I’ve been reading three wildly different books lately.

Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethic, and Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces.

One is a billionaire investor’s collection of mental models. One is ancient Greek philosophy about virtue and the good life. One is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist explaining the foundations of reality to undergraduates.

Not exactly a normal business reading stack. But taken together, they provide some great reminders and ideas.

Good outcomes require visible thinking. Failure is usually predictable. And progress depends less on clever moments than on choosing the right actions and repeating them when things get messy.

Marketing isn’t a guessing game. It isn’t magic. It isn’t a vibe. It’s a system. And the people who win consistently tend to do a few boring but powerful things over and over again.

Each of these thinkers providers a different angle.

Charlie Munger’s contribution is about avoiding failure before chasing success.

When most teams build a strategy, they start with what they want. More traffic. More leads. More visibility.

Munger would invert the question. How do we guarantee this fails?

Ignore the audience. Publish content no one is searching for. Make the site slow. Add friction to the buying process. Change the message every quarter. Never follow up.

Once you list those out, the path forward becomes obvious. Don’t do the things that reliably break the system.

Inversion clears the noise. It removes illusion. It forces clarity by walking backward from predictable failure.

Munger also obsessed over checklists. Not because they’re exciting, but because they scale judgment. At Expio, everything important runs on checklists. Site launches. SEO audits. Content updates. Monthly reviews. The best performers don’t wing it. They execute. They refine the checklist. They teach it. They never get bored of doing the basics well.

The people who think they’re too smart for checklists rarely last. Intelligence doesn’t scale. Systems do.

Aristotle’s contribution operates at a different layer. He was concerned with how excellence is formed over time.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that virtue is not something you perform once, but something you become through repetition. Excellence is the result of habit, not isolated acts.

Many marketing teams live in act mode. One campaign. One post. One clever headline. They chase the adrenaline spike and then wonder why nothing compounds.

Real growth comes from rhythm. From showing up every week with something useful, clear, and consistent. From doing the unglamorous work long enough for trust and authority to accumulate.

This is why I write these every Saturday. Not because every week brings a breakthrough insight. But because the habit sharpens thinking. The rhythm builds credibility. And the commitment reinforces identity. You become the kind of organization that shows up.

Feynman’s contribution is about truth surviving complexity.

He believed that if you couldn’t explain something simply, you didn’t actually understand it. Not because simplicity is shallow, but because clarity is evidence of mastery.

In marketing, this is mission critical.

If you can’t explain what you do, why it matters, and what the next step is in ten seconds or less, the sale is already lost.

AI is making this more important, not less. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can generate content at incredible speed. But if the underlying message is unclear, AI simply multiplies confusion.

The same principle will apply as computing power accelerates more broadly. Speed without clarity doesn’t create advantage. It creates chaos.

The clients who win are the ones who return to fundamentals. They strip the offer down to the real problem they solve. They simplify the message. And they use automation and AI to amplify clarity, not to compensate for confusion.

So here’s the takeaway for the week.

Invert your strategy so you stop doing what predictably fails.

Build habits that compound instead of chasing one-off wins.

Simplify your value story until it’s impossible to misunderstand.

Invert. Do the work. Tell the story.

See you next Saturday.