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“Escape competition through authenticity.”

Naval Ravikant

Five days after he won the 2016 Formula 1 world title, Nico Rosberg retired.

“This season, I tell you, it was so damn tough,” he said. “I pushed like crazy in every area.”

Why push that hard, then walk away?

Nico spent 2016 in a race with his teammate, Lewis Hamilton.

• Since each kilo of body weight cost Nico about 0.04 seconds a lap, he quit cycling to shed leg muscle.
• He meditated for 45 minutes each morning and again each evening.
• Some days he spent about two hours with a mental coach.

Each race hands out points by finishing place: 25 for a win, 18 for second.

After 21 races, Nico won the title by five points.

“To beat Lewis I had to throw everything at it,” he said. “I’m not willing to put that sacrifice into it again next year, so it’s the best moment to stop.”

Had Nico lost in 2016, somebody else would have taken the title. Haruki Murakami’s novels have one possible author.

Murakami writes ten pages a day.

He also runs marathons. In his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he wrote, “In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

On days he wants to write more, he stops at ten pages anyway.

In 2013 more than 100 fans lined up at midnight outside a Tokyo bookstore for his new novel.

To beat a rival, you keep pushing even as each extra push gains you less ground.

When you’re the only one in your lane, start with your minimum effective dose: the smallest push that still gains you ground.

🌱

What race could you leave for a lane of your own?

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“Suffer a loss to gain a profit.”

Japanese proverb

A few days ago I wrote about the point where more effort starts to cost you more than it gives back.

Uber and Alibaba each chose to go past the point of negative returns. They lost money for years to win a market.

In 2016, Uber was losing over $1 billion a year in China. The cash paid for part of each fare so riders would pick Uber over Didi, China’s biggest ride app.

Didi started with far more riders and spent heavily on fares too.

Whoever stopped paying first would lose the riders. Uber stopped first. That August it sold Uber China to Didi.

For a billion dollars a year, Uber ended up owning a fifth of the company that beat it.

In the US, Uber already had most of the riders. It lost billions in a price war with Lyft to keep them.

By 2024, about three in four dollars Americans spent on ride apps still went to Uber.

Then it started keeping more of each fare. In Seattle, drivers’ tax records showed Uber’s take per trip nearly tripled in five years.

In the US, losing billions kept riders on Uber long enough for it to take a bigger cut of each fare.

If you’ve ever priced below a rival to win a customer, you’ve done a small version of what Jack Ma did in China.

In 2003, eBay paid $180 million for China’s top auction site and charged sellers a fee to list on it. That same year, Ma’s company Alibaba launched Taobao, a rival site where listing was free.

eBay’s view was blunt: “Free is not a business model.”

Sellers moved to Taobao. By 2005, Taobao had more than half of China’s online auction market.

With its sellers gone, eBay shut its Chinese site the next year.

Once most sellers were on Taobao, it raised the fees and cash deposits it charged brand-name stores to sell there.

Free listing won Taobao the sellers it later charged.

A platform does all it can to attract users while it grows, then takes more from them once it’s on top.

Chris Dixon describes that pattern in his book Read Write Own.

When the winner takes most of a market, losing money now can raise your odds of winning it. Uber in China shows you can still lose.

🏁

What limit could you set on what you’ll lose to win?

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“A man under temptation resists once because he has strength of mind, he yields another time because this is overcome.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I think of willpower as a battery.

Each use of your willpower draws from the same depletable reservoir.

You can save willpower in three ways.

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1) Change your environment.

Around 1950, Ray Bradbury couldn’t write at home with young kids around. He heard typing below him in the library at UCLA and followed it down to the basement. Typewriters there rented for a dime per half hour.

He came back with a bag of dimes. In nine days he spent $9.80 and wrote the story that became Fahrenheit 451.

Ignoring a distraction costs willpower, so put distance between you and distractions.

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2) Automate decisions.

Mountaineer Ed Viesturs climbed by one rule: getting to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory. On his first try at Everest in 1987, a storm was building and he turned back about 300 feet below the summit. He said later that his team could have reached the top but would almost certainly have died on the way down.

Write one rule you’ll follow without redeciding each time. For example, after 9 p.m., your phone charges in the kitchen.

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3) Delete decisions.

During the 2020 lockdown, Groundhog Day star Andie MacDowell stopped coloring her hair and watched the gray come in. Her daughters told her she looked “badass.” Her Hollywood managers told her to wait.

She kept the gray.

In 2021 she walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival with her hair silver.

Coloring your hair means deciding every few weeks to do it again. Stop coloring and that decision goes away.

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🔋

What’s one decision you could delete to conserve willpower?

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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

I tried a habit of launching one product a day and burned out 17 days in.

For the next two weeks I didn’t launch anything.

An Output Habit counts what you finish.

An Input Habit counts the time you put in.

Writing 1,000 words a day is an Output Habit. Each word moves the count, so it may reward being verbose.

Writing for 1 hour a day is an Input Habit. Each hour counts whether or not you finish an essay.

So it rewards showing up, even if the post is still sitting in your drafts.

Publishing an essay each day is a different type of Output Habit. A short essay is worth the same as a long one, so it rewards getting the essay out the door.

Lines of code reward length the same way words do.

In 1982 Apple’s engineers were building the Lisa computer. Each week their managers had them fill in a form with the number of lines of code they wrote.

Bill Atkinson spent one of those weeks rewriting the code that drew shapes on the Lisa’s screen. His version ran faster and came out 2,000 lines shorter. On the form he wrote -2000.

Andy Hertzfeld tells the story in his book Revolution in the Valley.

His best week scored below zero.

Jonathan Coulton counted songs released. In 2005 he left his software job and started releasing a new song each week for a year. Since any song would do, some weeks he released a cover.

Other weeks he wrote his own. Code Monkey was about a programmer stuck in a dead-end job.

That song passed a million downloads.

I time my runs instead of measuring the distance. When I measure how far I’ve run, I think only about the finish line and stop enjoying the run.

Ed Whitlock ran up to three hours a day in five-minute loops of a cemetery near his Ontario home.

To keep from racing himself, he ran the laps uncounted and untimed. “I just concentrate on running for a long time,” he said. His running was an Input Habit.

At 72 he became the first man over 70 to run a marathon in under three hours.

Do you enjoy the habit itself? If yes, make it an Input Habit, the way I time my runs.

Does your habit have a clear finish line? If yes, make it an Output Habit.

Processing my email, preparing the team meeting document and setting next week’s priorities each have a clear finish line.

Do you tend to procrastinate on your habit? If yes, make it an Output Habit.

📏

Which of your habits should you base on inputs and which on outputs?

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“Take your broken heart, make it into art.”

Carrie Fisher

For years I’ve thought about how a bad night makes a comedian better.

Whatever happens to them, good or bad, becomes stories for the next set. That makes comedians antifragile. They get stronger from what goes wrong.

The couples therapist Esther Perel was a guest on Trevor Noah’s podcast. She offered him questions from her card deck to get the audience at his shows talking to each other.

He said he’d try it: “it will either work or I will get comedy from it.”

Takahiko Kondo was the pastry chef at Massimo Bottura’s restaurant in Italy. One night in 2012 he dropped a lemon tart near the end of service.

Bottura told Kondo the broken tart was beautiful, then rebuilt it on a fresh plate the way it fell.

Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart became one of the signature desserts at the restaurant, served on a plate made to look cracked.

🔥

How can you turn a loss into a lesson?

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“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

Naval Ravikant

I’ve seen lots of posts go viral on X.

The feed now works like TikTok’s. X ranks each post by how likely it is to keep you scrolling. So people who follow someone after a viral post often miss their next post.

Since the algorithm keeps us on X longer, it pays off for X. The person posting has to win followers back with each new post.

So for years I barely posted on social media, even though Trends.vc needed it.

Christian Selig built an app called Apollo that let people read Reddit. In 2023 Reddit started charging apps like Apollo for each request to its servers.

Selig’s 50,000 paying users likely brought in $500,000 a year. Reddit’s new price would have cost about $20 million a year, so Selig shut down an app he spent years building.

Kayla Newman posted a short video on Vine in 2014 and said “eyebrows on fleek.”

The phrase spread everywhere and IHOP tweeted that its pancakes were on fleek too.

Newman was never paid for the phrase.

Then Twitter shut Vine down.

A few weeks later she asked strangers on GoFundMe for $100,000 to start a cosmetics line. She raised a little over $13,000.

The rapper Nipsey Hussle started out selling CDs from his car at a strip mall on Crenshaw and Slauson in South Los Angeles. His music came out on a label he owned.

In 2017 he rented a storefront there and opened a clothing store called The Marathon.

Then he and a partner paid $2.5 million for the whole strip mall.

• Reddit set Apollo’s price.
• Twitter decided Vine’s fate.
• Nipsey was the tenant and the landlord.

I thought I had to pick between posts on X that last a few hours and essays on my site that last for years.

That was a false trade-off. Now druriley.com is the hub and the platforms are the spokes. I post each essay to my site first. Then I share them on X and elsewhere.

🔁

What could you build that keeps working after you stop?

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“Too much speaking is no good, nor too much silence; too much rain is no good, nor too much sun.”

Kabir

I’ve spent six years building Trends.vc.

Some stretches I worked 70 to 80 hours a week. Other stretches I worked 10 hours a week.

The long weeks were too much. The short ones were too little.

Bryson DeChambeau wanted to hit a golf ball farther, so he spent a year putting on 40 pounds.

He went from two protein shakes a day to six.

His drives became the longest on the PGA Tour.

So he pushed for more. He aimed for 245 pounds, took a month off to train for speed and tested the longest driver the rules allow.

His first year of bulking bought him about 20 yards. His second bought him less than two.

In 1984 Anatoly Karpov played Garry Kasparov for the world chess title.

The first player to win six games would take the title. Draws didn’t count toward the six.

Karpov pulled ahead 5-0.

One more win would end the match.

Then the draws piled up. He stopped winning and lost about 22 pounds.

His aides watched him go to bed later and later, until he was falling asleep at 4 a.m.

He began to make bad moves.

Kasparov started to win.

Citing both players’ health, the head of world chess stopped the match after five months with no winner.

Karpov’s lead had shrunk from 5-0 to 5-3.

The dose makes the poison.

A habit’s returns move through four zones as you put more into it:

1. Zero returns. You do nothing, so you get nothing.
2. Rising returns. The more you put in, the more you get back.
3. Diminishing returns. Each unit of extra effort pays less than the last.
4. Negative returns. More effort starts to hurt you.

Before you put more into a habit, check what your last increase bought you.

🌱

What’s the sweet spot for your most important habit?

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“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. “That may be so,” he replied, “but it is also irrelevant.”

Harry G. Summers Jr.

A man from Poland and I each had five minutes to checkmate the other.

He took one of my pawns. On my turn I sent my rook at his king.

He came back with three consecutive attacks on my king. I escaped each one.

One move later my rook and bishop trapped him.

Checkmate.

He was still up on points when he lost.

To take my pawn, his rook went to the far corner of the board. That rook was still there when his king needed it.

Lindsey Jacobellis was three seconds ahead with two jumps left in the 2006 Olympic snowboard cross final.

On the second-to-last jump she reached down and grabbed her board in the air to show off.

She caught an edge on the landing and fell. Tanja Frieden rode past her to the gold.

She got up and finished second.

When a move distracts you from the bigger game, being ahead can be what gets you wiped out.

♟️

What distractions should you ignore to focus on the bigger picture?

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“No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.”

Napoleon Hill

Before Li Shufu spent $1.8 billion on Volvo, he asked 20 other Chinese founders in his club to argue about it.

Liu Chuanzhi told him how Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business.

The club’s secretary-general said Li was wavering before the deal was signed. Once the members saw how much he wanted it, they talked about how to make it work.

Four months later he announced the $1.8 billion purchase.

Some mastermind groups are three people.

Once a week for six years, Paul Jarvis told his friends Justin Jackson and Jarrod Drysdale where his business was stuck.

During those years Paul co-founded Fathom Analytics and wrote Company of One.

Justin co-founded a podcast hosting company called Transistor. He wrote that Paul and Jarrod were a big encouragement while he built it.

I found my group at an Indie Hackers meetup. I walked in as a stranger and left with an accountability partner I’d check in with for the next six years and a group of founders that became my mastermind for two years.

The first offer I made for Trends.vc failed.

I asked 7,000 readers to pre-pay for the next report.

None did.

One mastermind member, Ash, said to admit the flop to those readers. “Pivot now. Be vulnerable. Send the message today.”

I sent the message with a new offer: the next report half free, the rest behind an upgrade. I made my first $100 in two hours.

Trends.vc came out of that mastermind.

Other founders had groups like mine.

Nathan Barry taught design online, then started building email software called ConvertKit. For two years he met each week with a group of friends that included Barrett Brooks and Caleb Wojcik.

James Clear joined some of their calls and came on their 2015 retreat. He later wrote Atomic Habits.

At that retreat, Nathan’s friends told him he was most interesting when he taught design.

He wrote in his notes, “ConvertKit can be a way to keep designing.”

ConvertKit became the company he’s known for. Barrett later became its COO.

Warren Buffett said what he expected the day he met Charlie Munger at a dinner in 1959: “We were gonna both behave better than if we didn’t know each other.”

So that other founders can have a group like these, I launched masterminds for Trends Pro Members.

The companies we credit to one founder often had a few friends who met with them regularly.

🤝

Who’s one person you could invite to a weekly call?

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“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was listening to a health podcast when I heard that calcium makes bones stronger once they carry weight.

The link between learning and doing came to mind: what you learn builds a skill only once you try to use it.

Carbs pack extra fuel into a muscle once exercise drains it.

Protein builds muscle after training tears the muscle.

Books, podcasts and classes are like calcium, carbs and protein. Each one needs to be paired with something else to work.

All beer distributors in Boston turned down Jim Koch when he started Samuel Adams in 1984.

So each morning he filled his briefcase with ice packs and six beers then walked into bars to pour samples.

He had three Harvard degrees and had never sold anything. 20 bars a day taught him how to sell. One bar at a time, Samuel Adams grew into a $3 billion company.

What you learn builds a skill once you try to use it.

🦴

What could you attempt before reading another page about it?