September 2025

The Boring Habit That Beats Every Productivity Hack
I collected examples of counterintuitive corporate rules and found another one today.
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Max Votek
2
The Mental Fight: How Boxing Taught Me to Spot Media Manipulation
How professional boxers use anger to win fights.
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Max Votek
1
On the “Founder vs Manager” Syndrome
At a Y Combinator event, Brian Chesky touched on an important idea: as soon as a company starts growing, it’s commonly believed that founders need to…
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Max Votek
The Shackleton Principle: What Building a Service Business Really Feels Like
About the comfort zone and the ability to create something new from nothing and service companies.
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Max Votek
2
When Everything Goes Wrong: Lessons from Ben Horowitz
Books & Insights series: "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz
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Max Votek
The Sobering Truth: How Even "Moderate" Alcohol Consumption Shrinks Your Brain
My attitude toward alcohol was shaped by my close friend Alexander Degtyarev, who has been helping people achieve sobriety for the past several decades…
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Max Votek
1
On How Negative Thoughts Make You Dumber
I've been thinking a lot and sharing thoughts with you about negative self-evaluations (negative self-talk) - you might remember my recent post about…
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Max Votek
3
Context Engineers - The New Profession of the AI Era
Prompt engineering has quietly transformed into context engineering.
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Max Votek
The 100-Page Prompt That Changed Everything: KPMG's TaxBot Revolution
How a Big Four firm turned two weeks of expert work into one day of AI magic - and what it means for enterprise AI
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Max Votek
The Four Archetypes of Product Leaders (And Why Most Companies Get This Wrong)
Last week I came across Shreyas Doshi's framework on product leadership archetypes from his interview with SVPG, and it crystallized something I've been…
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Max Votek
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