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No. 322 | March 6, 2026
Welcome to Friday Five, a short dose of insights to start the weekend with clarity and focus.
This Week in Friday Five
🎺 Miles Davis and three songs to start with
☕ The conviction that built Starbucks
📚 Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s early lessons
🎙️ Instagram chief Adam Mosseri
Music of the Week
Miles Davis was an American composer, trumpeter, and bandleader whose jazz career spanned nearly five decades.
Born in Illinois, Davis started playing trumpet in his early teens. He later studied at Juilliard before leaving to play professionally in the 1940s.
He went on to a historic career, playing with legends like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and was later inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Every time I listen to his music, it puts me in a trance. It transports me to another place and time. Hopefully, it does the same for you.
Start with Blue in Green, So What, and It Never Entered My Mind.
Quotes of the Week
Awareness means cultivating mindfulness, a heightened sense of presence. These quotes speak to that idea:
- “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” – Thomas Edison
- “If you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.” – Jane Goodall
- “There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that…imitation is suicide.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Article of the Week
“One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions.” – Winston Churchill
Sometimes leaders must go against the grain. They push past objections from the people closest to them. They rely on conviction and intuition.
Going headfirst into challenging times requires emotional endurance. The entrepreneurial journey is hard. It’s painful. That’s the cost.
Anything difficult requires risk tolerance. You cannot romanticize failure, but you must accept it as the price of building something new.
Building anything new is risky. Confidence helps. Great people help more.
Starbucks experienced this in its early days. It wasn’t a perfect employer. But its leader, Howard Schultz, cared about his people. That mattered.
For more on Starbucks, Schultz, and having conviction, read:
📝 Howard Schultz Leadership Style: Conviction Built Starbucks
Book of the Week
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazontells the story of how Amazon and its founder were built.
Amazon began as a company that mailed books from a warehouse floor. Bezos wasn’t satisfied with that business model.
He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, a place where you could buy almost anything.
Key Bezos lessons include:
- Focus on customers, not competitors
- Invest heavily in the long-term, even at short-term cost
- Make decisions quickly, speed wins
- Keep teams small and autonomous to maximize speed and reduce overload (the “two-pizza team” rule)
- Hire the best people you can to raise the talent bar
For more on Amazon, Bezos, and what he built, read:
📚 The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Podcast of the Week
Adam Mosseri leads Instagram at Meta and has been with the company for many years.
He joined Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in a family of artists, how people build emotional affinity for brands, and his approach to problem-solving.
They also discuss technology safety, how Instagram’s algorithm works, and the AI arms race.
For more on Instagram, Mosseri, and how he leads, listen:
🎙️ Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) Returns
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