👋 OPEN STRONG

Hey friends —

Here’s what hit me this week: I sat with the Artemis II crew’s interviews on Oprah and The Daily and realized something obvious in hindsight — the four people who just went farther into space than any human in 50 years aren’t telling a hero story. They’re telling a team story. Years of training. Thousands of sim runs. Conversations with family about risk. A bond they say no one on the ground will fully understand.

Meanwhile, a 25-year-old in Hartford built a film studio in his hometown and just won the state’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year. A running back tore the same ACL twice and showed up to practice every day anyway. A century-old garden quietly got named California’s Nonprofit of the Year for climate-resilience work.

Different stages. Same muscle: the rep is what bonds the team. Let’s build.

🔥 RESILIENCE IN THE WILD

Hometown bet: TJ Noel-Sullivan, 25, just got named Connecticut Young Entrepreneur of the Year (May 6). Four years ago he was at Mattel Films in LA. He saw Hartford was an underserved market, packed up, and went home. Debut feature Midas broke local records and scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. He doubled revenue two years running, built a six-person team, and now runs the same high-school video apprenticeship he came up through. [→ Hartford Business Journal]

Vet’s muscle: Connecticut’s SBA Small Business Week (May 6) named Paul Mayer of The Schegg Group the state’s Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year. His firm helps people through job loss — exactly the muscle the AI-disruption moment is asking American workers to build. [→ CBIA]

Two ACLs, every day: Panthers RB Jonathon Brooks tore the same ACL twice in 13 months and lost all of his 2025 season. He showed up to practice almost daily anyway. As of last weekend he’s cleared by his surgeon, switched his jersey from 24 to 25, and reports for OTAs on May 26. The field forgot him. He didn’t forget the field. [→ Last Word on Sports]

Where I land: Three sectors — film, HR, football — same muscle. None of them got there in a single dramatic moment. They got there in rooms nobody filmed: a Hartford editing bay, a Connecticut counseling office, a Charlotte training facility. The headline shows up at the end. The team shows up every day before that.

🏆 HERO OF THE WEEK

THE ARTEMIS II CREW

Commander Reid Wiseman • Pilot Victor Glover • Mission Specialist Christina Koch • CSA Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen — the first humans to fly around the Moon in more than 50 years, and the cleanest team-resilience story of 2026.

THE SCENE. Early April, Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego. The Orion capsule splashes down. Four astronauts climb out after 10 days in space — farther from Earth than any human has ever been. The mission was a free-return loop around the far side of the Moon. The first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.

THE SETUP. Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen were named to the crew in April 2023 and trained together for almost three years. Sim after sim. Thousands of off-nominal scenarios. Hard conversations with their families about risk. Years of unglamorous Tuesday mornings in Houston before the launch pad showed up at Kennedy.

THE RESPONSE. Now they’re on a global media tour. The Oprah Podcast dropped this week with an in-depth conversation about what changed in them — the photographs, the emotional impact, the conversations with family before they left. The New York Times’ The Daily gave the crew an episode where they fielded questions from kids. They’ve been on David Muir, CNN with Erin Burnett, Today, CBS Mornings, and Jimmy Fallon. They rang the NYSE bell. Today (May 13) they’re in Ottawa with Canadian PM Carney. Everywhere they go, the answer to “what was the hardest part?” isn’t the launch or the splashdown. It’s how to talk about a team experience nobody else on Earth can understand.

THE TAKEAWAY. The Artemis II crew is doing something rare in 2026 — generating positive, shared energy across listeners from very different worlds. Not because they pulled off a stunt, but because the story they’re telling is recognizable. Train. Trust each other. Take the turn that wasn’t in the plan. Come back changed, together. That’s the muscle. They just happened to build it 240,000 miles from home.

“We are bonded forever, and no one down here is ever going to know what the four of us just went through.”

— Reid Wiseman, Artemis II Commander, on the crew’s bond after the lunar flyby

Sources: Oprah Podcast — “Wisdom of Leaving Earth” • NYT “The Daily” — Kids ask the Artemis astronauts • CNN — Erin Burnett on the “unbreakable bond” • Space.com — full media tour recap

✍️ From the Blog "Curiosity Is a Muscle: An 80-Year-Old, a Software Engineer, and What AI Is Asking of Us Now"

Two recent encounters I can't stop thinking about. An 80-year-old on a bus through NYC who wanted to learn AI. A software engineer in his 20s trying to avoid it. She is ahead of him. The 10-minute ChatGPT install that changed her relationship with the internet. The disrupt-yourself conversation he didn't see coming. Why most of the fears people had about AI six months ago are already addressed, and the one gap that isn't. Four AI+ learning pathways for wherever you start. And a window that closes June 15. Keep reading →

🎤 ON THE MIC — RESILIENCE IS A MUSCLE

Episode 03 — Sarah Olin on “Bring Your Whole Self to Work — With an Asterisk”

Most companies say they care about employee wellbeing. Almost none of them build the culture to back it up. I sit down with Sarah Olin — founder of Lumo, a human-centric leadership and coaching firm with a bench of 25 coaches serving everyone from Calvin Klein to the City of Charlotte — to have the conversations most workplaces are still too scared to have. Her path: aspiring actress → mindfulness teacher → executive coach → builder of a coaching firm helping leaders across Fortune 500s, nonprofits, and municipal governments. The throughline of the episode: “bring your whole self to work” is a great slogan, but doing it without derailing the room is a leadership muscle — and most leaders haven’t trained it.

• “Bring your whole self to work — with an asterisk” — what it actually means to be responsible with your humanity in the room

• “Policy without culture is just paper” — the parental-leave gap even great employers keep missing

• Why every leader needs a safe place to vent — and why that place can’t be their team

[🎧 Listen now →] • Lumo

📈 HIRING WATCH

Healthcare 1, Information Services 0.

April jobs report (released May 8): payrolls +115K, unemployment 4.3%. The cleanest paradox in the data — healthcare added 37K jobs in April and is up 618K over the past year, while information services LOST 13K in April and is now down 342K jobs since November 2022 (the month ChatGPT launched). Same labor market. Opposite directions. The hands-on jobs are growing. The screen-facing ones are not.

Sources: Indeed Hiring Lab — April 2026 Jobs Report (May 8) • Fortune coverage (May 8)

📖 MUSCLE MEMORY— The Book is in full motion!

Resilience is a Muscle book to tour is in full swing. It's in the wild — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your nearest indie bookstore.