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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?

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

One of the rules I read each morning could have saved me three years: don’t force it.

I learned it from a relationship I should not have been in.

What’s forced, eventually, falls apart. Now when something feels unsustainable, I stop pushing.

That relationship made me immune to others like it.

In 1846, a doctor named Peter Panum went to the Faroe Islands during a measles outbreak. Most of the islanders came down with it.

The last outbreak was 65 years before. The old people who had measles back then stayed healthy.

Since part of the immune system keeps a record of the germs it fights off, their bodies knew how to fight measles.

Your rules for living are records too.

But they protect you only when you remember them.

I tend to forget my rules, so I read them each morning and most nights.

Most of what I worry about is out of my control.

Roughly 80% of my anxiety comes from forgetting one rule: focus on what you control.

When I remember the rule, I do my part and stop there.

Collect your rules. Then reread them before you make the same mistake again.

Wisdom is prevention.

🛡️

What forgotten lessons could you write down and reread?

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“All overnight success takes about 10 years.”

Jeff Bezos

I sold a property 10 years ago and went back today to see what I gave up.

New shops line the streets now. The blocks have filled in tight and everything I’d need sits a short walk away.

A business compounds like that if you keep showing up for years. So do a skill, a friendship and a habit.

I quit daily writing in my early 20s.

For years my learning slowed. Much later, I traced the slump back to the writing I dropped.

Grace Groner let one stock compound for 75 years.

In 1935 she was a secretary at Abbott Laboratories and bought three shares of the company for $180. She held them and reinvested each dividend.

When she died at 100, those three shares were worth more than $7 million.

Before you sell or quit something that’s working, picture it ten years from now.

🏘️

What’s working that you should commit to for the next decade?

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“Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from someone else.”

Sam Walton

I’ve read thousands of founder stories while building Trends.vc.

The first founder to build in a market tends to prove demand, then watches someone who came in later take it.

Eric Migicovsky proved people wanted a smartwatch. In 2012 he asked Kickstarter for $100,000 to build the Pebble and raised over $10 million.

Apple launched its watch in April 2015 and shipped two out of three smartwatches sold that year.

Pebble went insolvent the next year.

Migicovsky spent three years proving the demand that Apple sold into.

Snapchat proved people wanted stories that vanish after a day. Instagram copied the feature in 2016.

Eight months later, 200 million people used Instagram Stories each day. Snapchat had about 160 million.

Apple and Instagram can reach hundreds of millions of users the day a product ships.

So they can let smaller companies prove the demand, then arrive later and take the market.

Dmitry Gerasimenko started building Ahrefs in 2010. Since marketers were already paying for tools that showed which sites linked to theirs, he built another one. His crawler refreshed every 15 minutes, while the others updated about once a month.

By 2018, Ahrefs brought in over $40 million a year.

Most of the markets I study are fragmented. The product works as well for ten customers as for ten million, so a company can win by owning one niche.

Several founders tend to win at once. Semrush, a tool Ahrefs competed with, grew as well and went public in 2021.

Marketplaces and networks are the exception.

Each new user makes the marketplace or network more useful to everyone already on it.

So these are winner-take-most markets.

Since the first founder to build in a market can spend years proving demand and still lose, an efficient move is to build in a growing market with proven demand.

🗺️

Which growing market could you copy your way into?

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“The power of concentration is the only key to the treasure-house of knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda

I just heard someone explain the biggest misconception about Transcendental Meditation: that you’re supposed to stop thinking.

In TM you silently repeat a word called a mantra. Your mind wanders. When you notice you’ve wandered off the mantra, you come back to it.

Teachers tell students the wandering is part of the meditation.

Each morning after I meditate, I block off about two and a half hours for the work that matters most.

Distractions still pull me away during those hours.

Each time I notice, I bring my attention back to the work. Each return is a rep. Slowly, I’m getting better at it.

Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, taught Christians to treat each distraction as a chance to come back.

He helped develop Centering Prayer. Each time a thought pulls you away, you return to a single word you chose.

A nun once finished her first session and told him she was a failure at it. “In twenty minutes I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”

Keating answered, “How lovely. Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

Some mornings, between distractions, I sink so far into the work that it feels like a trance.

Expect to get distracted during focused work. Come back each time.

🧘

What could you finish this year if you kept coming back to it?

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“Climate does one half, and temperament the rest.”

Washington Irving

I bought my first plant this week. Since I know I won’t mist leaves or test soil, I picked the one that stores its own water.

For 30 years I went without a houseplant. When I stopped living as a digital nomad, I wanted some green around me. It turned out I could have a plant without the upkeep.

A cactus asks for almost nothing.

The businesses we admire as founders often ask for far more than we have the temperament to give. The venture-backed startup with a board, an office and a 400-person payroll looks like winning. Running one means managing headcount, burning runway and raising the next round before the money runs out.

Wanting a tropical monstera and doing what one needs are two different things.

Each of these plants maps to a kind of business. Match your temperament to one.

The greenhouse plant looks healthiest of all, as long as somebody pays for the heat.

It’s last on the list.

1) Cactus. Stores rain in a ribbed stem, opens its pores at night and turned its leaves into spines.

Pieter Levels runs Nomad List and Remote OK by himself. Zero employees, zero funding.

He crossed $1 million a year running both apps on a single server.

Markus Frind built Plenty of Fish alone. In 2008 he was running it at roughly $10 million a year in profit on about 10 hours a week.

Timo, 24, keeps ChatGPT on WhatsApp running for over 300,000 users on under 10 minutes of work a day.

A business that cheap to run keeps earning through the weeks you give it almost nothing.

Pick a cactus if you want a business that asks for little of your week.

2) Moss. It takes water straight off its surface and goes brown the moment the damp stops.

Patrick McKenzie sold his judgment as a software consultant and took his rate from $100 an hour to $30,000 a week.

April Dunford charges $50,000 for a startup positioning workshop and lists the price on her site.

Their fees stop the week they do.

Choose moss if you’d rather be paid for your judgment than build something that sells without you.

3) Bonsai. A tree that would grow full size in open ground, kept small by root pruning and a shallow pot.

Craigslist could sell banner ads and turns them down. Its CEO Jim Buckmaster has said the company has little interest in maximizing profit.

It still earned about $1 billion in 2018 with around 50 employees.

Shaun Hill’s Hill Farmstead in Vermont topped RateBeer’s ranking of the world’s breweries three years running. Hill caps it around 4,000 barrels a year and pulled back distribution until buyers had to drive to the farm. “I’m not moving to an industrial park,” he said.

Staying this size is a decision that gets made again each time an offer arrives.

Grow a bonsai if you’d turn away paying customers to keep the business the size you like.

4) Understory plant. The rainforest understory gets around 5 to 10% of full sunlight, so the plants down there stopped competing for height and grew wider leaves.

Plausible Analytics sells website analytics that keep visitors anonymous, a promise Google can’t make while its ads run on visitor data.

It reached $3.1 million a year by late 2024 with a team of 10.

Andy Yen and two colleagues at CERN launched Proton Mail in 2014 as email that Proton itself can’t read, while Gmail scanned inboxes for ad targeting. “We’re serving users and not advertisers,” Yen said.

Pick it if you’d rather sell what a giant can’t offer than race it for the same customers.

5) Vine. It skips building a trunk and climbs whatever’s standing, so it reaches light faster than it could on its own.

Thomas Frank sells Notion templates. He built $2.1 million of sales in about two years.

Notion supplies the software and the audience.

LittleThings, a website of stories and videos for women, grew to 50 million monthly readers by publishing into the Facebook feed. Facebook rewrote the feed in 2018, most of that traffic disappeared and the company closed seven weeks later.

Build on someone else’s platform and its owner sets your terms.

Grow a vine if you’d trade control for a faster start.

6) Carnivorous plant. It grows in bogs where the soil holds almost no nitrogen. Rather than fight for better ground, it grew a second way to eat and takes nitrogen from insects.

Dan Ni’s TLDR newsletters go out free to more than 8 million readers. The money comes from advertisers buying up to three slots a day.

Kenneth Lin started Credit Karma in 2007 to give people their credit scores for free. Lenders pay it a referral fee when a member takes their card or loan. It passed $1 billion in revenue in 2019.

Intuit bought it for $7.1 billion a year later.

Go carnivorous if you’re fine giving the product away and answering to whoever pays to reach your users.

7) Bamboo. It spends years building a rhizome network underground before anything dramatic happens above it.

Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a research lab. It sold its first product, an API for its language models, five years later.

Stéphane Bancel took over Moderna in 2011, when it was a research company with nothing approved to sell.

The COVID vaccine it got authorized in December 2020 was its first.

Bamboo suits you if you can work for years before there’s anything to sell.

8) Oak. Adds a ring each year, for centuries.

Sridhar Vembu co-founded Zoho in 1996 and grew it on profits alone. It passed a million paying organizations in 2026.

Jim Goodnight founded SAS in 1976 and has run it ever since.

Revenue grew to $3.2 billion by 2022 and the company is still private.

An oak suits you if you want to run one company for decades.

9) Perennial. The top growth dies off each winter. The roots wait underground and regrow it each spring.

Spirit Halloween opens stores in empty retail space in early August, hires tens of thousands of seasonal staff and strips them out two or three days after Halloween. Scouting for next year’s locations starts on November 1.

Calendar Club opens about 200 pop-up stores across the UK and Ireland each September and clears them out by mid-January.

A small permanent staff in Exeter stays on while the store operators and Christmas part-timers get hired fresh each season.

Good for you if you’d rather work flat out for a few months and plan through the rest.

10) Farm crop. More harvest takes more land, more seed, more water and more hands.

Chipotle’s filing lays it out:

• 2003: 298 restaurants, $315.5 million
• 2004: 401 restaurants, $470.7 million

Nick Huber and a co-founder started Storage Squad at Cornell in 2011, hauling students’ belongings into storage over the summer. They built it past $2 million in revenue before selling in 2021.

One founder left Apple and Amazon to start a freight company. It grew fast, with drivers hired left and right and trucks added weekly. Before long he was working 60 hours a week to run it.

Plant a farm crop if you’d rather know what next year’s growth costs than hope for a breakout.

11) Greenhouse plant. It looks healthy right until somebody stops paying for the heat.

Casper’s investors valued it at $1.1 billion in 2019. Durational Capital bought it two years later for about a quarter of that.

SoftBank valued WeWork at $47 billion in January 2019. Its IPO filing that August showed it losing more than it brought in.

WeWork filed for Chapter 11 in 2023.

A greenhouse plant works if you’re comfortable raising round after round until the company pays for itself.

Since I won’t mist a leaf, I own a cactus.

🌵

Which business (or plant) suits your temperament?

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“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To prove my friend wrong about habits, I sent him a photo of Thai chilies.

Earlier, knowing I’m big on habits, he sent me a meme that’s going around. Discipline, it says, makes each day look the same. A life without it makes each year look the same.

I told him it sounds good, but it’s wrong.

For weeks I hunted for Thai chilies until I found them. Each day, checking a shop was one experiment among others, like a recipe I might wreck or a new ad test. An experiment is anything I try without knowing how it will turn out.

A chef named Ferran Adrià kept the calendar at his restaurant, elBulli, the same each year and made the menu different each season. He served guests for half the year. He spent the other half in a Barcelona workshop inventing the next menu.

Eat there two summers in a row and you’d get two different menus.

The restaurant is a museum now. It’s called elBulli1846, after the 1,846 dishes his team catalogued.

Habits repeat, but one of mine is to run experiments each day.

The meme offers a trade: a better year in exchange for a boring day.

Take it if you want it.

A routine repeats whatever you put in it. Put something new in it and you keep the better year while each day comes out different.

🌶️

How could you make trying new things a daily habit?

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“Self-confidence is the memory of success.”

David Storey

A few years ago I wrote off Tim Ferriss’s jar of awesome as a silly idea. Now I use a version of that jar each day.

Each night Ferriss wrote down something good from that day, folded the slip of paper and dropped it in. When he felt down, he pulled the slips out and read them. He called them “little self made fortune cookies of goodness.”

My version is a highlight reel, a list of my wins.

The list sits inside a journal of my rules for living. I read it each morning and most nights.

My blue belt in jiu-jitsu is in there. So are five years as a nomad and building Trends.vc.

So is winning Product of the Month on Product Hunt.

So is writing an essay each day for more than 250 days (and counting).

Reading my highlight reel lifts my mood right away.

I close the journal more confident than I opened it.

Laura Wilkinson, a platform diver, kept a highlight reel too: a video of her best dives. She watched it before each meet.

Months before the 2000 Olympic trials, she broke her right foot in practice. In Sydney, her foot still sore, she came back from eighth place and won gold.

Her medal was the first Olympic platform gold for an American woman since 1964.

🏆

What wins would you put in your highlight reel?