Monday Morning Brief

(Est. read time without clicking the links, 10 minutes, 46 seconds.)

Why read the Monday Morning Brief? We don't bring you the news. You can get that anywhere. We bring you the small-print, overlooked stories that make you think about your small business in a different way. Little things outside your own industry that can have a big impact often get lost because, well, they're not in your industry. The Brief helps take the blinders off to give you a new perspective.

Economists beeped 258 people eight times a day for two weeks, collecting 23,000 thoughts. What people were thinking predicted their happiness better than anything else measured. Four types of thinkers were identified. Here are the patterns that emerged:

• Worriers dwell on world events 60% more than average
• Domestics think about chores, home, and finances 50% more
• Bodily thinkers report the most intrusive thoughts, at 28%
• Work-hard, play-hards think about work 50% more and hobbies 25% more

That last group scored highest on both income and happiness. They did not think about work less. They protected the play. One caveat: this is from a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, and the groups are loose. People move between them. Still worth a self-check. Where did your last ten thoughts go?

They've gone country? The number of children under 18 living in America's biggest cities has dropped 6% over the past decade, compared with 1% nationwide. The finding comes from a new analysis of census data through 2024. Little kids are vanishing fastest. Children under 5 fell 15% in big cities versus 7% nationally. San Jose lost 34% of its under-5 population, the steepest drop anywhere. Cost is the common thread. In New York, parents need $334,000 to comfortably afford childcare for a two-year-old. Thirteen big cities gained kids anyway, most in the Sunbelt. Fort Worth and Jacksonville each grew 11%. Low fertility rates also potential issue.

If you want to get smarter, eat during a shorter window. Rutgers researchers put 47 women on the same weight-loss plan. Everyone cut 500 calories a day. Everyone lost about 15 pounds in six months. Only one group got smarter. ​The difference was timing. Half ate inside an 8-hour window, roughly 10am to 6pm. Half ate across the usual 12 hours. The compressed group scored significantly better on spatial planning and problem-solving, with fewer memory errors. The more they shrank the window, the bigger the gain. So far, only women have been tested, but it costs nothing and changes nothing except a clock. Stop eating four hours before bed. Run it 30 days to test your own benefits.

More people are interested in flipping. One South Carolina college dropout is killing it. Josh Varnell got laid off seven years ago. By then, he'd been reselling on the side for 10 months. Rather than brush off his resume, he decided to give it a go full-time. His wife gave him until Christmas to make it work. He's now a millionaire. ​Here's the playbook (​video​):

• Buy where it's cheapest. Goodwill outlet bins price everything under $2 a pound. Yard sales run $2 to $5 an item.
• Learn one category cold. His wife took clothing and learned fabrics and brands on sight.
• Check comps before you buy. He grabbed a $5 Canon PowerShot at a yard sale. The last one sold for $137.
• Sell live on Whatnot, not one listing at a time. Never start bids at $1. Thirty viewers is a real business.
• Be patient. Most quit after one slow show.

You know Raymond Loewy. You just don't know you know Raymond Loewy. If you've held a Coke bottle (you have, right?), you've held a Raymond Loewy design (well, officially, he updated an older curvy bottle design). Loewy, born in France in 1893 (about the same time as my great grandmother) is known as the "Father of Industrial Design." His first hit was the Gestetner mimeograph machine. It did exactly what every other brand did, but it looked better. Loewy believed that people would always buy the better-looking product, whether it was a toaster, a car, or even a farm tractor or steam locomotive. Yes, the tractors he designed for Allis Chalmers were designed as "having stylish panelwork with curvaceous lines." His fingerprints are still on many of the brands we buy or recognize today, including Sears, Sunbeam appliances, Schick razors, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Electrolux vacuums, the jukebox, Studebaker cars, Le Creuset cookware, Air Force One's blue design, the US Coast Guard's distinctive orange "racing" stripe, the Exxon logo, the US Postal Service's eagle logo, and the Shell oil logo. Loewy's lesson is simple: If you have the option to make something beautiful and distinctive, do it. People still crave art - even in the most mundane objects.

Fun fact about the original Coke bottle design: The glass company that won the design competition struck gold purely by accident. They were looking for inspiration in nature and found the wrong thing. They wanted to learn what COCA looked like but accidentally searched for COCOA (cacao) - the starting point for chocolate. The design was an homage to the cocoa pod. That happy accident resulted in a patented design that is now recognized the world over, and even a blind person knows when they're holding a Coca-Cola.

Another guy you know but don't know you know is Brazilian-born artist, Romero Britto. You've probably seen his work in airports, hotels, and other places where people walk right past art without ever taking the time to stop and appreciate the artist who created it. Britto is the most licensed artist in history, and he's collaborating with shoe giant, Skechers. Now, the challenge will be getting those wearing his shoes to slow down enough to appreciate his art.

To be more profitable, consider doing some unprofitable things. Apple (one of the most profitable companies on the planet) loses megabucks on Apple TV, to the tune of about $1 billion a year. They're perfectly happy to continue the losses because of the focus on creativity that puts the brand in front of people who appreciate great television (even those who don't own Apple products). South Point Hotel Casino & Spa in Las Vegas loses between $1.5 and $2 million each month on its buffet. Theirs is one of only a handful left in the city once known for expansive but cheap buffet meals that brought guests into casinos. Owner Michael Gaughan claims the buffet brings in about 3,000 people a day to the independently owned casino. A buffet dinner at South Point will run you about $38 - much cheaper than Caesars' Bachannal Buffet at $87+. Gillette built this model shortly after the dawn of the safety razor when it began selling the razors at a loss, knowing customers would keep coming back for the far more profitable blades. HP followed later by almost giving away printers to lock you into buying the ink. Grocery stores will sell soda and other select items at a loss just to get you into the store where they know you'll buy other items. Do you have or can you identify a "loss leader" for your business?

Beer cheese finally has its day. Cheez-It is teaming with Coors Light on a beer cheese-flavored cracker, which’ll come out in August. What's next, a Cheez-It-flavored beer? (Would that be awesome, or gross?) Is there a local business or product that you can partner with to amplify both your brands?

You can Excel at just about anything these days. Some singles are turning to spreadsheets to manage their love lives, with one dating spreadsheet creator selling 10,000+ copies of her $9.99 template that lets users score compatibility and track red flags. Check Etsy, and you'll find many other spreadsheet-based solutions and tools. Have you created a spreadsheet to help you control costs, plan your travel, keep up with your family budget, plan meals, or anything else? You might have created a product others could use and would be willing to pay for!

Wanna live with Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, or Sophia? If so, there's an app for that. The Golden Girls found each other through an ad on a grocery store bulletin board. Today, there are more high-tech solutions. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of older Americans living with unrelated roommates grew 88% in the US. Several platforms have recently emerged to help match “home providers” with “home sharers,” or those seeking affordable housing. A home provider may be someone whose spouse has passed and now lives alone in a big empty house. Demand is growing amid a housing shortage and the rising cost of living. Home-share platforms screen applicants, verify incomes, coordinate matches (based on preferences like whether they smoke, have a pet, or require parking), and will even mediate disputes if they arise. Money doesn't always dictate the match. One person might be able to cook but can't drive, so roommates might be complementary in a variety of ways.

Home sharing isn't just for the elderly. It can be a solution to housing affordability for younger people, too. In NYC, nun-run convent boarding houses have become a popular housing option among young, professional women who are drawn by the reasonable rent rates (as low as $580) and staying for the community. CoAbode, a home-share platform for single moms that offers communal support through shared household duties, has added around 300,000 users since 2016.

There are 3 things people will still spend money on, even in the worst economic conditions. We'll spend money to look good, eat well, and be entertained. Research dating back to the Great Depression confirms that all three of these provide an "escape" from our real-world concerns. This pattern is still true today, and we can see it in recent data, albeit with a twist. Revenue at US breakfast restaurants and diners in 2025 was up 13% from $13.8 billion in 2019, according to data from IBISWorld. Consumers are tightening their budgets, but they still crave a reason to go out, so breakfast is emerging as the restaurant industry's recession-friendly indulgence. The one thing that might take a hit even if your wallet doesn’t: Romance, probably? Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a candlelit breakfast… yet.

Are you there yet? If you're a solo business owner/operator, you might find yourself in a growing club. Solo business owners are hitting seven figures at record rates. Payment processor, Stripe, found more than twice as many earned over $1 million in 2025 as in 2023. Those crossing $10 million nearly tripled. AI is taking on the work that once required hiring. New business applications in the information sector jumped nearly 45% in a year, the largest increase of any industry, while the share of applicants planning to hire fell sharply. The typical one-person business is nowhere near seven figures. About 30.4 million Americans run companies with no employees, and average annual receipts run $57,611 before expenses. The average US wage is $67,920.

While we're on the subject, you may have seen headlines claiming AI is minting solo millionaires. The numbers underneath tell a slower-moving story. The median solo founder makes about $3,000 a month. Roughly 0.2% ever clear $1 million. The ones who do hit that mark took years, not months. The tools got faster. Distribution did not. You still have to be known by enough people to sell to them, and that part has not sped up at all. A strong first two years looks like $10K to $30K a month.

Cities that once said yes to looser drug enforcement are having their doubts. Seattle and Burlington, Vermont, both loosened drug enforcement under harm reduction policies. Recent reporting describes open-air drug markets operating near parks and playgrounds in both cities, with users gathering by the dozens. King County, which includes Seattle, recorded 7,089 overdose deaths from 2016 to 2025, 7x its homicide total. Burlington logged 585 overdoses in 2024, 28 of them fatal, in a city of 45,000. British Columbia ended drug decriminalization on January 31 and now requires witnessed consumption for prescribed opioids. San Francisco and Philadelphia have also pulled back. Researchers dispute whether the policies caused the harm.

The Keep America Beautiful ad campaign began in 1971. "Don't litter" was as ingrained into Gen X as "wear your seatbelt." Throwing your trash out the passenger window and then being catapulted through the windshield were both hallmarks of previous generations. The "Crying Indian" television commercials starring Italian-American actor, "Iron Eyes Cody," were - let's just say - problematic on a number of levels (yeah, talk amongst yourselves). They did get people to at least think before tossing out their Styrofoam Big Mac containers and Mtn. Dew cans. After binging on the Mad Max series and other post-apocalyptic movies as a teenager, I told my parents we'd reach a point where mining previous generations' garbage would become an industry.

Today, one man's trash is another man’s precious metals. Startup Fast Metals raised $4.3 million to extract valuable materials like titanium and rare-Earth elements from red mud, a waste product of the aluminum refining process. With over 3 billion tons of caustic red mud piled on Earth, Fast Metals has its work cut out for it. The startup’s method uses another refinery waste stream to separate minerals from mud, turning waste into a revenue stream. I may have been a strange kid, but at least I wasn't completely crazy.

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At the bottom of this email:

• Tip of the Week: Add a Spring and Stick Your Elbow In Your Gut
• AI Lesson of the Week: You Write Too Good

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Tip of the Week:

Add a Spring and Stick Your Elbow in Your Gut

This is part 1 of a 2-part series. We'll start this week with some flying lessons, and we'll wrap up next week by showing how this correlates to business improvement.

A Flying Lesson

I once met a decorated Army combat pilot who flew Black Hawk helicopters in the Middle East. I asked her, what was the most important thing she learned to help her be successful and make sure she returned home after a mission.

Her answer: Keep your elbow in your gut.

She almost didn’t make it as a pilot. She couldn’t keep the controls steady enough to maneuver the heavy craft and keep it steady.

Her instructor demonstrated how her arm was allowing the stick to move too freely due to lack of stability. “Keep your elbow stuck to your gut, and your arm will be more stable.” The advice not only got her through flight school, but it got her out of some tight jams.

This simple technique converted her arm from a loose appendage that merely held the stick into a fulcrum that tightly controlled a 14,000-pound aircraft.

More restricted movement actually provides greater control. Whooda thunk it?

Not Just for Helicopters

The Navy’s Blue Angels fly in tight formations that require ultra-steady hands and flawless timing. Their moves are often slow, but they fly close together and require synchronized precision. In a move that almost seems like self-sabotage, the team adds a part to their F/A-18 aircraft that the carrier-based fighters do not.

A spring that provides 40 pounds of pressure is added to the control stick.

Flying these supersonic birds is difficult enough, so why add another layer of difficulty?

The aircraft’s controls are designed to be light to the touch and highly responsive. If you’re dodging missiles at Mach 1.5, that’s what you want. It must turn quickly with the slightest input.

Flying in formation requires the aircraft to hold a position just a few feet from another jet's wingtip at several hundred miles an hour. A light touch is a liability. A sneeze can translate into movement.

The spring loads the stick with constant resistance that gives the pilot a "false feel." Small, unintentional movements are absorbed by the tension and don't make it to the flight controls.

Movements have to be deliberate. This makes the jet steadier, more predictable, and better able to hold a line or fly inverted.

There Are No Solutions

As economist, Thomas Sowell, is famous for saying, "There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs."

The Blue Angels traded responsiveness for stability. The pilot's arm pays the bill.

Forty pounds of pressure. Think about lifting a 5-gallon bucket of water. That's forty pounds. Now, think about lying down and having someone set that bucket of water on your chest. It hits a little different when the pressure is constant.

To hold the F/A 18 level, the pilot pulls back against the spring for the entire length of the demonstration flight - all while making precise inputs to hold formation.

A flight can wear out a forearm, and pilots often need to peel their fingers off the stick afterward. To maintain this, pilots spend a lot of time in the gym.

They also spend the whole flight with their right elbow and forearm braced against their right thigh. Like my helicopter-flying friend, this turns the body into a stable platform for the hand.

Everything these pilots do is for the sake of precision. From the ground, it can look like these blue and yellow jets are welded together. From the cockpit, it is a delicate ballet that occurs between 120 and 700 mph.

What in your operation could you improve by making it harder?

In business, we call this "productive friction."

Next week, we'll cover some areas where you can improve your results by adding productive friction to communication, strategy, cash flow, and more. Be sure to join us next week to find your 40-pound spring.

AI Lesson of the Week:

You Write Too Good

Yes, we know.

Our 9th grade grammar teacher would hang us by our toes over an open fire for that title. "You write too well," she would scold.

Then she'd go on to delve into how one can never write "too well."

Mrs. Lolly never met the Internet, and she never imagined that AI would be doing so much writing for us.

Here's the thing: people respond best to writing that feels like something they would say or write, not a tapestry of flowery language.

This is why AI-generated text is so easy to detect. Just like a bad poker player, it has its tells.

There are words that almost never come out of a real human mouth - or pen, or keyboard. Once you see them, you can't unsee them.

To provide a quick update, here's a robust list of words, phrases, and patterns to scrub from your AI-written emails, reports, ad copy ...everything:

• "Delve." You have never said this out loud. Not once. It screams machine.
• "Crucial" or "pivotal." Almost nothing is that pivotal. The word inflates everything around it.
• "Tapestry." Nobody talks like this in a business post.
• "Here's the thing." There is no thing. It's filler posing as a transition. (And yes, I'm guilty of actually typing this far too often - no machine necessary!)
• "Hope this helps." It does not, and worse, it outs you instantly.
• "After careful consideration." Usually written with none whatsoever.
• "To provide a quick update." Just give the update. Skip the runway.
• "Most people..." A lazy oversimplification that dodges the actual point.
• "Robust," "seamless," "realm." The corporate AI starter pack.
• Adverb abuse. Lines like "X quietly runs Y." Nothing is quietly running anything. It is decoration.
• "It's not X, it's Y." The most famous AI sentence structure alive.
• "This isn't a budget, it's a statement of intent." That fake deep flip fools nobody.



Here is the part I did not expect: They say the patterns give you away faster than the individual words do. One robotic rhythm and your reader checks out before the sentence even lands.

(Did you catch any AI drivel? If you did, you're catching on!)

Hope this helps!

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