Before The Chaos (6/15)

Good morning from close friends Brett Hobbs and Michael Barone. After a brief hiatus, we are BACK with Before The Chaos!

3 Facts Before The Chaos

💼 Business: Wall Street ripped higher today — the S&P 500 jumped about 1.5%, the Nasdaq 2.4%, and the Dow 1.2% — while oil prices tumbled, after the U.S. and Iran announced a deal to end hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The lesson for your week: markets reward calm and clarity. So do you.

🌎 Current Affairs: The 2026 World Cup is in full swing across the US, Canada, and Mexico — the first-ever 48-team field. Today alone, Spain opens against newcomer Cape Verde and Iran faces New Zealand on U.S. soil, while over the weekend Germany routed Curaçao 7-1. A built-in reason to gather your people this summer.

🌧️ U.S. Weather: The big story today is water, not heat. A stationary front is parked over the South, fueling dangerous flash flooding in Texas — there’s a Flood Watch for all of southeast Texas through Thursday, with 5 to 10 inches of rain possible across South Texas, the western Gulf Coast, and the lower Mississippi Valley. If you’re down there, never drive through a flooded road — turn around, don’t drown.

Run Your Own Race

The World Cup kicked off last week, and with it comes a whole stadium full of comparison — faster players, bigger contracts, highlight reels that can make your own progress feel small.

Here’s the trap: you can lose your race just by staring at someone else’s lane. Comparison steals your joy when you feel behind, and steals your focus when you’re ahead. Either way, you stop running the only race you were ever built to win.

So this week, put your blinders on. Decide what winning looks like for you — not your coworker, not the person you follow online, not your neighbor. Then run hard at it: your pace, your lane, your finish line. The only person worth beating is the version of you from yesterday.

Reflection

“Whose race have I been running instead of my own?”

“What would winning this week actually look like in my own words, not someone else’s?”

Verse

1 Corinthians 9:24

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.”

Closing

You don’t have to be the fastest one in the stadium. You just have to keep running your race today, with everything you’ve got. Stop comparing. Start running. This lap is yours.

Have a blessed day,

Brett & Michael