Marketing takes 34 minutes. For months, missing one day broke the chain.
I built an app that lets me bank ahead: do tomorrow’s block today and the credit carries forward.
Right now I have a few days sitting in the bank. I don’t have to touch the work today to keep the streak.
And yet I did today’s block.
Researchers found something close to this in a sugarcane field.
Sugarcane farmers in India get paid once a year, in a lump at harvest. The same man is broke the month before and flush the month after. The researchers tested more than 400 of them on the same puzzles before the payout and again after.
Afterward, with money in hand, they scored much higher. Same farmer, same brain, richer by one crop.
That score gap matched a lost night of sleep or 13 IQ points.
When I read that, I saw my mornings in it. The shortage left the farmers with less attention for planning ahead and staying steady.
It was 2012 and the tool was called Shommi. It watched Twitter for people who wanted to buy something and handed leads to businesses. Car buying was my first test because of the high price tag. When I ran out of things to code, I drove to a strip of car dealerships on the north side of Atlanta and walked into 3 of them.
They were polite. They said interesting.
The most interested person in those 3 dealerships wanted to hire me for Ruby on Rails contract work.
A few years later I built something that scraped job boards so developers could see which skills paid the most and were growing the fastest. Nobody else was doing it. I took that as an open lane instead of a sign that no one wanted it.
In March 2014 he was running out of money and announced he would launch 12 startups in 12 months, one a month, in public. Most went nowhere. Nomad List turned into a city database with millions of visits a month and acquisition offers. Remote OK turned into one of the biggest remote job boards on the internet.
Seven years later he added up everything he had ever shipped and posted the count:
🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew
📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed
📈 My hit rate is only about ~5%
🚀 So…ship more
Almost 31,000 people liked it. That is the 5% rule.
Say your hit rate is 5%. Try once and you have a 95% chance of a miss.
Try twice and the odds of two misses are 90%.
Ten attempts leave a 60% chance of zero hits.
At 14 attempts, the odds of zero hits drop under 50%. At 45, they fall under 10%. At 90, the odds of zero hits sit under 1%.
“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”
Bruce Lee
I fast on a range from 12pm to 2pm. Most days I make it to 2pm. All of my calls are on Mondays, back-to-back masterminds and team meetings. At 12pm I eat an apple to get through them.
Ron Hill, who won the Boston Marathon in 1970, ran each day for 52 years on a floor of one mile at any pace. In his heaviest years he ran 120 to 140 miles a week. A car crash broke his sternum in 1993, so he waited for his wife to leave for the weekly shop, snuck out of the house and hobbled one slow flat mile. That single mile kept a 52-year streak alive.
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
Yoshida Kenko
I spent years taking resistance out of my work.
Each system I built automated another task. My work eventually ran on easy mode.
Then the calendar went quiet and my head went looking for a fight. Small grievances got loud. Overthinking filled the empty hours.
In 1994, keepers at the Central Park Zoo watched their polar bear swim the same figure eight through his pool, up to 12 hours a day.
He paced the water until the zoo hired an animal therapist to figure out why.
Biologists call it stereotypic behavior. The popular word is zoochosis. A survey of 55 captive bears found 85% pacing or tracing loops.
The therapist delivered a blunt verdict: “Gus is just bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people are in New York.”
In cities and towns, we live in the human equivalent of zoos. Four walls, scheduled meals and warm rooms replaced the wild.
A polar bear is an apex predator designed to swim miles of freezing ocean and hunt across ice. Drop that animal into a concrete pool with pre-sliced fish and he will not sit quietly in comfort. He spent half his life swimming a shape that took him nowhere.
Gus had no exit. Stockton Rush did.
In June 2023, he climbed into a 22-foot submersible called Titan to dive to the Titanic wreck.
He built the hull out of carbon fiber to cut shipping costs, against warnings that the material would buckle under deep-sea pressure.
Two hours into the dive, the hull gave way. Five people died, including Rush and 3 passengers who paid for their seats.
Nobody forced those men into the North Atlantic. They paid to enter water that could crush them.
When my calendar cleared, problem-seeking behavior took over. Without natural friction to push against, my focus turned inward. I over-intellectualized small decisions and gave routine issues outsized weight.
In 2014, researchers at the University of Virginia put people in an empty room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except think.
The only object in the room was a button that delivered an electric shock.
Before the session, each participant said they would pay money to avoid being shocked.
Left alone with their thoughts, 67% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves anyway. One man pressed the button 190 times.
Given an empty room, participants chose physical pain over stillness.
An idle mind manufactures the challenge a comfortable life removes.
Given 15 minutes of quiet, overthinking fills the room. Small issues feel urgent.
You reach for a version of that shock button. Checking a phone in an elevator counts.
When you eliminate real challenges, the mind invents artificial ones.
Stillness has its place. So does a demanding climb.
Cultivate mindfulness so you can sit with silence.
Choose productive challenges so your mind never has to invent fake ones.
So what does cheap intelligence make scarce? Start 5,400 years earlier.
Writing made remembering cheap
Around 3,400 BC, scribes in Mesopotamia started pressing marks into wet clay to record who owed what.
Before that most debts existed only in someone’s memory. After it a debt sat on a clay tablet either party could go and check.
Plato hated it. In the Phaedrus he has an Egyptian king tell the god who invented writing that the gift will backfire:
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”
Remembering got cheap. Reading got expensive, because those marks meant nothing to anyone who couldn’t decode them.
Power moved to the scribes who could read and to the states that kept the records.
If you’ve ever ended an argument about what you paid by pulling up the receipt, you’ve used what the scribes invented.
A print shop in the 1450s could turn out more in a day than a scribe could in a year.
After 50 years of printing, more than 9,000,000 books existed in Europe.
Guild rules covered hand-copying and said nothing about a press. So the scribes had no legal way to stop a print shop opening down the street.
For a printed book, paper ran to about half the cost. A scribe bought one sheet at a time and sold what they finished.
A printer selling on the open market bought thousands of sheets up front and got paid only if the books sold.
The trade stopped running on labor and started running on money. It moved to whoever could front the capital and choose the right manuscript. A bad choice meant paying for pages no one wanted.
If you’ve ever paid up front for something that never sold, you’ve run the printer’s risk.
Choosing what to print got expensive.
Steam made labor cheap
Between 1780 and 1840, British output per worker rose 46%.
Real wages rose 12%.
Economic historian Robert Allen named that gap Engels’ Pause. For 60 years the machines produced more while the people running them saw very little of it.
The profit rate roughly doubled. Profit’s share of national income grew at the expense of labor and land.
From 1840 to 1900 output per worker rose 90% while real wages rose 123%, passing productivity for the first time.
If your output went up this year and your pay stayed flat, that’s Engels’ Pause running again.
When a machine does what hands did, the money goes to whoever owns the machine.
Electricity made power cheap
Electric power was available in the 1880s. Productivity didn’t move until the 1920s.
Factories bought motors and dropped them into buildings laid out for steam.
A steam factory ran off one central shaft. Belts came down from it to each machine, so machines had to sit close to the shaft whether or not that suited the work.
An electric motor on each machine cut the belts.
Now the floor could be arranged in the order the work actually happened. Wide, single storey, lit from above, built around the product instead of around the power.
The factories that got the gains tore out the shaft and redrew the floor. The ones that bolted a motor onto the old layout got almost nothing.
If you put a chatbot into your workflow this year and nothing much changed, you added the motor and left the workflow exactly as it was.
Power got cheap and the money went to whoever knew what to rebuild around it.
Haber-Bosch made nitrogen cheap
Plants run out of nitrogen first.
Until 1909 the supply came from three places.
Lightning and rain delivered some. Root bacteria on peas and beans pulled more from the atmosphere. The rest came from bird droppings and nitrate beds in Chile.
You could not manufacture nitrogen.
You dug it up or you waited for weather.
The supply capped how many people the land could feed.
Fritz Haber pulled nitrogen out of the air in 1909. Carl Bosch made it industrial and the first ammonia plant ran at Oppau in 1913.
Synthetic fertilizer now supports roughly half the people alive.
Odds are that includes you.
The reaction takes enormous heat and pressure. It burns something like 1% to 2% of the world’s energy supply.
The ceiling on food stopped being land. It became energy.
Break a hard limit and whatever powered the breaking becomes the new limit.
Oil made moving cheap
Karl Benz patented a gasoline automobile in 1886. Ford’s assembly line turned the car into a middle-class purchase.
Between 1950 and 2000 the share of Americans living in suburbs climbed from 23% to 50%.
An engine changed where a person could afford to live.
If you drive to work, you can live further from your job than anyone could have in 1900.
In 1960 the countries sitting on the oil formed OPEC. By 1973 they could swing the price of almost anything that moved on oil.
Getting places got cheap and oil got expensive.
When moving gets cheap, the money goes to whoever owns the fuel the moving runs on.
The computer made calculation cheap
In 1987 the economist Robert Solow wrote that we see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
He meant it literally. Firms bought the machines and the output numbers sat flat.
The paradox held for years and economists argued about it the whole time.
What broke it was the work around the machine:
The software
The retraining
The redrawn processes
The people who could tell which tasks were worth automating
By then the computer was a commodity. Two rival firms could buy identical hardware off the shelf. One would pull ahead anyway. Hardware explained none of the gap.
IBM built the PC and set the standard. Microsoft sold the operating system that ran on it and Intel sold the chip inside it.
IBM captured the least of the three.
When the machine gets cheap, the money moves to whatever makes it useful.
The internet made publishing cheap
With the internet, you can publish as much as you like this afternoon for nothing.
So the value moved to whoever sits between the infinite supply and the fixed demand.
The feed
The ranking
The recommendation
Setting the order became its own industry. It decides which of the infinite things a person ever sees.
When making it costs nothing, the money moves to whoever decides what gets seen.
What’s getting scarce now that intelligence is cheap?
Copies got cheap and picking got expensive. Making things got cheap and capital got expensive. Nitrogen got cheap and energy got expensive. Publishing got cheap and attention got expensive.
At Trends.vc, we sell judgment on which ideas are worth chasing.
2) Signing your name to the answer.
AI produces the answer and carries none of the loss when it’s wrong.
The auditor who signs the books, the engineer who stamps a drawing, the surgeon in the operating room. Each sells the same thing: a person who eats the consequence.
3) Getting anyone to look.
Cheap intelligence pours infinite supply into a day that still holds 24 hours. Curation and distribution capture the margin.
4) Being in the room.
If your work requires hands in a room, you have more runway than headlines suggest.
⁂
Progress relocates scarcity. Wealth belongs to whoever stands where it lands.
🏺
What could you create that gets more valuable as the cost of intelligence drops?
He had one lap before the engine turned into a lump of molten metal.
In 1986 Formula 1 let teams run as much turbo boost as they dared in qualifying. BMW pushed 1.5 liters to more than 1,400 horsepower, roughly ten times what that size makes in an ordinary road car.
Teo Fabi qualified fastest at the Austrian Grand Prix on that engine, the first time his Benetton racing team ever took pole position, two tenths of a second ahead of his teammate Gerhard Berger. Afterward it came out of the car for a full teardown, each part inspected or replaced. The gearbox and the tires were built for the same short life.
On Sunday the BMW died on lap 17 and Fabi was out of the race.
Qualifying bought him the front row. The race took it back.
A higher floor meant moving faster, testing more ideas each week and compounding gains sooner.
The risk was crashing out.
Pushing the floor to 34 meant shrinking my margin for error. The higher you set the intensity, the more vulnerable you become to everyday volatility. A travel day, a night of bad sleep or a sudden shock can take the whole routine out.
Pushing harder works when you build the support to hold the higher setting together.
When you push a habit harder, durability is the first thing you spend. If your ambitions require that pace, build the conditioning and the recovery to carry it.
Turn the setting up when you have priced the trade and built what holds it together.
The engine that qualifies fastest is the engine most likely to come apart.
🏎️
What habit are you ready to run hotter with better support?
“Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.”
Joseph Pilates
I score each day from -4 to +4 to track how life and progress feel. A morning run predictably improves my state. If I log my tempo before running, I capture a lower baseline.
On a surface raft above a 300-foot drop, a free-diver splashes cold water across their eyes and cheeks before taking a single breath. Stimulating the facial trigeminal nerve fires the mammalian dive reflex, slowing the heart and shunting blood to the core.
One handful of cold water cuts an elite diver’s heart rate by more than half.
Bright morning light, around 10,000 lux, reaches the retina and sets the clock in the hypothalamus, which drives the morning cortisol rise and the timing of evening melatonin. Charles Czeisler, a circadian researcher at Harvard Medical School, aimed it at NASA astronauts and ground crews drifting off their schedules.
Scheduled bright light moved their clocks to where the mission needed them.
The human body needs core temperature to drop by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit to initiate deep rest. Matthew Walker, a sleep researcher at UC Berkeley, points to the bedroom thermostat: at 65 degrees, blood vessels in the hands and feet dump heat into the air.
That ambient drop raised deep slow-wave rest by 10 to 20 percent.
When your energy drags, the default move is to fight the mind directly. You push harder and try to reason your way through a slump.
Mental state is a lagging output of physical state. When you find the few physical triggers that predictably shift your mental state, you stop negotiating with mood and pull the lever directly.
🧊
What could you do with your body before pushing your mind?
“Thus we are all born into a silent war-game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing.”
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)
I put my newsletter on Product Hunt in 2020 and it won Product of the Month. No newsletter had done that before.
I credited my skill and ignored the market. The newsletter boom was lifting thousands of writers that same year. I was one of them.
Finance splits an investment return into beta and alpha. Beta is what the market gave you just for showing up. Alpha is what your skill added on top.
Beta reaches well past markets.
It can be a massive tailwind: the year you were born, the caste or class you were born into, family wealth or an industry growing 40% a year. A founder who catches a rising tide can drift forward and mistake the current for their own stroke.
If someone starts $50k in debt with no safety net and builds a $100k business, they crossed a canyon. They made real alpha. An heir who starts with $2 million and turns it into $2.1 million barely moved.
The boom was the beta in that Product Hunt win.
Winning it as a newsletter was the alpha.
You see the power of beta in scientific discoveries.
Newton and Leibniz both built calculus independently, ten years apart.
Darwin and Wallace both wrote down natural selection by 1858.
Bell and Gray filed for the telephone at the same patent office on the same morning.
When the same answer arrives twice from people who never met, the era’s beta did the heavy lifting. The tools, the math and the demand were already ripe. The person sped up the arrival, but the discovery belonged to the moment.
Alpha shows up when the result depended on who was in the room.
If you cut Bach, nobody writes the B Minor Mass. The music of the era keeps going. If you cut Einstein in 1905, special relativity still arrives through other physicists quickly. But General Relativity might wait 30 years for someone to see that space itself curves.