A college freshman asked me last week what he should do this summer to build a successful business career. I told him to get a sales job. He looked at me like I'd suggested he volunteer at the DMV.

I get it, nobody dreams of cold calling. But I wasn't being a smartass. I was giving him the same advice I'll give my sons.

Here's what I actually meant.

I wasn't telling him to become a salesman. I was telling him to learn the skill underneath sales, the one that makes everything else work: agency. The habit of acting before conditions are perfect.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, put it simply: "Agency > Intelligence." He argues agency is more powerful and more scarce than raw intelligence. I think he's right.

My career is the proof.

I started in public accounting. Passed the CPA exam. Did the work. It was credible, respectable, and safe. It also taught me almost nothing about how business actually works.

So I left and took a sales role at a Fortune 500 company. And sales taught me things accounting never could. How to hear "no" twelve times before lunch and pick up the phone again. And again. And again. But it also trained me to take action because no one was going to do it for me. And that trained me for entrepreneurship.

There's a story in Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way.

Two rival fruit companies wanted the same five thousand acres in South America. Two different locals claimed to own the deed. United Fruit, the bigger company, sent a team of lawyers to figure out who the rightful owner was.

Sam Zemurray, the smaller competitor, just went and met with both owners separately and bought the land from each of them. He paid twice, sure, but it was over. The land was his while United Fruit was still reviewing documents.

That's agency. Not the smartest move. Not the most efficient move. The move that gets the thing done while everyone else is still debating.

It's not just sales.

The smartest people aren't always the ones who win. The ones who win ship the imperfect product, make the call they've been putting off, and start the company before the business plan is finished. Not reckless. They just have a lower threshold for "enough thinking, time to move."

We built a house this year (Issue #2 readers know the math was terrible). That was a Zemurray decision. We'd spent two years overthinking the "right" financial move and losing bidding wars every weekend. At some point we stopped optimizing and started building.

The freshman at Case Western wanted me to say "get an MBA" or "learn to code" or "network with executives." Those aren't bad things. But they're all intelligence plays. They make you smarter, more credentialed, more prepared. What they don't do is teach you to act when it feels uncomfortable. Sales does that on day one.

This week's takeaway:

Find one thing you've been overthinking. Not a major life decision. Something smaller. A conversation you've been avoiding. A project you keep researching instead of starting. An email sitting in your drafts. For me it was writing again. You're reading the result.

⚡ ONE MORE THING

Richard Branson was asked how to become more productive, his answer: "Work out." He claims exercise adds four hours of productive time to his day. The question was about productivity. His answer was about action. That's the whole philosophy in two words.

— Matt

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