Being Curious, What Do You Call Success, OpenAI’s Big Tease, Pirate (Scooby) Snacks
If you’re someone who wants to create an exponentially different future.
For yourself.
Or your company.
You’re in the right place.
🏴☠️
The Different Newsletter.
Musings for entrepreneurs, marketing leaders, category designers and creators with a different mind.
Sponsored by Bad Tuna Industries.
With content stolen from Category Pirates.
🏴☠️
Most people aren’t curious.
And it crushes their careers.
Ever notice how much people talk about themselves. And how little they ask about you?
Curiosity fuels innovation, uncovers opportunities, and drives growth. Here’s how to spark your curiosity (and career):
1) Shut up: You’ll be amazed what you hear
2) Ask "Why?" 5-7 times: Be interested, challenge assumptions and dig deeper into ideas, strategies, & problems
3) Explore outside your bubble: Read, listen to podcasts, embrace the unknown, tackle new skills
Curiosity isn’t a trait.
It’s a muscle.
Start flexing it today.
What’s one thing you’re curious about right now?
(Drop a note in the comments 👇)
🏴☠️
Still Marketing Your Solution?
You’ve built something brilliant.
Technically elegant.
Architecturally sound.
Your team is proud.
The demo is slick.
The use cases are endless.
And yet … No one cares.
You’re not failing.
You’re just invisible.
You’re leading with the solution instead of the problem.
🏴☠️
What Do You Call Success?
(Special post from
)Why I clock in at 11am — and call that success.
Three eggs. Arugula. Half an avocado. Sparkling water.
This isn’t just breakfast. It’s a reminder of how far I’ve come.
I used to think success meant more:
More money. More hustle. More status.
Now, success looks like this:
→ A slow morning
→ A hike with my dog
→ A work schedule built around life, not the other way around
→ Traveling with my wife and working from anywhere with Wi-Fi
→ Cleaning the kitchen not because I love it, but because she hates the mess
Here’s the thing:
Most Former Educator Founders are chasing a dollar sign. I get it, I do it too, sometimes.
But when I’m fully present?
I remember that I designed a life I don’t want to escape from.
This is the win.
This is the clarity.
You don’t need to chase hustle.
You need to define your own scoreboard.
You need margin.
You need meaning.
And maybe... you need 11am eggs.
🏴☠️
We’re launching the prequel to Play Bigger later this week.
Al Ramadan (my brother from another mother who wrote Play Bigger with me) & I (with 2 friends) wrote the companion to Play Bigger.
We’re launching this Thursday.
Don’t tell Al I told you 😎.
You can check it out here.
🏴☠️
The Big OpenAI Tease
Are Sam Altman & Jony Ive (Apple genius) are signaling they are launching a new something.
Is it a phone?
A puck?
Glasses?
What’s your best guess?
(Let me me know your guess in the comments)
🏴☠️
Shalom my Pirate friend,
👊🏴☠️🙏
#NeverAgainIsNow
The “legal” warnings.
Dis-credits
(and the Scooby Snacks 🐶)
All newsletters contain nuts 🐿
This product is a solution to a problem that most people don’t have.
There are (random) strategically placed spelling, grammar and formatting mistakes in this newsletter.
If you think 89 year old Elvis lives on an island with 106 year old JFK, 98 year old Marylyn Monroe and 35 year old Taylor Swift, where they are creating a compound of secret new humans, who are immune to chemtrails and free of GMOs, then consider these strategic mistakes part of a secret code that unlocks Federal Government servers in Bumsquat Youdaho to the files that prove the The Statue of Limitations was created by Aliens.
If you’re not a Elvis lives on an island person, the errors herein exist because Lochhead is lazy… and wants to write in an unfettered, real(ish) time way and an editor would slow the roll.
Please.
Pretty please.
With whiskey on top.
Get out of the passing lane.
The creator of this Different Newsletter:
-can’t find his pants
-does not possess a GED
-is friendly with Mary Jane
-was thrown out of school at 18
-has been fired more times than he can count
-possess multiple learning differences superpowers
... this is the part of Different, that is like the very end of a movie...
….where some directors throw in silly crap-o-lla..
…simply for their own entertainment…
…assuming no people (or very few) are still in the theatre…
So I’ll just assume that you’ve either already stopped reading… or will stop here.
Because I can guarantee what follows is (mostly) a complete waste of your very valuable time.
(How do you spell AC/DC Mark?)
Have you every notice everything is funnier with “o-rama” at the end.
Car-o-rama
Bowl-o-rama
Punk-o-rama
Dance-o-rama
AI-o-rama 😎
Texas woman was mowing the grass when a snake and hawk attacked her from the sky
Soon there will be a one person(+AI), one billion dollar value company.
Bigfoot sighting in Monroe woods deemed credible by tracking group
Everything is the way that it is, because someone (like you) changed the way that it was.
(Don’t tell him I told you. It’s supposed to be a secret ‘til this Thursday)
Hey, thanks for hanging out for the extra silly Pirate (scooby) snacks at the end...
….let's hang out again soon 😎🏴☠️🙏
Published by Category Pirates.
Sponsored By Bad Tuna Industries.
Makers of Bad Tuna Scented Bath Oil ™
I won't tell Al 😂
“Curiosity is essential for progress. Only when we look to worlds beyond our own can we really know if there’s room for improvement.”
— Simon Sinek
Curiosity has been my compass since day one—first onstage in the theater as a kid, then as a professional opera singer, later as a software engineer, and eventually as a product manager. And through it all? I was learning about AI. Not because it was trendy, but because I just had to know how it worked.
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
— Albert Einstein
In fact, every career chapter started with a question I couldn’t ignore. And now? I’m sending the elevator back down—helping others navigate the same fog with fewer bruises and more breadcrumbs. I'm intensely curious how my pouring my life into theirs will turn out.
“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.”
— Bernard Baruch