Michael Blankenship

Sean will be at Shoptalk this week

@AaronOrendorff JOIN US!

+2.8k of the world’s smartest ecommerce operators have signed up for tomorrow’s Growth Summit. LET’S MAKE IT 5,000 🥹 Why? Because we’ve got … Over 25 speakers. Three training sessions. Executive keynotes. Plus, 10 lightning panelists. It’s Wed. And it is free. Roll-call ↓ - @couuor, CMO at Ridge - @connorrolain, HexClad - @codyplof, Jones Road Beauty - @Seanfrank, CEO of Ridge - @JasonPanzer, HexClad - @mikebeckhamsm, Simple Modern - @mbertulli, Pela Case x Lomi - @MehtabKarta, Karta Ventures - @TaylorHoliday, @CommnThreadCo - Katelynn Ludwig, DUDE Wipes - @JoWall202, VP Creative at birddogs - @KatyMimari, CEO Caden Lane - Katie Cirulli, CEBO at @grunsdaily - @packerj16, Co-Founder GOAT Foods - Emma Nelson, COO MUD\WTR - @mimizink, Portland Leather Goods - @jamalarobinson, CEV Collective - Jeff Hannam, CFO Simple Modern - Kristin Swarek, COO Caden Lane - @sharoonthomas, @fulfilio - @realamitrg, @richpanel - @itsaliciagan, @aftersell - @mikemanheimer, @PostscriptIO - @krishnapoda, @SarasAnalytics - @MoskowitzAvi, @PrettyDamnTweet I also heard a rumor @CurtisMatsko is going to make an appearance. And each of the Operators brands has donated goodies! - HexClad cookware and knife sets - Ridge wallets, backpack & luggage - Simple Modern $100-$500 cards - Lomi’s Smart Waste System 3.0 - Jones Road limited-edition bundles - Even DUDE Wipes is throwing in HOW IS THAT NOT ENOUGH FOR ANOTHER 2,200 OF YOU WONDERFUL PEOPLE TO JOIN US? 9ops.co/8ip21m

Maybe I'm crazy. But could this just be the retest after the OBV breakout? $btc

@AaronOrendorff 😂

What it’s like working for me … IN 4 SENTENCES

@AaronOrendorff Last one

New Operators Titans. New thumbnails. Whole nuther level. Damn. Place your bets on the winner ↓

@AaronOrendorff Me too brother 💪

I am learning a lot

What do you think of this @IncomeSharks ?

$BTC reverse head and shoulders on the OBV indicating a bullish breakout?

@AaronOrendorff FIRE

Is this the greatest data release for 7–8 figure brands in the history of ecommerce? Yes. It is. Two years of P&L analysis: $3.16B, line-by-line + broken down by vertical. - Sales - Net sales - Gross profit - Contribution margin - OpEx - EBITDA You can download every chart 📊 But that’s not all. @FinaloopTeam and I asked three questions: 1️⃣ What is the single most significant financial struggle growing DTC brands are facing? 2️⃣ How can benchmark data be helpfully used (put to practical work) inside a business? 3️⃣ Where do you turn first in a P&L to find opportunities for more profit or better cashflow? We got original insights from … - @dave_stickland, Popsmith - Kristin Swarek, Caden Lane - Cameron Lee, Fractional CFO - Jeff Lowenstein, Free to Grow - @andrewjfaris, AJF Growth - @MattMullenax, Huron - @seanfrank, Ridge - @mbertulli, Pela Case x Lomi - @ChereneAubert, ILIA - Mark Brown, &Collar - Nate Littlewood, Future Ready Did you have plans for the holiday? Cancel them! Go. Get. This. Report. It’s the last non-Operator’s thing I will publish. So consider this my farewell content banger. Link below ↓

@AaronOrendorff Can confirm - this is an absolute fact.

I have an enormous give-a-f*** ethos. If you ever partner, collaborate, or sponsor something with me … be warned. I will actually care. Give you feedback. And do everything I can to make whatever we do together the absolute best it can be.

@AaronOrendorff Read: This one is for Mike 😂

This one is for my fellow formatting 🤓 mega nerds … “ = Opt + [ ” = Shift + Opt + [ ‘ = Opt + ] ’ = Shift + Opt + ] Nonbreaking space = Opt + space Hard linebreak = Shift + enter – (en dash) = Opt - — (em dash) = Shift + Opt -

This captures something most people get backwards. They think flow requires unlimited time and zero pressure. The opposite is true. That 24-hour deadline forced you into what we call the challenge-skills balance - one of the most potent flow triggers. When the challenge spikes and time collapses, your brain has no choice but to suppress everything irrelevant. The prefrontal cortex quiets down. Self-doubt, perfectionism, distraction - all of it drops away. You enter transient hypofrontality. Pure execution mode. This is why our clients who run "One Month Days" - compressing 30 days of work into 11 hours - often produce their best work. The constraint isn't the enemy. It's the catalyst. Short deadlines trigger norepinephrine and dopamine. Your brain sharpens focus and pattern recognition. You stop deliberating and start deciding. Long deadlines do the opposite. Cortisol builds as the task looms. You overthink, second-guess, and procrastinate because there's no urgency forcing flow. Turn the month into a week. The week into a day. Make the deadline imminent. Let the neurochemistry do the rest.

I had arrived to class nervous and unable to concentrate. The final paper, worth a full 25% of the semester’s grade, was due in 24 hours. One of the options, and that which I had chosen, was to interview the top executives of a start-up and provide an in-depth analysis of their business model. The corporate powers that be had decided last minute that I couldn’t interview two key figures or use their information due to confidentiality issues and pre-IPO precautions. Game over. I approached Professor Ed Zschau after class to deliver the bad news. “Ed, I think I’m going to need an extension on the paper.” I explained the situation, and Ed smiled before he replied without so much as a hint of concern. “I think you’ll be OK. Entrepreneurs are those who make things happen, right?” Twenty-four hours later and one minute before the deadline, as his assistant was locking the office, I handed in a 30-page final paper. It was based on a different company I had found, interviewed, and dissected with an intense all-nighter and enough caffeine to get an entire Olympic track team disqualified. It ended up being one of the best papers I’d written in four years, and I received an A. Before I left the classroom the previous day, Ed had given me some parting advice: Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

This is the productivity trap most people never escape. Without goal-directed actions anchored to your highest priorities, your brain defaults to what's easiest and most dopamine-rich in the moment. Email. Slack. Meetings that could've been a text. It's not laziness - it's psychic entropy. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this as the mind's natural tendency to drift into disorder when it's left unstructured. Without clear goals pulling your attention forward, consciousness fragments. You end up in reactive mode, letting other people's priorities dictate your day. The ones who accomplish exponential results don't just work hard. They reverse-engineer their goals down to daily actions, then ruthlessly protect time for those actions. Meaningful work requires you to become goal-directed. If you don't decide what your highest-leverage task is before the day starts, you'll spend the whole day doing $10/hour work while your $10,000/hour opportunities sit untouched. Life will always try to fill your calendar. Your job is to fill it first - with what actually matters.

If you don’t commit to meaningful work, life will fill your time with busywork.

This is why most people quit right before the breakthrough. They're judging progress by visible outputs when the real progress is happening at an atomic level. Progress itself is invisible. Here's what's happens during those "invisible" periods: Your brain is building new neural pathways. You're expanding your flow channel (the range of challenges you can handle while maintaining peak performance). It's like working out. The muscle doesn't grow during the lift. It grows during recovery when you can't see anything happening. Same with skills, writing, or any meaningful work. The struggle phase of the flow cycle is where you're loading the system. The insights, the breakthroughs, the visible wins - those come later, during release and flow. But if you bail during struggle because you can't "see" progress, you reset the cycle. I've watched people spend years cycling through the first 20% of the struggle phase, never persisting long enough to hit release. Keep showing up. The neurochemistry is working even when the results aren't visible.

Just because improvements aren't visible doesn't mean they aren't happening. You're not going to see the number change each time you step on the scale. You're not going to finish a chapter each time you sit down to write. Early wins come easy. Lasting wins require a lifestyle.

What I find fascinating is WHY this works: When you handwrite, you're forced to process and compress information in real-time. Your brain has to actively engage with the material, filter what matters, and synthesize it into your own words. And it has more time to do it. We've seen this in our research: the best learners don't just consume information, they wrestle with it. Handwriting forces that struggle phase of the flow cycle. Plus, the motor cortex activation from writing creates more neural pathways tied to memory consolidation. You're literally wiring the information deeper into your brain. The irony is - As a culture, we've optimized for speed (typing)... ...when learning requires friction. Sometimes the "inefficient" method is the one that actually works.

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Here's the pattern I've seen with thousands of clients: Habits that produce flow (deep work, exercise, creative projects) form in 7-30 days. Habits that don't (checking email first thing, forcing meditation when you hate it) take 100+ days or never stick at all. I used to struggle for months trying to "build a meditation habit" sitting on my couch after work. Never stuck. Then I tried waking up at 5:30 AM and diving straight into deep work instead. Locked in within a week. Why? Because the second habit dropped me into flow. My brain got a dopamine hit from the focused work itself - not from discipline or willpower. The real shortcut is picking habits that naturally produce the neurochemistry you're craving.

The whole “it takes 21 days to form a new habit”… is false. the data say 7 to 200+ days. Even with consistency. Depends much on how well you manage what I call limbic friction (not a technical term). The solution is easy. Explained here. 30 min episode.

@AaronOrendorff Gonna be killer!

LET’S SMASH 2026 Online Dec 16 from 1–4pm ET Over 25 DTC executives. Four keynotes. Three live training sessions … (1) leadership, (2) marketing, and (3) finance. Plus, 10 lightning panelists. - 5 min each - All action - One strategy The most stacked lineup of the year ↓ - @seanfrank, CEO of Ridge - @JasonPanzer, HexClad - @mikebeckhamsm, Simple Modern - @mbertulli, Pela Case x Lomi - @couuor, CMO at Ridge - @connorrolain, HexClad - @codyplof, Jones Road Beauty - @MehtabKarta, Karta Ventures - @ChereneAubert, ILIA Beauty - Emma Nelson, MUD\WTR - Jeff Hannam, CFO Simple Modern - Kristin Swarek, COO Caden Lane - Lauren Festante, SVP Momentous - Sean Riley, DUDE Wipes - @KimGChappell, Bobbie Baby - @Packerj16, GOAT Foods - @itskrystalewis, CAKES body - @DerekLauermann, Grüns - @thedanielokon, Flewd - @summerdonbell, D’on Cosmetics - Zack Helminiak, Nomadix - Dor Brecher, MAËLYS - @sharoonthomas, @fulfilio - @realamitrg, @richpanel - @itsaliciagan, @aftersell - @mikemanheimer, @PostscriptIO - @stuartchaney, @RivoCommerce - @krishnapoda, @SarasAnalytics - @oliviaakory, @HausAnalytics - @michael_true_, @prescientai Do. Not. Miss. It. 9ops.co/mzfdfh

Was a huge @StephenKing fan. But I’ll never buy another of his books or watch another of his movies - fuck you and fuck your legacy.