One block at a time
Sunday coffee, weekly content series 7/19/2026
Every week I pile up way too many sources. Podcasts queued, articles saved, reports downloaded, an inbox with information I promise myself I will get to before the end of the week. The easy move is to consume all of it and call that the work. Gathering feels productive. It looks like progress. It is not. The practice is not collecting more. It is reading and listening to a fair amount, being okay with letting a few things go, then isolating a couple pieces that actually carry weight, sit with them, and think about what they are telling me deeply perhaps on a run with no headphones. That is the whole discipline, and it is harder than it sounds, because the pile always wants to grow and it’s easier to put the headphones on and listen to more rather than leave them behind and think about the concepts deeply.
INSIGHT FOR THE WEEK
The Creator Feeding the Creator
Look closely at this platform and you see a closed loop. Creators selling how to create to other creators. Coaches coaching future coaches of coaches. People monetizing the creation of creators. Once you see it, it’s everywhere and the accounts running that play go from sounding sharp to sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
Philipp at Serapex named the version deeper, “sophisticated procrastination.” You over educate and under execute. He says planning releases the same dopamine as achieving, so studying your business starts to feel like building it while nothing actually moves. As long as the idea stays in your head it stays perfect and infinite. Maybe this is why it feels so good to create with AI because you can keep iterating and perfecting with a “real” partner and it feels so good and you never have to ship product. Perhaps this is the new dopamine effect from AI that is synonymous with the prior hits we all learned scrolling social media. The moment you ship, it becomes one ordinary thing that might get twelve views, or none, and that is the part people cannot stand.
The cure is the bricklayer mindset, and it is the best thing I read all week.
Stop treating every post like a cathedral. Lay one brick. Small, imperfect, replaceable. Hold onto the vision yourself, then lay one brick in its direction continuously and give zero fucks whether anyone notices. To some people the output may be garbage. To me every brick still points the right way, and that feels good. If I am any good at laying bricks, and if the vision is real, it will work out in the end.
One more important line from Philipp worth keeping in focus: “you are the filter, not the source.” I do not invent these ideas. I take what I read and watch and notice, run it through my own lens, give it a shape, and let it go. What happens after it leaves my hands is not mine to control.
The Practice at Home
Philipp’s line goes beyond writing and production. You are the filter, not the source, in your relationships as well. This week’s School of Greatness episode landed the same idea from a different perspective. It is not your job to make your partner happy. It is your job to make space for who they are and to create adventure and love rather than sit around waiting for those to happen. That is a practice, not a feeling. Same as the bricks. Plan the adventure. Do not wait for it to arrive. The hard part is the internal work it takes to show up in the present the right way. I get frustrated when we talk about the same thing week after week, because each time it’s a micro dose of compounding stress. The stress and my common reaction to it do not help, it makes things worse. So, embracing the stress as a signal that we need to make decisions and plans and move on is the best move.
One Block at a Time
What I love about the take aways above is that this is what Bitcoin does in its own way. One block at a time.
There is a lot of heat in markets right now. Up, down, everyone certain and everyone loud. The Bitcoin consensus forming is that we grind sideways for several months and the real bull market starts late this year. What is fun after being a Bitcoiner this long is watching the noise around sixty thousand, eighty thousand, fifty thousand. The pattern setting up looks familiar. One more pump toward eighty where the crowd is calling the start of the bull run, then whales wash the leverage out with one last flush toward fifty thousand for maximum pain, and then the real show begins.
Sixty, eighty, fifty. It does not matter to me. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin, and these levels will not matter in three years. I had this exact conviction at twenty thousand, watched it fall to sixteen, watched it climb back to thirty, and I kept stacking the whole way down and the whole way up. Still have not sold a sat.
In contrast, Jordi Visser is worth listening to here, mostly because he is a brilliant experienced trader and operates from a completely different mindset and system than I do. Capital rotating out of AI, this trade on this trade off, hedge here, time the turns. It’s bananas the amount of information he needs to keep straight in his mind to see the system and moves clearly. He tends to pick the right asset and then trade it, but it does not always go his way. The principle underneath my side of it is boring on purpose. Buy the things that go up over time and hold them forever, and never become a forced seller. Listening to a self proclaimed ADHD hyperactive trader actually strengthens that. It sounds exhausting. I do not have to do any of it. Same practice every week. Dollar cost average into what is worth owning, and never sell.
Energy Is the Whole Story
From the trader’s noise to the market’s noise. This week was all about inflation coming in cooler than expected. Consumer prices fell on the month and the yearly rate dropped to 3.5 percent from 4.2. Wholesale prices fell. Real wages even ticked up. On the surface, relief. But one print is not a trend, and the print has one component that is persistent.
Read the reports together and that component is on every one. Energy. Consumer prices cooled because gasoline fell almost ten percent in a single month. Producer prices fell because energy fell. Real wages only rose because cheap fuel pulled inflation down for a few weeks. Import prices calmed because fuel calmed. Strip energy back out and core stays sticky, shelter keeps climbing, and the PPI pipeline upstream is still full of pressure. Meanwhile the Middle East is heating up again, which can put energy right back where it started.
The new Fed Chair knows exactly what is at play here. He is not naming energy as the problem. His catalyst is going to be jobs. Hiring is low but holding for now. If the jobs numbers start to crack, he will have to move. Until then he holds rates and talks hawkish to keep the long end of the bond market in line, and so far the posture alone is doing the work. Talk is shaping the market before a single policy change. It will be worth watching how hard things move when he finally acts. Greatest show on earth right now. Almost nobody is watching this new series. The best part is that it is like old school TV where you actually have to wait a week or a month to see the next episode you can’t just binge watch the entire series in two days to see how it ends.
Lay the Brick
It is all the same practice. Lay one brick. Tick tock next block. Stack one sat. None of it looks like much on the day you do it. The pile of sources, the price of the week, the cooler print that is not a trend yet, all of it is noise, and the only reason to listen to the noise week after week is that it is how you train yourself to see the real signal underneath and stay focused on the routine. This too shall pass. What compounds is the practice.
Have a great week.
- Jack
THIS WEEK’S SOURCES
ARTICLES
PODCASTS
The Pomp Podcast: Bitcoin’s Next Move Depends On One Fed Decision | Jordi Visser
What Bitcoin Did: The Next Ten Years Will Decide Bitcoin’s Future | Brandon Quittem
ECONOMIC REPORTS
