🦾 Do The Hard Thing
AI clears out your easy work. The trap is filling the vacuum with shiny new things instead of doing the one hard thing that actually matters.
AI can automate away most time-sucking, easy things.
This gives you back time and space.
Which creates a fork…
Path #1: Do something new, fun, shiny.
Path #2: Do the most impactful thing on your list.
I bet you can guess what moves the needle.
In life, results come from DOING THE TOP, OFTEN HARD THINGS.
AI makes it easy to remove tasks from your plate. AI also makes it easy to start new things.
Yet AI struggles or fails completely at removing the necessity of doing HARD THINGS. That’s still up to you. (And I suspect it always will be.)
Be wary of starting new things with the space AI gives you.
Use that space to hone in on what really moves the needle… Hard things. The 20% of 80/20.
Make it your default to continually figure out what your TOP ONE / HARD THING IS and focus there.
This is the way.
Master Control
Example from today.
🤖 Clear the easy work. Do the hard thing. → The Morning Briefing Agent
Here is the move behind today's edition: the reason AI opens up a vacuum is that it clears the easy, time-sucking work off your plate.
My Morning Briefing Agent reads my calendar, my inbox, my CRM, and my open tasks and hands me the whole day before 8am.
I stopped managing follow-ups. I stopped checking my calendar. Email is down to 15 minutes a day. I reply to my agent in chat and it takes the action: move the invite, push the follow-up, add the task. Five-minute install, works in Claude or ChatGPT, model agnostic.
That is the whole point. Automate the easy stuff so the vacuum it opens goes to the one hard thing that actually moves your life. You will never be worse off starting your day with a briefing.
The Morning Briefing Agent Skill + DB → $27
👀 You can't do hard things with a headache 📱
Eight-plus hours of unfiltered screen light drains the exact focus you need for deep work, and most people protect none of it.
The LITEZ all-day 3-lens system fixes that: it blocks up to 99% of the blue light hitting your eyes from sunup to bedtime.
Less eye strain, fewer headaches, and the focus for your best hours stays yours. Yellow for daytime, orange and red for night. I rotate all three.
BH readers get 10% off with code BHNL.
📰 Links
TechStartups: Databricks hits a 188 billion dollar valuation as enterprise-AI demand surges
The Verge: Google AI Mode starts surfacing original recipe links after publisher backlash
Reuters: JetBlue wins the auction for Spirit's LaGuardia slots with a 58.5 million dollar bid
Scientific American: A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is set to slam into the Moon on August 5
🛠️ One Build — The Foundation Audit
Open a blank doc and list every active project, brand, and product you are running right now. All of it.
Next to each, write one line: is this a foundation I am building on, or a shiny thing I started to dodge the hard work?
Ask Claude to find the 3 cracks in your current foundation, the half-finished systems that would compound if you just closed them out.
Pick ONE crack. Not a new idea, a crack. Block 90 minutes tomorrow to lay that one brick.
Every time a shiny new idea shows up this week, write it on a "not now" list instead of starting it. Watch how long that list gets. That is the temptation you are beating.
🎯 Skill — DO THE HARD THING
Spend 60 minutes on the one task you keep avoiding because it is hard, not because it is unclear. You already know what it is. It is the thing your brain skips past on the way to mocking up a new brand or reorganizing your notes.
AI just handed you the time by clearing the easy work. The only question left is whether you spend that vacuum on the hard thing or on another shiny distraction. One hour. The hard thing. That's the way.
📈 Markets
🤖 AI
🟢 AMD +4.5%. Microsoft will deploy AMD's Helios systems across Azure data centers (premarket).
🟢 IREN. Popped on a 2.8 billion dollar AI-infrastructure deal (intraday mover).
🔴 ORCL −3.98%. Oracle sold off as the enterprise-AI trade faded into the close.
🔴 NOW −4.2%. ServiceNow slipped on a bearish analyst call ahead of earnings.
💻 Tech
🟢 LITE +7.5%. Lumentum rode the optical-networking side of the data-center buildout.
🟢 TER +4.6%. Teradyne bounced with chip-test equipment demand.
🔴 TSLA −2.96%. Tesla faded ahead of its earnings print this week.
🔴 ADBE −4%. Adobe got caught in the software rotation.
🏦 Finance
🟢 GLXY +10%. Galaxy Digital rallied as bitcoin topped 65,000 dollars.
🟢 CRCL +9%. Circle, the stablecoin issuer, jumped with the crypto tape.
🔴 No clean financial decliner at Monday's close; big banks drifted lower with the tape but no single name broke out.
🌎 Other
🟢 AMC +9%. The world's biggest theater chain beat quarterly earnings.
🟢 STLD +10%. Steel Dynamics rallied into its earnings report (premarket).
🔴 PSKY −1.1%. A judge paused Paramount Skydance's Warner Bros. Discovery takeover.
🔴 WBD −1.7%. Same ruling hit the other side of the deal.
The tape keeps rotating out of last year's easy winners and into whoever is actually building. Same lesson as today's edition: the shiny trade fades, the foundation compounds.
🐦 Tweet
📊 Stats
Track and field now fields 1.1 million US high school athletes, more than basketball's 900,000, as "trackflation" shatters records. Source: Wired
Utah cutting its DUI blood-alcohol limit from 0.08 to 0.05 dropped alcohol-related crash injuries and deaths by 11% or more. Source: Colorado State University
At least 59 commercial ships have been attacked around the Persian Gulf since the US-Iran war began; crews are now offered six months' extra pay to run the Strait of Hormuz. Source: Bloomberg
🔥 Useful Sh!t Corner 🔥
🗓️ On this day in 1969 → Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon.
🦾 How to be dangerous → Keep a running "not now" list of the shiny ideas you refuse to start this quarter. Naming them out loud kills half their pull.
🌞 Health → Get 10 minutes of morning sunlight in your eyes before any screen. It anchors your circadian clock for the whole day.
🍳 Cooking → Salt your pasta water like the sea and save a cup before you drain. That starchy water is what makes a sauce actually cling.
💬 Quote → "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." —Stephen Covey
🤖 AI reality check → An unreleased OpenAI model reportedly disproved a decades-old math conjecture, then kept slipping its sandbox. Capability is outrunning containment.
🧰 Tools
🤖 While everyone’s watching tutorials, the winners are installing systems like this: My AI Agent Operating System → full memory, setup, and database needed to get an agent working for you in minutes. Get the basics down, then customize it for your exact work and life routine → Only $76 → Personal AI Agent System: A Work + Life OS
👓 Starting at screens for hours each day started giving me headaches and blurry vision at night. Blue light-induced eye strain was the culprit. And it’s why I now wear these daily: LITEZ Screen Glasses. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL
🛠️ The tools I actually run my business on → My Apps Stack (click here)
🛍️ Fav Products
🪴 Better Human Goods → Nontoxic essentials for health and home. Products that work without the junk. Use code BNL for 10% off.
🛒 My favorite products, with subscriber discounts → My Favorite Products
👋 I’m Colin → Father, AI builder, founder, investor. X-IG-TT → Free Stuff
🧠 Become irreplaceable: Build Your Personal AI Moat. Get 50% off the year and support so I can keep dropping free stuff here and here.
Use AI. Stay Human. This is the way.