Bradford Stroh

My Word for the Year: Light open.substack.com/pub/bradstroh/…

A peak productivity advice from James Clear: “You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.”

@BoringBiz_ This reminds me of Ernest Shackleton’s famous posting: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

Marc Andreessen on why you should not start a company Good reminder that many people under appreciate just how painful building a company is

Thoughts on building a personal “board of directors” and the benefits of mentorship. open.substack.com/pub/bradstroh/…

I’m convinced genuine excitement is the key to life. Some people just have a light in their eyes. It’s an excitement for life. Not just for the highs, but also for the texture and friction of the lows. Hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Excitement is contagious.

@zackbshapiro Worthy debate, but I agree in many spaces. Maybe the vertical platforms (“wrappers”) are a stepping stone to companies transforming themselves and just paying to help accelerate the journey.

@bstroh The companies themselves (or, more specifically, talent inside those companies) are definitely a necessary part of the solution. I’m not sold on vertical wrappers vs. bare metal frontier AI.

Somebody needs to build the McKinsey of the AI age, and it's probably not going to be McKinsey:

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee. It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency. It says there are 5 levels of work: Level 1: “There is a problem.” Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.” Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.” Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.” Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.” Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee… You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5. Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee. Plz feel free to steal it as well. And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!

Is AI Flying into the Airline Trap? open.substack.com/pub/bradstroh/…

Marc Andreessen went on Chris Williamson's podcast and broke down exactly how Elon Musk runs multiple companies at once No other CEO on Earth does this: 1. Every week, Musk shows up at each of his companies, identifies the single biggest problem that company is having that week, and fixes it. Then he does that for 52 weeks in a row. At the end of the year, each company has solved its 52 biggest problems. Meanwhile, most large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting for the board presentation with the compliance review and the legal review attached. 2. This is not a new operating method. It is actually how the great industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s ran their companies. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson, who built IBM. Total devotion from the leader to fully and deeply understand what the company does, be in the trenches, talk directly to the people doing the work, and be the lead problem solver in the organization. Andreessen says he is not aware of another current CEO who operates this way. 3. The framework Musk uses is the bottleneck. In any manufacturing chain, there is always one thing holding everything up. Sometimes it is raw materials at the start. Sometimes it is warehousing at the end. Sometimes it is in the middle. The job is to find it and remove it. Musk has universalized this concept across every company he runs. In any given week, there is one main bottleneck. He micromanages the solution to that one thing and delegates almost everything else. 4. Musk delegates almost everything. Andreessen is clear about this. He is not involved in most of what his companies are doing. He is involved in the one thing that is the biggest problem right now. Once that is fixed, he moves to the next biggest problem. Everything else by definition, is running better than the bottleneck, so it does not need him. 5. When Musk identifies the bottleneck, he goes directly to the engineer who actually understands it. not the VP of engineering, not the director, not the manager. The individual contributor who has the actual technical knowledge. He sits in the room with that person and fixes the problem alongside them. He does not ask for a report to be reviewed in three weeks. he shows up at the keyboard or on the manufacturing line and works through it overnight if necessary. 6. This is why technical people who work for Musk say it was the best experience of their lives. Andreessen's framing: if you are stuck on a problem you cannot solve, Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream, sit with you in front of the keyboard, and help you figure it out. For an engineer who genuinely cares about the work, that is an almost incomprehensible level of support from the CEO of the company. 7. Business school teaches the opposite of this: management as a generic skill applicable to any industry. Soup company or a rocket company, the management principles are the same. process, balance sheet, meeting schedules, compliance, executive motivation, interpersonal conflict resolution. Andreessen says those skills are useful in many contexts. They just give you nothing; you need to do what Musk does. And Musk pushes as far as he can away from all of that so he can spend all of his time doing the things only he can do.

A reminder from Atomic Habits by James Clear: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.”

I’m in love with this sentence: “The more delusionally optimistic you are, the more life rewards you.”

Major cheat code for life: Leave people better than you found them. A kind word. A thoughtful question. A small encouragement. A little more belief than they had before. You never know which sentence becomes the one someone carries for years.

Thank God we still have a Chicago football team with a brand new stadium. @NorthwesternU @ChicagoBears #notIndiana #Illinois????

So true.

I keep remembering, luck is made... Moving fast. Choosing sides. Thinking positively. Solving big problems. Being grateful for the grind. Surrounding yourself with winners. Luck is attracted to this.

True

@MediaKing @ericries I’m pumped to read it.

This book is the new “Good to Great.” Read it!

Jamie Dimon's counterintuitive rule for pressure: "It's almost more relaxing to attack the problem than to worry about it."

@USALMag @NULax What a way to end an epic career. Congrats to Maddy T!

The T in Maddy T stands for TEWAARATON ‼️ 2026 natty champ. 2026 Tewaaraton Award winner.