ISSUE #53

Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.

GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️

The Lazy Shortcut That’s Sabotaging Your Success 😩

Do you lose interest in reading or looking at something on screen in less than a minute?

You’re not alone, according to research. And with the rise of AI and its built-in text summaries, it’s only getting worse.

Look, I love hacks and shortcuts. I know that time is our most valuable asset.

But you’ve got to be smart about where you cut corners and where you don’t.

In this Go Forward Thought, I’m here to say f*ck TL;DR — too long; didn’t read is lazy. It costs you far more than the few minutes you saved by letting auto-summary rule your life.

Here’s how you can efficiently and effectively do a deep dive with the information you cultivate so you can not only read what you need but also absorb it.

Context is king

Today’s attention economy isn’t doing you any favors. We’re swimming in pithy, short headlines designed to break through the TikTok media machine that actually breaks our brains by rewiring them to only accept short hits.

So, we’ve given up on things like reading, which is the #1 habit of billionaire entrepreneurs. Maybe that makes it seems like a luxury, but it’s not.

By forking over our attention spans, we’ve diminished our executive function. We’ve lost the ability to think critically. And we’ve trained our brains to skip context and jump to whatever we see on the surface — like the handful of bullet points AI tells us is the point of something.

If you’re roadkill in the attention economy highway, AI will accelerate your demise.

So, you’ve got to fight to see the bigger picture.

Get Smarter with Your Summary Machine

Here’s an example from every single day: meetings.

If you’re like me, you spend most of your days meeting with team members, potential customers, existing clients, vendors, and so on.

I record all of my meetings, which you probably do, too, with your favorite AI notetaker embedded. Nowadays, they go beyond simple transcription, automatically summarizing takeaways and action items.

If you have a TL;DR mindset, you might glance at that information at most, or more than likely, just ignore it.

Summaries are easy to skip.

Fight that urge and focus. Insist on revisiting the context, the decisions, the action items, and the gems of insight buried in the transcript.

Here are five ways the intel from my meeting notetaker helps me hone my skills, spot opportunities and challenges, and identify new revenue streams.

1. I turn decisions into reflections to improve my learning and unlearning.
2. I take what my team and I say and turn it into inspiring content, both for internal education and marketing content.
3. I gain insight into my company’s intellectual property and spot ways to bundle our IP to better serve our people (and grow our ROI).
4. I use it to hold people accountable based on their promises. (This helps me quickly spot people who are over-delivering and under-delivering so I can respond accordingly and shape a more productive team.)
5. I invite AI to help me understand patterns — crucially, which need to be broken and which I should double down on.

The best part is that instead of feeling drained from my meetings, I’m energized and motivated to use the insights to grow my business.

All because I take the time to skip the TL;DR and go deeper. A little extra attention, curiosity, and effort, and you’ve got a competitive edge.

And that about sums it up!

Always here to help 🙌
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​Pete Sena​

Tool of the Week 🧰:
Fathom

Remember this?
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You’re quarantining during COVID, and all of your meetings are online. One day, a Fathom notetaker magically appears in your meeting… and seemingly has never left.

As one of the first players in the transcription bot game, Fathom has set the standard. This quote from CEO and co-founder Richard White is like a masterclass in forward obsessed entrepreneurship:

Learn from it, and use Fathom — it’s free for starters but has some very cool paid features. Topping my list is the ability to configure the highlights I want to capture and hook that intel into my automation tools and CRM.

Full disclosure: I get paid a little bit for my referrals to Fathom, but I never recommend anything I don’t use myself. And you can always hit reply to ask me for more deets on how to get the best juice from the tools I recommend!

Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Forward Obsessed Founder — you can also check out this issue on the web [Link].
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