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“Big doors swing on little hinges.”

W. Clement Stone

I turned off face recognition on my phone.

Unlocking by face is instant. I can be scrolling before I’ve consciously decided to pick the phone up.

A passcode adds a few seconds of friction. In those seconds I decide whether to keep going. Sometimes I type the first digit, notice I had no reason to pick it up and put it back down.

The passcode was the first.

• Red light mode. The display turns red on a schedule each evening. A red screen is ugly to scroll and better for sleep than blue or white light. That is the feature.

• No notifications. Uptime alerts break through. Everything else stays silent until I swipe down to check.

• App blockers, stacked. The first app forces a deep breath before opening. The second adds a delay and a daily limit on top. One blocker can be dismissed on a weak night, so two run together.

• Computer downtime at 9pm. Scheduled Downtime locks apps each evening. When the limit screen appears, work is done for the night.

• White noise to bed. The same sound each night masks sudden noises nearby, so fewer of them wake me. The body learns the cue too.

• All meetings and email on Monday. That buys deep work for the rest of the week.

I made each of these decisions once.

Willpower runs out. A single rule made in advance protects the day.

🔴

What boundary could you put on autopilot?

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“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Milton Friedman

I ran a daily standup for 2,000 days.

In 2020 I asked Trends Pro Members to post status updates with three questions:

• What did you ship yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Where are you stuck?

Hundreds of founders joined and they logged 44,110 standups.

By the end, two or three people posted each day.

I ended the standup on day 2,000 and shipped a book built from the standups the same week.

The book took a week. Ending the standup took years.

Run an experiment. It shows a spark of demand. People start using it, so now you have to keep it working for them. Run eight experiments that each get a little traction and you’re running eight projects you decided to keep by default.

Shipping 12 startups in 12 months sounds great to me. I want to try a lot of ideas and find the few that stick.

The experiments that kinda work are the trap.

A call option gives you the right to buy something later without the obligation to buy it. I want an experiment to work the same way. Upside if it lands. Room to walk away if I’d rather spend the week elsewhere.

I ended the standup, but it took 2,000 days. Walking away sooner takes practice.

Some moves I’m considering to keep experiments optional:

• Ship the experiment with an end date. Let the people using it buy the extension.
• Hand it to someone to run it. The experiment keeps running and I stop being the one asked.
• Presell it against a number. Take orders until a count is hit. Miss the count and the experiment never starts.
• Sell the experiment. Get good enough at selling a small business that handing it over is a move I can make in a week.

A thing that works is harder to end than a thing that fails.

🧪

What rule keeps your next experiment from becoming a commitment?

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“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Gustave Flaubert

I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host opened with a question for the room.

“What’s the latest move you made where the payoff wildly outran what it cost you?”

Curfew was my answer, a small app I built that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm.

For months I watched YouTube, at times up to 5am.

In Curfew, I set one boundary, a window that blocks YouTube outside of 4pm to 9pm. That boundary gave me back at least 15 hours a week.

The novelist Jonathan Franzen believed he couldn’t write serious fiction on a computer that could reach the internet, so he pulled the wireless card out of an old Dell laptop. That left the ethernet port.

“What you have to do is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”

That permanently blocked internet access on his machine.

Automate the boundary and you decide once. Leave it to willpower and you decide again each day.

⛔

What are you re-deciding daily that you could automate once?

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“I have to write to discover what I am doing.”

Flannery O’Connor

I run most days and listen to health podcasts. A few weeks ago I heard something I had to rewind: strength and muscle are correlated but they are different things.

Until then I thought bigger muscle just meant more strength.

Muscle is the capacity to produce force.

Strength is how much of that force your nervous system can fire at once.

You can grow a lot of muscle and still only use part of it. A lifter can also get much stronger while the muscle barely changes size.

For the first few weeks of lifting, most of the strength gain comes from your nervous system learning to fire what you already have. After three to five weeks, more of the gain comes from the muscle getting bigger.

Dickie Bush tells a story about two fishermen who had never cast a line.

The first fisherman went straight to the marina.

He bought a boat and specced a carbon-fiber rod.

He read books on casting, baiting and reeling.

He watched the fishing channel each night for months.

When he finally felt ready, he took it out.

Six hours later he had not had a single nibble.

The second grabbed a shitty rod, sliced up a hot dog and went to the lake on day one.

For a week he caught nothing.

On the eighth day he got his first nibble.

He moved spots and changed bait.

By the time the first fisherman showed up, the second had already been iterating on the water for weeks.

The first fisherman spent months gathering gear while the lake was being learned by someone else.

Make progress first. Then you can optimize later. They are different things and that is worth knowing.

Early on it barely matters which lever you pull. A beginner improves on almost any work.

Muscle and strength both climb inside the first couple of months.

The mistake is arguing about which one to train before you have trained either.

💪

What could you start before you know the best way?

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“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Alice Walker

I tried to learn Spanish for years and never consistently found the time. Any hour I gave it came straight out of something else I needed to do.

So I started studying Spanish while I run.

The course is Language Transfer, an audio method where a teacher asks you to build the sentence yourself before he gives it to you.

A 2013 paper in PLOS ONE found that young women who exercised while learning vocabulary recalled more of it than those who sat still through the lesson.

Breakout is an arcade game where a paddle keeps a ball alive against a wall of bricks. Track the ball better and you break more bricks. One miss costs a life.

An AI learning the game refused that trade. It opened a gap up one side, sent the ball above the bricks and let it ricochet until the wall was gone. The paddle barely moved.

Tunneling is finding out that a trade-off you thought was mandatory was optional all along.

For years the novelist Kevin J. Anderson had to pick between a day of writing and a day of hiking.

Then he started carrying a voice recorder up the trail and dictating chapters as he walked, one chapter out and one back, since he had to walk back anyway.

In 2010 he counted nearly 50 novels dictated into a recorder.

One week he hiked 50 miles and wrote 168 pages.

For the management thinker Nilofer Merchant, taking care of her body and being productive were in conflict. Then she started taking her one-on-ones as walks.

By 2013 she was walking 20 to 30 miles a week inside meetings she was going to have anyway. Then she got on the TED stage and told everyone else to try it.

Stacking a second activity onto one you already do is one route through.

Test trade-offs before you accept them.

🏃

Which trade-off could you try to tunnel through?

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“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.”

Roger Bannister

When I got back into running, 34 minutes was the longest I ever ran before that.

I needed to rebuild my conditioning, but moving past that ceiling was a mental hurdle.

My runs climbed to 55 minutes, then 89.

Running for nearly an hour and a half proved the distance was possible.

Even if I take time off, knowing that 89 minutes is possible does not go away.

I did it once, so I can do it again.

For decades, athletes treated the four-minute mile as a physical barrier. Doctors claimed the human heart would burst under the strain.

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. 46 days later, John Landy ran it even faster.

Within two years, dozens of runners crossed the same line. If you check the physiology, the human body did not evolve in 24 months. One man proved the time was possible. The collective limit fell away.

The same rule governs decisions in business.

The more examples you have, the easier something is to do.

When I started Trends.vc, each report packed mini case studies around each opportunity.

They remove objections by showing real people already making the idea work.

Each case study is proof of concept, showing that someone else has already done it.

Stories are ratchets.

Once a ratchet clicks forward, it does not slip back.

Once you see proof that an outcome is possible, in someone else or in yourself, the objection dies.

Confidence is a trailing indicator. It follows evidence.

🔒

Which objection can you answer with an example?

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“If the environment is controlled, behavior is controlled.”

B. F. Skinner

I paid two to three times what the same condo cost outside the city.

It was the tail end of a 3-year mini-retirement. I spent that time reading, biking and training jiu jitsu. By 2020 the money was running low. Either make money or go back to work for someone else.

Cheap condos sat further out. Instead I got a condo on the Atlanta BeltLine, a trail that connects neighborhoods across town.

The location made it easy to access groceries, meeting spaces and co-working offices. Some of my mastermind members lived along the same path.

I spent several hours a day biking the loop, listening to podcasts and researching Trends.vc Reports.

When Wilbur Wright set out to solve flight, he started with geography. In May 1900, he wrote to the US Weather Bureau and asked for wind records. Back came two issues of the Monthly Weather Review, listing average speeds at stations across the country.

He wanted steady wind and soft sand. Cities like Chicago had higher average speeds, but tall buildings created turbulent gusts and hard ground offered no forgiveness for crashes. He skipped the top five and picked Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an isolated strip of dunes on the coast.

The next autumn Wilbur was gliding up to 400 feet down the dunes four miles south.

He found the environment that let him fly before he built a flyer.

Years later I booked a place in Mexico City with one window that faced a wall. The room felt smaller each day I stayed.

My output there dropped to near zero.

A new environment can break habits when discipline is not enough.

In 1971 the White House asked the psychiatric epidemiologist Lee Robins to follow 943 Army enlisted men home from Vietnam.

About 20% of them were addicted to narcotics while they were there. Within a year of landing back in the States, only 5% were still addicted.

In Vietnam the heroin was cheap, close to pure and smoked. At home it was costly, weak and came with a needle.

Relying on discipline means fighting the same battle tomorrow.

The right environment removes the fight.

Now I check four things before I choose where to live.

1. A balcony or a patio
2. A window that looks outside
3. A separate bedroom, so sleep and work stay apart
4. Groceries, coffee and a gym within a five-minute walk

You shape your environment. Then it shapes you.

🪟

What one-time change would save you effort each day?

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“In a phase transition, two competing forces reach a balance. A small shift in temperature or pressure flips the entire system.”

Safi Bahcall

My shirt rubbed my nipple raw when I moved my run from 55 minutes to 89. Dehydration arrived at the same time.

Running without a shirt stopped the chafing.

At 55 minutes water was optional. At 89 I needed it.

Past 55, my legs grew heavy and my brain started looking for excuses to stop.

Keeping my feet moving meant overriding that resistance over and over.

That repetition trained executive control.

At my standing desk, when I wanted to push off a hard task, I met similar friction. I started the work anyway.

In the late 1940s, Emil Zátopek ran 400-meter intervals in heavy army boots through snow, holding his breath until he nearly blacked out.

In 1952 he won Olympic gold in the 5,000 meters and the 10,000 meters.

Then he entered the Marathon, a distance he had never raced before and won that too.

The strain tore at his muscles, causing severe injuries and a hernia that ended his dominance before the 1956 Games.

You make the jump for the expected upside, but the new level arrives with costs you did not face before.

A habit does not scale as a straight line.

At 99 degrees Celsius water is hot. At 100 it turns to steam.

Raise the habit enough and it changes state. New capabilities arrive. So do new costs.

🧗

What new capability could you unlock by jumping a level?

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“The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself.”

Clark Kerr

On the show Creator Lab, Bilal Zaidi asked me whether I would take investors for Trends.vc. I said no.

Trends.vc already had three interest groups. Me. The people I employed. The subscribers who paid for it.

Each decision had to balance all three.

An investor would have added a fourth group.

Craigslist ran into this when Phillip Knowlton, who held 28.4% of the company, wanted his money out.

Craig Newmark founded the site and Jim Buckmaster ran it.

In August 2004 eBay paid $32 million for Knowlton’s stake. The purchase came with a seat on craigslist’s board.

In June 2007 eBay launched Kijiji, a classifieds site aimed straight at craigslist, while still holding that board seat. Newmark and Buckmaster moved to dilute eBay’s shares. Delaware’s Chancery Court ruled in 2010 that craigslist breached its fiduciary duty to the very competitor it was trying to purge.

Craigslist spent 11 years in litigation before buying the shares back in June 2015.

Bringing in an outside stakeholder binds you to their interests by law, even when those interests actively work against yours.

• Uber’s riders want fares low.
• Its drivers want them high.
• Its investors want the rapid growth that cheap rides buy.

If you book a trip, you want the lowest price.

The driver taking the trip needs a living wage.

In February 2017 a dashcam caught Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with driver Fawzi Kamel about fare cuts. Kamel said the cheaper rates on Uber Black cost him $97,000. Kalanick shot back that Uber cut prices to stay in business against competitors.

Kamel kept pushing.

Kalanick finished with “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.” He apologized the same day the video went public and admitted he needed leadership help.

The more groups you answer to, the harder it gets to keep any of them happy.

🗳️

Who are you trying to please who shouldn’t have a vote?

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“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

Søren Kierkegaard

I got the thing I’d wanted my whole life and then I stopped growing. I was 23, driving to work, unable to name what was wrong. For the first time, nothing was chasing me.

Up to that point in my life, all I chased was peace and security.

I got both and felt stuck.

I grew up lower middle class, with stretches that ran below that. Getting out took years of doing things I didn’t want to do. They scared me. I did them because the other option was staying.

A courage challenge is a hard thing you pick when nothing is making you do it.

• The sales ask
• The hard conversation
• The call that keeps getting pushed

The years before 23 were survival. My back was against the wall.

Doing a hard thing is a different skill from surviving one.

I never saw those early years as courage. It was what I had to do to make it out, involuntary discomfort.

Once security arrived, that pressure was gone. I faced a choice. I could choose discomfort voluntarily or stop growing.

Without a threat forcing me, I stopped doing hard things. Growth left with fear.

Then I picked up Jia Jiang’s Rejection Proof.

An investor turned down his startup and it flattened him, so he went out looking for a no a day for 100 days. Day one he asked a security guard for $100. Day three he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts arranged like the Olympic rings.

The shift leader made them and handed them over.

He finished all 100 days.

Around that time I heard Tim Ferriss describe the same practice with a different name. He calls them comfort challenges in The 4-Hour Workweek: hold a stranger’s eye contact, ask someone for their number.

For the first 23 years of my life, discomfort was involuntary. After that, growth meant making it voluntary.

Today I run 8 courage challenges a day.

One was an email I left unopened for a month. Reading it and replying took 30 minutes.

Survival is doing the hard thing because you have to. Courage is doing it when nothing is making you.

🧱

What uncomfortable thing could you do today?