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“When the music changes, so does the dance.”

Hausa proverb

I love to bike. But I run instead.

Drivers here rarely yield to pedestrians. On foot I feel safer than on a bike.

I gave up the habit I love for one that fits my environment.

As cars spread through the Netherlands in the 1960s, the average Dutch person went from biking 1,500 km a year to about 800.

In 1971, cars killed more than 3,000 people in the Netherlands, 450 of them children. A journalist named Vic Langenhoff lost his daughter, killed while biking to school.

The next year he published an article headlined Stop de Kindermoord: stop the child murder.

The article caused an uproar across the country.

His first idea was to bus children to school. Other campaigners won him over to a different fix: make the roads safe to bike on.

Over the following decades the Dutch built about 35,000 km of bike paths separated from cars.

Today 27% of trips in the Netherlands happen on a bike.

The Dutch kept biking and changed their environment instead.

Habit harmony is when your habits and your environment support each other.

The better your habits suit your environment, the more likely the habit (and sometimes you) will survive.

🎶

Which habit could you swap for one your environment supports?

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“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”

Cal Newport

This is my fourth try at the method from Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing.

Each of the first three attempts started with early wins. Then I stopped.

The method starts with a question:

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

The version I kept hearing was simple: answer the question, then do that one thing.

I read “do” as “finish.”

The Ivy Lee method says the same thing: work on your top task until it’s done.

I tried that too.

When I took Keller’s question literally, the one thing I picked was often big. I scored each day done or not done. By bedtime it wasn’t done. I got discouraged.

So I made the one thing smaller, then smaller again. Once it fit in a few minutes, I checked it off and stopped.

The check marks piled up. The work I cared about barely moved.

So I stopped using the ONE thing method.

A few weeks ago I heard Keller in an interview. He blocks four hours a day for his one thing.

I’d been doing one thing method incorrectly.

The score is yes or no: did you put in the time you said you would?

When I finish the one thing early, now I ask the question again and keep going until the time is up.

In a 1949 letter, the crime novelist Raymond Chandler laid out his rule for a working writer: set aside at least four hours a day.

In those hours, writing was optional. He could look out the window or writhe on the floor. The one rule was to do nothing else. “Either write or nothing,” he wrote.

• Alex Hormozi protects four hours of uninterrupted work.
• Cal Newport wrote his first book in 60 to 90 minutes a day.
• Haruki Murakami writes for five to six hours, starting at 4 a.m.
• Charles Darwin worked in three 90-minute blocks a day.

Two hours can outweigh a day of interruptions.

⏱️

What could you build with two focused hours a day?

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“Man is a creature that can get used to anything.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

My goals used to center on net worth, homes and cars.

Reaching these types of goals gives you a brief high. Then a day, week or month later, your life feels the same as before.

Now I focus on how my days feel: control over my schedule, aerobic capacity and strength.

Buzz Aldrin reached one of the biggest goals a person can: in July 1969, he walked on the moon. Back on earth, the goal was behind him.

In his memoir Magnificent Desolation he wrote: “There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into.”

Aldrin spent 21 hours on the moon.

Then he spent the next decade fighting depression and alcoholism.

Run a marathon and then what? Visit each country and then what?

That’s the hedonic treadmill: we get used to the goals we reach and want the next one.

A Vanity Goal leaves your days the same or worse once the high fades. A 10,000-square-foot house is more to take care of. A team of 1,000 people is more to manage each day.

A Sanity Goal makes your ordinary days better after you reach it. If you can’t get to work without a car, owning one makes each workday easier.

Going from a $30,000 car to a $1 million one changes far less: you drive the same roads to the same places.

Now you also worry about potholes and theft.

Financial independence is a Sanity Goal. Mr. Money Mustache, a blogger who retired at 30 by saving most of his pay, wrote that having enough money is reassuring for “a naturally worry-prone person (like I tend to be).”

The peace of mind from financial independence shows up on each day after you reach it.

Vanity Goal	Sanity Goal
A $1,000,000 supercar	A reliable car
A private jet	Eliminating your daily commute
A 10,000-square-foot mansion	Living close to friends
A $1 billion net worth	Reaching financial independence
Employing 100 people	Making enough profit to control your time
Working 80 hours a week	Doing 4 hours of focused work a day
An invitation to exclusive galas	Weekly dinner with people you trust
Winning an industry award	Making a product customers love

Judge a goal by how long it pays you after you reach it.

🌝

Which vanity goal would you swap for a sanity goal?

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“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

Seneca

A few months ago, I was reading Maurice Ashley’s Move by Move.

On March 14, 1999, Maurice became the first Black player to earn the grandmaster title.

He got there by working backward. The title required three tournament norms and a 2500 rating. Aiming at that target told him which tournaments to enter and what to study each day.

A goal needs a system to reach it. A system needs a goal to give it direction.

So I hate to hear “systems beat goals.”

Bill Walsh titled his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, but his system was in service of the score.

When he took over the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, his first season ended with 2 wins and 14 losses.

• He started writing out the first plays of each game before kickoff, a list that grew to 15. Nobody had to pick them under pressure.
• Each practice ran on a written schedule, with each drill given its minutes.
• Even the receptionists got instructions on how to answer the phone.

Walsh wrote that he focused on “the process of improving.” But he checked that process against winning: when the wins didn’t come, he raised the standard. Within three seasons, the 49ers won the Super Bowl.

Without a goal, daily effort has no direction. Habits serve goals.

Decide what you want first, then work backward to the habits that make it inevitable.

🎯

What habits do you need to reach your most important goal?

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“If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration.”

Serena Williams

I spread one daily marketing block across 8 products and each one lost momentum while I tended to the other seven.

With 8 products sharing that block, each one got marketing time once or twice a week. If that.

Hit a piece of metal with a hammer and it gets hot. Move to a second piece and the first one cools while you hammer the other.

Each product sat cold for days before I touched it again.

You cannot start a fire by hand without continuous pressure. Friction only turns into flame if you keep going. With a bow drill, you spin a wooden spindle against a board until the dust at the bottom gets hot enough to glow.

A bushcraft guide warns that one slip of the bow can mean starting again, because the heat you built up is lost.

Starting a fire by hand demands unbroken speed and downward force. First comes wood dust, then heat, then smoke. If you keep driving the bow, the hot dust turns into a glowing ember.

One slip of the cord or one pause resets the board. The heat bleeds into the air and you start from cold wood all over again.

You can tend a fire a few minutes at a time, but starting one takes continuous pressure.

🔥

What project deserves your focus until it catches fire?

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“Please Note: I will not engage in work emails after 7pm or on weekends.”

Shonda Rhimes

I’m in the middle of a big habit push.

Each day I reach out to 13 people. It might be my best friend, a family member, someone I heard on a podcast, someone whose tweet I reply to or someone I’m asking on a date.

I do 8 courage challenges, up from 5 in August. A courage challenge is a hard thing I pick when nothing is making me do it.

Running went from 13 minutes to 34.

An anti-habit is a rule about what I won’t do.

As my habits got bigger, I tightened my anti-habits:

1. Fasting runs until 2pm. It used to end at noon.

2. Eating stops at 8pm instead of 10pm, so dinner is digested before bed. Sleep comes faster and goes deeper.

3. Messaging and social apps stay closed until 2pm. They used to open at noon.

4. Chess stops at 8pm, with 5 games as my daily max.

Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo and smoked 60 cigarettes a day before he wrote novels full time. When he made the switch, he and his wife started going to bed soon after dark. He quit smoking.

In writing mode he wakes at 4am, writes for 5 to 6 hours, runs 10 kilometers in the afternoon and goes to bed at 9pm.

Going to bed at 9pm buys him the 4am start.

A Formula 1 car can go from 300 km/h to a full stop in under 4 seconds. Brakes that strong let a driver stay at full speed longer before each corner.

The more aggressive your habits are, the more aggressive your anti-habits need to be. They’re the boundaries that protect the time, energy and attention the aggressive habits run on.

What anti-habit can you set before you push a habit harder?

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“In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning.”

Elizabeth Kolbert

I’ve watched a lot of markets come and go in 6 years of building Trends.vc.

Partway through, ChatGPT arrived and intelligence got cheap.

Some markets vanished. Others grew.

Evolution can explain why one market dies and another grows.

Ecologists study how environments change. When a drought or an ice age hits, some species go extinct and some hang on in a smaller range.

Other species carry on almost unchanged, because the disruption never touched what they depend on.

Others thrive, because the disruption cleared their competition or fed them directly.

New species appear where nothing lived before.

Markets take the same routes.

Route	What it looks like in a market
Gone	The thing you sold is what the disruption replaced
Hurt	The market survives, the margin leaves
Unchanged	The market never depended on what changed
Thriving	Demand rises because of the disruption
New	A market that had no name before

1) Gone. Chegg sold intelligence, packaged as homework answers.

When ChatGPT gave the same answers away free, students stopped paying for them.

Chegg has lost about 99% of its market value since its 2021 peak near $14.7 billion.

2) Hurt. Bill negotiators phone a cable company and argue the price down. Billshark takes 40% of what it saves you. BillCutterz, running since 2009, takes 50%.

A machine makes that phone call now. Pine AI says 150,000 people have used it.

Kudos, a wallet app, sells a flat subscription instead of taking a cut.

3) Unchanged. Barbers kept cutting hair.

Machines learned to write essays before they learned to wield scissors.

4) Thriving. Electricians are in more demand because intelligence got cheap.

Each data center is a building somebody has to wire.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 9% growth for electricians from 2025 to 2035, against 3.5% for all occupations.

5) New. Mercor sells expert training data for AI models.

It reached a $10 billion valuation by October 2025 recruiting ex-Goldman, ex-McKinsey and elite-law-firm people.

Take a disruption you can see coming, run a market through it and ask which of the five routes it lands in.

🧬

What could you offer that cheap intelligence makes scarce?

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“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

Leonardo da Vinci

10 years back, my interior designer wanted to put a bar cart in my house.

Put liquor in plain sight and you’re subconsciously primed.

Move it out of sight and the thought doesn’t form.

I didn’t want bottles on display.

They went in a cabinet with closed doors instead.

In Google’s Manhattan office the candy sat out in the open, in full view of anyone walking past. Google moved the M&Ms into opaque jars and put the dried figs and pistachios into glass ones.

Over seven weeks the staff ate 3.1 million fewer calories in M&Ms.

The M&Ms were still there. Friction affected their decisions.

Shape your environment. Then it shapes you.

How can you change your environment to delete a daily decision?

“Water that is too clear has no fish.”

Dongfang Shuo

I read a memoir called Heavy a few months ago and one passage has stayed with me since.

Kiese Laymon weighed 319 pounds in college. By 26 he was running 11 miles a day, playing two hours of basketball and eating 800 calories.

He ran at least six miles a day for 2,564 days straight.

During that stretch he passed out in a grocery checkout line.

Then his mother gambled away the money he had lent her and asked him for more. They fought about it.

He ran over 20 miles that night.

He came home and stepped on the scale. Just under 160 pounds for the first time in his life.

Then his body broke. Arthritis got bad enough that he couldn’t make a stride.

He gained it all back.

With most good things, more of them does less each time. The tenth hour of study teaches less than the second did.

With a few good things, more of them starts to cost you. Six liters of water inside three hours killed a healthy woman in a radio contest.

Past a point, a good thing starts producing the harm it was protecting you from.

Where could you stop before the good turns bad?

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“Stay far from timid.”

Biggie Smalls

I read a few lines in Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues and put the book down. Blue team defends a system. Red team breaks in.

“That’s the problem with blue teaming it—you need to be perfect, while—”

“The red team only has to find a single error,” Cory Doctorow, Red Team Blues

Aggression has value at the poker table apart from your cards. A bet can win the pot outright whatever you hold.

The winning style has a name, tight-aggressive.

Fold most hands. Bet hard on the few you play.

The passive player is the defender, playing not to lose.

The defender can only win at showdown. The aggressor can win at showdown too or take the pot whenever the defender folds.

Each fold bleeds chips. When a timid player finally bets, opponents step aside because the raise screams strength. Chips leak on defense and the rare big hand pays almost nothing.

In chess the threat is stronger than its execution. A standing threat forces the defender to answer it on each move while the attacker keeps his options open.

Answer each move correctly and you have still spent the game solving problems someone else set.

Back at the poker table, both errors have a name.

One player only plays the top ten starting hands and folds when anyone pushes back. Phil Hellmuth named him the mouse in Play Poker Like the Pros.

Another pushes money in with any two cards and never looks at who he is up against.

The table calls him the maniac.

Good players make money off the maniac. They stop bluffing him with weak cards and let him do the betting when they are strong.

The maniac attacks everyone equally. That is the same as aiming at nobody.

In chess, overextending an attack leaves pieces exposed. You create targets instead of threats.

Unaimed aggression hands the advantage back.

Timid loses slowly. Maniac loses fast. Aim your aggression and you choose when the fight happens.

⚔️

What opportunity could you create instead of waiting for one?