🔥THIS WEEK'S EPISODE TO STUDY AND REVIEW 🔥- #255 Sam Zemurray (Banana King). If you really like that one, there's also the first time David went through that book, Episode #37, and another time he went through it, not labeled as an episode number, just titled "Sam Zemurray (The Fish That Ate the Whale)! There will be an episode posted to study for updated here each week so we can discuss the principles from it and how to implement them in our businesses and lives on the live calls, and at any time during the week here when we learn or realize something we want to share!

What's up Habit Engineers! Ryan Bowne here, Founder/CEO of Terra Grounding Floors. Quick intro: I'm building the category-defining company in bioelectrical wellness infrastructure. We own the patent fortress (US 63/894,583) that controls who can and cannot create grounding flooring technology - basically the 'toll booth' model for the entire $875B wellness real estate market. Why I'm here: Building Terra requires me to compound 1% improvements daily just like Max teaches. Current habit stack: 4:30am wake → grounding meditation → morning prayer → patent strategy → family breakfast at 7 → partner negotiations → 6pm family dinner (non-negotiable) → kids' bedtime prayers → evening strategy for next day's agenda → repeat. The Triple S Method keeps me locked in while juggling IP law, manufacturing partnerships, and a November 6 deadline that determines market control. Favorite Podcast: How I Built This Episode: Stewart Butterfield - Slack Why this hits different: Everyone knows Slack's $27B exit, but this episode reveals something deeper - Stewart failed TWICE building games (Game "Neverending" and "Glitch") before accidentally creating Slack from internal tools. Key insight that changed how I'm building Terra: Stewart says 'We didn't build Slack to be a business. We built it to solve our own problem, then realized everyone had that problem.' This mirrors Terra exactly. I started trying to solve my own cortisol issues through grounding. Built the solution and immediately started filing patents/trademarks to lock down this entire category. Three key takeaways that compound: 1. Category creation > Competition - Slack didn't compete with email, they created 'work messaging' 2. Infrastructure becomes invisible but essential - Nobody thinks about Slack anymore, they just use it 3. Patents + Network effects = Monopoly - Stewart's biggest regret? Not filing more IP early Currently applying this to Terra: We're not competing in flooring, we're creating 'bioelectrical wellness infrastructure' as a category. By November 6, one manufacturer gets exclusive rights. By 2030, grounding floors will be as expected as WiFi.

I should've announced this before, I'm sorry - Sundays are my day of rest, so I will not be active in the community those days. Eventually we'll grow this community where we'll have more than one admin to help solve problems or anything when we've got hundreds or thousands of people in here, but for now it's just me haha. I saw this this morning and thought it was a good visual aid! Let's make this week amazing!!

The key is how do you model their actual behaviors— some are geniuses, us mere mortals have no chance of being that smart. So, here is my first take at these behaviors; this is open to discussion. I am sure I missed some. The idea is how we change ourselves to be more like the Founders? Curious to get everyone’s feedback. Once you have a clear set of traits, you can build out training, testing, and feedback loops to make the habits stick. I. Direction — How They Choose What to Work On 1. Focus They lock onto one mission and remove everything that dilutes it. Practice: Run a weekly audit: What directly advanced my mission? What distracted me? Eliminate the latter. 2. Information Arbitrage They don’t chase novelty; they exploit unnoticed value. They steal brilliance from unrelated fields and apply it faster. Practice: Study one “irrelevant” domain weekly and extract a working idea. 3. Avoid Stupidity They prevent failure more reliably than others chase genius. Practice: List the five dumbest mistakes people in your position make. Build guardrails against them. II. Thinking — How They See the World 4. First-Principles Reasoning They rebuild understanding from fundamentals, physics, math, psychology, not tradition. Practice: Write down each assumption and test it through data, not opinion. 5. Causal Mapping They think in systems, not stories. Everything is a chain of cause and effect. Practice: Diagram problems until you can trace how each link produces the next. 6. Ruthless Cognitive Clarity They strip emotion from decisions and see incentives as the true map of behavior. Practice: Replace “why” with “what caused this?” and chart it visually. III. Execution — How They Move 7. Iteration Discipline They prototype fast, fail cheap, and learn faster than anyone else. Practice: End every project by scheduling the next version. Nothing is ever final. 8. The Art of No They master subtraction. Saying no keeps velocity clean. Practice: Track how many hours you spent on what didn’t move the mission forward. Then stop doing them.

I know this community is already a valuable resource, but I also know there’s a TON of things that can and need to be better, or are currently missing. If there’s anything you feel like this community should have that would be valuable to you, please comment on this thread below. And if you’re looking through ideas and you see a comment you agree with that we haven’t already included, give it a thumbs up. That’ll help us prioritize which value-adds to include next for y’all :)