Choosing with Intention
☕📰 03.08.25 The Saturday Rundown
This past week, Coffee with Steve explored something that threads through everything—intentionality. Whether the choices we make in our daily lives (how much coffee to drink, what emails to keep1), the way we build sustainable businesses, or the myths we hold about success, one question keeps resurfacing:
👉 Are we making choices intentionally, or just letting them happen to us?
We’re not just catching up here—but we’re taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture, and thinking about how we move through the world. That’s why we’re kicking things off with the inaugural Saturday Run Down with a playlist built around deliberate, intentional music—songs that demand presence, that don’t just wash over you. (More on that below.)
💭 This Week’s Big Ask:
What’s a moment in a movie, TV show, or book where a character made an intentional choice that changed everything?
Was it Walter White choosing to embrace Heisenberg?
Frodo choosing to bear the ring instead of handing it off?
Don Draper walking out of McCann-Erickson to start a new life?
Mildred Pierce deciding to build her own empire, knowing the cost?
And now, let’s turn the camera on you: What choice did you make this week that had similar consequences?
Okay, hopefully, you didn’t start a meth empire, but maybe you took a leap, set a boundary, changed direction, or doubled down on something that mattered.
Hit "Message Steve" and tell me about it.
I accidentally resent this Thursday night, but this piece talks about Colleen Spear and Spearpoint Strategies, and I just attended her sustainability workshop, and walked away with some incredibly powerful strategies that will help me build more profitability into my business.
Elevating Business Models with a Focus on People, Planet, and Profits
Originally posted on August 23, 2024 at SteveBargdill.com
#GratiTuesday:
Smoke, Ash, and Bootstraps: A Personal Reckoning with the Entrepreneurial Myth
Here are some financial resources for wildfire victims.
🎧 Intentionality | A Playlist by Coffee with Steve
Every note, every lyric, every pause—deliberate. This playlist isn’t background noise. It’s music that forces you to listen, to sit in the stillness, to confront choices, ideas, and emotions that can’t be ignored.
This past week on Coffee with Steve, we talked about personal agency, sustainability in business, and the myths we tell ourselves about success. Whether it was controlling the little things or questioning the bigger narratives, one theme kept coming up:
👉 Are we making our choices intentionally? Or just letting them happen to us?
That’s what Dead Man—the film behind this playlist’s cover—asks too. It moves at its own pace, embracing silence, uncertainty, and the weight of every decision. The image? The gun is raised, but the moment is frozen. What happens next? That’s intentionality—the pause before action. Will you pull the trigger or not?
Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey, Tom Waits—every artist on this playlist crafts with that same depth. Nothing is accidental. The music demands presence.
So now, I want to hear from you:
💬 What’s a song that feels deeply intentional to you? Hit "Message Steve" and let me know.
Subscribe to the full Coffee with Steve experience here. Or don’t. It’s your inbox—you decide. Pick what you want, skip what you don’t, and keep me around as much (or as little) as you like. I promise, we’ll still be friends.
Go ahead, ask me how I’m doing with scripting an AI in Python to sort all my emails for me.