become more efficient as understanding of AI and its tools is more widely disseminated.

Last year, I shared one of my favorite maxims, which came from the autobiography of John H. Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Company, which published JET and Ebony magazines. See that post, with the backstory, here. Here’s what Johnson’s boss at the time, Harry H. Pace, told him:

If you want to succeed in business, young man, you’ve got to learn how to work with people that you don’t like. And you’ve got to learn how to compromise. After you compromise, you have to forget the past and go on to the future. For in business, you have no permanent enemies or permanent friends—only permanent interests.

Today I shared this with an entrepreneur friend who’s refusing to negotiate with an important supplier because of the supplier’s personality. Because she’s doing this, my friend can’t source the products her customers want and is forgoing some revenue. It’s a lose-lose situation for her and her supplier.

Business is full of characters and people with strong personalities, among other things. You aren’t going to be friends with everyone you need to do business with. Regardless of how you feel about someone, if you need them to accomplish a goal or objective, you’ve got to figure out how to get past personality differences and work with them. Pace put it best: “In business, you have no permanent enemies or permanent friends—only permanent interests.”

This week, while using Claude and Claude Cowork, I’ve noticed something different. The tool is enforcing usage limits. That is, it won’t work if I hit a limit. The interesting thing is that the usage limit is for a given period of time. For example, I was working on something at 11 a.m. and hit a session usage limit. Claude said that my limit would reset at 3:30 p.m. The same thing had happened the night before at 7 p.m., when it said my session limit would reset at 11 p.m. It feels a bit more like throttling than anything, but I could be wrong and have limited data to back that up.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting: I was talking with a friend who’s an entrepreneur. He started a new company and is using Claude Cowork to build an agent to analyze data from disparate sources automatically. It’s pretty complex. In the middle of building the agent, he hit a usage limit. He was frustrated, so he upgraded his plan on the spot. He had no further difficulties.

My takeaway is that if I make Claude and Cowork a part of my normal habits and workflows, I’ll likely have to upgrade to the most expensive plan. Otherwise, my ability to rely on them will plummet, and tasks could stretch over days instead of minutes or hours. At the moment I don’t mind, because I get far more value from the tool than the price I pay. But it shows me that while Claude and similar tools are great, if you rely on them heavily, you must have the proper plans and tokens. If you don’t, they’re like the employee who shows up to work and leaves early, whether or not their work is done.

This week, I met with an early-stage founder who just finished a big project and is thinking about the next strategic thing they should work on. During our conversation, the founder zeroed in on their biggest challenge: getting more customers. The first version of their product is built, and it’s been tested by a handful of early paying customers. No major issues were found, so the founder is ready to get more paying customers to use the platform. The challenge is that how to find them isn’t obvious. In fact, it’s pretty hard, especially since the founder is bootstrapping the company.

Making customers aware of your product or service is a problem that never goes away, regardless of your size. But it feels insurmountable in the early days when resources are limited. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. The tactics that work change constantly as the world evolves. But one principle that underlies many successful tactics is to start by meeting customers where they are.

It’s hard to get people to change their habits, or “flows” as I call them. Instead of trying to get them to come to the site of a new company or to a new platform to learn more about your product, consider meeting them where they already are. I know that sounds broad, but when you do that, you’re forced to think about things from the customer’s perspective. You have to learn their existing behaviors and habits. Once you understand them, you can begin testing tactics that lean into what they’re already doing. Test enough of them and one is bound to work. When you find one that works well, do more of it.

Finding customers is something all entrepreneurs think about. In the early days, they should try to understand their potential customers’ behaviors and habits. Doing so makes it easier to understand how to market to them by meeting them where they are.