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“Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions.’”

Peter Senge

On a run last week I heard Travis Kalanick explain why taking Uber into China was a problem he chose to create.

Kalanick believes a company has to solve problems at least as fast as it creates them.

Around 2013 he took a few of Uber’s earliest employees to China. One person there told him it was the worst idea ever.

He took that as a good sign.

By early 2016 Uber was losing more than $1 billion a year in China. That August it sold its China business to its local rival Didi.

Its problems there piled up faster than it could solve them.

Mike Isaac tells the story in his book Super Pumped.

Since each problem I solve creates new problems, I work in priority order.

When I work on my second or third most important problem, I create the wrong problems. The new problems from those lower priorities pile up and pull me further from my most important problem.

Work on your most important problem first and the new problems you create are the right ones.

🎯

What’s the most important problem for you to solve right now?

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“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.”

Charlie Munger

I spent 3 years trying to find a business idea.

Mobile apps came first, then SaaS ideas. I let each one go.

Then I changed the question. I stopped asking which idea was best and asked what I could see myself working on the longest.

The answer was exploring how businesses and markets work. I could spend years spotting opportunities and finding what links one market to the next. I was already doing it for free.

That became Trends.vc.

Starting a business is like trying a blank key in a door.

It won’t turn the first time. So you go back, reshape the key and try the lock again.

The longer you’re willing to keep reshaping, the more likely the door opens.

In 2003 Niklas Hed and two friends from university started a game company in Finland.

Over the next 6 years they shipped 51 games. By then the company was close to bankruptcy.

They made one more.

Number 52 was Angry Birds.

Your first idea is like the first cut of that key.

Before you ask what the best business idea is, ask what you could see yourself working on the longest.

🔑

What could you start that you could keep doing for decades?

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“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

Peter Drucker

I’ve lost more chess games to the clock than to bad moves.

Each player gets 3 minutes in a game of blitz chess. I used to find good moves and run out of time hunting for better ones.

Hundreds of losses taught me to play good moves instead of waiting for perfect ones.

Last week I sat down for two and a half hours of deep work and spent all of it ranking my to-do list.

The time block ran out before I started the top item. Some items on my list were still unranked.

Planning felt productive.

This was before I separated planning from execution.

What you work on counts far more than how hard you work. Out of a hundred things on a list, the top one can outweigh the rest of the list combined.

Finding it takes real work.

People credit Abraham Lincoln with a saying in defense of preparing first.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Sam Hinkie spent three seasons building an NBA team to win later. He took over the Philadelphia 76ers in 2013 and collected draft picks and young players while the team lost.

In 2014 he drafted Joel Embiid. Injuries kept Embiid off the court for the next two seasons.

Hinkie’s teams won 47 games in those three seasons.

In April 2016 the owners moved to hire Bryan Colangelo to run basketball decisions. Hinkie resigned instead.

His resignation letter made the same case: “In the short term, investing in that sort of innovation often doesn’t look like much progress, if any.”

In 2018 Embiid led the 76ers to 52 wins and the playoffs.

Yaron Weitzman tells the story in Tanking to the Top.

Since planning is valuable, I give it a short session before deep work.

Deep work is only for doing, so planning can’t pass for progress.

🪓

What’s the top item you could start before ranking the rest?

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“The years teach much which the days never know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each day I open a board with my business numbers and ask one question of each: am I above or below my 30-day median?

Above it, I’m doing better than usual.

Numbers jump around, often for reasons that have little to do with what we did. These swings are part of running a business.

What I want to know is whether I’m moving in the right direction.

A programmer named John Walker tells a version of this in The Hacker’s Diet. In January 1988 he set out to go from 215 pounds to 145.

Along the way his weight swung by several pounds from one day to the next, mostly from water. A good week could still end on a higher number.

He called the bathroom scale “a modern instrument of psychological torture, an engine of confusion and despair.”

John started plotting a moving average instead. Each morning’s weight nudged the line a little. He judged his progress by the average.

By November he weighed 145.

A good day can hide a bad month. A bad day can hide a good one.

🔥

What goal could you judge by the month instead of a day?

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“A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years’ mere study of books.”

Chinese proverb

I learn more from 10 minutes of a podcast than from an hour with most books.

So why would two people talking teach me more than a book someone spent years writing?

Dale Carnegie tested his advice on a classroom before he wrote it down. He taught public speaking at night to people in business. His students needed more than speaking lessons, so he searched for a textbook on getting along with people.

He came up empty and wrote a short talk instead.

Each season he gave the talk and sent the class out to test it. A week later they reported back.

The rules started on a card the size of a postcard, then grew into a leaflet and a series of booklets. Years later, the booklets became How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The book has sold more than 30 million copies.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens also began as lectures to his history students.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld tests each joke on a crowd before he keeps it. After his sitcom ended, he retired his old jokes in an HBO special. Then he built a new act from nothing.

He’d show up unannounced at basement comedy clubs and try new jokes one at a time. The documentary Comedian filmed it.

It took him more than a year to build a full hour.

Alone with a page, you can spend an hour trying to sound smart. Across from a listener, you aim to be understood.

🎙️

What could you explain to a friend before writing it?

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“If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.”

Naval Ravikant

Last week I took a 2-hour walk and kept asking myself one question.

What becomes valuable as AI does more of our work?

In February 1968 New York’s sanitation workers wanted a raise of a few hundred dollars a year, so they walked off the job.

The year before, the state passed a law that banned public workers from striking. Their union leader John DeLury led the strike anyway.

About 100,000 tons of garbage piled up on the city’s streets.

A judge sent DeLury to jail. Vincent J. Cannato tells the story in his book The Ungovernable City.

Plenty of other people could learn to drive a garbage truck. But with all the drivers out at once, the city had no one to replace them.

The workers got their raise.

Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts did the same in 2024. They shut the ports for a few days and won a 62% raise over six years.

Holding out together made common work scarce.

A typical nursing assistant in the US earns about $42,000 a year.

An anesthesiologist earns more than $350,000.

Both keep patients alive. Many people can learn to help a patient wash and eat. Few can be trusted to keep a patient unconscious through surgery and wake them up safely afterwards, so hospitals compete to hire anesthesiologists.

You could work harder than anyone on the ward as a nursing assistant and still earn a fraction of an anesthesiologist’s pay.

Companies get paid the same way. Only one company makes the most advanced chip-printing machines: ASML.

In 2025, it kept about 29 cents of profit from each dollar of sales.

Kroger shoppers can buy the same groceries at other stores across the street. The grocery chain keeps less than 2 cents of each dollar.

People and companies earn the most for work many people want done and few can do.

💎

What could you offer that isn’t available anywhere else?

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“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

Warren Buffett

A few months ago I wrote about luck versus hard work.

Your position can matter more than both.

In 1994 TLC released CrazySexyCool. It sold over 10 million copies.

T-Boz, Left Eye and Chilli sang the songs, starred in the videos and performed the album on tour.

Their manager, Pebbles, ran a company called Pebbitone. TLC signed their record deal with her company. Pebbitone held the contract with LaFace Records.

Since the cost of studios, videos and tours came out of TLC’s royalties first, little of the album money reached the three women.

TLC got about 20 cents for each album sold, split three ways. Out of an estimated $175 million in album sales, their share was about 1%. That’s roughly $1.75 million.

In July 1995 all three women filed for bankruptcy, with about $3.5 million in debt.

“We’re as broke as broke can be,” Chilli said the next year.

The three women behind an album that sold over 10 million copies ended up in debt.

Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris as a worker at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Because he was a state employee, the game belonged to the state.

A Soviet agency called Elorg licensed it to companies in the West. Nintendo bundled it with the Game Boy.

By 1992 Nintendo sold about 7.5 million copies in the United States alone.

Pajitnov earned nothing from those sales. The rights came back to him in the mid-1990s. Only then did he earn his first royalties, about 12 years after he built the game.

Dan Ackerman tells the story in his book The Tetris Effect.

Pajitnov did the work. Elorg collected the license fees.

Hard work from a weak position carries the most risk and keeps the least return.

♟️

How could you put yourself in a position to earn more?

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“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.”

Zig Ziglar

My first rule is focus on what you control and I forget it often.

Roughly 80% of my anxiety comes from losing sight of this. So I read my rules each morning and most nights.

In the 1880s a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how fast what we learn wears off. He used himself as a test subject. He memorized lists of nonsense syllables and tested himself hours and days later.

A day later, most of the syllables were gone.

Each time he relearned them, they came back faster and stayed longer. In 1885 he published his results as the forgetting curve in his book Memory.

Reading my rules each morning is how I remember them.

Motivation and inspiration wear off too. So revisit your goals and your reasons for chasing them daily.

A shower keeps me clean for about a day. My rules last about as long before I need to remind myself of them again.

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What hard-won lesson should you revisit each day?

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“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I heard the psychiatrist Dr. K talk about antidepressants on his HealthyGamerGG podcast.

Their side effects start within days. The benefits take two to four weeks, so some patients quit before the drug ever works.

On her first night with a sleep apnea mask, the mathematician Tanya Khovanova wanted to quit too.

For years she woke up tired. A test counted 37 breathing stops an hour.

The mask gave her headaches. It kept her on her back and smelled of plastic.

She kept wearing it.

Her breathing stops fell to 1 an hour. A month later she started dreaming again.

Quitting sugar also hurts before it helps.

The author Debra Parmley caught herself in the kitchen with a soup spoon, eyeing the brown sugar.

A headache ran from the back of her neck over the top of her head. She felt like flinging plates at people’s heads.

She emptied each open container into the trash so she couldn’t dig it back out.

About six weeks in, carrots and strawberries tasted sweet again.

Since the side effects come first, the start of anything good can feel like a mistake.

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What could you keep doing through the first hard weeks?

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“Planning a thing lies with man. Accomplishing it lies with Heaven.”

Zhuge Liang

A few days ago I wrote about companies that lose money to win a market.

Those companies were playing poker.

Matt Affleck made the right bet at the 2010 World Series of Poker. He held two aces. He pushed all his chips in against Jonathan Duhamel’s two jacks.

With one card left to come, Affleck was a 77% favorite.

The last card was an eight. It gave Duhamel a straight.

Affleck went out in 15th place.

Affleck’s chips gave Duhamel the chip lead. Duhamel went on to win the title.

At the poker table I can make the best decision and lose when the dealer turns over the final card.

Fred Smith took a bet the casino was likely to win to keep FedEx alive. FedEx was down to $5,000 when General Dynamics turned down his pitch for more money. On the way home he played blackjack in Las Vegas and won $27,000.

The odds favored the casino.

Smith won anyway, then went on to raise $11 million from investors.

Annie Duke played poker for a living before she wrote books about decisions. In How to Decide, she calls judging a decision by how it turned out “resulting.”

Affleck’s bet was right and it lost. Smith’s was wrong and it won.

When you make a good decision and get a bad outcome, you’ll be tempted to call it a bad decision.

Chess is a game of perfect information. Poker (and life) are games of odds.

🃏

What could you do to raise your odds of success?