Money goes both ways. You can earn back a dollar. You can never earn back an hour. Treating the two as the same is a category error that makes you optimize the wrong thing.
We chant “Time is Money.”
We’re optimizing the bottom of the stack.
I used to think Time mattered most. Then I believed Environment did. Then I saw a third option sitting above both: Awareness.
A fish doesn’t know it’s in water.
You can’t optimize a container you can’t see.
The real hierarchy:
Awareness: Your feedback loop with reality. Without it, you can’t orient.
Environment: The default pull on your behavior. Set it right and good behavior costs less.
Attention: What your mind is currently locked onto. Environment nudges and hijacks this more than you realize.
Willpower: What you put above baseline to act. Exhaustible. A bad environment bleeds it fast.
Money: A medium of commerce. Stored energy you can trade.
Awareness sits above environment for two reasons.
You can be in a bad environment and not know it. You can’t act on what you can’t see.
You can be in a good environment and not know it. You can’t appreciate what you can’t see.
Environments change. Awareness is how you catch the change.
A good environment makes attention easier to hold. Willpower is what you draw on when environment and attention pull against each other, and it runs out fast.
We pay Facebook, Instagram and others in attention. The most valuable asset.
The pitch is connection. What gets delivered is mostly escapism. We give them the resource that sits above money, above time, above energy. They sell our attention and take the spread.
An experiment is one bounded unit of work. A start, an end, a deliverable.
Most days there are more experiments in my queue than I can run. The question is which to pick first.
I use two filters: does this remove something from the system? Does this build something future experiments depend on?
Removal
A removal experiment cuts something:
A feature
A chapter
A commitment
A step
I cut a chapter from my habits book. The book went from 21 essays to 20. It read better. The collection got stronger by losing a piece.
When I scan the queue, removal ideas move up the list. The downside is usually bounded. I can add the thing back if the cut was wrong. The upside compounds. Fewer moving parts, less maintenance, more energy for what’s left.
Infrastructure
An infrastructure experiment builds something future experiments run on. A tool, a system, a capability.
I spent two days wiring voice-to-text into my writing process. That experiment produced zero posts by itself. But every post after it was faster. Writing went from hours at a desk to minutes on a walk.
When I scan the queue, infrastructure ideas move up the list. One build accelerates every experiment that follows.
The Catch
Both filters are heuristics. A removal experiment can still be a mistake. An infrastructure experiment can still go unused. Running the experiment is the only way to find out.
But across one hundred ideas in a queue, removal and infrastructure have better odds. Pick them first.
🎯
What’s on your list that would make tomorrow’s work easier?
Each new habit felt low-cost on its own. But habits pile like grains of sand. Add enough of them and the pile collapses under its own weight.
I’d miss one habit. Then two. Then the system collapsed.
I restarted. Added carefully. Got to the same place. Broke it again.
I solved this problem by placing a cap on the number of habits I am allowed to have at any given time. Once I picked the number and defended it, my habits stopped collapsing.
Then I ran into a new problem.
I was rejecting habits I was pretty sure would improve my life. Small ones with big downstream effects. The kind I’d normally jump on. I had already maxed out the count, so I kept turning them down.
So I looked closer at what the cap was actually measuring.
I realized I was tracking two kinds of habits.
Commitment habits require you to do something.
Go for a run.
Do four hours of deep work.
Read for 30 minutes.
Abstention habits require you to avoid doing something.
Phone off until 10am.
Eating stops at 8pm.
Caffeine cuts off at 2pm.
Both kinds cost willpower. Both kinds cost attention. The difference is what else they cost.
A commitment habit claims time. I stop what I’m doing, switch context, execute, switch back. That block of time is spent.
An abstention habit runs alongside everything else. It skips the context switch that commitment habits demand. Skipping the 3pm sugar gives me back the 4pm slump.
A slot in the day is finite.
I had been counting both like a single resource. That was my mistake.
So I split the cap. Tight ceiling on commitment habits, because time is fixed and context switching is real. Looser ceiling on abstention habits, because they sometimes pay themselves back.
A recent example: a late-eating cutoff. I was wrecking my sleep with food after 8pm. The old version of me would have hesitated because I had already maxed out the count. The new version realized that this is an abstention habit. My commitment count stayed the same.
I added the cutoff. I slept better. I kept everything else running.
🛑
What’s one thing you could stop doing that would improve your life?
I add and remove habits regularly. I run small tests across my life and business. Each one shifts something. The problem is that three weeks later I can’t remember how I felt before the change. The water temperature adjusted and I adjusted with it.
This is the boiling frog problem applied to self-improvement. A 1% gain here, a 2% gain there, a 3% improvement somewhere else. Each one compounds. Together they’re significant. Individually, they’re invisible. And because I only notice extreme differences, I miss the compounding.
The flip side is worse. A habit that’s quietly draining me by 1% a week looks fine in the moment. Without a reference point, I can’t tell if I’m trending up or down.
My solution is forced review checkpoints. When I start or stop a habit, I set three calendar dates: one week, one month and one quarter out. Each checkpoint, I run the same check. Average tempo since the change versus the average before.
Tempo is the signal I use. I rate my day from -4 to 4, every day. It’s subjective, but the trend line tells truth. Because tempo is already in my daily log, the checkpoint costs nothing extra. I just pull the averages. If tempo averaged 3.2 before the change and 3.8 after, that’s signal. If it dropped to 2.9, that’s signal too.
When I start or stop something, I add a short note in that day’s entry.
Tempo is 4. Adding a 10-minute walk after lunch.
That’s the baseline. A month later, I have something concrete to compare against instead of a vague memory.
Most people add habits and move on. The habit survives by default. Forced review checkpoints make survival earn its place.
For years my habits lived in boom and bust cycles. A low target felt like coasting. A high target broke the streak. The pace was too much to keep up.
So I banked. Beat the target? Store the surplus for tomorrow’s bad day.
It worked for a while. The bank grew. I’d coast on it for days. The muscle to show up weakened. When the bank ran low, I couldn’t rebuild it.
Think about kids born rich. They inherit money they didn’t earn. Over time, some lose the ability to make their own. The money was there. The skill to rebuild it was gone.
The range solved what the bank was trying to solve:
Bad days
Travel
Chaos
And I still showed up every day. On a bad day, I hit the floor. On a good day, I push toward the ceiling. The range absorbs the shock. The daily effort stays.
Say my meditation range is a floor of ten minutes, a target of thirty, a ceiling of sixty. On a good day, I meditate for sixty. On a tired day after a long flight, I sit for ten. I still showed up. The streak lives.
🏋️
Which habit keeps breaking because the target refuses to bend?
2,000 days. 44,110 standups logged. Today, two or three people join daily.
The natural move is to stop. Write a short post later about “what happened to the standups.”
I’m doing the opposite.
Day 2000 landed on Monday. I treated it as a natural circuit breaker and paired it with a closing artifact: a book that turns six years of standups into a story. The Morning Pages of Founders. Trends Pro members can read it now.
Deprecation feels like loss. You remove the thing and the people who remain feel abandoned. The history evaporates. The community that was there finds out by noticing the silence.
Commemoration closes the loop. You pair the wind-down with a closing artifact and a natural milestone. The artifact absorbs the value. The milestone gives the audience a date to hold. The exit becomes a celebration of the thing itself.
Three ingredients:
A natural milestone. Day 2000. Ten years. A hundred episodes. The number needs to already exist. If you have to invent it, it won’t carry weight.
A closing artifact. A book, a documentary, a final episode, a farewell letter. Something the audience can hold after the thing is gone.
A clean exit date. Announced in advance. Far enough out that the audience can process. Close enough that it feels real.
A book takes work. A final episode takes planning. An exit letter takes courage. The cost is what converts the exit into a signal of respect.
How you end is how it’s remembered.
🕯️
What practice of yours has reached its natural close and earned an ending?
One scene stopped me. In a documentary called The Thinking Game, a DeepMind AI agent is learning the Atari game Breakout from scratch. Paddle at the bottom of the screen, ball bouncing up, wall of bricks to break.
At first it plays randomly. After some practice it gets competent. It tracks the ball, keeps it alive, chips through bricks. The apparent trade-off: the better you track the ball the more bricks you break. One miss costs you a life.
Then the agent stops playing that way. It carves a narrow path up the left side of the wall, slips the ball into the space above the bricks and lets it ricochet between the ceiling and the wall. The bricks destroy themselves. The paddle barely has to move.
I rewound it. Trade-offs were on my mind from my own work. This felt related.
The move was in the game all along. Human players miss it because they keep moving the paddle out of habit.
I named it tunneling. Then I started looking for it everywhere.
Tunneling is finding out that a trade-off you thought was mandatory was optional all along.
Today I went looking for tunnels in nature. Here are eight.
Mitochondria (power plants inside cells). Mitochondria are tiny structures inside your cells. They make the energy your body runs on. Two billion years ago, cells hit a wall. They grew bigger. Their insides outgrew the outer layer that produced their energy. Bigger cells starved.
Then one cell swallowed a bacterium that was good at making energy. Instead of digesting it, the two struck a deal. The bacterium became the first mitochondria. Now the energy plants lived inside, growing with the cell. Complex life descends from that event.
C4 photosynthesis. Plants need carbon dioxide from the air to make food. They get it by opening tiny holes in their leaves. Those same holes leak water. Eat or drink.
C4 plants like corn, sugarcane and many grasses restructured the leaf. They grab carbon dioxide in one set of cells and pass it to another set deeper inside, where the food-making happens in a concentrated space. They keep the holes open less often and lose less water. The architecture solved the eat-or-drink trade-off.
The lens in the eye. A simple light-sensitive patch forces a trade. A wide opening catches lots of light but the image blurs. A pinhole sharpens the image but starves it of light.
The lens fixed that. A curved transparent structure bends the incoming light so a wide opening produces a sharp image. Lenses evolved independently in very different animals. Proof the tunnel was there to be found more than once.
Bats flying in the dark. Night flying should be impossible for something that eats insects. Moths are invisible in the dark.
Bats built a different sense. They make high-pitched clicks too high for humans to hear, then listen to the echoes bouncing back. The echoes tell them the shape of the world around them, including every moth. A huge piece of the ecosystem (nighttime flying insects, almost no predators) was waiting for something that gave up on seeing.
Octopuses that dropped the shell. Most mollusks solved predators with shells. Shells work, shells are heavy, shells slow you down.
Octopuses dropped the shell and became soft and fast. To survive without armor they evolved skin that changes color and texture in milliseconds. Camouflage replaces armor.
Lichen (two organisms acting as one). Fungi grip bare rock and survive harsh conditions. They can’t make their own food. Algae make food from sunlight. They die on bare rock.
Lichen is a fungus paired with algae, living as one organism. Together they colonize arctic tundra, desert surfaces and newly exposed stone that neither could survive alone. Pioneer organisms.
Tardigrades that hit pause. Complex animals need water, mild temperatures and stable chemistry to stay alive. The more complex you are, the narrower your window. Tardigrades broke the rule.
As their environment dries out, they replace the water in their cells with a sugar that sets like glass. It locks every tiny part in place. They stop being alive without dying. In that paused state they survive near-absolute-zero temperatures, pressures greater than the deep ocean, the vacuum of space and radiation that would kill a human hundreds of times over. Add water and they come back. The chemistry itself is the sensor.
Language. Individual learning is powerful, slow and dies with you. Demonstration transfers some skills to whoever is physically there.
Written language freed knowledge from the person who discovered it. Anything one person learns can now be distributed across everyone alive and everyone not yet born. Depth and breadth stopped being a trade-off.
Put the best AI coding model in a bad harness and it writes bad code.
Right now, Opus 4.6 is the strongest AI coding model available. Google has some of the most generous rate limits in the market. Those rate limits are expressed through their Antigravity IDE. Generous access to top-tier intelligence, including 4.6. Put them together and the quality is terrible.
The same model inside Cursor or Claude Code performs much better.
Same model. The environment changed and the outcome follows.
Intelligence × Environment = Outcome.
Environment matters as much as intelligence.
This maps to us as well.
High raw potential in a toxic team, a draining city or a relationship that shrinks you. You underperform your own potential.
Moderate potential in a high-trust team, a city that fits, a partnership that amplifies. You go further than you could alone.
We spend our lives upgrading ourselves. More degrees. More courses. More credentials. More hours.
We were all spawned into our environments, like a spawn point in a video game. We didn’t pick where we landed. Yet we can shape ourselves and our environments from this point.
🪟
Who could you become if you upgraded your environment?
We live in the wild, not the zoo. The systems around us are built for what we buy, what we click and what can be mass produced. Our wellbeing is a side effect, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Once we accept that no one is looking out for us, we start taking accountability for our own wellbeing and outcomes.
When you stop expecting others to look after you, the steering wheel is yours to take.
Start with the lotion. I threw mine out after reading the label. Parabens are known endocrine disruptors. “Parfum” is legal cover for whatever fragrance compound the manufacturer wants. Those often include endocrine disruptors too.
The lotion was designed to sell. Cheap to produce, smells nice. The incentive is the purchase. The consequences arrive later.
Same shows up in food. Cheap, low-quality calories designed to sell. Fried food. Packaged snacks. People who pay attention eat less of it or enjoy it occasionally. Brand works as a check when customers can see the damage. Slow or hidden damage flies under brand’s radar.
I was recently watching an episode of The Best Ever Food Review Show set in a seafood restaurant in New York City. A worker pulled the seafood out of the steamer. It had been steaming in a plastic basket. Plastic leaches. Everyone eats it.
It doesn’t have to be malicious. Sometimes producers don’t know. Sometimes they don’t care.
The producer’s incentive often ends at checkout. The customer lives with the consequences.
Awareness is upstream of everything.
Read labels.
Trace incentives.
What wins in a market isn’t always in your interest. Long-term damage is harder to trace, so markets underprice it. Even short-term harm slips through when it’s invisible. Attention and money decide the winner.
In the zoo, you assume the glass holds. Someone’s checking temperatures. Someone’s looking out. In the wild, you don’t assume that. Anything that can happen, can. A lot of us live feeling like we’re in the zoo, lulled into a sense of safety. The world is indifferent. Sometimes we get a cold reminder.