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“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Alice Walker

I tried to learn Spanish for years and never consistently found the time. Any hour I gave it came straight out of something else I needed to do.

So I started studying Spanish while I run.

The course is Language Transfer, an audio method where a teacher asks you to build the sentence yourself before he gives it to you.

A 2013 paper in PLOS ONE found that young women who exercised while learning vocabulary recalled more of it than those who sat still through the lesson.

Breakout is an arcade game where a paddle keeps a ball alive against a wall of bricks. Track the ball better and you break more bricks. One miss costs a life.

An AI learning the game refused that trade. It opened a gap up one side, sent the ball above the bricks and let it ricochet until the wall was gone. The paddle barely moved.

Tunneling is finding out that a trade-off you thought was mandatory was optional all along.

For years the novelist Kevin J. Anderson had to pick between a day of writing and a day of hiking.

Then he started carrying a voice recorder up the trail and dictating chapters as he walked, one chapter out and one back, since he had to walk back anyway.

In 2010 he counted nearly 50 novels dictated into a recorder.

One week he hiked 50 miles and wrote 168 pages.

For the management thinker Nilofer Merchant, taking care of her body and being productive were in conflict. Then she started taking her one-on-ones as walks.

By 2013 she was walking 20 to 30 miles a week inside meetings she was going to have anyway. Then she got on the TED stage and told everyone else to try it.

Stacking a second activity onto one you already do is one route through.

Test trade-offs before you accept them.

🏃

Which trade-off could you try to tunnel through?

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“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.”

Roger Bannister

When I got back into running, 34 minutes was the longest I ever ran before that.

I needed to rebuild my conditioning, but moving past that ceiling was a mental hurdle.

My runs climbed to 55 minutes, then 89.

Running for nearly an hour and a half proved the distance was possible.

Even if I take time off, knowing that 89 minutes is possible does not go away.

I did it once, so I can do it again.

For decades, athletes treated the four-minute mile as a physical barrier. Doctors claimed the human heart would burst under the strain.

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. 46 days later, John Landy ran it even faster.

Within two years, dozens of runners crossed the same line. If you check the physiology, the human body did not evolve in 24 months. One man proved the time was possible. The collective limit fell away.

The same rule governs decisions in business.

The more examples you have, the easier something is to do.

When I started Trends.vc, each report packed mini case studies around each opportunity.

They remove objections by showing real people already making the idea work.

Each case study is proof of concept, showing that someone else has already done it.

Stories are ratchets.

Once a ratchet clicks forward, it does not slip back.

Once you see proof that an outcome is possible, in someone else or in yourself, the objection dies.

Confidence is a trailing indicator. It follows evidence.

🔒

Which objection can you answer with an example?

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“If the environment is controlled, behavior is controlled.”

B. F. Skinner

I paid two to three times what the same condo cost outside the city.

It was the tail end of a 3-year mini-retirement. I spent that time reading, biking and training jiu jitsu. By 2020 the money was running low. Either make money or go back to work for someone else.

Cheap condos sat further out. Instead I got a condo on the Atlanta BeltLine, a trail that connects neighborhoods across town.

The location made it easy to access groceries, meeting spaces and co-working offices. Some of my mastermind members lived along the same path.

I spent several hours a day biking the loop, listening to podcasts and researching Trends.vc Reports.

When Wilbur Wright set out to solve flight, he started with geography. In May 1900, he wrote to the US Weather Bureau and asked for wind records. Back came two issues of the Monthly Weather Review, listing average speeds at stations across the country.

He wanted steady wind and soft sand. Cities like Chicago had higher average speeds, but tall buildings created turbulent gusts and hard ground offered no forgiveness for crashes. He skipped the top five and picked Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an isolated strip of dunes on the coast.

The next autumn Wilbur was gliding up to 400 feet down the dunes four miles south.

He found the environment that let him fly before he built a flyer.

Years later I booked a place in Mexico City with one window that faced a wall. The room felt smaller each day I stayed.

My output there dropped to near zero.

A new environment can break habits when discipline is not enough.

In 1971 the White House asked the psychiatric epidemiologist Lee Robins to follow 943 Army enlisted men home from Vietnam.

About 20% of them were addicted to narcotics while they were there. Within a year of landing back in the States, only 5% were still addicted.

In Vietnam the heroin was cheap, close to pure and smoked. At home it was costly, weak and came with a needle.

Relying on discipline means fighting the same battle tomorrow.

The right environment removes the fight.

Now I check four things before I choose where to live.

1. A balcony or a patio
2. A window that looks outside
3. A separate bedroom, so sleep and work stay apart
4. Groceries, coffee and a gym within a five-minute walk

You shape your environment. Then it shapes you.

🪟

What one-time change would save you effort each day?

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“In a phase transition, two competing forces reach a balance. A small shift in temperature or pressure flips the entire system.”

Safi Bahcall

My shirt rubbed my nipple raw when I moved my run from 55 minutes to 89. Dehydration arrived at the same time.

Running without a shirt stopped the chafing.

At 55 minutes water was optional. At 89 I needed it.

Past 55, my legs grew heavy and my brain started looking for excuses to stop.

Keeping my feet moving meant overriding that resistance over and over.

That repetition trained executive control.

At my standing desk, when I wanted to push off a hard task, I met similar friction. I started the work anyway.

In the late 1940s, Emil Zátopek ran 400-meter intervals in heavy army boots through snow, holding his breath until he nearly blacked out.

In 1952 he won Olympic gold in the 5,000 meters and the 10,000 meters.

Then he entered the Marathon, a distance he had never raced before and won that too.

The strain tore at his muscles, causing severe injuries and a hernia that ended his dominance before the 1956 Games.

You make the jump for the expected upside, but the new level arrives with costs you did not face before.

A habit does not scale as a straight line.

At 99 degrees Celsius water is hot. At 100 it turns to steam.

Raise the habit enough and it changes state. New capabilities arrive. So do new costs.

🧗

What new capability could you unlock by jumping a level?

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“The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself.”

Clark Kerr

On the show Creator Lab, Bilal Zaidi asked me whether I would take investors for Trends.vc. I said no.

Trends.vc already had three interest groups. Me. The people I employed. The subscribers who paid for it.

Each decision had to balance all three.

An investor would have added a fourth group.

Craigslist ran into this when Phillip Knowlton, who held 28.4% of the company, wanted his money out.

Craig Newmark founded the site and Jim Buckmaster ran it.

In August 2004 eBay paid $32 million for Knowlton’s stake. The purchase came with a seat on craigslist’s board.

In June 2007 eBay launched Kijiji, a classifieds site aimed straight at craigslist, while still holding that board seat. Newmark and Buckmaster moved to dilute eBay’s shares. Delaware’s Chancery Court ruled in 2010 that craigslist breached its fiduciary duty to the very competitor it was trying to purge.

Craigslist spent 11 years in litigation before buying the shares back in June 2015.

Bringing in an outside stakeholder binds you to their interests by law, even when those interests actively work against yours.

• Uber’s riders want fares low.
• Its drivers want them high.
• Its investors want the rapid growth that cheap rides buy.

If you book a trip, you want the lowest price.

The driver taking the trip needs a living wage.

In February 2017 a dashcam caught Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with driver Fawzi Kamel about fare cuts. Kamel said the cheaper rates on Uber Black cost him $97,000. Kalanick shot back that Uber cut prices to stay in business against competitors.

Kamel kept pushing.

Kalanick finished with “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.” He apologized the same day the video went public and admitted he needed leadership help.

The more groups you answer to, the harder it gets to keep any of them happy.

🗳️

Who are you trying to please who shouldn’t have a vote?

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“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

Søren Kierkegaard

I got the thing I’d wanted my whole life and then I stopped growing. I was 23, driving to work, unable to name what was wrong. For the first time, nothing was chasing me.

Up to that point in my life, all I chased was peace and security.

I got both and felt stuck.

I grew up lower middle class, with stretches that ran below that. Getting out took years of doing things I didn’t want to do. They scared me. I did them because the other option was staying.

A courage challenge is a hard thing you pick when nothing is making you do it.

• The sales ask
• The hard conversation
• The call that keeps getting pushed

The years before 23 were survival. My back was against the wall.

Doing a hard thing is a different skill from surviving one.

I never saw those early years as courage. It was what I had to do to make it out, involuntary discomfort.

Once security arrived, that pressure was gone. I faced a choice. I could choose discomfort voluntarily or stop growing.

Without a threat forcing me, I stopped doing hard things. Growth left with fear.

Then I picked up Jia Jiang’s Rejection Proof.

An investor turned down his startup and it flattened him, so he went out looking for a no a day for 100 days. Day one he asked a security guard for $100. Day three he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts arranged like the Olympic rings.

The shift leader made them and handed them over.

He finished all 100 days.

Around that time I heard Tim Ferriss describe the same practice with a different name. He calls them comfort challenges in The 4-Hour Workweek: hold a stranger’s eye contact, ask someone for their number.

For the first 23 years of my life, discomfort was involuntary. After that, growth meant making it voluntary.

Today I run 8 courage challenges a day.

One was an email I left unopened for a month. Reading it and replying took 30 minutes.

Survival is doing the hard thing because you have to. Courage is doing it when nothing is making you.

🧱

What uncomfortable thing could you do today?

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“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”

Thomas Reid

I tried more than 20 businesses before one of them worked.

One or two made a little money. None of them got big.

I worked hard on each one.

These days I split my focus across five areas. Physical health, mental health, social life, wealth and wisdom.

Looking across those five areas revealed the problem. I spent those early years working in isolation.

I am introverted, so social connection was the hardest area for me.

In 2019 I joined a mastermind called Zero to One.

Those founders inspired me and held me to what I said I would do.

Trends.vc came out of that room.

I spent years taking care of health, mindset, learning and money. Trends.vc would not have worked if I stayed in isolation.

Think about an investment portfolio.

You can hold thousands of stocks. But if they all sit in one category, you are underdiversified.

Picking best-in-class assets across four sectors does not protect you when a market downturn hits all four at once. You focused on picking winners, but you left the fifth category empty. Without an uncorrelated asset to balance the drop, a broad decline in your main holdings can wipe out the entire fund.

Survival is not about how many assets you own, but whether you covered critical categories.

The same imbalance shows up in the gym. We all know the guy with a massive chest and arms who skips leg day. He looks formidable until someone glances down.

You cannot outwork a blind spot by doubling down on your strengths.

If a critical area is empty, that single gap can still take you out.

🛢️

How could you cover an underdeveloped area of your life?

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“Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought.”

Sun Tzu

Each day I ask one question.

What’s the one thing I can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?

Lately I’ve started putting a time estimate next to the answer.

Estimating the work forces a simulation.

To set the number, you picture the steps. You see where to begin, what you need on hand and what finished looks like.

That mental walkthrough is priming.

Hospitals treating a blocked artery run against a deadline of 90 minutes.

Door to balloon, they call it. The clock runs from the front entrance to the moment a catheter opens the artery. In 2005 fewer than half of American patients beat it.

A 90-minute deadline leaves no time to coordinate after arrival.

Hospitals started the sequence before the patient reached the door. A paramedic sent the heart tracing ahead from the ambulance. One call activated the lab.

By 2010 the national median fell from 96 minutes to 64. The share of patients inside the window went from 44% to 91%.

An estimate is a rehearsal. You walk the path before you start the clock.

⏱️

Which project would you estimate to start moving?

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“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way.”

Flannery O’Connor

When I wrote my first Trends.vc reports, I focused on density. Each report was raw research, clear data, judgment and conclusions.

Each good piece of content does one of two things.

It makes you afraid to stop consuming. Or it makes you unable to stop consuming.

Same outcome, different mechanism.

The first path is signal-to-noise. The reader stays because each sentence delivers value.

“What will I miss if I leave?”

The Economist does this. Trends.vc reports do this.

Dense research where skipping a paragraph might cost you an insight worth thousands of dollars.

The reader gets smarter by the minute.

The second path is escapism. The viewer stays because the story won’t let them go.

“I can’t walk away.”

Netflix does this. Serialized storytelling does this.

The viewer gets so deep in the world that leaving feels like withdrawal.

Great comedians and edutainment pull off both.

Each piece needs at least one.

Without signal, there is nothing to learn. Without story, there is no reason to stay.

📡

What will your next piece optimize for: signal or story?

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“Stability is destabilizing.”

Hyman Minsky

I’ve tracked my habits for 15 years. When I hit them consistently for a stretch, I add more on the strength of that momentum.

Each time the list grew too long, the routine fell apart and habits went uncompleted.

During my mini-retirement I was biking around Atlanta listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. I heard Courtland Allen describe how his habit tracking kept collapsing.

Capping the list stopped the collapses for me.

Over Christmas 2022, Southwest Airlines lost track of where its pilots and flight attendants were. Michael Santoro, vice president of the pilots’ union, told CBS News the airline saw a meltdown once or twice a year. The scheduling software couldn’t keep up with changes across the network.

Crews sat waiting to be told where to go. Lyn Montgomery, leader of the flight attendants’ union, said hold times ran anywhere from three to 17 hours.

Southwest cancelled 16,900 flights over the holiday and went back to matching crews to planes by hand. In December 2023 the Department of Transportation fined it $140 million.

I’ve never run an airline.

I’ve run a list of habits past what it could carry.

Sweden started building the Vasa in 1626. On top went a deck structure built heavier than the guns called for, 64 cannons, 120 tonnes of ballast and close to 500 sculptures across the stern.

Before she sailed, 30 men ran back and forth across her upper deck to see how she rolled. Vice Admiral Klas Fleming stopped them after three passes, worried she would go over at the quay. She sailed anyway.

On 10 August 1628 the Vasa traveled 1,300 meters, caught a gust and went down in sight of the yard that built her.

Somewhere between 30 and 50 people drowned that afternoon.

No single cannon capsized her. The additions simply ran out of hull to carry them.

I’ve added habits until the day had no room left.

Joseph Tainter’s answer for why complex societies end is that they accumulate their way there. Each layer a society adds to solve a problem returns less than the layer before it, while costing the same or more to keep running.

Systems rarely collapse from a catastrophic failure. They collapse under the weight of too many reasonable additions.

🏛️

What protective limit could you set while things are calm?