Learn From My Mistakes

Short story of how I break life chaos into small, solvable problems - 3 min read.

I call them the chronically offended.

Not the people who offend others.

The ones who wake up already hunting for something to take personally.

Professionally. Full time. With benefits.

It is like a slow cancer in society, eating us from the inside.

One tiny moment at a time.

You do not even notice it until it feels normal.

The rule of this disease is simple:

Step 1. Find something offensive in someone’s words.
Step 2. Take it to the extreme.
Step 3. Collect drama points.

It looks like this:

You: “I am not hungry, I will skip lunch.”
Offended person: “So the food I cooked is disgusting. You could just say you hate my cooking.”

You: “I prefer working from home. I focus better.”
Offended person: “Wow. So you think office workers are useless and lazy. You are destroying company culture.”

You: “I am not in the mood to talk right now, can we catch up later?”
Offended person: “So I only matter when you feel like it. Good to know.”

You: “I muted notifications on weekends.”
Offended person: “So my messages are not worth your time. You only care when it is convenient for you.”

Actually, yes. That might be exactly why I muted them. Please relax.

And now a reasonable person starts doubting their own sanity and boundaries.

One of the healthiest habits I picked up years ago: take nothing personally.

I love this quote:

That is the energy.

You cannot really “hurt my feelings” if I did not leave them on the table for you.

I once heard a tiny first grader yell, “You hurt my feelings!” because someone would not share a crayon or something.

Some people are practicing their “poor me” routine before they learn the alphabet.

You say I am ugly and my jokes are stupid.

No problem. Add it to the Yelp reviews.

But if you decide my jokes are offensive and come to correct me, now we have a problem.

And it is not mine.

Because here is the truth: Being offended is a choice.

A very time- and mind-consuming hobby.

Their framework is simple:

• Always stay open to getting offended.

• Scan for a trigger in every sentence.

• When you find one, yell “Bingo.”

So what do the easily offended do with all this?"

Instead of quietly removing you from their life and moving on, they try to reshape the entire environment so nothing ever pokes their feelings again.

Friends, colleagues, internet strangers. Everyone must comply.

Is it toxic?

Oh yes. It is an invisible mutation in how we talk to each other.

Now think about your warmest, closest relationships.

Those are the people you do not rehearse your sentence three times for.

You just talk.

You can say things that are “inconvenient” or “politically incorrect” and nobody calls HR.

We have a close relationship with one family.

We voted for different candidates.

So now it is a sport. If there is even a small opening, we roast each other’s choice. Hard. (I am pretty sure I am winning).

And when we are done?

We grab coffee.

No offense.

Why?

We take nothing personally.

Till next time.

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The article is basically: “Yes, focus is hard. No, you are not special. Here is what to do.” My favorite part is how he treats your phone like radioactive waste and your environment like a rigged game you can actually rewire.

We talk a lot about being ‘resilient’. But what does it actually mean? - 4 min read.

The author basically says you need some stress to do well, just not so much that you melt. It is a nice reset if your current strategy is “avoid all discomfort and still somehow grow as a person.”

Five Dollar Fatigue - 3 min read.

I like how honest this one is: you can love a podcast, newsletter, or creator and still be sick of one more recurring charge – it is a little tour inside the head of someone who genuinely wants to be supportive but is exhausted from deciding who gets their five bucks every month. He calls it Five Dollar Fatigue, and it sticks.

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Cool Facts About Ray Kroc

Late-Starter Mindset: He spotted the McDonald brothers’ operation at 52, after more than 30 years as a salesman, and still bet his future on it, treating age as data not a deadline when deciding to pivot his career.

Template Vision Moment: On his first visit to the McDonald brothers stand, he saw the kitchen layout as a blueprint that could be copied across the country and judged every later idea by whether it fit that template.

Persistence As Operating System: His go-to rule was “Press on; nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” and he used it literally, pushing through rejections, bad deals and failed ventures instead of changing goals every time things got hard.

QSC&V Decision Filter: He boiled the business down to four checks – Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value – and used those as the lens for evaluating franchisees, store performance and investments rather than chasing clever side ideas.

No-Idle-Time Rule: His mantra “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean” turned every quiet minute into a productivity trigger, so staff defaulted to cleanup and maintenance instead of passive waiting.

One-Franchise-At-A-Time Gate: He forced would-be empire builders to run a single store “the McDonald’s way” before approving a second location, using that gate as a quality and discipline filter instead of selling territory in bulk.

Control Through Real Estate: Together with Harry Sonneborn he shifted the model so McDonald’s owned the land and buildings and leased them to franchisees, using rent and leases as a lever to enforce standards and long-term behavior.

Training Factory In The Basement: In 1961 he backed Hamburger University, started in a restaurant basement, to teach operators standardized procedures so decisions in thousands of stores matched the same playbook on service, quality and cleanliness.

Standardization Over Shortcuts: He kept the original Speedee Service System, set strict rules for portion sizes and cook times, rejected soybean filler to save money, and even required refunds if food was wrong or took more than about five minutes, using rules not mood to drive service.

Aligned Incentives, Not Side Hustles: He refused supplier kickbacks and avoided selling food or equipment to franchisees, choosing instead to set standards while operators did the buying, so his focus stayed on scaling a system where everyone’s profit depended on running great stores.

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One video that got us thinking, and we think you'll like it too

If you are tired of being told to “set bigger goals,” this flips the table and argues that smart people do the opposite: they box themselves in with constraints and somehow get more done.

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