No. 341 | July 17, 2026
Welcome to Friday Five, a short collection of ideas to take into your weekend.
This week’s theme: compounding advantages and the patience required to build them.
The common thread: the most valuable people and companies behave as if their position is temporary. They never assume today’s advantages will last, so they keep improving.
If this resonates, forward it to a friend. Most readers discover Friday Five because someone they trust shared it with them.
Music of the Week
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” — Mick Jagger
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in the early 1960s.
The group has won multiple Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame for music that has remained relevant for more than six decades.
To dive into their music, start with “Paint It Black,” “Gimme Shelter,” and “Beast of Burden.”
Quotes of the Week
Patience, gentleness, and forgiveness. That’s the theme running through these quotes:
“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.” — Saint Francis de Sales
”He that can have patience can have what he will.” — Benjamin Franklin
”Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” — Aristotle
”The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” — Leo Tolstoy
”Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
Article of the Week
“Do right for the company. Do right for society. You can’t prosper unless the community around you prospers.” — Ed Stack
Question what you’re doing. Abandon old systems. Refuse to stand still. Stay open to change. That’s how Ed Stack kept Dick’s Sporting Goods relevant.
Dick’s operated as if it were always under attack. Even if it isn’t true today, someday it will be. Customer loyalty fades. The company constantly reinvents itself to stay front of mind.
Stack continually redesigns existing systems. New prototypes are always in motion. Dick’s views competition as inspiration rather than a threat. That mindset keeps the company from standing still.
Dick’s understands that customer expectations constantly change. But quality, price, and convenience are timeless.
Stack and the company he and his father built focus on relentless improvement because competitors are always searching for unmet customer needs.
For more on Dick’s Sporting Goods, Ed Stack, and relentless improvement, read:
📝 Relentless Improvement: Why Dick’s Sporting Goods Keeps Winning
Podcast of the Week
“Step one, solve intelligence; step two, use it to solve everything else.” — Demis Hassabis
Sir Demis Hassabis, an AI researcher and entrepreneur, is the CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs.
He was jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for his AI research contributions. Hassabis is a polymath who went from childhood chess prodigy and video game pioneer to one of the leading figures in artificial general intelligence.
Hassabis may be one of the few people alive who has been a chess prodigy, video game designer, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize winner.
Hassabis’ remarkable story is captured in The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence.
For more on Hassabis, his companies, and his quest for intelligence, listen:
🎙️ Story Of The Most Important Founder You’ve Never Heard Of
Book of the Week
“Power requires a benefit and a barrier. You have to have something that you do that gives you a better outcome than your competitors, and then something that makes it impossible for somebody else to mimic that.”— Hamilton Helmer
Helmer argues that strategy is about more than short-term improvements. It’s about building a business capable of extraordinary returns.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy argues that companies need both an advantage and a widening moat that prevents competitors from catching up.
These powers include Scale Economies, Network Economies, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resource, and Process Power.
Helmer’s seven powers are memorable because they explain why some companies keep pulling away while others never catch up. Here are a few ideas that particularly stuck with me:
- Scale matters because higher production volumes often lead to lower costs per unit, allowing leaders to widen the gap over smaller competitors.
- Some businesses become more valuable as they grow. Every new user makes the network stronger for everyone already inside it.
- Disruption often comes from newcomers introducing business models incumbents can’t imitate without hurting their legacy operations.
- The harder it is for customers to leave, the more pricing power incumbents gain.
- Reputation matters. Customers routinely pay more for products that are objectively similar because they trust the brand behind them.
- Sometimes, enduring advantages come from controlling scarce resources that competitors simply can’t obtain.
- Some companies quietly build advantages over decades through unique processes that competitors struggle to replicate.
For more on the 7 powers and business strategy, read:
📚 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
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