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Most founders I work with have the same problem. Their team can't operate without…
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Max Bernstein shared thisYour Anxiety Is A Design Problem In January 2025, an air traffic controller at Reagan National was working a quieter shift than usual. An Army helicopter was flying a training route along the Potomac. A regional jet was circling to land on a runway whose approach path crossed the helicopter's route. The two aircraft were on different radio frequencies. Neither crew could hear the other. At O'Hare, two separate controllers would have handled this. At Reagan that night, one controller was managing both. He lost track of the helicopte, and tragically, sixty-seven people died. The controller at O'Hare handles 20 to 25 aircraft at a time. 857,000 movements a year. And it works. Because the system externalizes everything. Each aircraft gets a paper strip. The radar shows positions. The strips hold the plan. The controller's working memory holds almost nothing. That's by design. At Reagan, the system put two types of traffic on converging paths and left one person's brain to hold it all together. Your morning works the same way. The client request you've been avoiding. Something about taxes. The 30 emails you haven't opened. A dentist appointment. A nagging feeling you're forgetting something you can't quite name. Each one of those is an aircraft on your radar. And you're holding all of them in your head. No strips. No system. In 1956, George Miller proved your brain holds about 4 things at once. In 2011, Roy Baumeister proved you don't have to finish a task to release it from working memory. You just have to make a specific plan. Your brain treats "I know when and how" the same as "done." The anxiety you feel before 9 AM is a design problem. Not a character flaw. I wrote the full breakdown with the research, a five-minute method, and a set of AI prompts that run it for you. https://lnkd.in/e4zUmQRn
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Max Bernstein shared thisI almost got on the wrong plane this morning. We were at the tiny Gainesville, FL airport. My girlfriend and I lined up at the gate without really looking. Then we looked. Everyone around us was 80+. Every single person was holding a boarding pass printed on a full sheet of 8.5x11 paper. We were the only two holding phones. I walked up to scan my boarding pass and the gate agent laughed. The guy behind me said “y’all are way too young to be on this flight.” I said “oh stop” like it was a complement (It was not a compliment). This was a Sun Country charter to Biloxi at the Beau Rivage casino. Round-trip airfare, hotel shuttle, gambling perks. One package. The $199 price includes the flight, two nights, a food credit, and $25 in slot play. Beau Rivage eats the transportation margin to put a specific person inside their building for 48 hours. That math only works if you know exactly what one customer is worth over a lifetime. Trust me…those casinos do. One plane. One city. One demographic. One day. The whole product was built around how one specific person moves through the world. They print their boarding pass so the process accommodates printing. The gate agent knows the drill. The shuttle driver knows the drill. The host at Beau Rivage has their name (and dedicated slot machine) before they land. You go deep enough into one person’s world and the product starts running itself. Most offers go wide instead. Built for everyone, optimized for no one. The sales page targets “entrepreneurs.” The course is for “anyone who wants to grow.” The service is for “companies looking to improve.” Then there’s the casino charter. Built so specifically for one person that my 42-year-old self trying to scan a QR code felt like I’d walked into someone else’s family reunion. The gate agent wasn’t confused. I was. That’s the signal. When your product has a wrong-person problem, that usually means it has a right-person problem too. The Beau Rivage charter doesn’t accidentally exclude me. It was never built for me. Every piece of it, the paper boarding passes, the group travel, the host waiting with a name, is a feature for someone else. Big profits lives in the narrow product. The one that looks too small until you watch a full charter fill up on a Sunday in March for one very specific person who shows up every single time you open the door. What’s yours?
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Max Bernstein reposted thisI don't recommend things lightly, but I'll happily shout out Max Bernstein and his newsletter Signal>Noise any day of the week. Max is one of those people whose thinking I genuinely trust. He writes about AI and human expertise in a way that actually makes you think rather than just scroll past. It's well-written, full of tips you can actually use, and never feels like noise for the sake of it. Which, given the name, feels very intentional. https://lnkd.in/edv7dqnj
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Max Bernstein shared this269 people completed work tasks faster with AI. They also felt less ownership of the work, less meaning from it, and less capable afterward. A study published in Nature (the science journal, not a forest) split those people into two groups. - One group handed the work to AI and reviewed what came back. - The other stayed inside it, shaped it, argued with it...made it theirs. The first group finished faster. They also walked away feeling like the output had happened to them instead of coming from them. This is the part of the AI productivity conversation you don't hear about much. I wrote about it below. It starts in 1925, with a washing machine.
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Max Bernstein shared thisALL CAPS instructions now make Claude perform worse. So does "YOU MUST" and "CRITICAL:" and every other trick that worked six months ago. Here's what to do instead.
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Max Bernstein reposted thisMax Bernstein reposted thisI turned 74 today. Here's what I know after 50 years in business that nobody told me when I started: Resilience isn't a personality trait. It's infrastructure. In 2008, after 20 years of running MindIQ, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and job burnout. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Four kids. A mortgage. A business that still needed me to show up. I didn't push through on willpower. I built a system. That system became Staying in the Game. Five decisions I faced over five decades. Each one is different. Each one is a different kind of hard. Every decision follows the same format: 1. The Story: What happened, with the details that made it hard. 2. The Decision: What the moment was really about and why founders get it wrong. 3. The Resilience Connection: The specific layer of resilience that decision builds. 4. The Lesson: What to do when you hit this decision yourself. 5. The AI Prompts: 30 Coaching, Advisory, and Mindset prompts that apply the framework to your situation today. Plus, an Appendix: When to Fold. Because sometimes the most resilient thing you can do is know when to stop. I charge $5,000 for this kind of coaching one-on-one. Today, because I'm 74 and in a great mood, it's $47. Use code Birthday and it's $37. Get it here: https://lnkd.in/eAusHkpC If you've been in the game for a few years, you already know what resilience costs when you don't have it. Now you don't have to pay that price. Happy birthday to me. And to you. What's the hardest decision you've had to make in your business? Drop it in the comments.
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Max Bernstein shared thisLet's vibe... Starting tomorrow I'm running it back as a 3-day sprint: Friday, Tuesday 3/10, Thursday 3/12. Three sessions. You walk away with a finished app, even if you have zero idea what to build right now. What we're covering goes deeper than "here's how to use Lovable." We start from scratch on what a good idea actually is. How to know if people would pay for it. How to position it. How to ship something useful in 1-2 weeks. Skills that work no matter what tools exist next month. I wrote up a quick breakdown below. The schedule, what we're building, the vibe coding buddy I made for the class, etc. If you want to join us live: The community trial is 7 days. Sign up today, show up tomorrow, cancel before you're ever charged. [Full breakdown in the article below.]
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Max Bernstein reposted thisMax Bernstein reposted thisOutbound sales are getting near impossible. So, I pivoted. Founders, I suggest you do the same. Here’s what I did. I’ve always believed inbound leads were way better. Duh. Those leads are raising their hand, typically have a real pain, and are actively looking for help. I had AI built my new website overnight to attract those leads. Literally overnight. Actually, my son Max Bernstein, who’s become an amazing AI consultant (biased, but highly recommend), created the site using Claude and other tools (I think). Plus, I can edit it! I meet with a lot of founders who complain about the cost and effort put into marketing, to get leads. Don’t fight the wave. Optimize so your future customers find YOU.🎯 You don’t have to give up outbound. You can, however, approach it more strategically with AI. Then, you’ll have the best of both worlds. The key to any successful business is adapting when the cheese moves. I learned this the hard way a couple decades ago. Never again. When things change, stop, evaluate, and make your move. Doing nothing will bring your business down to nothing. The cheese has moved. Your opportunity awaits. So, what do you think of the new website? Don’t worry, I have thick skin.😁 https://lnkd.in/eEx_gHHMFractional Sales Leader - Fractional CRO | Louie BernsteinFractional Sales Leader - Fractional CRO | Louie Bernstein
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Max Bernstein shared thisOne of the biggest reasons I see people struggle who are new to AI, is because they don't start with the fundamentals. But honestly...it's not their fault. If you started using AI a few years ago, all you did was learn how to prompt because THAT was new and exciting. You started at step 1 and actually built the proper skills, the proper way. Now, I see people start using AI and day one start asking me questions about ClawdBot, Agents, Claude Code and Cursor. They are trying to go from level 1 to level 793 right away. They end up overwhelmed, lost, massive API bills or just bad results. Think about what happens when someone browses YouTube to learn AI. The advanced stuff is all the stuff that is getting served because it is new, exciting and gets the clicks. It may not be the sexiest stuff, but if you are starting, start with the basics and build from there. Wax on, wax off.
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Experience & Education
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Max B. Consulting, LLC
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Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Brand Specialist
Catchafire
- Present 6 years 7 months
Health
Assist nonprofits with mission-critical projects to advance their mission and goals
Contributed approximately $10,832 through 3 engagements with nonprofit organizations
Learn more about my impact: https://www.catchafire.org/profiles/594193/
Honors & Awards
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NAVC SPOTLIGHT AWARD: NexGard® (afoxolaner) Lyme Awareness Campaign from Boehringer Ingelheim and Shepherd
NAVC
The NAVC, the world’s leading not-for-profit association dedicated to supporting the global veterinary health community, introduced the Animal Health Marketing Awards, The VETTYs, in 2017 to recognize and reward the marketing, public relations, digital, social, design, events and creative work created on the behalf of animal health. The competition is open to products and services available through veterinarians or that supports the veterinary community, including pharmaceuticals, pet foods…
The NAVC, the world’s leading not-for-profit association dedicated to supporting the global veterinary health community, introduced the Animal Health Marketing Awards, The VETTYs, in 2017 to recognize and reward the marketing, public relations, digital, social, design, events and creative work created on the behalf of animal health. The competition is open to products and services available through veterinarians or that supports the veterinary community, including pharmaceuticals, pet foods, diagnostic equipment, professional associations, pet advocate organizations and more.
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NexGard Lyme In-Clinic Detailer Boehringer Ingelheim/NexGard Shepherd
NAVC
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NexGardClinic.com Boehringer Ingelheim/NexGard Shepherd
NAVC
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Vital Circle Award
Merial National Sales Meeting
The Vital Circle Award is the highest award bestowed upon Merial employees. It is awarded by fellow peers based on Merial values and outstanding personal contribution.
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