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Originally shared in our August 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. University of Pennsylvania professor, former president of the American Psychological Association, and founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman has created some of the most lasting foundations of modern psychology. His work on learned helplessness/optimism and human flourishing have been a guiding light for our own work of understanding entrepreneurial thinking and behavior beyond traditional business-oriented definitions. Now his latest book helps us unpack how humans…

Originally shared in our July 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Writer Katy Purviance taught in a conventional classroom before founding the Spokane Learning Co-op — an outdoor, self-directed education center in Washington state. In this recent post to her Substack blog, she draws on decades of curiosity research, including work from Williams College’s Susan Engel, arriving at an uncomfortable but important claim: kids arrive at school full of questions, but that curiosity collapses within a few…

Originally shared in our July 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. David Brooks has spent decades writing about character and how it’s built. His recent piece in The Atlantic points that same lens at AI, and lands on a bracingly simple argument: “When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable.” When anyone can summon a competent answer in seconds, the differentiator stops being how smart people are and becomes their relationship to mental effort, whether they lean…

Originally shared in our June 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis built his career on a simple contrarian habit: looking at the same headlines everyone else reads and asking, “What does this make possible?” His Moonshots podcast is a weekly, unfiltered tour of where technology, longevity, and entrepreneurship are heading, acting less as a tidy lesson than a standing invitation to practice seeing abundance where others see disruption. Long time followers…

Originally shared in our May 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has a counterintuitive take on sales: the best sellers don’t sell at all. In this episode of the Naval podcast, he argues that the most powerful thing you can do, whether you’re recruiting talent, raising money, or closing a deal, is to be credible. That means being honest about what you believe, knowledgeable enough to explain it simply, and genuinely…