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Toxic people defy logic.

Some are blissfully unaware of the negativity they spread, while others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos.

As you "handle" toxic people and set good boundaries to protect yourself, keep these 3 things in mind:

1) Handling toxicity is about energy management, not just conflict resolution.

Smart people know that dealing with toxic people isn’t about “winning” the interaction. It's about protecting your time, focus, and mental bandwidth so you can direct energy toward meaningful pursuits.

2) The strongest defense is internal, not external.

The battle against toxicity often happens inside. If you strengthen your mindset, toxic people lose much of their influence over you.

3) Support systems act as mirrors of reality.

Toxic people distort perspective, making you doubt yourself. By leaning on trusted allies, smart people recalibrate their sense of what’s real, ensuring they don’t internalize someone else’s dysfunction as their own flaw.


Now read the list one more time with these insights in mind...

10 WAYS SMART PEOPLE HANDLE TOXIC PEOPLE

1) Set limits

Smart people cut complainers short by shifting the focus to solutions.

2) Don’t die in the fight

They know which battles matter and walk away from the rest.

3) Rise above

They refuse to let toxic people pull them into drama.

4) Stay aware of emotions

They notice when their buttons are being pushed and reset before reacting.

5) Establish boundaries

They decide in advance how much time and energy they’ll give toxic people.

6) Don’t let anyone limit your joy

They protect their happiness and self-worth from outside negativity.

7) Focus on solutions, not problems

They redirect conversations toward actions instead of complaints.

8) Don’t forget, but don’t dwell

They learn the lesson and leave the baggage behind.

9) Squash negative self-talk

They stop toxic behavior from influencing their inner dialogue.

10) Use a support system

They lean on trusted people to gain perspective and stay grounded.

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Teaching an experimental class for MBAs on “vibefounding,” the students have four days to come up and launch a company. More on this eventually, but quick observations:

1) I have taught entrepreneurship for over a decade. Everything they are doing in four days would have taken a semester in previous years, if it could have done it at all. Quality is also far better.

2) Give people tools and training and they can do amazing things. We are using a combination of Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT. The non-coders are all building working products. But also everyone is doing weeks of high quality work on financials, research, pricing, positioning, marketing in hours. All the tools are weird to use, even with some training, but they are figuring it out.

3) People with experience in an industry or skill have a huge advantage as they can build solutions that have built-in markets & which solve known hard problems that seemed impossible. (Always been true, but the barriers have fallen to actually doing stuff)

4) The hardest thing to get across is that AI doesn’t just do work for you, it also does new kinds of work. The most successful efforts often take advantage of the fact that the AI itself is very smart. How do you bring its analytical, creative, and empathetic abilities to bear on a problem? What do you do with access to a very smart intelligence on demand?

I wish I had more frameworks to clearly teach. So many assumptions about how to launch a business have clearly changed. You don’t need to go through the same discovery process if you build a dozen ideas at the same time & get AI feedback. Many, many new possibilities, and the students really see how big a deal this is.

AI is eating consulting? McKinsey just confirmed it now counts AI as part of its workforce - 40,000 humans & 25,000 AI agents. That’s 65,000 “employees” 😳

Chief Executive Bob Sternfels made it official:

→ AI already powers 40% of McKinsey projects
→ Agents produced 2.5M charts in 6 months
→ 1.5M human hours saved per year

The goal is to have 1 AI agent per human 🤖

McKinsey didn’t fire people (yet). But they deleted entry-level work.

The boring parts are now gone:

→ Desk research
→ Slide drafting
→ Data cleaning
→ First-pass analysis

That work now happens at machine speed. Humans move up the stack instantly.

But the real bet the consulting giant is making isn’t about productivity.

It’s about optionality.

McKinsey is building a firm that can:

→ Scale without hiring
→ Serve more clients with the same headcount
→ Recompose teams instantly
→ Price expertise, not hours

Consulting then becomes software-like.

High margins.
High leverage.
Low friction.

And this is the real future of work.

Humans won’t execute.
They’ll direct, judge, and decide.

AI will do the rest.

P.S. check out Top 10 AI Startups in 2026 & Their Decks: https://lnkd.in/dY7b4kT4

Data modeling is far from dead! It’s actually more relevant than ever.

There’s been an interesting shift in the seas with AI. Some people saying we don’t need to do facts and dimensions anymore. This is a wild take because product analytics don’t suddenly disappear because LLM has arrived.

It seems like to me that multi-modal LLM is bringing together the three types of data:

- structured

- semi-structured

- unstructured

Dimensional modeling is still very relevant but will need to be augmented to include semi-structured outputs from the parsing of text and image data.

The necessity for complex types like VARIANT and STRUCT seems to be rising. Which is increasing the need for data modeling not decreasing it.

It feels like some company leaders now believe you can just point an LLM at a Kafka queue and have a perfect data warehouse which is still SO far from the actual reality of where data engineering sits today

Am I missing something or is the hype train just really loud right now?

Protect your people or lose your people. It's that simple.

Real leadership shows up when the pressure builds and everyone's looking for someone to blame.

Here's how great leaders actually protect their teams:

From Office Drama
Bad leaders: "You need to navigate the politics if you want to get ahead here."
Good leaders: "Focus on your work. I'll handle the politics and drama."

From Busy Work
Bad leaders: "Corporate wants these reports, so you need to fill them out."
Good leaders: "This is pointless busy work. I'll handle it so you can focus on what matters."

From Micromanagement
Bad leaders: Pass down every controlling demand from above.
Good leaders: "My boss wants daily check-ins, but I trust you. I'll handle the reporting."

From Pointless Meetings
Bad leaders: "Everyone needs to attend the all-hands, no exceptions."
Good leaders: "This meeting doesn't apply to you. Keep working, I'll brief you on anything important."

From Burnout
Bad leaders: "Everyone's working late, why aren't you?"
Good leaders: "If you're working nights and weekends regularly, we have a process problem I need to solve."

From Blame Culture
Bad leaders: "Why did this happen? Someone screwed up."
Good leaders: "This happened. Here's how we fix it and prevent it next time."

The best leaders I know aren't popular with their bosses. They're popular with their teams.

Because they choose their people over their politics.

What kind of leader are you?

-DM

I'm thrilled to announce this years winner of RB2B's President's Club.

He only started 6 months ago and has closed $1M in ARR.

Bro, is insane. Doesn't take breaks, doesn't sleep, doesn't eat.

Just look at this output:

- 16,830 conversations
- 3,040 demos
- 1,600 custom pricing quotes
- countless support tickets too

As a thank you, we sent him to the Grand Wailela in Hawaii for a week.

First class travel, all expenses paid.

Yes, he still has to work, but he's AI and has no feelings/say.

Thank you Adam Bot!

"Should I quit or keep going?"

Everybody wants to know what's "right" .. but life isn’t black or white. It’s about what is right for you in that moment .. or even better, what your preference is in the moment

I’ve written five New York Times bestsellers and read thousands of books.

Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about how reading actually works.

Here are four pieces of advice that will make you a better reader.

First, torture your books. Crack the spine. Underline. Write in the margins.
Books are not precious objects. They are tools for thinking. The more you engage, the more you remember.

Second, become a quitter. If a book is not working for you, stop. It is not your responsibility to push through. It is the author’s responsibility to keep you engaged. A useful rule of thumb: 100 minus your age equals the number of pages you should give a book before walking away.

Third, build a second brain. Keep your highlights and notes in one place. Notion, Google Docs, or whatever system you trust. Export your Kindle highlights. Capture your margin notes. Later, those ideas become reusable raw material.

Fourth, become a T-shaped reader. Go deep in your field. But also read widely outside it. Psychology, art, history, poetry, even comics.

Depth without breadth narrows you. Breadth without depth thins you. The goal is both.

If you do these four things, you will not just read more. You will remember more.

I share a few more tips in a recent I did: https://lnkd.in/gMpWSKd3