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No. 325 | March 27, 2026
Welcome to Friday Five, a short dose of ideas to start the weekend with clarity.
Most success looks like talent. Up close, it’s usually a set of decisions made earlier than everyone realized mattered. That’s the thread running through this week’s Friday Five: true success, character, and the power of choice.
If this issue resonates, forward it to someone who enjoys ideas like this. Most readers find Friday Five through a friend.
This Week in Friday Five
Five ideas this week: happiness and success, taking care of customers, and why some people build more than one successful business.
🎸 Three songs to start with Bonerama
💬 True success
📝 Ray Kroc on happiness and success
📚 Built From Scratch—The Home Depot story
🎙️ John Morgan and his $250M side hustle
Music of the Week
Bonerama is a brass band from New Orleans formed in the late 1990s.
The group features trombone, guitar, sousaphone, and drums. The sound is raw, like New Orleans itself.
Start with Ocean, War Pigs, and Hot Like Fire.
🎧 Bonerama
Quotes of the Week
True success is internal. External victories fade. Character is the ultimate legacy. These quotes capture that idea:
“Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.” — Ryan Freitas
“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” — Will Rogers
“You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” — James A. Froude
“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” — Albert Einstein
“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.” — Bruce Lee
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Article of the Week
“If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” — Ray Kroc
You have to want to work. You have to show up every day. That’s the path to long-term success. Ray Kroc embodied it.
Success recedes when you relax. That didn’t happen under his watch. He built a system that made slacking difficult. Competitors are always lurking.
Kroc believed that if you only work for money, you won’t last. Love the work and success follows.
For more on Kroc, implementing systems, and building McDonald’s, read:
📝 Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s Success: The System That Built an Empire
Book of the Week
Built From Scratch is the story of two persistent founders who built a billion-dollar business over 20 years.
It covers Home Depot’s founding, rise, and lessons on building an enduring enterprise.
Enduring lessons:
- Do what’s right for the customer
- You’re only as good as the people on the front lines
- Take care of your people, and they’ll take care of customers
- Surround yourself with people better than you
- Listen to the people closest to the customer
- If you can’t be the best in a category, don’t do it
- Raise more capital than you think you need
- Stay in motion—competitors never stop improving
- Learn from mistakes quickly
- When you say you’ll do something, do it
- Customers sit at the top of the pyramid
📚 Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion
Podcast of the Week
John Morgan is best known as the founder of the personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan.
His story is wild. Even wilder is the number of side businesses he’s started—amusement parks, marketing firms, software companies, shopping centers, and more.
Morgan is a great interview—one of the better storytellers you’ll hear. Fitting for a personal injury lawyer. But the reason he entered the field is the interesting part.
For more on Morgan, business building, and side hustles, listen:
🎙️ Billionaire Lawyer Spills His $250M Side Hustles (Pick One)
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