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If You Don’t Filter, You Drown
Why Founders Must Audit Their Inputs Before Scaling Their Outputs
Justin Glover
August 11, 2025
Today’s Perspective Shift
From: Consuming everything that crosses your feed
To: Designing an intentional input diet
Theme for the Quarter: Tools With Soul
Theme for the Week: Freedom Through Filtering
(Control the input, master the outcome)
Quote of the Week:
"You are what you consume…guard your inputs like your outputs depend on them."
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✨ In Today’s Episode:
The founder’s silent killer: input overload
A simple “Input Audit” for immediate clarity
Why your attention P&L may be your most important metric this year
If You Don’t Filter, You Drown
Why Founders Must Audit Their Inputs Before Scaling Their Outputs
🧠 ONE Smart Idea
Your business runs on the quality of your thinking.
Your thinking runs on the quality of your inputs.
If you aren’t intentionally filtering what comes in, you’re letting random noise set your strategic direction.
📖 Story Spark
A founder friend once bragged about “staying on top of everything.”
Podcasts at 2x speed.
Every newsletter.
Every trend on LinkedIn.
By Q4, he was exhausted, indecisive, and reacting to every shiny object.
When I asked him to list the top five pieces of content that actually moved the needle that year, he paused for a long time… then said, “Two blog posts. One book.”
⚙️ Tactical Application: The Input Audit
Think of this like your quarterly financial review (but for your mind).
Step 1 – List Your Inputs
Newsletters
Podcasts
YouTube channels
Social follows
Slack/Discord groups
Step 2 – Score Them (1–5 scale)
Clarity ROI – Does it make me think sharper?
Relevance – Does it directly serve my current goals?
Energy Impact – Do I feel lighter or heavier after consuming it?
Step 3 – Cut or Keep
Anything under 3 on average? Unfollow, unsubscribe, or mute for 30 days.
Protect the top scorers. Consume them first, before the noise.
Pro tip: Put your top five into a separate “Priority Feed” folder so you always start with signal.
🔦 Tool Spotlight: Readwise Reader
A read-it-later app that lets you tag, highlight, and auto-filter incoming content from email, RSS, and even Twitter.
Pair it with AI summaries to decide what’s worth your time before you dive in.
🧭 Intelligent Elevation
Filtering is not about being uninformed.
It’s about being intentionally informed.
The best founders don’t consume more (they consume better).
Your inputs are the raw material for your strategy.
Choose them like you choose your investors.
💸 Make Money With AI
Strategy: Use AI to create industry-specific “Insight Briefs” that founders pay for to save research time.
Steps:
Pick an industry you understand well (e.g., fitness coaching, boutique real estate, SaaS).
Use tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Claude to pull the week’s top 10 articles, trends, and data points.
Summarize each into 1–2 sentence actionable insights.
Package them into a clean 2-page PDF with Canva, branded to your audience.
Sell as a subscription (weekly or monthly) for $29–$199 depending on depth.
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💬 Closing Insight
The world is trying to push a firehose of information through your mind.
You can’t drink from a firehose …you drown.
Filter first.
Think better.
Build smarter.
"The more you subtract, the more you add."
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Most scale with chaos. You scale by design.
— Justin Glover
