Watch

Listen

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

Thomas Sowell

All of my meetings are on Mondays.

Masterminds, team calls, one-on-ones and email run back to back without a break.

By evening I am out of words.

The other six days my team is the filter. A real fire reaches me. A small one waits until Monday.

That subtraction costs me speed. Send me something on Tuesday and you hear back the following Monday. But it buys six days of unbroken focus.

Each strength is funded by a deliberate weakness.

Costco chose to sacrifice markup and selection. It caps markup on branded products at 14% over cost. Kirkland Signature, its own label, gets 15%. Most retailers work on 25% to 50%.

Costco stocks around 4,000 items.

A typical supermarket carries 30,000.

Stock 30,000 items and you buy less of each one. Smaller orders cost more.

By capping markup and limiting items, Costco bought massive volume. The membership fee carries about half the operating profit, paying for low prices all along.

Southwest Airlines cut comfort to buy turnaround speed.

It built its operation around a single aircraft type, the Boeing 737.

• One set of spare parts
• One training course for pilots and mechanics
• Crews that move between aircraft with far less retraining

The airline also skipped assigned seats and meals. Flights ran point-to-point rather than routing everyone through hubs.

Those subtractions bought faster turnarounds, more flights per aircraft each day and lower fares. Assigned seating finally arrived in January 2026.

Both companies protect what they actually sell.

Costco sells trust that the price is the lowest available. It can keep margins tiny, but it cannot lose buying power.

Southwest promises cheap seats that leave on time.

Meals and comfort are easy to cut. Turnaround speed is not.

Costco gave up margin. Southwest gave up comfort. I give up response speed.

Pick what you will be worst at, then earn it by being extreme elsewhere.

🐢

What could you neglect to buy room for your biggest strength?

Watch

Listen

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”

René Descartes

Each day I read one of my rules: “Resistance is a sign that the step is too steep.”

When you procrastinate on a project, the instinct is to blame your discipline. But avoiding the work does not mean you are lazy. It means the step in front of you is too steep.

In 1951, John Steinbeck sat down to write East of Eden. The scale of the book terrified him. He delayed starting, paralyzed by the mountain of work ahead.

Whenever he thought about writing an epic novel, a sick sense of failure stopped him cold.

If you have ever stared at a blank screen, you know that stall.

His breakthrough was shrinking the step until it was impossible to avoid. He knew that looking at the whole mountain makes you freeze:

“Write just one page a day, that is all. Be aware of it only as a single page.”

Chopping the monolith into a single daily slice dissolved the dread.

The book was finished in a year.

When a project feels overwhelming, you back away. The resistance is not a character flaw. It is a measurement problem.

Your brain stalls when an large outcome pretends to be a single task.

Monoliths invite avoidance because they offer nowhere to start.

Separate preparation from execution. Shrink the first move until starting takes less effort than putting it off.

Once an outcome turns into an atomic sequence, the resistance disappears.

📄

What stalled task could you split into two startable steps?

Watch

Listen

“They’re hands you can lose a lot of money with.”

Doyle Brunson

I looked down at a king and a nine on my phone. In my headphones, Maria Konnikova was recounting her lessons from Erik Seidel in The Biggest Bluff.

Seidel warned her that king-nine is an expensive trap. Amateurs see a face card and stay in the hand.

He tends to fold it because a weak side card leaves you drawing to second-best.

The obviously terrible hands are easy. You throw them away in half a second and wait for the next deal.

Those hands don’t drain your stack because folding them takes no thought.

Holding a king looks playable. At a table with fewer opponents, it looks even better.

When the flop pairs your king, you think you’re ahead.

Someone else often holds a king with an ace beside it.

If an opponent is behind, they fold early, so you win a small pot. If they hold ace-king, they call each bet and take your whole stack.

Doyle Brunson called cards like king-nine trouble hands for a reason.

They keep you around long enough to lose your chips.

You see the same dynamic in business.

In 1962 Warren Buffett started buying Berkshire Hathaway stock, a declining textile mill that looked like a bargain at $7.50 a share. It was a classic borderline trade: a cigar butt with one free puff left.

Two years later the mill’s president agreed to buy Buffett’s shares back at $11.50 each. The written offer came in at $11.375. Buffett was angry enough over 12.5 cents that he bought up the rest of the stock, took control of the mill and fired him.

If you have ever doubled down on a mediocre hand instead of walking away, you know how that goes.

For the next 20 years, Buffett poured money into new looms and equipment, trying to turn around a business bleeding to foreign competition. Each improvement was matched by competitors.

By 1985 he closed the mills, calculating the distraction cost over $200 billion in compounding gains.

It was his worst trade: you can pour a fortune into new looms, but a dying business never becomes a winner.

Charlie Munger later explained the fix. On their desks sat a wooden box labeled “Too Hard.”

If you bring them an opportunity that is complicated, borderline or requires heroic effort, they toss it into the box and wait for an obvious pitch.

Derek Sivers framed the same filter as a choice between hell yeah or no. Unless you feel an immediate yes, the answer is no.

Terrible ideas are easy to reject. Nobody struggles to turn down an offer they hate.

The rule exists for the 7 out of 10.

The client who pays okay but drains your weekend. The project that works only if conditions stay perfect.

When an opportunity sits on the edge, we negotiate with ourselves. We look at the face card and ignore the weak kicker.

Passing on borderline ideas protects your time for the rare opportunities that are an obvious yes.

♠️

What borderline project should you fold today to protect your time?

Watch

Listen

“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think.”

Henri Frédéric Amiel

I gave up daily writing in my early 20s. Life got chaotic and the habit felt expendable.

The next week, my life felt the same.

The cost had a delayed effect.

By the time my learning and clarity slowed down, I stopped connecting the slump to the habit I dropped.

Writing organized my thinking and taught me how to tell a story. The practice created a public record of lessons, making me less likely to repeat the same mistakes. It built discipline and helped me scale myself.

To explain an idea in public, I had to see where my understanding was weak. Half of what I learned came from making ideas make sense to strangers.

Writing looks solitary, but it put more people in my life than any conference.

When you drop a habit, the damage is rarely immediate.

✍️

What did you figure out recently that you could share?

“As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.”

Morgan Housel

I plan to put my phone down at 10 each night. If nothing is due tomorrow, 10 turns into midnight.

Without a deadline tomorrow, I take tonight less seriously and stay up late.

In 1955 British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

The same rule governs evenings. Give a task a week and it takes the week. Give a night no reason to end and it stretches to midnight.

On Mondays I stack four or more calls: two masterminds, a team call and a one-on-one. Back-to-back conversations leave no buffer. By afternoon my energy drops.

A packed schedule works only when nothing goes wrong.

One late call or one small fire and the rest of the schedule collapses.

Morgan Housel describes debt the same way. The more of it a company carries, the fewer scenarios it survives.

A company with no loans can sit through a recession. A leveraged one dies in the downturn.

Calendar commitments work like financial debt.

Stack too many and one surprise wipes out the day.

An empty schedule fails from underuse. With nothing to push against, simple tasks expand to fill the whole day.

Housel runs his days at 80 or 90 percent of capacity for the same reason.

“I’m not interested in anything that’s not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits.”

I want enough due tomorrow that tonight ends on time and enough slack that a surprise costs an hour instead of the day.

A packed day breaks from overuse. An empty day atrophies from underuse.

⚖️

What could you drop from your fullest day so one surprise can’t sink it?

Watch

Listen

“Dig a well before you are thirsty.”

Chinese proverb

I can skip a day of marketing now and the streak holds.

Marketing takes 34 minutes. For months, missing one day broke the chain.

I built an app that lets me bank ahead: do tomorrow’s block today and the credit carries forward.

Right now I have a few days sitting in the bank. I don’t have to touch the work today to keep the streak.

And yet I did today’s block.

Researchers found something close to this in a sugarcane field.

Sugarcane farmers in India get paid once a year, in a lump at harvest. The same man is broke the month before and flush the month after. The researchers tested more than 400 of them on the same puzzles before the payout and again after.

Afterward, with money in hand, they scored much higher. Same farmer, same brain, richer by one crop.

That score gap matched a lost night of sleep or 13 IQ points.

When I read that, I saw my mornings in it. The shortage left the farmers with less attention for planning ahead and staying steady.

They called it a tax on bandwidth.

Take the shortage away and the tax disappears.

Habit banking gave me that bandwidth back. The real burden was the daily worry of missing a day.

A rough day spends savings instead of breaking the chain. The panic drains out.

Habit banking helps most where the deadline creates the pressure.

A reserve removes the risk of snapping the streak and the stress about it.

You still do the work, but the dread is gone.

🏦

Which daily habit could you get one day ahead of?

Watch

Listen

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Archimedes

Nine years back I quit my tech job on 3 years of savings and a software skill.

I spent 8 hours a day turning product specs into working code. Today an agent does that in seconds.

Putting thought onto a page used to take a dedicated trade.

In ancient Mesopotamia, a merchant who wanted to record a debt hired a scribe to press marks into wet clay.

In medieval Europe, a monastery needed a full year of hand labor to copy a single Bible onto calfskin.

The scribe sat between the thinker and the page.

If you wanted to send a message, record a debt or copy a text, you paid someone who could write.

Gutenberg set movable metal type in Mainz in the 1450s.

A single print shop produced more in a day than a scribe finished in a year.

Within 50 years, European presses turned out more than 9 million volumes.

Scribe guilds protested and tried to ban the machines.

The press ignored them.

Over the next century, manual copying stopped paying.

A scribe bought one sheet at a time and sold whatever they finished.

A printer bought hundreds of reams up front and made money only if the books sold.

Paper ran to roughly half the total cost of a run.

Printing the wrong manuscript bankrupted the shop.

The power moved from the copyist to the publisher, who evaluated manuscripts, judged public taste, allocated upfront capital and ran distribution.

For 70 years, software engineers were modern scribes.

We wrote syntax line by line: loops, database queries, interface components and state machines.

Now coding agents generate entire codebases from a plain English prompt.

Writing code is no longer the hard part. Knowing what to build is.

Building still takes attention and time. You just spend less of it typing.

When building software becomes cheap, three jobs remain.

Someone chooses what is worth building. Someone funds the compute and drives distribution. Someone stays accountable when the system breaks.

When building gets commoditized, leverage moves to judgment.

⚡

How can you position yourself to win in this next phase?

Watch

Listen

“You will never see the long run if, in the short term, you don’t buffer yourself against the vicissitudes of chance.”

Maria Konnikova

I wrote code before work for 3 months and made zero sales.

It was 2012 and the tool was called Shommi. It watched Twitter for people who wanted to buy something and handed leads to businesses. Car buying was my first test because of the high price tag. When I ran out of things to code, I drove to a strip of car dealerships on the north side of Atlanta and walked into 3 of them.

They were polite. They said interesting.

The most interested person in those 3 dealerships wanted to hire me for Ruby on Rails contract work.

3 months of mornings bought 1 Saturday’s worth of information.

A few years later I built something that scraped job boards so developers could see which skills paid the most and were growing the fastest. Nobody else was doing it. I took that as an open lane instead of a sign that no one wanted it.

It went nowhere.

Then a productivity app in 2019.

Then Trends.vc.

Along the way came HeadsUp, Multi and other products.

Pieter Levels builds software alone and ships it in public.

In March 2014 he was running out of money and announced he would launch 12 startups in 12 months, one a month, in public. Most went nowhere. Nomad List turned into a city database with millions of visits a month and acquisition offers. Remote OK turned into one of the biggest remote job boards on the internet.

Seven years later he added up everything he had ever shipped and posted the count:

🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew

📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed

📈 My hit rate is only about ~5%

🚀 So…ship more

Almost 31,000 people liked it. That is the 5% rule.

Say your hit rate is 5%. Try once and you have a 95% chance of a miss.

Try twice and the odds of two misses are 90%.

Ten attempts leave a 60% chance of zero hits.

At 14 attempts, the odds of zero hits drop under 50%. At 45, they fall under 10%. At 90, the odds of zero hits sit under 1%.

That math assumes your odds never change.

In reality, attempts are not independent draws. Each attempt sharpens your taste, your skills and your distribution.

Levels’ hit rate climbed as he shipped. His public list now shows 9 successes across 114 projects, putting his rate at 8%.

Your iteration pace decides how long the math takes. 90 attempts at 1 a year is a lifetime. 90 attempts at 1 a week fits inside two years.

Keep the cost of each attempt low enough that you never run out of time or money.

Success is a function of attempts.

If each attempt is survivable, success stops being a question of if.

It becomes a question of when.

🧮

Which goal becomes inevitable with enough iterations?

Watch

Listen

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

Bruce Lee

I fast on a range from 12pm to 2pm. Most days I make it to 2pm. All of my calls are on Mondays, back-to-back masterminds and team meetings. At 12pm I eat an apple to get through them.

12pm is the floor, the earliest I eat.

2pm is the bar, the target for most days.

Ron Hill, who won the Boston Marathon in 1970, ran each day for 52 years on a floor of one mile at any pace. In his heaviest years he ran 120 to 140 miles a week. A car crash broke his sternum in 1993, so he waited for his wife to leave for the weekly shop, snuck out of the house and hobbled one slow flat mile. That single mile kept a 52-year streak alive.

A range helps your habit survive volatility. Good days, bad days and the ones in between.

📏

Which single target could you widen into a range?

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

Yoshida Kenko

I spent years taking resistance out of my work.

Each system I built automated another task. My work eventually ran on easy mode.

Then the calendar went quiet and my head went looking for a fight. Small grievances got loud. Overthinking filled the empty hours.

In 1994, keepers at the Central Park Zoo watched their polar bear swim the same figure eight through his pool, up to 12 hours a day.

He paced the water until the zoo hired an animal therapist to figure out why.

Biologists call it stereotypic behavior. The popular word is zoochosis. A survey of 55 captive bears found 85% pacing or tracing loops.

The therapist delivered a blunt verdict: “Gus is just bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people are in New York.”

In cities and towns, we live in the human equivalent of zoos. Four walls, scheduled meals and warm rooms replaced the wild.

A polar bear is an apex predator designed to swim miles of freezing ocean and hunt across ice. Drop that animal into a concrete pool with pre-sliced fish and he will not sit quietly in comfort. He spent half his life swimming a shape that took him nowhere.

Gus had no exit. Stockton Rush did.

In June 2023, he climbed into a 22-foot submersible called Titan to dive to the Titanic wreck.

He built the hull out of carbon fiber to cut shipping costs, against warnings that the material would buckle under deep-sea pressure.

Two hours into the dive, the hull gave way. Five people died, including Rush and 3 passengers who paid for their seats.

Nobody forced those men into the North Atlantic. They paid to enter water that could crush them.

When my calendar cleared, problem-seeking behavior took over. Without natural friction to push against, my focus turned inward. I over-intellectualized small decisions and gave routine issues outsized weight.

In 2014, researchers at the University of Virginia put people in an empty room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except think.

The only object in the room was a button that delivered an electric shock.

Before the session, each participant said they would pay money to avoid being shocked.

Left alone with their thoughts, 67% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves anyway. One man pressed the button 190 times.

Given an empty room, participants chose physical pain over stillness.

An idle mind manufactures the challenge a comfortable life removes.

Given 15 minutes of quiet, overthinking fills the room. Small issues feel urgent.

You reach for a version of that shock button. Checking a phone in an elevator counts.

When you eliminate real challenges, the mind invents artificial ones.

Stillness has its place. So does a demanding climb.

Cultivate mindfulness so you can sit with silence.

Choose productive challenges so your mind never has to invent fake ones.

🐻‍❄️

What productive challenge could you take on next?