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“Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.”

Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway 1989 Letter to Shareholders

I came up with a term to describe something I value.

If tardigradity is the probability a thing keeps going, it has to come from somewhere. Biologists have the receipts. Tardigrades, sharks, horseshoe crabs, nautiluses, sponges and ostracods survived all five mass extinctions.

The traits they share. Each one is a test you can run on a habit, system, business or life.

1. Low cost of running. Needs less food, less attention, less willpower, less of everything.

• Habit: takes little time, setup or equipment.
• System: runs on little energy.
• Business: low burn. Profitable at small scale.
• Life: low baseline expenses.

2. Multiple inputs work. Eats whatever’s around. A single input can vanish and the thing still eats.

• Habit: works anywhere, with anything, in any mood.
• System: fed by multiple sources.
• Business: multiple revenue streams, customer types, channels.
• Life: energy pulled from multiple sources.

3. Works in varied conditions. Wide range of temperatures, moods, seasons.

• Habit: runs when you’re tired, sick, traveling, sad.
• System: holds steady when context changes.
• Business: survives recessions, trend shifts, platform changes.
• Life: functions across moods, seasons, life stages.

4. Small footprint. Needs less. Hides easier. Feeds easier.

• Habit: five minutes. One rep. One glass.
• System: minimal surface area. Few dependencies.
• Business: small team, small product.
• Life: few possessions, few commitments.

5. Protected from volatility. Lives somewhere buffered.

• Habit: first thing in the morning, before the day touches it.
• System: runs in a buffered environment. Off-hours. Separate account.
• Business: niche position, defensible moat.
• Life: quiet routines and spaces that stay yours.

6. Spread across many places. Lives in lots of places.

• Habit: runs across locations and time slots.
• System: distributed across machines, tools, backups.
• Business: every client stays under 10 percent of revenue.
• Life: relationships and purpose spread across bases.

7. Few moving parts. Less to maintain. Less to break.

• Habit: few steps. Holds in one thought.
• System: few components.
• Business: simple model. Few products, few processes.
• Life: fewer decisions per day.

8. Built-in defenses. Exoskeleton, shell, armor.

• Habit: automatic, scheduled, tied to an existing cue.
• System: redundancy, backups, guardrails.
• Business: savings, contracts, moats.
• Life: emergency fund, strong body, deep relationships.

9. Playing long. Patient. Compounds instead of sprints.

• Habit: measured in years.
• System: built to last. Impressive is a side effect.
• Business: sustainable pace.
• Life: patient with outcomes. Decades over quarters.

10. Can pause without dying. Shuts down when conditions get bad. Comes back intact.

• Habit: skipping a day leaves it alive.
• System: can go offline and return.
• Business: can scale down seasonally.
• Life: can rest, sabbatical, reset without losing identity.

11. Multiple paths to continuation. Many small bets instead of one hero.

• Habit: multiple triggers, multiple versions, multiple times of day.
• System: multiple copies, multiple paths to the same outcome.
• Business: many small bets. Succession planning.
• Life: multiple friend groups, meaning sources, ways to earn.

12. Flexible repurposing. Moves into whatever opens up.

• Habit: fits into whatever moment shows up.
• System: reconfigures around new inputs.
• Business: pivots toward shifts instead of fighting them.
• Life: moves toward opportunity.

The test underneath all twelve is one question. What would need to be true for this to stop? The shorter that list, the higher the tardigradity.

🐢

What trait is missing from the thing you want to last?

“Your margin is my opportunity”

Jeff Bezos

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Last week I ran competitive research on a tool I planned to build into Charm. A subreddit post writer. Something that generates Reddit-native launch posts matched to each community’s culture.

I found 15 tools doing this already.

SubClimb. MediaFast. Redreach. Replymer. ReplyAgent. Okara. SubredditSignals. And more.

My competitive landscape doc was supposed to validate a build. By tool number eight, it had become a shopping list.

SubClimb does the job for $9/mo:

• Five AI-generated posts per day
• Twenty-five replies
• Subreddit culture matching
• Ban protection

I signed up and moved on to the next launch.

When you find a red ocean, the correct move depends on which seat you’re in.

From the builder’s seat, 15 competitors is a warning. Margins compress. Differentiation costs time. Each feature you build already exists somewhere else.

From the buyer’s seat, 15 competitors is a gift. Quality went up because they’re all fighting for your dollar. Prices went down because someone always undercuts. The tool you’d spend weeks building is already live at a price that rounds to zero.

I’ve written about red oceans before. The standard framework says find the blue ocean. Swim where there’s space.

Or create a purple ocean.

The framework assumes you’re a builder.

The buyer’s move is the opposite. Seek red oceans.

When you find a red ocean, switch seats. Be the customer. Spend that build time somewhere you’re the only one in the water.

Buy the red ocean. Build the blue (or purple) ocean.

🔬

Where in your business are you building something that 10+ teams already built for you?

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“What feels like play to you, but feels like work to others, will produce outsized rewards.”

Naval Ravikant

What’s forced falls apart.

I learned this in relationships first.

The same rule applies to businesses.

Flow is a loop. You put effort in. The market, the customer, the product or the channel sends something back. The return pulls more effort out of you naturally. Force is what’s left when the loop breaks and you keep pumping effort the same way anyway.

Do you naturally want to put this effort in? Are you drawn to the work or pushing yourself there each morning?

When you put effort in, what flows back?

• Customers come back without chasing.
• Word-of-mouth grows faster than your marketing.
• The product gets used the way you imagined.
• Posts get shared without you nudging anyone.

When those signals are showing up, keep going. When they stop and you keep putting in the same effort, you’re forcing.

The offer needs a discount before it moves. Customers need three follow-ups before they return. A channel stops returning customers and you reach for new tactics. You can keep pushing through each of these. The signals are telling you what stopped flowing.

Force has a cost. You get drained. After enough forcing you stop being able to tell which signals are real because you’ve been overriding them every week. The business limps along and you tell yourself this is just how business works.

It isn’t. Genuine effort on something that flows feels like the kind of work you’d do for free. Force feels like holding a door open against the wind. From outside the two look similar. From inside they’re different and the gap widens.

What’s forced falls apart. In love. In business.

🚫

Which of your current bets feels like force vs flow?

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I’ve been deep in biographies lately and the same routine keeps showing up. Dalio. Dorsey. Harari. Ferriss. They all run transcendental meditation twice a day.

• Harari sits for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon
• Dorsey runs the same
• Dalio does twenty and twenty
• Ferriss does twenty-one and twenty-one

I have my own practice each morning. Two and a half hours. It’s the upstream lever for the whole day. Seeing how those guys ran two sessions got me curious, so I added a midday block to test it out.

It’s a second bite at the apple.

The morning sets the state. The midday session brings it back when the day starts to wear it down. Meetings, decisions, small frictions. A short pause in the middle clears that out and the afternoon picks up sharper.

Right now I’m sitting for about thirteen minutes at midday. Working up to twenty-one. Acute stress from the morning clears faster. Baseline anxiety stays low into the evening.

🍎

What short pause could you plant in the middle of your day?

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“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

Stress is raw material. Meditation metabolizes it.

Life supplies the stressors. You might not be interested in stress, but stress is interested in you.

Some sessions are about clearing the table:

• yesterday’s argument
• this morning’s email
• the call you’ve been dreading

Other sessions, when the table is clear, you go deeper into yourself. There’s no floor to that one.

🧘

“What if each hard day made you better at the next?”

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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal

I sit still for two and a half hours each day.

Meditation trains a specific muscle. Each minute is a rep against the urge to stop or check the time. Two things pull at you when you sit. The body wants to escape the moment. The mind wants a distraction: a thought, the phone, a snack, anywhere else but silence.

The same urge shows up elsewhere. On a hard run. Under a heavy lift. In a tense negotiation. The mind reaches for the exit. Most people take it.

On a hard run, the urge to stop used to feel stronger. Now it feels like a familiar pull I sit with and overcome each morning during meditation. The body still has more to give. Most of the time, the mind is where our limit lives.

There’s a name for what’s happening. The sports scientist Tim Noakes calls it the Central Governor: your brain throttles your muscles long before your body is in real trouble. The fatigue you feel at mile six is a warning issued by a cautious brain. The actual ceiling sits well past it. David Goggins puts the same idea in lived language. “Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. I call this The 40 Percent Rule.” The body usually has more to give. The mind reaches for the exit first.

Stillness is difficult. Doing it daily builds the muscle.

• Running and lifting gets easier
• Negotiations are easier
• In tense conversations, you think clear when you used to panic
• Cold showers become easier

Train the urge in one place. Reap the benefits in others.

🪨

What “limit” could you train past?

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“Yeah, interest rates are gravity. If we knew interest rates were gonna be zero from now till judgment day, you know, you could pay a lotta money for any other asset.”

Warren Buffett

I learned to code alone. Vim was my editor. A single bug could hold me up for a month.

There were books and YouTube. Nobody nearby could unblock me in the moment. Each solution took ten times longer than it would with someone to help.

Each feature took days or weeks instead of minutes or hours. In financial terms: a high interest rate environment. Working alone makes each action expensive the same way high interest rates make each asset expensive to hold.

Friction is to action what interest rates are to assets.

Low friction means cheap action: you can afford speculation, side experiments and habits with distant or uncertain payoff. High friction means expensive action: each move has to justify its cost and most fail to.

When friction is low, wasteful behavior survives. Zero-rate years let companies live that should have died, kept alive by cheap debt. The same dynamic applies to people. Easy environments let wasteful habits live on borrowed time. The drag is invisible because each action costs almost nothing. There’s little to no selection pressure.

High friction does the opposite. Most people in that situation give up and try something else. The few who survive carry the marks of a thousand near-quits.

I survived. My first engineering job made actions cheap overnight.

The biggest change was access to experienced people. A senior engineer at the next desk could unblock me in minutes on a problem that would have cost me days alone. That one change compounded fast. I went from junior to senior in under two years.

I came in with skills nobody else had:

• Vim fluency
• debugging endurance from weeks on single bugs
• a deep grasp of how things actually worked underneath

Nobody was coming to save me, so I had to understand each system to solve a single bug in it. With access to senior engineers, I picked up everything else fast.

Engineers who come up under low friction often break when friction rises. They can solve problems only when the help is there, the docs are fresh and the search is fast. Take any of those away and they stall.

Test for any habit, skill or commitment: raise the friction. Strip time. Add chaos. Remove the help. What survives works when conditions are hard. What collapses only worked because conditions were easy.

Buffett said interest rates are gravity for assets. The same gravity governs people. Your environment prices each move you make. Low friction tilts you toward speculation. High friction tilts you toward survival skills.

Given the choice, you would pick low rates. The odds at high rates are stacked against you and the casualty list is long. Most people in hard mode landed there by chance. The environment either breaks you or you make it through.

There’s a line from Madea’s Family Reunion. A daughter confronts her mother over the suffering she allowed: “You are going to rot in hell.” The mother answers: “I vacation there.” That captures what surviving high friction does to a person. You came from what others fear. When conditions worsen, you know the territory. You have done it before. You can do it again if you have to.

🧗

What did you learn in a high-rate environment that became an unfair advantage later?

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I tried the “willpower-only-exists-if-you-believe-it” thing.

But I felt the drain anyway. Some tasks drain you more than others. The afternoon costs more than the morning. The night costs more than the afternoon.

Stanford researchers Veronika Job and Carol Dweck found that people who think willpower is unlimited show less depletion than people who think it’s limited. Henry Ford put it bluntly: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” Self-help shelves have echoed this for decades.

Some things bend to belief. Some things do not. You hurt yourself (or worse) by pretending otherwise.

I’ve found that willpower is one of those real things. It’s a battery. It drains. It dies.

Enjoyment = Efficiency

When I enjoy a task, I burn less willpower. When I hate a task, I burn more willpower.

If willpower were truly infinite, enjoyment wouldn’t matter. Neither would time of day.

The battery doesn’t care what you believe.

🪫

“What task should you do first while your battery is full?”

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I keep my habits in an app that tracks how often I do each one.

The habits at the top of the list have longer streaks. The ones lower down have shorter streaks and more gaps.

I sort them in the order I do them. The order is the schedule. The ones I put first get the most willpower, attention and energy, so they get done. The ones I put last fight everything that piled up before them.

Willpower is exhaustible. So is attention. Each hour the day runs, more of those reserves get spent and more interruptions stack between me and the habit. The first slot has the most fuel and the least drag. The last slot has the least fuel and the most drag.

If you want a habit to happen, move it earlier on the list.

The earlier the slot, the higher the odds.

🗂️

What habit have you been doing late in the day? What would change if you moved it to the top of your list?

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It’s late on a Friday. You finish a long piece of writing. You drop it into the tool you built and watch it render into a video. Scene three loads with the wrong music. You feel the wince before you think the thought.

That wince is the gold.

Recently I ran a Trends.vc report through Multi.

The wince is the bug report writing itself.

• The button that sits a thumb’s width too low
• The step that drags for thirty seconds
• The output that’s almost useful

Eating your own cooking makes empathy automatic. The product breaks while you use it and you fix it before you close the laptop. You’re the customer and the founder.

The hedge: your workload will map imperfectly onto every customer’s. The solo founder publishing daily reports through Multi hits different edges than the marketing team running a weekly campaign. But your workload is a real load. It beats the hypothetical one you’d otherwise have to imagine into existence.

Compare it to the alternative. A ticket lands in someone’s inbox. A stranger describes a frustration in words. The PM files it, prioritizes it against other tickets, schedules the fix for next sprint. The friction reaches them secondhand. Words on a screen, written by someone who already moved on.

When you are the user, the diagnosis and the decision sit in the same head. You feel the pain, you write the fix. The roadmap fills in from the friction you feel.

📡

What daily problem could you solve with a tool you’d ship and refine yourself?