“You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work.”
Krishna
I saw a post on X from an account that does one thing: feed a prompt to the strongest AI models and screenshot the answer. Someone asked what one small, unnoticed thing separates the ultra successful.
The answer was tolerance for ambiguity. Most people have an uncomfortable relationship with not knowing. They resolve it too early: chase consensus, wait for certainty or quit the moment the picture gets murky.
What looks like prudence is fear dressed up as reason.
I run at least 21 experiments a day. For a long time I thought the point of each one was a win I could point to. Most of them miss. The point is the experiment itself: I do the work without knowing how it turns out.
Today that meant:
cook a recipe I might wreck
swap the photo on my Kindle author page
pin a comment to funnel my YouTube viewers
try the new interest targeting on a paid ad
Experiments build tolerance for ambiguity. Each time you act without knowing how it turns out, the next one scares you less.
The recipe, the funnel, the new targeting, the Kindle photo. I ran them today without knowing how any of them would go. You can’t see where an experiment leads until you’ve run it.
🌫️
What would you try today if the outcome was not the point?
“The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.”
General Stanley McChrystal, 2015.
I wrote a post about a jellyfish. It survives 500 million years with no brain. That fact stuck with me: no center, each decision made at the edge. I made a note to follow it.
A jellyfish runs a nerve net. Sensing, deciding and acting all happen at the edge. The stinging cell fires on its own when prey brushes the trigger. The bell pulses on its own from pacemaker cells around the rim. Nothing is in charge. Nothing needs to be.
Companies split along the same line. On one side, decisions live at the edge: open source projects, franchise networks and special forces teams. On the other, decisions live in a center, a brain: top-down corporations, military chains of command and founder-led startups. Most organizations land between but lean one way.
The right answer can change faster than information reaches the center. When it does, push decisions to the edge. When it holds still, pull them in. A nerve net trying to build a rocket loses no matter how good the people are. A brain trying to run a thousand neighborhood shops loses no matter how good the CEO is. The best team loses when decisions live in the wrong place.
A nerve net survives damage, reacts fast at the edge and scales without choking. Wikipedia kept growing through years of chaos because no single editor held it together. A brain aims, compounds learning and produces consistency. Apple under Jobs could move thousands of talented people in one direction because the aim came from one person.
A brain becomes a bottleneck. Each decision waits for the center to make it. By the time news reaches the center, it is already old. A company built around one person is fragile in exact proportion to how much it depends on that person. A nerve net carries the opposite risk: it drifts when no one pulls it toward a shared aim and stalls on work where each part has to fit together.
A small shop runs fine with no strategy department. A jellyfish runs fine on reflex alone. Both sit below the line where a center costs more than it returns. Push everything to the edge until decisions get complex enough to need real processing.
Even brain-led animals run reflexes at the edge. You pull your hand off a hot stove before your brain hears about it. Your spinal cord handles it on its own, because waiting for your brain to weigh in would be too slow. Most organizations need both layers. Match where decisions live to what the work needs.
🧠
Which way do you lean when you decide: brain or nerve net?
Last night I built a poker trainer. Poker runs on expected value: weigh what you might win against what you might lose. Over enough hands the math tells you the right move. Call it EV. A move can be premium EV (the numbers scream go) or marginal EV (it barely tips positive). Either way, the trainer can hand you the answer in a fraction of a second.
Pulling the trigger is the hard part.
Poker is a game of imperfect information. You can’t see the cards in the other players’ hands. And even when the math favors you, the last card doesn’t care that you were right. So you sit there knowing the odds are with you while your hand still hovers over the chips.
Life works the same way. The hard call, the email you’ve been circling, the conversation you keep rescheduling, often has positive EV. You’ve already done the math. You know the move.
And we don’t make it.
When a decision feels stuck, I sometimes re-run the numbers. I gather more data, refine the estimate by a percent or two. It feels like progress. It’s avoidance.
Most of what I’d filed under “I’ll get to it” was a positive-EV decision I hadn’t summoned the nerve for.
Test it yourself. Next time a choice feels jammed, ask whether one more calculation would actually change your answer. If it wouldn’t, the math is finished and you’re stalling.
When the EV is clear and you still hesitate, the calculator is done talking. The rest is nerve.
🎲
What good bet are you sitting on until the doubt clears?
“But the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.”
Seth Godin
I cut the price of Trends Pro and watched the whole dynamic shift.
The move felt generous. Lower the barrier. Let more people in. The signup rate stayed about the same. But who signed up changed.
Support tickets went up. Refund requests followed. People joined confused about what they’d bought. Community conversations got shallower. Members who used to show up prepared started drifting because the room felt different.
So I re-raised the price.
Support dropped. Engagement deepened. The community felt like itself again.
The price was doing its job all along. It filtered for people who’d already decided they wanted in. They arrived ready.
Joe Riedel runs Rampart, a local journalism outlet. He priced subscriptions high enough to fund labor-intensive reporting. When subscribers churned, he added podcasts and exclusive columns instead of cutting the rate. Value up, price holds. The people who stay are the ones who came for the substance.
Dropping a price feels like opening the door wider. But you’re changing who walks through it. The downstream effects compound:
More support
More confusion
More churn
The “savings” get eaten by the extra work.
This hits hardest in a paid community. People are paying to be in a room with each other. Lower the bar to get in and you change the room they paid to join.
Price selects your market before a single person reaches your inbox.
If you want to reduce churn, add value. The instinct to lower price optimizes for volume. But volume and quality pull in opposite directions when the product depends on who’s in the room.
🧲
What kind of business are you building each time you set your price?
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter (2008).
This week I found a link tucked three clicks into my ConvertKit billing settings. “Switch to a lower tier.” I clicked it, ran the math and my stomach dropped. My email list sat under the limit for months while I paid the rate for the tier above it.
The full numbers tell it plainly. I’ve paid ConvertKit (now Kit) more than $24,500 since February 2023. The timeline:
January 2024: my list crosses 65,000. Kit auto-upgrades me to the 75,000 tier and charges about $700 prorated that same day.
Since then: $663 a month.
Today: back under the 65,000 line and there a while now.
I pruned my list of inactive subscribers. That lifts deliverability, the share of emails that reach the inbox. It should cut the bill too.
So I asked Kit one question. When did my count last fall below 65,000 and could they credit what I overpaid after that? The money was small. The answer mattered more than the dollars. The first reply skipped both parts and closed the ticket.
I wrote back and pushed. This time Kit went into the billing logs. I should have been on the 65,000 tier from June through August 2025, then the 55,000 tier from September through January. Eight months, two tiers, about $936 in overcharges by their own count, plus the months since.
Their answer was a three-month credit. That’s a fraction of the total. The rest, they said, falls outside a 30-day refund window.
When my list grew past the tier, the charge hit the same hour, prorated to the cent, before I lifted a finger. When I cut the list back under, the price held. Silence on their end. The downgrade waited as a link I had to go find, parked behind a menu I rarely open.
Up was automatic. Down was my job.
That asymmetry is a choice. A system that clocks my growth to the same hour can clock my shrinkage just as fast. ConvertKit built the automatic move in the direction that bills me more and left the other direction for me to stumble onto. The increase runs itself. The decrease is a scavenger hunt.
The billing was the first problem. The way Kit handled it was the second. They had the exact overcharge in hand, to the month, then offered back a sliver of it and called the rest old. Faced with the total, Kit reached for the smaller number.
So I’m leaving.
Run the math from the vendor’s side. Kit held the line on about $936. The customer behind that $936 paid them close to $8,000 a year for more than three years and would have kept paying. That customer is gone.
Extraction looks like profit until you price in reputation and churn.
🧾
What’s a loyal customer worth to you over the years?
For years I built businesses that went nowhere. Then one took off: Trends.vc.
By then I’d started holding a floor of 21 experiments a day: the fewest I let myself run. An experiment is anything I do that’s uncertain or uncomfortable: a question I’m scared to ask, a tool I’ve never touched, a thing I build before I know it’ll work.
Below that floor, nothing I built took off. At 21 a day, one did. I run the same range now: 21, 34, 55.
Those numbers are a Fibonacci sequence: each is the sum of the two before it. Each step up is a phase transition. Moving from one level to the next feels different the way water at 99 degrees is still water and 100 degrees is steam.
I call this a hurdle rate, a term I borrowed from finance. It’s the minimum return an investment has to clear before it earns anything. Below the hurdle rate, your capital loses ground to the cost of holding it. Above it, the curve bends and small inputs throw off larger outputs.
Experiments work the same way. Below a certain rate, you’re putting in effort and still slipping backward. Above it, the same effort compounds.
Slipping backward against what? Your environment.
Your environment keeps drifting. The market shifts. Tools change. What worked last year quietly stops working. Experiments are how you stay fit to it, how you keep matching a target that won’t hold still. Run enough of them and you adapt about as fast as the world moves. Run too few and you fall behind while standing still.
This is why a number that works for someone else can sink you. Their environment drifts at a different speed. A founder in a fast market needs a higher floor than a woodworker in a craft that’s barely moved in a century. Same with eras. Same with places. The faster your world moves, the higher your floor has to sit just to hold even.
Fitness to your environment is the first thing you get back. More follows.
You make more luck because you’ve widened the surface it can land on.
You learn faster because each experiment pays you information.
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris
I work out each morning. For years my instinct was to push it harder. The harder I pushed, the more I crashed.
I had the same instinct in my work. I run a floor of 21 experiments a day. Each one is something I do that’s uncertain or uncomfortable. For years I kept raising that floor. More experiments meant more chances one paid off, so raising it felt like pure upside.
Each habit aims at something: health, weight, income. Clear the habit’s bar and that thing compounds. Fall below it and that thing decays.
Intensity is how hard you push. Durability is whether the habit survives your worst week. Push too hard and durability is the first thing to go.
They won by being cheap to keep alive. The strongest thing in any single season is usually gone by the next one.
There’s a second cost. Once a habit clears its bar, more intensity stops helping that habit and starts costing the others. The extra attention has to come from somewhere. It comes out of your other habits. The one still below its line takes the hardest hit, because that’s where the attention was needed most. So overshooting a habit you’ve already secured is a transfer. You move energy off a habit that needs it and onto one that’s already paid.
It rhymes with something Morgan Housel says about debt: the more a system carries, the fewer bad scenarios it survives. Lever one habit up and the whole set has less room to absorb a bad week.
Each thing you drop is a scenario the set no longer has to survive. Cut the surface area. Keep each habit a step above its bar. Then leave it alone and let time do the work.
The strongest move isn’t the most you can do on a good day. It’s the least that still compounds, held even on the days you’d rather skip.
🐢
What’s one over-fed habit you could trim to free up another?
“How can our principles become dead, unless the impressions which correspond to them are extinguished? But it is in thy power continuously to fan these thoughts into a flame.”
Marcus Aurelius
Each week I wrote my principles onto a fresh page by hand. Most days I just reread the last one. Each was a lesson I learned the hard way. Copying it out kept it fresh. A forgotten lesson is one you pay for twice.
Then long workdays crowded out the rewrite and I let it slide for almost a month.
The lessons faded. The small impulses they kept in check started winning.
I sat back down with a fresh page and copied my principles over. The ones that no longer fit never made it.
The next morning I felt more centered, back in control of the impulses that won all month.
I added a line to my weekly review: did I carry my principles forward?
🔄
What have you filed as optional that’s actually keeping you oriented?
Flannery O’Connor sat at her desk from nine to noon every morning. Many of those mornings she wrote nothing and counted it a good day. Maya Angelou rented a hotel room and wrote from seven to two. Both ran on the clock.
Stephen King counts two thousand words a day. Graham Greene sets five hundred and stops mid-sentence when he hits it.
I count my experiments the same way, by what I finish.
I once counted my launches by what I finished, too. One a day, every day. Seventeen days in I burned out and produced nothing for a week or two. So I went back to timing them, just to start again. A habit you keep beats one you quit.
⏱️
What do you measure by the clock that you could measure by output?
Last night a friend told me how he fell off his workout routine. Traffic pushed him out of his old gym, so he went looking for a new one. Each option had to pass two tests: work for him and work for the friend who trains with him. Gym after gym failed the second test. He froze.
Then he split the decision. A gym sits two blocks from his place. He goes. The friend can still get a heads-up each time. He goes either way. That unblocked him.
He bundled two variables into one decision: his workout and his friend’s convenience. Bundled, the decision got harder and he got stuck. Split, his workout could move while the friend’s schedule stayed an open question. That’s conflating variables: loading a decision with conditions it can survive without.
Isolating a variable means pulling one problem out of the bundle and solving it on its own. A big plan is usually several separate problems that look like one. Find the piece that stands alone and do it now, even in imperfect form. The rest can land later.
Over five years ago I started publishing weekly reports on my personal site. A brand and a dedicated domain could come later. The reports stood alone, so I shipped them. Readers kept coming back, so I registered the trends.vc domain.
The same bundling hides in plans everywhere. “I’ll launch the product after I finish the landing page, set up analytics, write the email sequence and record the demo video.” Four dependencies, stacked into a wall between you and shipping.
The wall feels like preparation. It works like procrastination.
There’s an old parable about a donkey standing between hay and water, equally hungry and thirsty. It weighs the two needs until it starves with both in reach. Eating, then drinking, would have saved it.
Some bundles pay. A compound lift is one action with several payoffs: audiobooks over dinner, mastermind calls on a treadmill. Compound lifts belong to systems that already run. If you’re building a running habit, isolate it. Run to music if music gets you out the door. Once the runs are routine, swap in audiobooks and the same hour pays twice. Demand the audiobook from day one and you may never start running at all.
A friend wants to write children’s books. Their first requirement was a print-on-demand publisher. I told them kids read on iPads: ship a digital copy now, add print later. “Oh, I never thought about that.” The books are still unwritten.
Dropping an optional requirement works like a razor. It shaves away the excuse and whatever remains is the real reason. Only they know what theirs is.
When a plan stalls, list everything you’re waiting on. Then sort: