The Systems Guy • Follow me for systems on health, wealth, and free time ⚡ Cornell MBA • 2M+ audience

Hi, I'm Ben Meer.

Tired of non-actionable life advice, I started writing online in February 2022.

Here are the results:

→ Built social audience from 0 to 2M+ (across IG, LinkedIn, and X) 
→ Grew 0 to 690K+ followers on LinkedIn in 21 months
→ Scaled newsletter—System Sunday—from 0 to 270K+ subscribers

There are 2 primary ways I can help you:

1) System Sunday Newsletter

Most people don't know how to build life systems to accelerate personal growth. So I created a weekly newsletter that teaches these systems (it's free). Subscribe to unlock new levels of wealth, health, and freedom.

→ Try it: benmeer.com/ss

2) Archimedes [Coaching]

Access the most exclusive members' club for LinkedIn thought leaders. Get the proven systems, resources, and community to 10x your personal brand. 

→ Check it out: joinarchimedes.com

——

Sponsorships: partnerships@benmeer.com

Ben Meer

How to live life like it’s your second time around.

5 rules to experience more joy and less regret:

1. Remember the Spotlight Effect.

We think people are paying far more attention to us than they are. 

Harsh truth: 

Your freedom begins the day you realize nobody is thinking about you.

—

2. Consider the things you won’t care about in 5 years. 

• Other people’s opinions
• Petty disagreements
• Sensationalized news 

Allow yourself to stop caring now.

—

3. Shift your mindset from ‘I don’t know how’ to ‘I don’t know how yet.’

In the words of Adam Grant:

• Impostor syndrome: ‘I don't know what I'm doing. It's only a matter of time until everyone finds out.’

• Growth mindset: ‘I don't know what I'm doing yet. It's only a matter of time until I figure it out.’

The highest form of self-confidence is believing in your ability to learn.

—

4. Make 'No' your default. 

Whether it's a new work project or social gatherings, saying 'Yes' to non-priorities ruins your priorities. 

As Derek Sivers says, if it's not a 'Hell yeah,' it's a no.

Then pour that time into what actually excites you.


—

5. Normalize being weird.

“Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.” —Chris Sacca

—

We only get one do-over in this beautiful life. 

Make sure to live it intentionally. 🙌

♻️ Repost to help others live life to the fullest.
➕ Follow Ben Meer for more.

This quote hit home for me.

12 small life edits that have outsized returns:

Morning Routines

1. Make your bed first thing. You build momentum and set the tone for the day. 

2. Step outside. A healthy tide of cortisol is released when you step outside at daybreak, allowing you to become more alert. You'll reset your circadian rhythm.

3. Send a good morning text. Gm texts >>>. Make someone's day.

—

Evening Routines

4. Write down your 3:3:3 plan for tomorrow: 3 hours on your most important project, 3 shorter tasks, 3 maintenance activities (h/t Oliver Burkeman).

5. End your workday with a shutdown ritual (h/t Cal Newport). Close your laptop, plug in the charger, and spend 2 minutes tidying your desk. Then say "shutdown". Separating your work and life is key.

6. Journal 1 beautiful life moment. Delicious tacos, presentation you crushed, a moment of inner peace. Write it down. Gratitude programs a mindset of abundance.

—

Meals

7. Prioritize unprocessed, whole foods: eggs, blueberries, dark leafy greens, and walnuts. You'll feel on (finally).

8. Hydrate before you caffeinate. Drink a full glass of water right away. 60% of your body is water. Replenish it.

9. Follow Japan's 80% Rule: Only eat until you are 80% full. Overeating makes the body divert blood & energy to digestion (causing drowsiness). Nobody has time for a food coma.

—

Home

10. Establish a home for every item. My advice: List your most misplaced items (keys, wallet, etc.) and standardize a home for these things today.

11. Choose practical materialism. Buy things that make you healthier, wealthier, or provide you free time. Products that make a material difference in the quality of your life.

12. Follow the 1 In, 1 Out Rule. If you purchase one item, then donate, toss, or sell another. Manage both inbound and outbound possessions to enjoy equilibrium.

—

One last thing:

It's not just your environment worth editing. Your inner dialogue shapes your life, too.

Audit your thoughts to make sure they align with who you want to become.

Your future self will thank you. 

♻️ Repost to share these tips with others. 
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How to subtly upgrade your life in 2026.

Dial in these 5 everyday inputs:

1. Social Inputs

You become the 5 people you spend the most time with.

Choose wisely:

• Find intellectual sparring partners (where you help one another).
• Resist false kindness: Create an inner circle that will give you honest feedback.
• Avoid energy vampires: Spend more time with people who give you energy and less time with those who steal it.

—

2. Information Inputs

Elevate your sources. 

If you want to level up your information diet, here are some immediate upgrades:

TED Talks, documentaries, insightful podcasts, books that challenge and inspire, and unbiased news sources.

See the comments below for a curated list of my favorite resources.

—

3. Mental Inputs

Small shifts in language create big mindset shifts.

Among my favorites:

• Failure → Learning
• Stuck → Exploring new angles
• Nervous → Energized
• Hate → I prefer
• Have to → Get to

—

4. Health Inputs

Your brain influences every thought, feeling, and action you take.
So prioritize your brain health:

• Take long walks.
• Sleep 7+ hrs nightly.
• Have a strong rest ethic to avoid burnout.
• Rebalance your dopamine with less screen time.

—

5. Environmental Inputs

Pare down to essential items.

Then, manage both inbound & outbound possessions.

Inbound:
• Choose quality > quantity
• Purchase less; love every single item more

Outbound:
• Follow the 1 In, 1 Out Rule: If you buy one item, then donate, sell, or toss another

—

Your future results are a lagging measure of your current inputs.

Choose wisely. Everything else is downstream.

♻️ Repost to spread this message to your network.
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Social intelligence quietly determines who gets promoted.

Here are 20 sentences to master it:

These may be called soft skills, but there is nothing soft about their impact. 

♻️ Repost if you found this useful. 
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The ultimate career superpower?

Learning faster than everyone else.

These 4 science-backed frameworks make it possible:

1. Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
↳ Identify the 20% of material driving 80% of learning.

2. Spaced Repetition 
↳ Revisit concepts at growing intervals. Memory compounds with time.

3. Feynman Technique
↳ Break an idea down into its simplest parts to deeply understand it.

4. Memory Palace
↳ Attach facts to memorable mental images. Visuals are hard to forget.

 —

Accelerate your learning with AI:

Here’s 3 prompts to use:

1. “Explain [topic] to me as if I’m 12.”

2. “Quiz me on [topic] with 5 questions, then give hints only if I’m stuck.” 

3. “Generate a spaced-repetition schedule for mastering [skill] in 30 days.”

Paste these into your favorite AI to take action. 

—

The best investment you’ll ever make is in your own mind.

Information is abundant. It’s the willingness to learn that’s rare.

💾 Save this to find it later.
➕ Follow Ben Meer for more frameworks like these.

6 simple secrets to become quietly confident:

1. Allocate time every day for learning

Confidence starts with competence.

• Block out 30 minutes for reading
• Listen to an audiobook or podcast during your commute to work
• Treat everyone like they were sent to teach you something

—

2. Hone in your body language

Nonverbal communication is underrated. 

People will like or dislike your communication based on:

7% words, 38% face and tone, and 55% body language. 

Stand up straight. Keep your shoulders back. Make eye contact. Smile. Give a firm handshake.

—

3. Be more interested than interesting 

Make people feel important using the SHR Method:

Seen
• Give eye contact
• Offer a specific compliment

Heard
• Ask good questions
• Be interested, not interesting

Remembered
• Follow up
• Remember name(s)
• Recall something you discussed

—

4. Build your own momentum

• Write down your wins (compliments, successful presentation, solo trip, etc.)
• Consistently review these wins

You’ll build an undeniable stack of evidence showing how far you’ve come and how seriously capable you are.

—

5. Pause before speaking

When speaking, we allow ourselves only 30% of the time a listener would give us to fill a pause.

You have more time to reply than you think.

Wait for 2s first.

Pause in Speaking + Eye Contact = Confidence

(h/t Charlie Newport)

—

6. Embrace your flaws (Pratful Effect)

Think of your favorite character from the movies or TV.

They always had at least one major weakness (you wouldn’t like them as much otherwise).

Owning your flaws is humanizing; you’ll be magnetic.

You don’t need to hide parts of yourself to be accepted by others. 🙌

—

It doesn’t matter whether you’re introverted, extroverted, or ambiverted.

Confidence isn’t the loudest voice in the room.

It’s the calm belief that you'll figure things out.

♻️ Repost this if you learned something new.
🔖 And save it so you can master all 6 strategies.

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." —Peter Drucker

20 simple phrases to build a healthy team culture:

If you want to install a growth mindset:

1. "What did we learn?"
2. "How might we…?"
3. "I need your help…"
4. "What are your thoughts on…?"
5. "Thanks for taking that risk."

If you want to build trust:

6. "I made a mistake."
7. "You've got my full support."
8. "I appreciate when you…"
9. Help me understand…"
10. "I trust your judgement."

If you want to cut out toxic language (avoid these):

11. "That's not my job."
12. "We've always done it this way."
13. "Who's to blame?"
14. "That'll never work."
15. "Just do what I say."

If you want to prevent eroding your culture (avoid these):

16. "They should have…"
17. "You're wrong because…"
18. "That's a stupid idea."
19. "Why didn't you…"
20. "I told you so."

The words you speak become the culture you work in.

The best ones don't just happen overnight.

They're built one word, phrase, and conversation at a time.

♻️ Repost to champion healthy workplace communication.
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I build decks (sales & pitches, not patios) | professional magician | out here makin' friends

I used to help founders raise/sell millions with beautiful decks.
Now, I’m using AI to help humans heal their inner world.

Same storytelling skills. Different stakes.

I’m Head of Product & Ops at a stealth mental wellness AI startup, building games that help humans heal their relationship with self (the ‘what happened to you’ pieces).

On here, I talk about:
- Mental health & dopamine: the games our brains play, how tech makes it worse/better
- Storytelling: whether it’s a deck, a product, or a habit… story drives behavior
- Ops & product in the wild: what’s working (and not) as we build
- Books: I read 100+ a year and steal the best ideas shamelessly

For you? Well, you tell me…

Founder? Need a deck or website → DM and I’ll intro you to my partner. 
Ops/prod person? Follow for ops + AI wisdom from the trenches. 
Interesting human? Send me your favorite book rec.

Now we’re friends!

John Linford

Remember that incredible girlfriend? 
The one doing the nonprofit? 
She’s my fiancée now :) 

Happy to share a glimpse of my personal life with my professional circle. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming 😂

Helping humans heal | talking ops, AI, & books | professional magician | out here makin’ friends

Hot take: think Apple’s gonna die.

They’ve done a beautiful job with their products.

I’m an Apple guy, writing this on a Mac.

That said, in the coming days/times, what’s going to be prioritized are the interconnected, well-trained, and ubiquitous AI platforms. 

And for all the merit a closed ecosystem had..
It might be killing them for the future.

Case in point: swapped their AI to Gemini.

I think it’s because they didn’t have sufficient stuff to train models on. 

Couldn’t make it good.

I think they need to pivot, and become die-hard hardware / physical product gurus (more than they already are), open up their ecosystem, and figure out a way to intersect with the growing tide.

Else their phones / computers are gonna get left in the dust by the coming AI-enabled wave.

Right? Wrong? 
Would love to spark some debate here.

Quickly seeing these skills becoming valuable in an AI world:
1.	Reading fast
2.	Generalist education
3.	Passion for liberal arts

Seems like a full circle moment to me.

The people thriving with AI (excluding builders) are the ones who know how to connect dots across disciplines, who see context, who ask better questions than machines can answer.

It's the: "I really like to code but in my spare time I research the intersection between over the board chess strategies and macroeconomics"

or 

"Somedays, I just wanna quit my high-level corporate product job so I can start a woodworking shop, designing custom iPad cases"

That kinda vibe. 

David Epstein called this years ago in Range:

“In a wicked world, breadth beats depth.”

In his lingo, it’s all about kind vs wicked frames.

Kind systems:	
- Clear rules
- Repeating patterns
- Immediate, accurate feedback
- Skills gained through repetition

Think: chess, golf, math

Wicked systems: 

- Feedback is delayed or misleading
- Rules are unclear or incomplete
- Patterns are inconsistent
- Experience can mislead

Think: business, leadership, innovation

Important to notice,
Wicked systems 
(almost always)
Involve people!

(only broke that up for emphasis lol)

As AI takes over kind tasks, 
humans become orchestrators,
Managing chaos thru minion-power. 

Which means the skills of managers become preeminent. 

Really seems like the system of STEM-focus, being technical, is about to flip on it’s head.

I’m trying to split my brain.

One half is slow.
Dialed.
Logical.
Meditative.
Principle-driven.

That’s the brain taking pen/paper notes.
Going on long walks. 
Sitting in silence.
Built for an older time. 

Other half is fast.
Task-switching.
Instictual. 
Keen. 
New. 

That’s the brain running four parallel agents.
Composing and responding instantly.
Referencing internal docs rapidly.
Built for a new age of speed. 

I think both are important. 

And learning about “fast-twitch” and “slow-twitch” brainpower is critical, and Thinking Fast and Slow is one of the best primers I’ve found for that.

Highly recommend, you read this one?

Amazing how many conventions from previous bosses carry over.

I still:
- run trainings like Dave Lainhart
- do sales calls like James Dawson
- do my calendar invites like Matt W Gore 
- adjudicate pro formas like Jed McCarthy
- think about strategy like Mark Josephson
- orchestrate project management like Matt W Gore
- run convergent/divergent thinking like Nathan Wallace
- think about stakeholder needs like Anna Schena Walsh

And so much more. 

Feeling grateful on this Friday. 

I’d love to hear about your conventions.
Who’s inspired you.
Let’s get some feel-good in the comments.

Anyone else think about how you could kill it as an influencer, because you do such cool stuff on a day-to-day basis, but you don’t want to sell your soul or cheapen the incredible real-life experiences you’re having by manufacturing the setting for content? 

Cuz same.

Lenny’s Podcast has been a hack.

One of the recent episodes with Lazar Jovanovic (professional vibe-coder at Lovable) helped me immensely as I’m trying to build out workflows that massively increase my productivity. Two salient points: 

- don’t spend credits iterating
- build in parallel

The first bit is counterintuitive.
How we used to use AI (read: chat) was like this:

‘Here’s an idea’
*ok interesting response*
‘Here’s some clarification’
*ok now that’s slightly better*
‘Here’s even more conversation’
*oh shoot now we’ve lost the plot*

AI loses memory/context quickly.
It’s getting there, but not there yet. 

So, better to start, feed it some ideas, but then take that *slightly* better idea, and toss it into a new chat/tab, then slightly improve with one extra bit of brainstorming. 

Then, when you have all the pieces built out, you feed the final framework, implementation plan, design inspiration in one swoop, and let it run. You can build with confidence then. 

The other piece should have been obvious:
Build with multiple agents/chats at once.

Instead of staring down at the one chat screen,
I’m now in Code, Cowork, and Chat (Claude)
All at one, running different projects. 

Once they have good prompts, the rest is just reading and prompting for the AI to continue on it’s track, which means you can context switch easier.

Starting to feel the additional benefits in a big way.

Feeling like I’m tapping at the promised productivity hacks of AI. 

What’s been a helpful hack you’ve been using as you’re building with AI?

Want to invite your pondering on this:
Lucky versus leverage.

The more entrepreneurs and business folks I engage with, especially the high-flying successful ones, the more I’m convinced your first major win is luck.

Prevailing economic winds.
Problem/pain knowledge.
Right mentors, right time.
Solution earned insights.
Right offer, right time.

List goes on.

Anyone who is super successful and doesn’t give some small nod to luck is kidding themselves, IMO (open to counterarguements).

However!

Once you’ve gotten lucky, all the sudden…
You’ve got leverage. 

You’ve got connections
Equity
Money
Reputation
Previous ‘at bats’.

You can leverage those for additional success.

But that first catapulting?

Lotta luck in there.

Disagree? Agree? Tell me.

Product at early-stage startup means trampoline.
Bouncing from strategic to tactical, up n’ down. 

Acting as:

Product manager
(what are we doing this sprint)

Head of product 
(what are we doing this quarter)

Chief product officer
(what’s happening in five years)

Curious, what are the rules of thumb that guide when you hire to separate and reassign these combined roles? When should we think about giving other people my 3-4 extra jobs?

I might have just seen the death knell of Saas. 

We implemented EOS over the last few months.

Highly recommend, gets everyone rowing well.

But we’ve been using this software to run mtgs. 
Called Ninety, it’s…fine. Does the job.

But I’ve been meaning to play around with Replit. 

So, I went to Claude,
Fed it a bunch of context,
Few images and tech docs,
Created a solid Replit prompt…

And in two hours of tinkering,
I remade Ninety.

Full stop.
It works. 

We’re gonna start using it next week. 

For reference, we were about to add a bunch more team members to this platform. At $10/seat, we were gonna be paying $100/mo for this thing.

The money isn’t the point.
The point is that I built it. 

And dumb SaaS should be quaking in their boots. 

If you’ve got a simple web page that you’re charging a comfortable monthly price for…beware. Me and my little army of AI agents is coming for you. 

Whaddya think? There a reckoning coming? 
And if this is ‘dumb SaaS’, what’s smart?

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The Battle

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