Be Your Best in 2026: The Most Important Lessons from The Knowledge Project (2025)

Welcome to the final episode of 2025. I pulled together some of my favorite moments from the year. These conversations helped me think better, work smarter, and live with more intention. It's time to listen and learn. Toughness, kindness, and clarity. All three. But don't forget the toughness. Because you don't want yes people around you. You want people who say, why don't we push the boundaries of our thinking? The AI makes me get to the answer perhaps more quickly, but you need someone with experience to know which of those references matter to the business. I am genuinely concerned that because of different societal factors, because of people who maybe lost out on some social skills during the pandemic, there is not that rejection resilience that many of us need in life. You mentioned that we can engineer trust. How do we do that? One is repeated exposure. Second is establish a set of shared values. Everything is here to teach me and help me. It's all working for my good. So we're gonna go look for those moments when you're most uncomfortable and remind yourself, this is my teacher. From when a customer orders something, when it gets through the distribution center, how is it gonna be picked, packed, packaged, and shipped? And when you look at that from a flow perspective, you start thinking about new solutions. Getting really, really comfortable with being uncomfortable is magic, and I wasn't always good at that. The right entrepreneurs, the best entrepreneurs, they just simply out care other people. When you talk about inputs versus outputs, what inputs do you think about in life? Well, I think it the inputs I think about are, you know, that it depends on what I'm trying to get accomplished. But if the inputs are just thinking about hard work, how do I get up every day? Do if I wanna stay healthy, do I get up every single day and work out? I I hear that you work out every single day because instead of trying to figure out which days you're gonna work out, it's always a negotiation with which days. And some days you don't feel like, exercising. You just work out every day. I have the same philosophy. You just get up every single day and do the things that are important. So the inputs I have is I get up every morning, I work out, I look through I read through my email, and I try to think about what's the most important thing that I have to get right today. What's the and, and think about first order issues. What is the first order issue that I have to solve? What is the first order issue of a company that needs to get fixed? What is the first what is the thing that I need to do to influence an outcome for, for a founder? And, you know, that's very, very clarifying. Often, we can create a …