No. 300 | September 26, 2025
Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a quick dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start your weekend with clarity and intention.
Music of the Week
Denis Jašarević—better known as Gramatik—is a Slovenian electronic music producer.
His love of music began early—first with funk, jazz, soul, and blues—before shifting to hip hop as he grew older.
His music blends genres—chill-out, hip hop, electronica, and trip hop.
If you’re new to Gramatik, start with: Muy Tranquilo, Just Jammin’, and Dungeon Sound.
Quotes of the Week
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how panic is self-induced—worsened by how we choose to respond. These quotes capture that idea.
“We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating sorrow.” – Seneca
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” – Seneca
“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.” – Marcus Aurelius
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals, not under my control, and which have to do with the choice I actually control.” – Epictetus
“Running a start-up is like chewing glass … the glass chewing never ends.” – Elon Musk
Article of the Week
“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Steve Jobs shares countless lessons on people and leadership in Make Something Wonderful.
Highlights include: hiring and developing A-players, building a culture where passionate debates thrive, and aligning everyone around shared values and mission.
Jobs also explains why passion matters in Make Something Wonderful.
He believed the work itself had to matter—it had to be work worth doing.
Jobs also showed why culture is imperative in Make Something Wonderful.
Culture is people. Hire those better than yourself—that’s the key to building the culture you want.
For more on people, passion, and culture, read my article below:
📝 Steve Jobs on People, Passion, and Culture: Building Apple’s Core Values
Book of the Week
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empireby Brad Stone offers an in-depth look at one of the most influential businesses of all time.
The book covers how a retail upstart in the 1990s became a powerful and feared company across the globe.
Stone explores Bezos’s evolution—from geeky technologist obsessed with building Amazon to billionaire with global ambitions (and an enviable physique).
Bezos ruled Amazon with an iron fist, driven by relentless discipline and global ambitions.
What’s incredible is how he compartmentalized everything when his marriage unraveled and his personal life spilled into the press.
For more on Bezos and Amazon, you can buy the book below:
📚 Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
Podcast of the Week
Todd Graves came up with a chicken-finger concept in the mid-1990s.
He took a true entrepreneurial path by funding his startup with an SBA loan and his personal savings.
Fast forward 30 years, and he’s now one of the richest people in the world.
That chicken-finger concept became Raising Cane’s. Graves still owns nearly the entire company, which now has 800+ locations in 40 states and 5 countries, generating almost $4 billion in annual revenue.
For more on the wild story of building Raising Cane’s, check out the episode below—From Chicken Fingers to One of the Richest People in the World.
