No #176 | July 6, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool newsletter.

We've officially entered into camping season. So to all the parents out there building tents, sleeping on terrible mattresses and enduring endless mosquito bites all for the joy it brings your kids, I salute you🫡.

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• 😲Dude With A Problem
• 🏀Dennis Rodman
• 🤔In Your Control
• 😅Garden Hose Setting
• 😎Cool Links

😲Dude With A Problem

So it’s officially summer for my kids.

Later nights and fewer evening activities can only mean one thing in our household: more movies.

This past week, my son and I have been deep in an early-2000s action movie rabbit hole, watching White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, and London Has Fallen.

These films all fall squarely into what screenwriter Blake Snyder calls the “Dude with a Problem” story arc in his excellent screenwriting guide, Save the Cat!​

The premise is simple: a regular dude is suddenly thrust into an extraordinary situation.

They didn’t ask for it. They're not necessarily qualified for it. But for 90ish minutes (and often three sequels), they rise to the occasion.

The more ordinary the guy, the more compelling the story.

Why? Because deep down, we are that guy. Life throws us curveballs daily (some big, some small) and we do our best to swing at them with whatever tools we’ve got. A dead car battery. A bad meeting. Broken camping tent. A sick kid. A surprise home reno disaster. Most of us aren’t defusing bombs or saving presidents, but we are dealing with chaos in Crocs.

So here’s to all the regular folks doing their best in extraordinary moments. You may not get a slow-motion helicopter shot or a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, but you do get the satisfaction of knowing that, once again, the dude with a problem found a way through.

Popcorn optional. Courage required.

🏀Dennis Rodman

If you haven't realized it yet, my love language is 1990s Chicago Bulls folklore.

As I mentioned last week, I'm currently reading Phil Jackson's biography 11 Rings and here is another amazing anecdote on Jackson's strategy and approach to dealing with the the charismatic and complicated superstar Dennis Rodman.

The wisdom: Don't be the boat on someone else's ocean. Be the ocean.

🤔In Your Control

Stumbled across this graphic this week and it was a great visual reminder of what we can, and cannot, control.

You could make a philosophical argument though that actions in the middle ultimately will have influence on the areas that are outside of your control.

😅Garden Hose Setting?

What are you?😅

I'm partial to the shower and jet setting.

😎Cool Links

😃How the Busiest People Find Joy. Research suggests that to have a satisfying life, you need to regularly feel three things: achievement (recognition or a sense of accomplishment), meaningfulness (a connection to something bigger than yourself), and joy (happiness or positive emotion) in the moment. For the many ambitious professionals we’ve studied, the answer is typically OK to great in the first two areas but decidedly lacking in the third. While achievement and meaning often flow naturally from work and family, joyful experiences tend to be rare and fleeting.

🧠'E-tattoo' could track mental workload for people in high-stake jobs, study says. Whether it is doing sums or working out what to text your new date, some tasks produce a furrowed brow. Now scientists say they have come up with a device to monitor such effort: an electronic tattoo, stuck to the forehead. The researchers say the device could prove valuable among pilots, healthcare workers and other professions where managing mental workload is crucial to preventing catastrophes.

☕How the Starbucks' Founder Uses the 'Two Chairs Rule' to Guide Every Leadership Decision. “Every decision that we tried to make with two chairs metaphorically sitting in the room was designed to ask ourselves during the debate, is this decision going to exceed the expectations of our people and our customers and make them proud?” Schultz said. “And if the answer was no, we shouldn’t do it.”

📖The 2025 Goodreads Guide to Summer Reading. (Editor's note: the series I'm reading right now is Wilbur Smith's Courtney series - it's historical fiction and it is the perfect book for a few pages of reading before falling asleep on the beach😂).

💌Tell a friend to subscribe​

Thank you!

Let’s connect! 💬 You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter