I’ve been reading The Magic of Thinking Big.

I’ve also been on a wave of reading more old-school personal development books.

The more I read them, the more I think a lot of newer books are just remixes.

Different cover.

Different examples.

Better launch strategy.

Same core ideas.

Think bigger.

Move faster.

Stop making excuses.

Get around sharper people.

Believe before you have every piece of proof.

Simple ideas.

Hard to actually live.

One thing that hit me in the book is how often people fall behind not because they are not smart enough, but because they are too impressed with how smart they are.

They can explain every risk.

They can poke holes in every idea.

They can tell you why the timing is wrong, the budget is too small, the market is hard, the team is not ready, or the funnel is not perfect.

And a lot of the time, they are not even wrong.

That is the dangerous part.

Their analysis might be accurate, but their posture is broken.

Instead of asking, "How could this work?"

They ask, "How could this fail?"

That is an expensive way to be smart.

I think about this because I became CMO of Nutre at 27.

I did not come from a big corporate background.

I did not climb some traditional ladder.

I did not have twenty years of category rules programmed into me.

At first, that could sound like a weakness.

I actually think it was one of my biggest advantages.

I had fresh eyes.

I was not carrying around a long list of things that supposedly do not work.

So I asked different questions.

Why can't we test faster?

Why can't we run more creative?

Why can't we use athletes?

Why can't we build our own systems?

Why can't a meal prep company feel like a real lifestyle brand?

Experience is valuable.

But experience becomes dangerous when it turns into a ceiling.

When every new idea gets filtered through old failure.

When you confuse pattern recognition with pessimism.

When you think spotting the problem makes you the smartest person in the room.

It might make you sound smart.

It does not make you useful.

The best operators see risk clearly, but they do not worship it.

They can say:

"Yes, that could go wrong. Now how do we make it work anyway?"

That is the difference.

That is funnel vision.

Not just building better funnels.

Building a mind that can actually see bigger paths.

Question to reply with: Where are you being too smart right now?

This week, I have been building something that feels pretty crazy:

A full ad creative design system.

The idea is simple:

What if our best-performing ads could help create the next generation of ads?

Right now I am connecting:

Motion is pulling insights from our top-performing ads.

What hooks are working.

What formats are getting spend.

What messages are producing customers.

What patterns keep showing up in winners.

Then the system analyzes those ads through our filters and asks:

Why did this work?

What angle is underneath it?

What should we make more of?

What should we avoid copying blindly?

From there, it can communicate with Higgsfield to create new ad concepts, images, and video directions.

The bottleneck is food realism.

AI food can still get weird fast.

The meals have to look real, appetizing, and like Nutre.

So I am trying to use AI for the system, the angles, and the first visual directions, while leaning more on real food footage and product assets where realism matters.

That is the big lesson.

AI does not remove the need for taste.

It exposes whether you have any.

If you have no filter, AI just helps you make more bad work faster.

But if you have a strong filter, it can help you move way faster without lowering the standard.

That is the goal.

Not an AI image toy.

A creative operating system.

Performance data in.

Creative patterns out.

New concepts generated.

Human taste applied.

More tests launched.

That is where this gets interesting.

These are a few things I saved this week and what I would steal from each.

Sean posted about seeding hundreds of small TikTok creators, paying per video plus commission, rewarding high output, and then loading the best creative into every ad channel.

The takeaway is that this is not just a TikTok Shop strategy.

It is a creative supply chain.

Most brands think about creators as distribution.

I think the bigger unlock is creative R&D.

More hooks.

More angles.

More faces.

More raw material.

More ways to learn what the market cares about.

What I would steal: Stop asking only, "How many sales did this creator drive?" Also ask, "What did this creator teach us about what the market responds to?"

Bryan posted about AI collapsing ecommerce roles:

Media buyer plus creative strategist plus landing page builder.

Lifecycle marketer plus copywriter plus designer.

Creator manager plus outreach SDR plus deal negotiator.

That is exactly how this feels.

Not because one person should do everything forever.

But because one sharp operator with the right agent stack can remove a ton of handoffs.

The future is not just fewer people.

It is fewer dropped balls.

What I would steal: Build your AI stack around outcomes, not job titles. Ask, "What is the fastest path from insight to shipped work?"

I watched an interview with an ex-NFL player who built a fitness coaching business doing around $4M/month.

The biggest point was offer economics.

Their base product is around $10K, with higher-ticket ascension.

That means they can spend more to acquire a customer than most fitness businesses can afford.

People love saying, "The brand that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins."

But that does not come from ads alone.

It comes from price point, margin, LTV, retention, close rate, and fulfillment.

What I would steal: Before blaming your ads, ask if your business model gives you enough room to win the auction.

This week's AI takeaway is simple:

Audit your software stack.

A lot of software companies are rolling out MCPs, connectors, and better API access.

That matters because the next wave of AI is not just better chat windows.

It is AI that can talk to the tools your business already uses.

Your ad platform.

Your analytics dashboard.

Your CRM.

Your creative library.

Your project management system.

Your customer support platform.

That is when AI becomes more useful.

It can pull context, compare patterns, draft reports, create briefs, update dashboards, and send work to the next step.

With human approval where it matters.

Here is the simple exercise:

Make a list of the software your business actually uses every week.

Next to each tool, write:

Do not start with some giant sci-fi system.

Pick one annoying workflow.

Weekly reporting.

Creative performance review.

Lead follow-up.

Support tagging.

Customer feedback summaries.

Then ask:

"If a reliable assistant had access to this tool, what would I want them to do every week?"

That is usually the first useful AI workflow.

AI does the prep.

Humans make the call.

That is the sweet spot.

At Nutre, we are working on our next big summer event.

It is still coming together, but it is starting to feel bigger than a normal promo.

More like a summer contest.

Potentially with a concert act involved.

The goal is to create something people actually want to talk about.

Not just another discount.

Not just another summer sale graphic.

A real brand moment.

Promos are fine.

But moments are better.

A good moment gives customers a story, gives the team something to rally around, and gives content more life.

That is what I want more of this summer.

Less random marketing noise.

More reasons for people to care.

Hope you guys got value out of this email.

If you have questions or want me to cover something specific, just reply and I will do my best to get to it.

And seriously, reply and tell me:

Where are you being too smart right now?

See you next week.