“The right thing at the right time is the right thing. The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.”
Tom Ford
I drank tea before I meditated and the day went sideways.
Most mornings I meditate first, then drink tea. That day I flipped it. The caffeine was already working when I sat down. I spent the whole meditation with a restless mind.
Salt and yeast both belong in dough. Let them touch before the flour goes in and the salt kills the yeast. Same ingredients, wrong order, nothing rises.
When a public figure does something I don’t like, my first move is to blame the person. Then it hits me that the role was open and the “pay” was too good to pass up. Someone was going to take it.
The role pays whoever takes it. The person changes. The game stays.
Markets find agents. When a niche exists, the niche fills.
🎲
What game could you change instead of resenting who wins it?
I had curiosity and the willingness to find out. The answer changed my year.
Steve Jobs said you can only connect the dots looking backward. You can’t tell how much an experiment will pay off before you run it. Multi was a question. The question was a small experiment. The small experiment paid off more than anything else I did all year.
Warren Buffett says you only need diversification when you’re ignorant. He means it as an argument for concentration. But flip it: we’re all ignorant. No one has the information to bet only on sure things. A high experimentation rate is the right response to real uncertainty.
You can’t see around corners. The thread you pull today might connect to something you won’t understand for months. The question you ask might unlock the product that funds your next five years.
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.”
Octavia Butler
I spent three weeks planning a habit I never started.
I wanted to launch a product, then another, then keep going. A habit you measure by what you make beats one you measure by minutes spent, when you can pull it off. So I planned for output.
Weeks passed. I didn’t start. The first step felt too steep.
So I started somewhere. I set a timer for one minute and worked on the launch.
The next day I did it again.
Resistance usually means the first step is too steep.
One minute felt too small to matter. That’s why it worked. Small enough to start beats big enough to impress.
I made the same move fifteen years ago with meditation. One minute a day. It grew into a daily practice that runs one to two and a half hours now. The laughably small version survived.
Imagine that it is 24 hours before you are going to be born. A genie comes to you. You get to design the world you will enter. The catch: you don’t know whether you will be born rich or poor, male or female, healthy or sick, in the United States or Afghanistan.
Warren Buffett, on the “ovarian lottery”
John Rawls wrote a thought experiment. He called it the original position. Imagine you’re behind a veil, about to be born, but you don’t know where. You don’t know your country, your race, your family, your gifts. What rules would you write from behind the veil?
You wake up here.
Different country
Different family
Different neighborhood
Different caste
The character sheet was filled in before you opened your eyes.
Frederick Douglass spawned enslaved.
He learned to read in secret.
He escaped at twenty.
He spent the rest of his life writing, speaking and advising presidents.
Most spawn easier than Douglass. Your spawn point was set. The play from here is yours.
🎟️
What advantage in your starting point have you been overlooking?
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lewis Carroll
You can be consistent and still be dying.
I started with a few seconds of meditation. I was consistent.
My stress kept climbing. The inputs kept piling up. Travel, screens, cortisol. The load on my system was bigger than what seconds or even a few minutes could clear. I was paying below minimum.
Think of it like a credit card. If you pay $50 a month on a card accruing $80 in interest, you are technically paying. You are also technically drowning. The act of paying doesn’t make you solvent. Only the amount relative to the accrual does.
Habits work the same way. If your output is less than the entropy working against it, you are losing. Days logged don’t matter. Showing up doesn’t matter. The interest is compounding faster than you’re paying it down.
What finally worked was a much longer sit. Long enough to beat the accrual.
Are you clearing entropy or just dying slower than you would otherwise?
Every habit has a hurdle rate. The minimum input it needs to clear the entropy working against it. For my meditation, that input is well above five minutes.
Consistency below the hurdle rate is just dying on a schedule.
⚖️
What habit are you consistent with that might be below its hurdle rate?
I ran for half an hour and ten minutes became my new normal.
Most people treat a habit as one number. You hit the number or you miss it. The better way is to put the habit on a range. The floor is what you do on a normal day. The ceiling is the highest you’ve reached.
To raise the floor, you reach a new ceiling. Running thirty raised my floor to ten. Thirty became the new ceiling above it. Ten settled in as the normal because I’d already done thirty.
Life has volatility. A bad night of sleep. A travel day. A week of stress. When your floor sits right at your ceiling, the streak breaks. When your floor sits below a ceiling you’ve already reached, a bad day stays inside the range.
The ceiling gives you room to deal with volatility without breaking your habit.
📈
Which habit of yours would survive a bad day if you had room above it?
“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”
Mark Twain
I cut my phone time at night by adding jazz.
For years I tried subtraction:
Phone in another room
Notifications off
Computer closed
Each rule held for a few nights and broke. I’d reach for some screen and the evening was gone.
Then I carved out an exception. Jazz on the phone became the only allowed use at night. The pull to scroll dropped because the phone had one job. Music. The disconnection held.
Twain has the verb. Coaxed. A step at a time.
After years of failing to break the habit cold, the question stops being “how do I quit?” and starts being “what do I put in its place?” Imperfect substitution leaves you with progress. Pure abstinence keeps leaving you with nothing.
When you’ve been trying to break the same habit for years, find what it’s filling for you and put something else there. The replacement doesn’t have to be ideal. It has to be progress over the thing you’re trying to break:
“Because of the race to hijack human attention, the race to the bottom of the brain stem, it’s designed to get basically lower and lower into what will get your attention.”
Tristan Harris
I sat down to play one game of chess. Twelve hours later, I deleted the app.
I play slow chess online. Each side gets fifteen minutes or more, the patient version. Months passed since I last opened the app. One game became thirty.
Something about it felt deliberate.
The pull felt stronger than I remembered. I don’t know what changed. They run constant split tests.
Win or lose, the next game might be the good one, so I played it. That last part is the oldest trick there is. B.F. Skinner found that a reward you can’t predict pulls harder than a reward you can. A pigeon pecks longer for a treat that arrives at random than for one that arrives on schedule. So does a person.
Then the anger turned into something closer to understanding. The chess app competes with TikTok, YouTube and every other app on the phone. They’re all fighting for the same fixed pool of hours. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said it in 2017: “Netflix is competing with sleep on the margin.” An app that fights hard for that attention keeps the hours. An app that opts out hands them to one that fights.
This is what I call engineered addiction: compulsion designed into a product on purpose, because the product can’t survive without it. Tristan Harris, who studies how products capture attention, calls it “the race to the bottom of the brain stem.”
Each product reaches a little lower into the nervous system to grab attention, which forces the next product to reach lower still. The builders know they’re doing it. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, later said the engagement loop was built “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” My anger was aimed at the wrong target. The chess app is one player in a game it didn’t invent.
When the product is engineered to hook you, elimination is easier than moderation.
🎣
What would you do with the hours engineered addiction consumes?