I used to ask a question each night.

“What could be improved?”

This seems productive. It’s dangerous.

“What could be improved?” includes things outside your control.

Such as the weather, traffic, the stock market and others’ behavior.

Now I ask:

“What could you have improved?”

One word changes everything.

—

“What could be improved?”	“What could *you* improve?”
“The traffic was bad.”	“I left too late.”
“The market crashed.”	“I didn’t set a stop loss.”
“They reacted poorly.”	“I communicated poorly.”

“You” is a forcing function for awareness, accountability and improvement.

Sometimes, you’ll realize there was nothing you could have done.

You can make good decisions and things can still go wrong.

You can prepare but you cannot predict.

In these cases, the outcome was truly out of your hands.

Words are software for your brain. Patch your prompts.

🫵

What can you improve?

We want the pros without the cons.

But life serves us package deals.

I’m flying 22 hours for my best friend’s birthday.

Part of me wants to stay home. Part of me wants to show up.

—

• Autonomy comes with accountability and independence.

• Deep Connection comes with obligations and intimacy.

• Skin in the Game comes with risk and reward.

• Mastery comes with sacrifice and leverage.

• Honesty comes with conflict and clarity.

—

Tradeoffs are inevitable.

So choose your tradeoffs.

🩸

What package is worth the price?

The cost of knowledge has dropped to zero.

If you want to know “how to” do something, ask AI.

The answer is fast and free.

How-To is a commodity. How-I is a monopoly.

For years, I wrote Trends.vc Reports.

They are high signal, useful and full of case studies.

But they aren’t my stories.

Compare that to my 100 Rules for Life.

I poured a lifetime of pain into it.

Authenticity is your ultimate moat.

It’s how you build a personal monopoly.

Information is abundant. Stories are scarce.

🆔

What’s a story only you can tell?

(s/o Lara Acosta for the “How-To vs How-I” framing)

They say “eat the frog” first.

Do the hardest thing at the beginning.

I disagree.

Build momentum instead.

If I start the day with a cold shower or by checking email, I face resistance. Which leads to delaying, procrastinating and stalling.

Stacking small wins works better.

• Meditate
• Clean
• Read

An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an external force.

Sir Isaac Newton

By the time I hit the “wall”, I am already moving fast enough to break through it.

You still have to eat the frog. But momentum makes it easier to swallow.

🐸

How can you sequence your day to get momentum on your side?

For most of my life, I didn’t understand bottlenecks. And years after I understood what a bottleneck was, I still didn’t understand necessary conditions.

Each night I use the Ivy Lee method to make my todo list for the next day.

My old way of prioritizing was based on urgency. What was screaming the loudest.

Now I aim at bottlenecks.

A Necessary Condition is a state required for your system to function at all (e.g. Sleep, Diet, Mental Health).

A Bottleneck is the point of maximum resistance that limits the throughput of your system (e.g. Distribution, Conversion Rate, Churn).

I handle most necessary conditions with habits.

• Diet: No bread. No added sugar. Avoid fried food.
• Sleep: No caffeine after 10am. No screens after 10pm.
• Mental Health: Meditate for 1 to 2 hours.

But sometimes emergent necessary conditions land on your desk.

• A sudden health scare
• A critical server outage
• An urgent family matter

If you ignore necessary conditions, they become the bottleneck.

You have to secure the floor (necessary conditions) before you can raise the ceiling (bottlenecks).

The two-step process for my Atomic Ivy Lee list:

1. Tend to Necessary Conditions: Extinguish the fires that threaten the system.


2. Aim at the Bottleneck: Once the system is stable, attack the limiting factor.

Bottlenecks are rarely easy. If they were quick fixes, you would have solved them by now. But solving them is the only way to reach the next level.

⚓️

What is your current bottleneck?

Fifteen years ago, I started meditating for one minute a day.

Now meditation lasts between one hour and two-and-a-half hours a day.

One of my fellow mastermind members recently shared their goal of starting a daily mobility routine.

They aimed to start at 7 minutes.

But they hadn’t started yet.

I suggested starting with one minute.

They rejected this because they felt like 7 minutes was “small enough.”

If it was small enough, they would have already started.

We underestimate the power of momentum.

One minute feels trivial. And that’s the point.

The hardest part is going from zero to one.

Prioritize consistency over intensity. Both matter. But intensity without consistency is multiplying by zero. (If the habit doesn’t survive, intensity doesn’t matter).

Starting small may seem to contradict my idea that 1% Better Isn’t Enough. It doesn’t.

One percent is often not enough. But getting started is a prerequisite.

Start laughably small and let momentum carry you.

🤏

What laughably small habit can you start today?

When I was thirteen years old, my dad said he would send me money.

He didn’t send it.

When I asked about this, his reply became part of my worldview:

“No one owes you shit.”

The lesson stuck.

Nature ignores your expectations.

Fair is not a law of physics.

We live in the wild, not the zoo.

If you want reliability, you have to engineer it.

This calls for backup plans.

Now I pay the price of redundancy when the cost of failure is too high.

This price is the insurance premium.

He eventually sent it. But from that point forward, I paid the premium.

🛡️

How do you manage single points of failure?

Each day I rewrite my mental models.

In 2013, I started journaling. By 2019, I shared 100 Rules To Live By.

The list is a lot shorter seven years later.

Rewriting is natural selection for ideas.

If an idea isn’t worth the effort of rewriting, it drops off the list.

Only high-signal ideas survive.

What I select for:

1. Signal — Usefulness.
2. Economy — Ideas that take too long to write get compressed or removed.
3. Frequency of Use — A mental model used multiple times a day is more valuable than one used once a year.

I also rewrite 5-year goals on a daily basis. Same principle.

If a goal isn’t worth rewriting daily, you probably don’t want it enough.

Reviewing is passive. Rewriting is active.

Writing adds friction.

Friction tends to be a bug. Here, friction is the feature.

✍️

What is your most useful mental model?

Voice Ink (voice-to-text) has been prompting me to update for weeks.

Last time I updated, it broke. I filed GitHub issues. I emailed the developer. It eventually got fixed.

Today I updated again. It broke.

I found an old version from months ago, downloaded it. Lost all my usage history. But it works now.

Not perfect, but better.

I was frustrated. Then I started writing. And that frustration became the topic for today.

• Some things are fragile. Stress breaks them.
• Some things are robust. They withstand stress.
• Some things are antifragile. Stress makes them better.

I decided to harness that stress and use it for this post.

Ray Dalio says:

Pain + Reflection = Progress

We all endure pain.

Some of us reflect and grow from it.

Writing is one way I reflect. Meditation is another. So is humor. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Others journal, use therapy, go on walks or talk to friends. The function matters more than form.

Pain is inevitable. But you can build habits to reflect and turn pain into progress.

That’s why I love when things break.

🏚️

What habits help you turn pain into strength?

I spent five years as a digital “slow-mad.”

Slow-mad (n): Like a nomad, but slower. Living in places for months, not days/weeks.

My energy was consumed by the administrative overhead of living.

• Finding new apartments
• Deciding where to eat
• Finding workspaces
• Picking new gyms
• Setting up wifi

This is the Red Queen Effect.

In Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice:

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The irony? I was moving to new places. But I was running fast just to maintain stability.

When investing, if your return is 4% but inflation is 5%, you are losing buying power.

You have to meet the hurdle rate just to break even.

Entropy is the natural tendency for things to fall apart.

1. Relationships decay if you don’t nurture them.
2. Muscles atrophy if you don’t train them.
3. Teams drift if you don’t align them.

You must pay a maintenance tax just to stay exactly where you are.

We love the idea of “1% better every day.”

But in the real world, entropy charges interest.

If your relationship decays by 2% a day from natural conflict and you improve it by 1% a day (date night), your relationship is still dying.

It’s just dying 1% slower than before.

You only get “1% better” after you’ve paid the hurdle rate.

🏃‍♂️

Are you doing enough work to clear the hurdle rate?