Blog / Last Week
March 26, 2026 // 3 lessons learned last week.
"Show me your friends and I'll show you your future."
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
No matter how hard you think you work, there are people working harder. The key insight: find something you are genuinely passionate about, because dedication comes naturally when you care deeply about what you are doing.
Do not feel stuck in your current circle.
If you are not happy with what you are doing, get clear on what you want to be doing, then start building the skills that make that path real. It takes a lot of effort, but if you put in the work long enough, you eventually get lucky.
Luck is just the intersection of hard work and opportunity.
Action steps:
Start meeting more people and see what sticks.
Having a routine and doing some of the same things consistently creates momentum. For me, the routine is simple: every week I hit my LinkedIn reps (reach out, comment, connect).
On X, I treat it like a running notebook. When I hear a useful idea from a book, podcast, or article, I post the insight or link if I think it will help someone else.
LinkedIn is more work mode: reflections on the industry, lessons from my career, and what I am building and learning.
Going forward, I want to publish longer-form more consistently, either on Substack or on my blog at masonearl.com. Over the past couple months I have been writing a lot more there, and it has been fun watching it turn into a real resource, almost like a personal Wikipedia.
I think having a personal site / landing page / portfolio, is only going to get more important. It is one of the best ways to express your creativity and interests to curious people.
It has never been easier to build: grab a domain on Squarespace or Cloudflare, ask Cursor to help with DNS, create a GitHub repo, and connect it to Vercel.
Why this matters: Consistency compounds. People cannot support what they do not see, and a steady stream of useful thoughts attracts opportunities without you forcing it.
I am guilty of getting anxious before flying sometimes. Lately I have found simple life hacks that shrink trip anxiety fast, and most of them are just momentum.
When my calendar is full of meetings, lunches, and dinners, the anxiety almost disappears. Being in motion makes the unknown feel familiar.
A few things that help:
There is another layer to this: doing hard things on purpose (work, training, discomfort, difficult conversations) raises your stress capacity. It becomes proof that you can tolerate pain and keep moving.
What I noticed:
Action steps: