Above the Chaos

A Stoic Playbook to Lead With Clarity, Conviction, and Confidence

Lead Above the Chaos

You became the bottleneck because you are too good at execution to let go. This is the Stoic operating system that gets you out of the firefighting and back to leading, calm under pressure, when everything depends on you.

By Eric Weiss, executive coach to 75+ technical founders and teams at OpenAI, Qualcomm, and Sony PlayStation.

To celebrate the book launch, the eBook will be free for a limited time. Grab it now!

The full eBook and the 64-page workbook, free for a limited time. No spam, unsubscribe in one click. Both will arrive in your inbox in about two minutes.

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You Built a Company, Now It's Running You.

The first Slack ping hits before coffee. A big customer might churn. By the time your cup is poured, nine more messages have landed and none of them can wait.

You raised the round. You shipped the product. The thing you bet everything on is working. By every metric a board cares about, you're winning.

So why does it feel like you're holding the whole thing together with both hands while the ground keeps moving?

The company outgrew its infrastructure, and the infrastructure became you. You're the routing layer, the escalation path, the final say. You became the bottleneck. Not because you're bad at this. Because you're too good at it to let go.

You have run the playbooks. GTD, time-blocking, the 5am mornings, the cold plunges. They buy back a few hours and the water rises again, because the problem was never your calendar. It is that the whole company now routes through one person.

A bad day would almost be a relief, because a bad day ends. This is all day, every day.

You can out-grind it for a while. You cannot out-grind it forever.

This book lays out a complete Stoic Leadership Operating System that will help you rise above the chaos. The book builds a foundation on these eight Stoic principles:

• Principle 1: Focus on What You Can Control
• Principle 2: Cultivate Virtue and Integrity
• Principle 3: Maintain Emotional Equilibrium
• Principle 4: Embrace Obstacles as Opportunities
• Principle 5: Practice Mindfulness and Self-Reflection
• Principle 6: Understand the Impermanence of Outcomes
• Principle 7: Foster a Strong Team Culture
• Principle 8: Lead by Example

Finally, the book ties it all together into a complete Leadership Philosophy Canvas that you can use to lead your business with clarity, conviction, and confidence.

Get the eBook and the Workbook, Free

You won't change anything by reading. The change happens when you put it on paper. You get the full eBook plus the 64-page workbook, with all nine exercises laid out one step per page and room to work each one by hand. The workbook is the same set of exercises I run with founders in coaching. All 64 pages, free. Most founders pay for the paperback. You can read the same book today for an email, and the workbook comes with it.

You will follow three founders through a cohort as they each work out of the bottleneck. Most readers see themselves in at least one of them.

Arrives in about two minutes. You can run the first exercise today. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

About the Author: Eric Weiss

I coach SaaS and AI founders through the messy middle between product-market fit and scale. Before coaching I filled nearly every seat myself, from software engineer to data scientist to CTO, so I write from inside the role.

I've worked alongside more than seventy-five technical founders and teams, including OpenAI, where I helped operationalize GPT-3 during its rapid expansion, along with Heap, Sendlane, Tealium, and Sempre Health. Earlier I led the data science and engineering team behind Qualcomm's $7.8 billion IP business and helped build and launch Sony's PlayStation Network.

I found Stoicism the hard way. Above the Chaos grew out of that turnaround and the years of coaching that followed.

I wrote this book because I cannot sit across from every founder who needs it. It is everything I know about leading through the messy middle, on paper. What it cannot do is tell you which mistake you are making right now. That part still takes a conversation.

What Founders Are Saying

Eric has coached and built alongside teams at OpenAI, Qualcomm, Sony PlayStation, Heap, Sendlane, and Tealium.

You Can't Be the Hero Anymore

The chaos isn't going anywhere. Your relationship with it can.

FAQ

Get the free eBook and workbook

Nine exercises. One Leadership Philosophy Canvas.