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“The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Haruki Murakami
Look at the daily lives of great writers, founders and investors. You see the same shape every time. A small set of rituals. Each one specific. Each one non-negotiable.
A ritual here is one practice with a cadence.
Most surveys of great operators (Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals is the canon) show only the creation rituals. Creation without the distribution is misleading. Two thousand words a day in a drawer is two thousand words in a drawer. Creation is necessary but not sufficient.
Ernest Hemingway, novelist
Work:
- Begins at first light
- Writes standing at a chest-high bookshelf or typewriter
- Stops only when he knows what comes next
- Tracks the daily word count on a hand-drawn chart on the wall
- Pegs 500 words as a good day
- Spends the afternoon fishing, swimming or drinking
- Re-reads the manuscript from the start before writing more
Distribution:
- Charles Scribner’s Sons handled trade
- Files an Esquire “Letter” essay roughly monthly from 1933 to 1936
- Sits for staged photo shoots with his boat, his rifle and the marlin
- Travels to bullfights, safaris and wars as press fodder
- Sat for the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction No. 21” interview (1958) that locked in the writer-as-craftsman myth
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and NeXT
Work:
- Wears the same outfit every day (black turtleneck, Levi’s 501s, New Balance 991s)
- Walks long loops with whoever he wants to talk to instead of holding office meetings
- Sits cross-legged on the floor barefoot during early Apple meetings
- Eats the same one or two foods for weeks at a stretch
- Returns to the same Zen monastery near Los Altos for retreats
Distribution:
- Apple’s products and retail did most of the marketing
- Rehearses every keynote for weeks before delivery
- Delivers four to six keynotes a year at Apple events
- Granted personal interviews sparingly and only to chosen reporters (Walt Mossberg, Steven Levy, Brent Schlender)
- Sat for the 2005 Stanford commencement address that became the most-watched commencement speech of all time
Warren Buffett, investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
Work:
- Spends five to six hours a day reading newspapers, filings and books
- Drinks five Coca-Colas every day
- Orders McDonald’s breakfast based on whether Berkshire’s stock is up or down
- Tap-dances to work, in his own words
- Plays bridge twelve hours a week online
- Holds his calendar mostly empty by design
Distribution:
- Writes the Berkshire annual letter every year since 1965 (never missed)
- Hosts the Berkshire annual meeting in Omaha (six hours of unscripted Q&A, 40,000+ attendees)
- Appears on CNBC’s Squawk Box for scheduled interviews each spring
- Lets the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett (HBO, 2017) be filmed at home
- Sat for the Snowball biography (Alice Schroeder, 2008) over 2,000 hours of interviews
Toni Morrison, novelist
Work:
- Wakes at 4 AM
- Watches the first light come in before writing
- Drinks coffee before any words
- Writes on yellow legal pads in longhand
- Reserves the pre-dawn block for fiction while raising two boys and editing at Random House
- Edits standing at a tall lectern in the afternoon
Distribution:
- Random House published her (and she was a senior editor there until 1983)
- Gives public readings on a touring circuit around each book release
- Holds a permanent residency at Princeton (1989-2006), building literary community and press access
- Won the Nobel Prize in 1993 (which then re-marketed every prior book)
Hayao Miyazaki, animator and director
Work:
- Arrives at Studio Ghibli around 11 AM
- Stays until 9 PM, seven days a week during production
- Sleeps on a cot in the studio when a deadline closes in
- Walks the neighborhood at 3 PM for fresh air and ideas
- Hand-draws every key frame himself
- Smokes outside the office under a small awning
Distribution:
- Studio Ghibli’s distribution deals (Disney internationally, Toho in Japan) handled trade
- Sits for full press tours around every release
- Subject of the NHK documentary series 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki and Never-Ending Man
- Opened the Ghibli Museum (2001) as a permanent marketing artifact
Charles Darwin, naturalist
Work:
- Walks the Sandwalk three times a day on a quarter-mile loop
- Counts pebbles on each lap so his mind can wander
- Holds three writing blocks of about 90 minutes each
- Lets his wife Emma read aloud to him after lunch at 3 PM
- Plays backgammon with Emma every evening
- Writes six or more letters by hand each day
Distribution:
- John Murray (publisher) printed On the Origin of Species and sold out the first run of 1,250 copies in a day
- The 6+ letters a day to Hooker, Lyell, Huxley and Wallace were both work and the entire scientific press apparatus of the era
- Coordinated the Linnean Society reading of his theory alongside Wallace’s paper in July 1858
- Sends complimentary copies of Origin to 250 named scientists before publication
- Let T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) run the public debate
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
Work:
- Holds no meetings before 10 AM
- Saves high-IQ decisions for the morning
- Sleeps eight hours, every night
- Opens every meeting with thirty minutes of silent reading of a six-page narrative memo
- Refuses to read PowerPoint slides
- Treats a handful of decisions a year as “Type 1” and gives them concentrated time
Distribution:
- Writes the annual shareholder letter every spring (since 1997)
- Appends the original 1997 letter to every subsequent letter
- Delivers keynotes at AWS re:Invent each year
- Sat for a CBS 60 Minutes feature in 1999 that broke Amazon mainstream
- Bought the Washington Post in 2013 as both investment and permanent press capital
Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire
Work:
- Reads across psychology, biology, history and physics every day
- Sits in a chair for an hour or two doing nothing but thinking
- Inverts every problem before trying to solve it
- Refuses meetings without a written agenda
- Eats See’s peanut brittle as a fixed habit
Distribution:
- Hosts the Daily Journal annual meeting Q&A (separate from Berkshire’s)
- Delivers one or two major university speeches a year (USC commencement 1986 and 2007, Harvard Law 1995)
- Let Poor Charlie’s Almanack (2005) compile his speeches as the canonical artifact
- Sat for podcast interviews with John Collison, Tren Griffin and Acquired in the final years
Haruki Murakami, novelist and ultramarathoner
Work:
- Wakes at 4 AM
- Writes for five to six hours straight
- Stops at ten pages even if a sentence is half-finished
- Runs 10 km or swims 1,500 m every afternoon
- Reads or listens to music in the evening
- Lights out by 9 PM
- Holds the same schedule for six months at a stretch while drafting a novel
Distribution:
- Knopf (US) and Shinchosha (Japan) handle trade
- Sits for almost no interviews and runs no book tour
- Publishes short stories in Japanese literary magazines on the cycle between novels
- Wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Running as a personal-brand artifact about the running itself
David Lynch, filmmaker
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
- Has held the same meditation practice since 1973
- Eats the same lunch for years at a stretch
- Drinks seven Cokes a day during peak production years
- Sketches in the same notebook he carries everywhere
- Watches the weather every morning before starting work
Distribution:
- Studios and festivals handled film releases (Cannes premiered Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive)
- Recorded a daily weather report on his own YouTube channel from May 2020 to his death
- Released music albums, sold paintings and sold David Lynch Coffee as branded objects between films
- Hosted the Festival of Disruption in LA and Brooklyn as recurring marketing events
- Wrote Catching the Big Fish (2006) as the personal-brand artifact for the meditation practice
Andy Warhol, artist
Work:
- Walks Madison Avenue for an hour every morning
- Records every taxi fare, meal and tip in a hardback ledger
- Calls Pat Hackett every morning to dictate the previous day’s events for the diary
- Keeps a tape recorder running through dinners and parties
- Carries a Polaroid camera to every social event
- Photographs almost everyone he meets
Distribution:
- Leo Castelli Gallery (then Iolas) handled sales
- Hosts open-door parties at the Factory most evenings
- Founded Interview magazine in 1969 as his own owned media channel
- Appeared in TV commercials in the 1980s (Diet Coke, TDK, Pioneer, Drexel Burnham)
- The Polaroid photos themselves doubled as an art-and-press feedback loop
Benjamin Franklin, printer, statesman and inventor
Work:
- Asks himself “What good shall I do this day?” each morning
- Takes a one-hour air bath naked by an open window each morning
- Swims in open water several times a week
- Tracks thirteen virtues on a printed grid every day
- Asks himself “What good have I done today?” each evening
- Writes the next day’s plan the night before
Distribution:
- Founded The Pennsylvania Gazette as his own newspaper in 1729
- Wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack annually from 1733 to 1758
- Self-published most of his pamphlets
- Built the postal infrastructure (postmaster of Philadelphia, then deputy postmaster general for the colonies) that distributed his own work
- Wrote the Autobiography as the founding self-help title in American letters
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft
Work:
- Takes two “Think Weeks” a year, alone in a forest cabin
- Reads a stack of papers and books submitted by employees during each Think Week
- Reads for hours on Sundays
- Rocks back and forth while concentrating
- Travels with a tote bag of physical books
Distribution:
- Publishes a GatesNotes year-end letter every December
- Publishes a summer reading list every June
- Publishes a year-end reading list every December
- Does Reddit AMAs on a regular cadence
- Delivers TED talks on a regular cadence
- Filmed Inside Bill’s Brain (Netflix, 2019) as a three-part marketing artifact
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
- Logs every disagreement with colleagues in a daily Issues Log
- Records every meeting at Bridgewater on audio or video
- Reviews each important decision against his written Principles
- Sleeps seven and a half hours minimum
Distribution:
- Sends “Daily Observations” to Bridgewater LPs daily
- Wrote Principles (2017) and ran a multi-year marketing campaign around it
- Filmed Principles for Success (animated YouTube series, 30M+ views)
- Posts on LinkedIn regularly
- Sat for TED talks and CNBC scheduled interviews
Joan Didion, essayist and novelist
Work:
- Spreads the day’s pages on the dining table at the end of each afternoon
- Pours one drink and reads back what she wrote
- Sleeps in the same room as the unfinished manuscript in the final week
- Keeps a notebook in her bag at all times
- Tests every sentence by reading it aloud
- Re-types the prior day’s pages before starting new ones
Distribution:
- Knopf published her
- Publishes long-form essays in NYRB, Vogue and Saturday Evening Post between books
- Sat for the documentary The Center Will Not Hold (2017) directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne
- Granted the Celine ad campaign (2015) that turned her into a fashion icon at age 80
Twyla Tharp, choreographer
Work:
- Wakes at 5:30 AM
- Hails a cab to the gym before her body wakes up
- Says “the cab is the ritual, not the workout”
- Trains in the gym for two hours
- Starts each new project by placing a labeled cardboard box on the floor
- Drops every clipping, sketch, recording and note into that box for the project’s duration
Distribution:
- Performance venues (American Ballet Theatre, Broadway) handled the work
- Publishes a book every several years (Push Comes to Shove 1992, The Creative Habit 2003, The Collaborative Habit 2009, Keep It Moving 2019)
- Each book seeds the next decade of speaking and teaching work
Ludwig van Beethoven, composer
Work:
- Counts out sixty coffee beans per cup at breakfast
- Composes from sunrise to midday
- Eats lunch at the same tavern most days
- Walks the woods through the afternoon with a notebook and pencil
- Writes nothing musical after dark
- Goes to bed by 10 PM
Distribution:
- Vienna’s noble patrons (Lobkowitz, Rasumovsky, Lichnowsky) underwrote him with annuities
- Publishers Breitkopf and Härtel and Steiner printed the scores
- Self-produces a subscription concert (Akademie) every year or two to premiere new work
- Prints and distributes his own subscriber bills before each concert
- Negotiates with multiple publishers in parallel to drive up prices
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx
Work:
- Drives a “faux commute” in circles before working from home
- Journals five minutes each morning
- Keeps an “embarrassment list” of mistakes
- Adds to that list every week
- Writes the day’s intention before opening her laptop
Distribution:
- Sat for The Oprah Winfrey Show in November 2000 that broke Spanx national
- Spent 18 months seeding press relationships before that single appearance
- Department-store buyers (Neiman Marcus first) handled retail
- Tells the “fax machine and $5,000” origin story at every conference she speaks at
- Posts to Instagram on cadence with hand-on-camera selfie videos that read as personal
Paul Tudor Jones, hedge-fund manager
Work:
- Visualizes a trade in detail before placing it
- Checks the 200-day moving average on every chart before reading any news
- Risks no more than 1% of capital per trade
- Writes the trade thesis down before opening the position
- Marks the calendar five years out from anniversaries of past losses
Distribution:
- Founded the Robin Hood Foundation in 1988 and hosts its annual gala (one of the largest fundraising nights of the year in New York)
- Sits for an annual Bloomberg or CNBC interview around the gala
- Allowed Trader (1987 PBS documentary) to be filmed, then bought up copies for years afterward (the suppression itself fed his mystique)
Stephen King, novelist
Work:
- Writes 2,000 words a day
- Same desk, same chair, same start time
- Writes seven days a week including his birthday and Christmas
- Plays loud rock music while drafting
- Refuses to leave the chair until the quota is met
- Reads four to five hours a day on top of writing
- Walks four miles in the afternoon
Distribution:
- Scribner / Viking publish him
- Writes “The Pop of King” column in Entertainment Weekly for eight years (2003-2011)
- Tours bookstores for every hardcover release
- Runs a Q&A page and reply system on stephenking.com
- Wrote On Writing (2000) as a permanent marketing artifact for the catalog
Tobi Lutke, founder of Shopify
Work:
- Programs every day even as CEO
- Reads forty-plus minutes every morning before opening Slack
- Stops work at 5:30 PM and goes home for dinner
- Skips most meetings as a rule
- Sleeps eight hours, no exceptions
Distribution:
- Shopify owns the merchant channel and does most of the marketing for the brand
- Tweets and replies on X daily
- Publishes the annual Shopify Investor Day letter
- Public memos to his org that he then posts externally (the 2023 “We’re not a family” memo went viral by his choice)
Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree
Work:
- Writes a long-form memo to clients several times a year
- Walks his dog for an hour every day as thinking time
- Reads every memo aloud to himself before publishing
- Avoids macro forecasts entirely
- Re-reads his own old memos every few years
Distribution:
- Memos go to Oaktree clients first, then public
- “bubble.com” (January 2000) and “The Most Important Thing” became investing canon
- Published The Most Important Thing (2011) and Mastering the Market Cycle (2018) as memo aggregations
- Sits for podcast interviews on cycle around each new memo
Maya Angelou, poet and memoirist
Work:
- Rents a hotel room by the month at $200 or so
- Brings yellow pads, a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible and a deck of cards
- Asks staff to strip the art off the walls
- Arrives at the room at 6:30 AM
- Writes lying on the bed
- Leaves by 2 PM
- Reads the day’s pages aloud over a glass of sherry in the evening
Distribution:
- Random House published her
- Performs her poems aloud at every public appearance
- Read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993
- Records audio of her own work as a parallel artifact
- Toured the lecture circuit at $50,000+ per appearance through the 90s and 2000s
Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia
Work:
- Closes the office when the surf is up
- Surfs in the morning when the waves break at Rincon
- Climbs at least once a week well into his 80s
- Eats a long sit-down lunch with employees in the company canteen
- Spends a full month each year on remote rivers fly-fishing
Distribution:
- Patagonia catalogs are long-form essays and photography, designed to be kept rather than thrown out
- Published Let My People Go Surfing (2005) and The Responsible Company (2012)
- Ran the “Don’t Buy This Jacket” full-page New York Times ad on Black Friday 2011
- Gave Patagonia to a trust in September 2022 in the single largest marketing event in company history
- The Footprint Chronicles makes supply-chain transparency a recurring content stream
Stan Druckenmiller, investor
Work:
- Refuses to take a position without conviction
- Reviews every open position before bed
- Stays quiet in meetings until he sees the data
- Concentrates 80% of capital in one idea when conviction shows up
- Sells positions immediately when the thesis breaks
Distribution:
- Delivers one Sohn Investment Conference talk per year. That’s the entire ritual.
- Sits for almost no interviews outside that single venue
- Lets the track record speak
Anthony Trollope, novelist and postal inspector
Work:
- Wakes at 5:30 AM
- Pays a servant to bring coffee at that hour
- Writes 250 words every fifteen minutes by pocket watch
- Targets 2,500 words before 8:30 AM
- Starts the next novel on the same page if one finishes mid-session
- Heads to the post office for a full day’s work after writing
- Treats writing as a craft on the same schedule as cobbling
Distribution:
- Negotiates every publishing contract himself
- Serializes new novels in Cornhill, Pall Mall and Saint Pauls before book release
- Tours America in 1861 and Australia in 1871 and 1875 to seed those markets
- Publishes the Autobiography (1883) as the marketing artifact for his collected works
Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb
Work:
- Holds 1:1 meetings with every direct report each week
- Stays in an Airbnb listing somewhere in the world several weeks a year
- Sends a company-wide email every Sunday night
- Walks the floors of Airbnb stays as a customer
Distribution:
- Airbnb’s marketplace and brand operation do most of the marketing
- Posts many of his internal letters publicly on X or the Airbnb blog (the 2020 layoffs letter became a case study)
- Hosts the annual host conference (“Airbnb Open” and successors)
- Sits for the Masters of Scale podcast and How I Built This on cycle
Naval Ravikant, investor and writer
Work:
- Keeps an empty calendar by default
- Takes meetings on walks instead of in offices
- Reads physics, philosophy and math an hour or more a day
- Picks one book and reads it ten times before moving on
- Eats one or two meals a day with long fasts in between
Distribution:
- Posts on X (since 2009)
- “How to Get Rich” tweetstorm (May 2018) was a single session that became a book
- Sat for The Joe Rogan Experience and The Tim Ferriss Show as career-defining appearances
- Allowed Eric Jorgenson to compile The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (free book, 2020) from the tweets and podcasts
- Hosts the Naval podcast on irregular cadence
John Cheever, novelist
Work:
- Puts on his only suit each morning
- Rides the elevator down to a basement maid’s room with the other working husbands
- Hangs the suit on a hanger
- Writes in his boxers all day
- Puts the suit back on to ride the elevator home
Distribution:
- The New Yorker published 121 of his stories over 40 years
- Knopf published the collections
- Each New Yorker story was a teaser for the eventual collection
- Sat for the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction No. 62” (1976) the year of his comeback novel Falconer
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Block
Work:
- Walks five miles to work each morning
- Eats one meal a day, in the evening
- Fasts all day Saturday with only water
- Takes an ice bath every morning
- Sits in a 220-degree sauna three times for fifteen minutes each in the evening
- Sits for meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
Distribution:
- His own product (Twitter / X) was his marketing channel for a decade
- Posts personal photos of ice baths, fasting and sauna routines as a content stream
- Sat for the Tim Ferriss podcast and Joe Rogan as career-defining appearances
- Uses Bluesky and Nostr now as parallel channels
Marc Andreessen, founder and investor
Work:
- Keeps an “anti-todo list” of tasks he refused
- Reads four to five books simultaneously, one per slot in the day
- Sleeps nine hours a night
- Sits for ten minutes of mindfulness each morning
- Naps in the afternoon when the schedule allows
- Lifts weights and walks the trails near his house
Distribution:
- Built a16z as a media company that invests
- Operates a podcast network, a magazine (Future), a content team
- Posts on X constantly
- Wrote The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (October 2023) as a market-positioning artifact
- Sat for Lex Fridman, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh, Joe Rogan in 2023-24 as a coordinated press cycle
Cal Newport, computer scientist and author
Work:
- Plans every minute of the workday on paper at the start of the day
- Stops work at 5:30 PM regardless of state
- Runs a written shutdown ritual ending with the words “Schedule shutdown, complete”
- Walks for an hour or more a day as thinking time
- Reads five books a month minimum
- Avoids social media entirely
Distribution:
- Publishes a new book every 2-3 years (Random House / Portfolio)
- Sends a Sunday newsletter
- Hosts Deep Questions podcast weekly
- Writes long-form essays in The New Yorker on cadence
- Avoids the X / Instagram / TikTok game entirely and lets the books carry the brand
Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe
Work:
- Maintains a public reading list of every book he finishes
- Reads 100+ books a year
- Memorizes long technical papers by re-reading them
- Walks San Francisco for hours when working a hard problem
- Replies to email in batches
Distribution:
- Stripe owns its developer channel and runs Sessions (the annual conference)
- The public reading list at patrickcollison.com is itself a marketing artifact
- Founded Stripe Press in 2018 to republish books (Stubborn Attachments, The Dream Machine, Working in Public)
- Publishes essays in The Atlantic (with John) on progress studies
- Funds Arc Institute and Fast Grants as ongoing marketing through philanthropy
Peter Thiel, investor
Work:
- Plays chess at near-master level
- Drives one big idea per book, conversation or essay
- Eats a meat-heavy paleo diet
- Lives across multiple cities on rotation
- Returns to René Girard’s work as a fixed re-read
Distribution:
- Founders Fund and Palantir do the institutional work
- Published Zero to One (2014) based on his Stanford CS183 lecture notes (Blake Masters compiled them)
- Sits for one or two long-form interviews a year (Dave Rubin, Stanford, Tucker Carlson, Honestly with Bari Weiss)
- Hosts the Hoover Institution intellectual circuit
Austin Kleon, writer and artist
Work:
- Reads a print newspaper every morning and makes a blackout poem from it
- Walks three miles a day, rain or shine
- Writes morning pages by fountain pen
- Reads physical books for an hour before sleep
- Goes to bed by 9 PM
- Keeps screens off before 10 AM and after 10 PM
- Sits for ten minutes of meditation before starting work
Distribution:
- Sends a Tuesday newsletter every Tuesday for 12+ years
- Posts daily to his blog at austinkleon.com
- Workman Publishing publishes the books (Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going)
- The blackout poems themselves are public-facing (many originated as social posts)
- Wrote Show Your Work (2014) as a manifesto for the distribution ritual itself
Pieter Levels, indie founder of Nomad List
Work:
- Works from a single laptop with no second monitor
- Codes in cafés instead of offices
- Lives in a different city every few months
- Ships one feature or one new product per week
- Posts live revenue numbers in public
- Eats one meal a day
Distribution:
- X (Twitter) is his only marketing channel and he posts to it multiple times a day
- Posts every product launch, every revenue milestone, every milestone customer
- Publishes live revenue numbers on nomadlist.com/open
- Builds in public continuously, with the build-log being the marketing
- Wrote MAKE (2018) as the indie-hacker handbook that compounded his audience
Tyler Cowen, economist and writer
Work:
- Reads five or more books in parallel, one per room of the house
- Drops any book the moment it stops earning its time
- Eats lunch with a different person each week
- Travels to a new country several times a year for the food
Distribution:
- Writes a Marginal Revolution blog post every day, including holidays (since 2003, over 20,000 posts)
- Writes a Bloomberg Opinion column on cadence
- Hosts Conversations with Tyler podcast every couple of weeks
- Funds Emergent Ventures grants (the grant program is also marketing)
- The daily blog post is the work and the marketing at the same time
Ryan Holiday, writer and bookstore owner
Work:
- Writes from 8 AM to noon, dressed for the job in jeans and a button-down
- Journals in two notebooks before any other writing
- Runs five miles every evening
- Walks his ranch with his family for three miles when the day ends
- Reads 100 to 250 books a year
- Carries a memento mori coin in his pocket at all times
Distribution:
- Sends a Daily Stoic email every day since 2016 (never missed)
- Runs The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, TX as a physical marketing artifact
- Posts annual reading lists
- Penguin / Portfolio publishes the books
- Posts to Instagram and YouTube on cadence
- Records The Daily Stoic Podcast daily
Casey Neistat, filmmaker and founder
Work:
- Wakes at 5 AM
- Edits in chronological order without rewinding to fix earlier cuts
- Skateboards through New York for transit
- Runs a marathon or longer at least once a year
- Goes to bed by 10 PM
Distribution:
- Posted 800 daily vlogs in a row on YouTube (2015-2016). The streak IS the marketing.
- Sold Beme to CNN for $25M in 2016 and used the news cycle as press
- Tweets and posts to Instagram daily
- Runs sponsored content as part of the vlog format, blending product and story
Patrick O’Shaughnessy, investor and podcaster
Work:
- Reads a physical book every night before sleep
- Wakes at 5 AM
- Holds a regular blue-sky half-day for thinking with no agenda
Distribution:
- Records a new Invest Like the Best episode every week as a forcing function to learn and to market
- Built the Colossus podcast network on top of the show
- Sends regular reading recommendations to a private list
- Writes the annual year-end review
Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator and writer
Work:
- Walks while thinking, several times a day
- Writes by editing his own draft over and over
- Reads only at night, never during work hours
- Writes between school drop-off and school pick-up
- Walks his sons to school every morning
- Re-reads his own old essays continuously
Distribution:
- Posts new essays at paulgraham.com sporadically (40-200 over each year of YC’s life)
- The essays themselves are the marketing for YC
- Posts on X constantly
- Y Combinator’s batch system (Demo Day, the network) does the institutional marketing
Tim Ferriss, author and investor
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twenty-one minutes every morning
- Makes his bed first thing
- Does five to ten reps of a bodyweight movement before the day starts
- Drinks “titanium tea” each morning (turmeric, ginger and pu-erh blend)
- Writes in the Five-Minute Journal for two minutes
- Takes a two-to-three-minute cold shower or plunge
- Holds a three-day water-only fast once a month
Distribution:
- Sends 5-Bullet Friday email every Friday since 2014 (1.5M+ subscribers)
- Publishes The Tim Ferriss Show podcast on a roughly 2x/week cadence since 2014
- Writes a year-end review post every January
- Self-promoted The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) by submitting it to twelve podcast hosts simultaneously, which seeded the podcast era
- Posts on X and Instagram on cadence
Two daily stacks separate the names you remember from the footnotes you’ve never seen.
What was the first daily ritual you held long enough to compound?