McHugh Michael

Focus on the Variable You Can Control black and yellow f 1 car toy

Focus on the Variable You Can Control: Adrian Newey, Colin Chapman, and Formula One

2 Comments / Entrepreneurship /

Big gains in performance don’t come from piling on more inputs. They come from a focus on the variable you can control and likely overlook. The ones that others are unwilling to test, or simply don’t understand. Formula One looks like a sport about speed, money, and horsepower. That’s the surface story. Beneath it, the […]

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Friday Five — Power Over Mind, Find Strength, Don’t Waste Time

Friday Five, Newsletter /

Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 316 | January 16, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start your weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Danny Barker was a New Orleans jazz musician, vocalist, and author. Born into a family of musicians, Barker first

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Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons a display of various shoes on a wall

Ask Why, Then Wow Customers: Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons

1 Comment / Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Personal Growth /

Repetition leads to mastery, but only if you’re repeating the right questions. It’s one of the quieter Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons in Delivering Happiness. At Zappos, repetition showed up as asking why again and again. Hsieh wanted to understand why they were building what they were building. Another lesson Tony Hsieh emphasized was deceptively simple:

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Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons: How Zappos Was Built

Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Startup Strategy /

The Zappos business model, selling shoes online, looks obvious in hindsight. But the real Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons come from how it was actually built—through iteration, mistakes, and deliberate choices. Founder Tony Hsieh learned a few lessons building Zappos. One: learn by doing, not overplanning. Two: never outsource your core competency. Three: invest time, money,

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Friday Five — Quit Talking, Begin Doing, What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way

Friday Five, Newsletter /

Read or subscribe to the Friday Five at michaelwmchugh.com No. 315 | January 9, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start the weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Led Zeppelin was an English rock band formed in the late 1960s by Robert Plant

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Happiness Before Success: What Zappos’ Tony Hsieh Taught Me About Freedom

3 Comments / Entrepreneurship, Personal Growth /

Tony Hsieh founded Zappos, an online shoe company that Amazon eventually bought for over a billion dollars. Before that, he co-founded Link Exchange, an ad network Microsoft bought outright. Somewhere between these two exits, Hsieh arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: happiness before success mattered more to him than anything else. Delivering Happiness is deceptively simple

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Friday Five — Focus on What You Can Control, Ignore What You Cannot, Turn Words Into Action

Friday Five, Newsletter /

Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 314 | January 2, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start the weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Rebirth Brass Band, a New Orleans group, was founded in the early 1980s by Phillip Frazier, his brother Keith,

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December Reading List: 4 Best Books I Read in December 2025

Books /

December gave me space to look back at what I’ve read over the past year and where that reading is leading me next. My December reading list includes Land’s Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It, Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations, Hetty: The Fascinating Story of America’s Richest Woman,

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November Reading List: 4 Best Books I Read in November 2025

1 Comment / Books /

The Thanksgiving holiday, like Christmas, gives me a natural pause to reflect on what I’ve read this year and where I want my reading to take me next. My November reading list includes Sam Walton: Made In America, The Red Bull Story: The Unbelievable Success of Dietrich Mateschitz and His Energy Drink Empire, It’s How

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