Setting Your Table When the Table Itself Is Shaking

When strategic clarity becomes your greatest superpower—and why this week revealed everything.

This has been a brutal week. Not because life got hard—it always does. But because we got clarity on what hard actually looks like right now.

A National Security Strategy so fundamentally misaligned it reads like it was written by people who don’t understand the terrain we’re operating in. Two people murdered and nine wounded at Brown University. Fifteen murdered and forty wounded at Bondi Beach—a Hanukkah celebration, families gathered to celebrate, targeted with deliberate violence. And watching Army football fall by one point. One. Point. The kind of loss that teaches you everything about margins and preparation and what happens when conditions aren’t quite set correctly.

Any one of these would be worth sitting with. Together, they’re a mirror.

Strategic Clarity Requires Seeing What’s Actually Happening

Strategic clarity requires seeing what’s actually happening, not what you want to be happening. When your national security apparatus gets misaligned, when violence finds its targets so deliberately at a celebration of faith and family, when a team that prepared all season falls one point short—these aren’t separate problems. They’re data points revealing the same terrain.

We’re operating in systems where the rules have shifted, but the institutions still act like they haven’t. That’s not a tactical failure. That’s a strategic one.

Sanger, The New York Times’ national security correspondent, walks through the administration’s new National Security Strategy document with ruthless clarity. What he exposes is precisely what I’m talking about: when strategy gets corrupted by short-term transactional thinking, the entire system becomes reactive instead of strategic. A national security strategy that prioritizes profit over systems thinking is what happens when people don’t set their table before the game begins.

The difference between those who respond to crises and those who see them coming is preparation. Not luck. Not genius. Preparation.

When organizations operate without clarity about their objectives—without positioned strength, without strategy—watch what happens: teams fracture, resources scatter, and reaction becomes the only response available. And when nations respond reactively instead of strategically? The human cost becomes incalculable.

The people affected by this week’s violence, the Soldiers who gave everything for unclear strategic direction, the coaches & players who absorbed that one-point loss—they’re all humans trying to make meaning in chaos. The empathy isn’t weakness. It’s not sentiment. It’s clarity about what actually matters.

The families in Rhode Island. The community at Bondi Beach, a Jewish community celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, now carrying a trauma that will reshape their lives. These aren’t statistics. They’re reminders that your work—your actual work, the work of helping people move from survival to strategy—that work has never been more necessary.

But Listen. Here’s Where It Gets Good.

Yes, this week was hard. Yes, it hurts. This is the part people miss; you’re awake to it. You saw it clearly. You didn’t look away. That clarity, that refusal to numb or minimize or pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t? That’s where transformation lives. That’s where the real game begins.

Not in the big dramatic moment, but in the Tuesday morning when you choose—again—to see what’s actually here and ask: “What am I learning? What does this teach me about how I need to show up?”

That energy, that genuine engagement with the hard stuff, that’s where you find what makes you feel alive.

🙅🏼‍♂️ The Power of Elimination

This Tim Ferriss seth godin Derek Sivers Martha Beck collab episode is explicitly about creative subtraction; stripping away what doesn’t matter to reveal what does.

I’m doing this right now. Every time I rewrite a paragraph, strip away a sentence starting with “And,” remove an expletive construction, ensure the citations sit exactly right—I’m embodying the discipline I’m teaching you. I’m eliminating the excess to reveal the essential.

This is what the team at #Manuscripts sees when they hold the manuscript to a standard that feels brutal. They’re not trying to constrain the work. They’re helping me strip it down to its purest form. The same way Sivers eliminated subscriptions & contracts to reveal what he actually values. The same way Godin eliminated gray areas to create clarity. The same way Martha Beck taught us to follow authentic joy instead of manufactured dopamine hits.

The manuscript that emerges from this ruthless simplification won’t just explain how to think strategically. It will demonstrate it in every sentence, every structure, every choice made in service of clarity rather than convenience.

🦾The Armor We Wear

But here’s what I’ve learned that I want you to know: clarity alone isn’t enough. You also need depth. Real depth. The kind that comes from authentic connection.

Scott Galloway’s work on masculine friendship; his insistence that real strength comes from vulnerability with the right people, speaks directly to what we’re witnessing this week. In a time when young men especially operate in a void, told to be strong without being soft, competitive without being collaborative, or individual without being connected. His message is urgent.

The void that produces violence. The isolation that produces despair. The armor that produces distance. That’s what my “Dropping the Armor” chapter addresses. Not the armor that protects you in combat zones. That has its place. But the armor that prevents genuine connection, authentic leadership, & the kind of vulnerability that creates transformation.

Why “Set Your Table” 🍽️ matters now is because it teaches people how to strip away the excess and how to open enough to connect. How to be strategically clear and authentically vulnerable. How to prepare before the battle and know when to lay down the weapons.

📖The Manuscript Is the Answer

Yes—> the editing is brutal. I knew it would be. Manuscripts is holding me to a standard because they see what I’m building. This manuscript is becoming remarkable not despite the difficulty but through it. I’m setting my own table in real time.

My manuscript isn’t the answer because it fixes anything. But because it teaches people how to think like humans again. How to prepare before the battle. How to simplify without losing depth. How to open without losing strength. How to stop reacting to other people’s tables and start setting their own.

This week was hard. And I’m using it. That’s everything.

📢 The Tribe Is Waiting

The tribe is waiting. The people who are done performing competence, done reacting to chaos, done letting other people define their tables—they’re ready. They’re looking for a framework that honors the complexity of modern life while providing the clarity to navigate it. That honors the need for strength *and* vulnerability. That teaches strategy *and* authenticity.

That’s what I’m building.

Keep going.

—*Rusty*

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**Go Deeper:**

— Understanding what happens when national strategy loses coherence.

— The power of creative subtraction and clarity.

- [Scott Galloway on Masculine Friendship](https://scottgalloway.com) — Why vulnerability is the ultimate strength.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​