Marissa Brassfield @efficient

There was a favorite restaurant. A show you'd stay up too late to watch and rant about at any opportunity. A book you reread every fall. A Saturday morning that had nothing to do with anyone else's schedule. It's all still in there somewhere. It's just been a really long time since anyone, including you, asked. You're not boring. You've just been the one holding everyone else's lives together for so long that yours got buried underneath. It's time you found yourself again, don't you think?

There's a difference between being boring and being buried. If having a whole day to yourself sounds equal parts amazing and paralyzing... you've been buried.

@The530Bro @kyliebytes L.A. native, lived a year in Santa Maria - this is the only way to say it.

Major cheat code for life: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines. There's immense power in rejecting that trend. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.

The Missing Dashboard Metric hubs.li/Q04lMr1l0 Written by @efficient of CTOx

Watch it here: youtu.be/w1rZiSTW_f8?si…

My grandfather was part of the Sakadas, Filipino sugarcane plantation workers brought to Hawaii in the 1940s. The value he passed to my mom was: education gives you better options. My mom was the first of her generation of family to go to college. I was the first of mine to go to an Ivy League school. Both of us riding the “outwork them” train. Then I burned out (3x) and unlocked a 3.5-day workweek with AI. And I had to face a question scarier than any business problem: What do I actually want my life to feel like? And what am I willing to do to achieve that? I sat down with Ben Laws on the MaxLife Podcast to talk about what happens when the tools catch up to the ambition and sovereignty is a legitimate business model. We got into some of my favorite territory in our conversation: - Our top sales rep built an AI side hustle over lunch and made $6K in 3 days - My husband and I automated our family logistics and briefly ran out of things to talk about (the Monday hikes came back) - Teaching my 6-year-old to prompt his own bedtime stories, starting from a speech device he used as his voice before he could talk - Why a 500-person Hawaiian family wedding where everybody was doing something to help is my mental model for a regenerative economy The closing question I sat with after the recording: What would you love the next 10 years to feel like? What would be true? What would you let go of? Play with that vision until something in your body says yes. Then share it with your AI of choice and prompt it for a plan to get there. Full conversation linked in the comments!

Algorithms are choosing your kid's videos, their friend suggestions, what they see, what they think is normal. What's excluded and hidden. And you're worried YOU don't have time to learn AI? The most common reason I hear from parents about why they're not engaging with AI is some version of "I'm too busy." Same. Life is genuinely busy. But these algorithms are already running our kids' lives. Suggesting videos, places to eat, activities to try. Deciding which kids and ideas they get exposed to. Shaping what they think normal looks like... Long before they're old enough to question it. We got to grow up before any of this existed. They won't. So I make the time because I want to be able to have real conversations with my kid about what's happening to his attention and his feed. I want to know enough to set the rules in my own house... And I want a seat at the table when decisions are being made for our families. You don't have to become an expert. Knowing enough to support and guide, to show them the kinds of questions to ask, the red flags to recognize... That's enough.

Why hasn’t my ballot been counted? I dropped it off on June 2 at a polling center in the SFV. I get why it would take longer to process mail-in votes, but this wasn’t that.

If you substituted "Claude Code" for "cocaine" in half the AI posts on my feed right now, every single person would be getting an intervention call from their family. Real posts from real builders this week: "I only rest during compute starvation periods." "A few friends are trying polyphasic sleep to supervise their agents 24/7." "I have 2 kids under 2 and can't make myself go to bed even though I'm SO tired." "I don't know what to do with myself when Claude is down." I'm no doctor, but there's a thin line between productivity and process addiction... Escalating tolerance. Inability to stop. Sleep disruption. Neglect of biological needs. Rationalization. I overstepped this line before AI. And now I've built my entire operating system with AI. Content development, publishing pipelines, financial tracking, email triage, memory from every working session. I use these tools daily. This time, I can feel the line. Flow: open chest, relaxed jaw, full breaths, peripheral awareness intact. Natural stopping points. Compulsion: jaw tension, shallow breathing, tunnel vision. No stopping points. Only interruptions. Your chest knows which state you're in right now. Take a breath. Notice. We guide the machines. The machines do not guide us.

Your calendar is a mirror, and most of us don't love what it's reflecting.

If you're into this, check out #76 of the MaxLife Podcast - I had the most incredible chat with Ben Laws. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… open.spotify.com/episode/1vijyk… youtube.com/watch?v=w1rZiS…

Plenty of people are using AI to find more hours in the day, offloading the work they don't want to do, then turning around and filling that cleared space with more work. Instead… Use tech to make your human life better, not just your work life faster. Lighten the household stuff. Automate the groceries instead of running that endless "we're almost out of..." loop in your head and having an outburst when nobody else noticed we're out of toilet paper. Make work easier too. Let AI scrape the document, update the Notion, and finally turn that meeting that should've always been an async update into one. The time and energy you free up? That's yours. Do whatever you want with it

Overwhelmed about AI because you think you need to learn prompting before they can use it? You don't. If you want to try something fun (and helpful) with AI that doesn't overhaul your life or your systems... This is it.

"maybe in another lifetime"

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… open.spotify.com/episode/1vijyk… youtube.com/watch?v=w1rZiS…

Every role I've held in the last 20 years didn't exist 20 years before that. We got into what that means for everyone panicking about AI right now (and a whole lot more) on Ben Laws' Max Life podcast. Links in the comments!

Every day is a chance to make new choices! I realized a few months ago that I didn’t have any hobbies that I wasn’t monetizing. So I got into container gardening and then plant propagation. It’s so enjoyable to see growth after optimizing their environment (sun, soil, water, nutrients). And propagating plants has taught patience. Both are a delightful antidote to the AI-accelerated work I do. There are so many fun and fulfilling ways to spend time beyond work.