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steve balls so hard he does live calls from planes

You can read this book for free that will change your business. But instead you’ll vibe code some brittle trash tonight that your team doesn’t need. YOUVE BEEN WARNED

There are a few books that I find myself revisiting over and over again, and "The Gift of Therapy" by Irwin Yalom is certainly one of them for me. It has almost nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with empathy and interpersonal complexity. Here's an example from one of his chapters, and it's a story that I find myself thinking of often.... This is taken directly from the book and his website: --- "One of my favorite tales of healing, found in Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi, involves Joseph and Dion, two renowned healers, who lived in biblical times. Though both were highly effective, they worked in different ways. The younger healer, Joseph, healed through quiet, inspired listening. Pilgrims trusted Joseph. Suffering and anxiety poured into his ears vanished like water on the desert sand and penitents left his presence emptied and calmed. On the other hand, Dion, the older healer, actively confronted those who sought his help. He divined their unconfessed sins. He was a great judge, chastiser, scolder, and rectifier, and he healed through active intervention. Treating the penitents as children, he gave advice, punished by assigning penance, ordered pilgrimages and marriages, and compelled enemies to make up. The two healers never met, and they worked as rivals for many years until Joseph grew spiritually ill, fell into dark despair, and was assailed with ideas of self-destruction. Unable to heal himself with his own therapeutic methods, he set out on a journey to the south to seek help from Dion. On his pilgrimage, Joseph rested one evening at an oasis, where he fell into a conversation with an older traveler. When Joseph described the purpose and destination of his pilgrimage, the traveler offered himself as a guide to assist in the search for Dion. Later, in the midst of their long journey together the old traveler revealed his identity to Joseph. Mirabile dictu: he himself was Dion — the very man Joseph sought.Without hesitation Dion invited his younger, despairing rival into his home, where they lived and worked together for many years. Dion first asked Joseph to be a servant. Later he elevated him to a student and, finally, to full colleagueship. Years later, Dion fell ill and on his deathbed called his young colleague to him in order to hear a confession. He spoke of Joseph’s earlier terrible illness and his journey to old Dion to plead for help. He spoke of how Joseph had felt it was a miracle that his fellow traveler and guide turned out to be Dion himself. Now that he was dying, the hour had come, Dion told Joseph, to break his silence about that miracle. Dion confessed that at the time it had seemed a miracle to him as well, for he, too, had fallen into despair. He, too, felt empty and spiritually dead and, unable to help himself, had set off on a journey to seek help. On the very night that they had met at the oasis he was on a pilgrimage to a famous healer named Joseph. HESSE’S TALE HAS always moved me in a preternatural way. It strikes me as a deeply illuminating statement about giving and receiving help, about honesty and duplicity, and about the relationship between healer and patient. The two men received powerful help but in very different ways. The younger healer was nurtured, nursed, taught, mentored, and parented. The older healer, on the other hand, was helped through serving another, through obtaining a disciple from whom he received filial love, respect, and salve for his isolation. But now, reconsidering the story, I question whether these two wounded healers could not have been of even more service to one another. Perhaps they missed the opportunity for something deeper, more authentic, more powerfully mutative. Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human. The twenty years of secrecy, helpful as they were, may have obstructed and prevented a more profound kind of help. What might have happened if Dion’s deathbed confession had occurred twenty years earlier, if healer and seeker had joined together in facing the questions that have no answers? All of this echoes Rilke’s letters to a young poet in which he advises, “Have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions themselves.” I would add: “Try to love the questioners as well.”

So what’s the answer? Start with: Eli Goldratt And graduate to @justinroffmarsh

I have bought 11 SMBs and this terrifies me. People are going to risk EVERYTHING on this thesis and they are going to learn a BRUTAL lesson. The firestorm you encounter post-close is like nothing else!

I sell AI for a living at a major tech company, this is all accurate. Change management is very difficult.

Would be swell if this story began and ended with me being smarter than you and buying a home service franchise. First install, dude fell through ceiling and broke his back. Homeowner was there. Was brutal. First in a comedy of errors that lasted over year, ending with the whole franchise system melting down. Lots of bankruptcies and broken lives. Looks like I ought to write a full post about it.

If you know who Cedric is and his writing this is 100x funnier

I would love nothing more than to be a “forward deployed engineer” in my company all day but with 400 people that is just a dream.

We've taken "just add tech" to an entirely new level. This guy tweeted about this months ago. It was dumb then, it's dumb now. I love it when I see people WHO HAVE NEVER ACQUIRED A BUSINESS, talk about 'roll ups'. I hate it when ETA bros do it. I hate it when tech guys say it. "Just roll it up..." "Private equity everything..." (remember that guy?) They have no idea how hard it is to do ONE SUCCESSFUL small business acquisition. They have no idea what it's like, day to day, to operate an SMB. They have no idea how fragile these businesses are. They also have no idea how much a lot of people hate AI and are going to fight it tooth and nail. Silicon Valley crack is the best crack, tho. So expect to see more and more of this.

holy shit this was cathartic to read. I've helped a few PEs with over a dozen rollups and every time they say the value came in the change management process that I go through with them. Every other consultant/agency just slaps claude and tries to hold zero responsibility for the hard shit lmao I kneel to you big dawg, because you put this in words that let my mind heal a bit over the weekend. stealing some of this for my next few meetings with some PE dudes

Agreed. Our company name: Freedom with AI. Our whole thesis at one point was Corporate to AI entrepreneur. Reality proved us wrong. And every Dev shop trying to AI-fy SMBs and mid-market companies are creating quite a bit of frustration in addition to may be some productivity gains. As of now, Empowered Betty leveraging AI will supersede any effort to automate her.

This guy SMBs.