The Monthly Mo

Everybody Wants You to Win

The hiring manager wants you to be the perfect person for the role.

The girl you’re on a first date with is hoping you’re her soulmate.

The friend of a friend you’re meeting for the first time is hoping you’re the sickest guy ever.

The audience listening to your speech is hoping you’re inspiring.

The client on the other side of the meeting is hoping you can solve their problem so they can stop taking meetings about the problem.

The investor is hoping you have a million-dollar business idea because, believe it or not, they also enjoy making money.

Everybody wants you to win.

Not because everybody loves you.

Not because the world is full of angels.

But because everybody wants to win.

The harsh truth is that most people do not care about you enough to want you to fail. They are too busy thinking about themselves. Their problems. Their plans. Their dinner reservation. Their situationship.

A lot of people become timid in certain situations because they walk in like the room has already decided against them.

They walk into the interview thinking the hiring manager is looking for a reason to reject them.

They walk into the date thinking the girl is looking for the first red flag.

They walk into the meeting thinking everyone is waiting for them to say something stupid.

They walk into the speech stuttering because they think the audience wants them to bomb.

But most of the time, that is not true.

Most people are not sitting there plotting on your downfall. They have laundry to do. They are wondering if they left the oven on. They are thinking about whether they should text their ex.

People do not have time to hate you properly. And honestly, those who do, are not worth your energy anyways.

Most people are hoping you are normal, useful, fun, interesting, or at the very least, not a complete loser.

That realization changes everything.

You stop walking into rooms asking, “What if they do not like me?”

You start walking in asking, “How can I make this easy for both of us?”

And that is something I realized about myself this month.

I approach certain situations differently than most people. I do not usually assume the room is against me. I assume there is a way to win because the person across from me wants to win too.

When you understand that, you carry yourself differently.

You stop acting like you’re on trial.

You relax. You become smooooooth. 

The SpaceX IPO happened earlier this month, and as I told anybody who would listen, I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Not because SpaceX is a bad company. It is probably one of the most impressive companies ever built.

But price matters.

The company is valued around $2 trillion, which is over 100 times its annual revenue. And listen, I get it. It is an Elon Musk company. Everything he touches turns to gold. Literally.

But at some point, you have to ask yourself what you are actually buying.

One of the biggest concerns for me is the float. A very small percentage of the company is actually available to trade publicly. The rest is still held by insiders, employees, early investors, and people who got in long before the IPO.

That matters because when those shares eventually become available to sell, things can get interesting.

Do I think Elon is going to sit back and let the stock get destroyed if that happens?

Absolutely not.

Would I be shocked if he found some creative way to keep the story alive, maybe through one of his many other companies, some insane partnership, or a headline that makes Wall Street lose its mind again?

Also absolutely not.

But that is all speculation.

For now, I just think this is one of those situations where the company can be amazing and the stock can still be too expensive.

Both things can be true.

Will be very interesting to see what happens.

Investments -

Portfolio down 3.31% this month.

Not ideal, but we survive.

At one point, my portfolio was down about 9.6%, but it recovered a decent amount over the past week or so.

Last month, I wrote about how the good news regarding the war in the Middle East felt like it was already priced in. My thought was that if things sparked up again, the market would not react kindly.

Well, that happened about a day or two after I published last month’s newsletter.

Hope you were paying attention.

Since then, tensions seem to have cooled off a bit, and markets have recovered as expected.

For now, I am still being cautious. I do not love buying aggressively near all-time highs, especially when the market feels like it is one bad headline away from remembering that the world is still insane.

We’ll see what happens.

If there is one thing I took away from this month, it is that life is moving whether we are paying attention or not.

World Cups come and go. People come and go. Problems that once felt massive eventually become funny stories, or at least slightly less dramatic ones.

So I’m trying to be more present. More intentional. More willing to say yes. More willing to walk into rooms like I belong there.

And hopefully, by the next World Cup, I’ll look back at this version of myself and think, “Not bad. But we had no idea what was coming.”

See you next month. Love you all. :)

Until next time,

Mohammad Kevin El-Ajouz