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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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What could you build that keeps working after you stop?