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No. 309 | November 28, 2025
Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to help you start the weekend with clarity and focus.
Music of the Week
The Lost Bayou Ramblers, hailing from Lafayette, Louisiana, perform Cajun music throughout the world.
Louis Michot (fiddle, vocals), Andre Michot (Cajun accordion, lap steel), Johnny Campos (electric guitar), and Eric Heigle (drums) make up the group.
Their most recent album, Live: Orpheum Theater NOLA with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, won them a Grammy.
Check out The Bathtub, Once There Was A Hushpuppy, and Sabine Turnaround, if you’re new to the band.
Quotes of the Week
Balance the books of life daily. Settle what needs settling. Close your emotional checking accounts before bed. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. These quotes capture that spirit.
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us balance life’s books each day.” – Seneca
“Keep your accounts with yourself clear and correct.” – Epictetus
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
“Finish every day and be done with it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.” – Charlie Munger
Article of the Week
“I owe whatever success I have attained to my ability to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.” – Andrew Carnegie
Jensen Huang has an execution strategy worth studying: hire upward, move fast, and immerse yourself in the work.
Hiring smarter is as simple as it sounds: hire upward. Lean on referrals more than interviews. A person’s past work tells you almost everything.
The people you hire need to work fast. Competitors want to outrun you. Jensen’s advice: work faster than they do.
Passion only gets you so far. You have to love the work. Immersion leads to mastery—obsession accelerates it.
For more on Nvidia, Jensen Huang, and hiring people smarter than you, read my article below:
📝 Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Execution Strategy: Hire People Smarter Than You
Book of the Week
Bloomberg by Bloomberg is Michael Bloomberg’s story in his own words.
Bloomberg started at Salomon Brothers after graduating from Harvard Business School. He was forced out of the firm in the early 1980s after working his way up to partner.
That firing set the stage for an extraordinary career building a financial-technology empire.
The book is that story in intimate detail—from the grind of working 7 to 7, six days a week, to the early scrappiness of Bloomberg LP.
For more on Michael Bloomberg and his story, read the book below:
Podcast of the Week
Hetty Green was a name I didn’t know until this week.
She built a massive fortune in the late 1880s—an era when the odds were stacked against women.
Her nickname, “The Witch of Wall Street,” captures her perfectly.
For more on Hetty Green, the fortune she built, and how she swam upstream, listen to the episode below:
🎧 Hetty Green: The Witch of Wall Street
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