“He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.”

Rabindranath Tagore

He built the biggest jewellery chain in the world. Then he stood up at the Royal Albert Hall and called his products crap.

Gerald Ratner was speaking to 6,000 business leaders at the Institute of Directors on 23 April 1991. Someone asked how his shops sold things so cheaply.

One sherry decanter was priced low “because it’s total crap,” Ratner told the audience. A pair of earrings cost less than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer. The sandwich, he added, would probably last longer.

The room laughed.

Ratners lost around £500 million of its value, the board removed him the next year and the chain was renamed.

One joke cost him the company he spent decades building.

The same trap appears the moment you do something good.

I ate a smash burger recently after sticking to my diet all month. The excuse was that I earned it. My body and brain felt sluggish immediately after.

Sticking to my diet gave me an excuse to cheat.

You finish 4 hours of focused work, complete a hard workout or eat clean all day. Then your brain treats that effort as permission to slack off. The reward wipes out the progress you just made.

Self-sabotage usually wears the costume of a reward.

To protect your progress against self-sabotage:

• Treat good habits as the standard. Sticking to your routine is the baseline rather than a favor that unlocks credit.
• Decide the reward beforehand. Pick how you celebrate before you start the work. Choosing a reward while riding a high leads to bad choices.
• Never reward a habit by breaking it. Do not celebrate a clean diet with junk food or a frugal week with a shopping spree. Reward the habit with things that keep it going.

A good day builds momentum. Spending it as permission is how you give that momentum back.

🧾

What progress have you given yourself permission to erase?

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“The fastest way to still the mind is to move the body.”

Gabrielle Roth

A man who broke rock all day in a prison quarry went back to his cell and ran in place.

Swinging a hammer at limestone all day was how the state planned to wear Prisoner 46664 down.

He added 45 minutes on the spot to the end of it. Then 100 fingertip push-ups, 200 sit-ups and 50 deep knee-bends.

Nelson Mandela ran that routine Monday through Thursday.

His cell on Robben Island was about 7 feet across. He kept the routine for most of the 18 years he spent there.

It came from his boxing years and he later wrote down what it was for.

“Exercise dissipates tension.” He said he “worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition”.

The training was the one part of his day the state didn’t control.

When I feel down, depressed or hopeless, the things that reliably shift it are physical:

• A run.
• Mobility work.
• A cold shower.
• Hard intervals.
• Strength training.

Each one is voluntary discomfort.

Exercise is an antidepressant.

James Blumenthal’s team at Duke ran the comparison. 202 adults with major depression, 16 weeks.

Remission at 4 months: 45% on supervised exercise, 40% doing it at home, 47% on sertraline, 31% on a sugar pill.

Almost a third of patients improved on a placebo. Exercise added 14 percentage points and matched the prescription drug.

One year later, patients who kept exercising stayed in remission.

Movement is medicine.

Charles Dickens walked at night for years.

In October 1857, he left his house in Tavistock Square at 2am and walked to Gad’s Hill Place near Rochester. 30 miles, in about 7 hours.

He did a version of that often, roaming London from midnight to dawn.

Walking 30 miles in the dark was how he wore out his body to quiet his head.

When you’re stuck you have time on your hands and you spend it making the case for how bad you feel.

A cold shower breaks that loop and forces your attention somewhere else. It gives you distance and shifts your physical state before you return to the problem.

So does a run. You can’t hold an argument with yourself while you’re gasping.

Next time a bad day lands, move first.

Get into your body to get out of your head.

🏃

What movement could clear your head today?

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“No one tests the depth of a river with both feet.”

Ashanti Proverb

I wrote code for 3 hours before work each day. It was 2012 and I was building Shommi, a tool that tracked Twitter to find potential customers for businesses. I told myself a working solution would sell itself.

After 3 months I ran out of things to improve. On a Saturday I drove to a strip of car dealerships on the north side of Atlanta and walked into 3 of them. I told them people in their area were tweeting about buying cars.

They were polite and said “interesting.”

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

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

Long feedback loops make finding out expensive. Short loops make failure cheap.

Unilever’s mathematicians tried to design a detergent nozzle first. Fluid dynamics and phase transition were their specialty.

The nozzle clogged anyway.

Unilever’s biologists came at it without the theory. They made 10 variants, kept whichever sprayed 1 or 2 percent better, made 10 variants of that one and ran the loop again.

45 generations later, they had a nozzle shaped unlike anything the mathematicians designed.

449 rejects bought a nozzle that sprayed many times better.

13 years after Shommi, I changed the scale of the test. I paid hours instead of months to test the idea that became HeadsUp. I handcrafted Notion documents laying out what each founder’s competitors were doing and sent them to 8 founders.

One offered $300 a quarter before a line of code existed.

Google runs 12,000 split tests a year because each test is cheap to run. In 1 test on 41 shades of blue, a single color shift added $200 million in annual revenue.

Saras Sarasvathy sat 27 expert entrepreneurs down with the same startup problem and had them think out loud. They set what they can afford to lose before they start, then skip forecasting what they might gain. She named it affordable loss.

Size each test so a miss can’t finish you.

📄

What test could you shrink until failure is cheap?

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“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”

Margaret J. Wheatley

I write one number for each day, somewhere between -4 and +4, to score how the day went. I call it my tempo.

Two questions follow each night:

1. If the day was less than 4: What would have made it a 4?
2. If it was 4: What made it great?

I built an app called Apex to correlate my habits against my tempo, sleep and mood.

The habits that add the most points to my tempo:

• Cold showers: +0.7
• No phone after 10pm: +0.7
• No laptop after 9pm: +0.6

On days I take a cold shower, I get to bed 21 minutes earlier.

Reflection is the engine of progress and the number is what gives it something to run on.

Compress a day to one digit to see what actually made the difference.

📊

What number would you give today?

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“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

Margaret Atwood

I chose the model that writes for Multi off a public ranking and it still gets things wrong.

Arena ranks frontier models on text, code, image, video and search. New entries keep landing near the top.

A research group called METR measures the longest job an AI can finish on software tasks. They size that job in how long the same work would take a person.

The length doubled roughly every 7 months.

A model counts as finishing when it comes out right half the time.

From 2019 to 2025 that adds up to about a thousandfold.

A tool that finishes your work half the time is a coin flip you still have to check. Each better model takes a bigger piece of the work off you.

Launch your product with the best model now and swap in better models as they arrive. Or keep waiting and better models arrive while you still have no product or users.

📈

What could you launch now, then upgrade as tools improve?

“The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

Niels Bohr

“You don’t want to make money by screwing your investors,” Charlie Munger said. That, he said, is what a lot of venture capitalists do.

Two podcast hosts had him in front of a microphone and asked whether venture capital does its job in society. He said no. The people doing the work inside those businesses often “hate the venture capitalists.”

His complaint was about how the money gets made.

He and Buffett made their money by buying businesses whose customers would want the same thing in 20 years. Buffett wrote the rule down in 2007. Their criterion of “enduring” ruled out companies “in industries prone to rapid and continuous change,” because “a moat that must be continuously rebuilt will eventually be no moat at all.”

Berkshire could buy once and hold for decades.

Betting on what’s changing pays too. Venture investors fund young companies built around a market or a technology that’s moving right now. Nobody can tell which one takes the market.

Paul Graham ran Y Combinator. He put the math in writing: “for each big winner we could pick a thousand companies that returned nothing and still end up 10x ahead.” So they fund many and let the winner show itself.

By the time he wrote that, Dropbox and Airbnb carried about three quarters of everything Y Combinator funded.

In the same interview, Munger said venture capital is “a very legitimate business if you do it right.”

What if you want to do both?

Amazon used the changing market to pick its moment and the unchanging wants to pick where the money went. Amazon’s 1997 shareholder letter described a “window of opportunity” in online commerce and called the moment “Day 1 for the Internet.”

In October 2007 an interviewer asked Bezos how Amazon sets its strategy. People ask him constantly what will change in the next ten years. Nobody asks him what will stay the same.

That second question set where the money went:

• lower prices
• broader selection
• faster delivery

“All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now.”

Both strategies work.

The open question is which one suits you. The same strategy that wins for someone else can lose for you.

🎲

Which approach feels right for you?

“Frugality is enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy.”

Vicki Robin

One drop of solder came off each kerosene can and kept paying Rockefeller for as long as the plant ran.

• Each can took 40 drops to seal
• At 38 the kerosene ran out onto the floor
• At 39 the seal held

Rockefeller started a ledger at 16, one line for each cent in and each cent out. His mother taught him the saying he lived by: willful waste makes woeful want. He kept that ledger for 82 years.

One drop cut from each can was worth $2,500 in the first year and 39 became the rule across Standard Oil.

Amazon made frugality one of its 16 leadership principles.

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

In 1995 Amazon built its desks from doors, because a door cost less than a desk.

Its employees still work at door desks today.

Running my marketing costs 55 minutes a day. I could raise it and I don’t.

That number has one job. It has to hold on my worst week. 55 holds.

Voyager 1 runs on a power budget that shrinks about 4 watts a year.

It left Earth in 1977 and still sends data back.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory switch off one instrument at a time to stay inside that budget. They shut down the cosmic ray subsystem in February 2025 and the low-energy charged particle detector in April 2026.

Voyager 1 launched with 10 instruments. Two are still running.

The Greenland shark costs almost nothing to keep alive.

Its metabolism runs so cold it grows less than a centimeter a year and moves through the Arctic at a stroll.

Radiocarbon dating put its lifespan at 272 years, the longest of any vertebrate on record.

Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, keeps his costs flat while his net worth swings by hundreds of millions.

Asked how he handles the swings, he said his day-to-day life doesn’t change.

His life costs the same either way.

David Senra has read biographies of more than 400 founders. What they share, he says, is an obsession with the lowest cost. He says they see that advantage compound over and over.

The less a system takes to run, the less vulnerable it is.

🔥

What could you make cheaper so it runs for decades?

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“Survival is the only road to riches.”

Peter L. Bernstein

Two men who won the Nobel Prize for pricing options helped found a fund that bet 25 dollars for each dollar it held.

Long-Term Capital Management lost 4.6 billion dollars in four months, almost everything it owned.

Ed Thorp ran a fund on a formula that told him exactly how much to bet. For 19 years he compounded at about 19% a year.

Thorp’s formula came from John Kelly. Give it a bet you want to make and it returns one number: the share of your money that bet should get.

Say you find a bet you win 60 times out of 100.

Win and you double what you put in. Lose and it’s gone.

Start with 100 dollars and bet a fifth of what you hold each round.

Win the first and you hold 120. Lose the next and you hold 96.

Bet two fifths instead. Win the first and you hold 140. Lose the next and you hold 84.

Run all 100 rounds with the same 60 wins.

A fifth each round turns your 100 dollars into about 750.

Two fifths turns it into about 78.

Thorp never bet the number the formula gave him. He bet half of it, so where the formula said a fifth he put down a tenth.

That earned about three quarters of what the full number would have earned. His fund’s value rose and fell half as far.

The formula only works if you know your chances exactly.

He could count them at a blackjack table. In the market he could only estimate.

Eliud Kipchoge runs up to 220 kilometres a week and runs hard on only about a fifth of those kilometres.

He won the Olympic marathon twice on training he never ran flat out.

Diners at an Okinawan table stop eating when they are 80% full.

The rule is called hara hachi bu.

Ask which of your weeks you could repeat all year.

Roald Amundsen held his party to 15 nautical miles a day on the way to the South Pole, well short of what the dogs and the men could have covered. His men rested up to 16 hours a day.

Robert Falcon Scott raced him for that pole the same Antarctic summer and marched on whatever the weather gave him. Long days under a clear sky. Tent-bound days when the storms came.

Amundsen stood at the pole on 14 December 1911 and walked back into his hut on 25 January, all his men alive and heavier than when he left.

Scott reached the same spot 34 days behind him and found the Norwegian flag already flying there. His party of five turned for home.

Edgar Evans died in February. Lawrence Oates said he was just going outside and might be some time, then walked into a March blizzard.

Scott and the last two lay down 11 miles from a depot stocked with food and fuel.

A blizzard held them there until they died.

The attention you have today is all the capital you have to bet with.

Give each habit a smaller share than your best week could carry.

Run it at the smallest share you’ll still keep on a bad day.

Too big a share ends the habit.

🎚️

Which habit can you protect by asking less of it?

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“If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.”

Guan Zhong

I put off a book for 15 years and finished it before lunch.

Publishing the book was a morning of formatting.

The book came out of a notebook. From 2013 on I read my principles each day. Now and then I copied them onto a fresh page by hand to keep them in front of me. By 2019 that page held 100 rules.

Those 100 rules became the book I published five years later.

In 1988 Johan Cruyff took over Barcelona’s soccer team and made the kids in the club’s youth academy play the same way his professional players did. He coached there for eight years and the club kept his system after he left. 22 years later Messi, Iniesta and Xavi finished first, second and third in the vote for the world’s best player, all three out of that academy.

I think of Cruyff whenever I start something new and want to see results inside a week.

Sir Richard Weston backed the king in England’s civil war and Parliament seized his estates. In the five years that followed he wrote a book he never meant to publish. From Ghent and Bruges he watched Flemish farmers work their fields and sent letters home to his sons.

English farmers often rested a third of their land each year so the soil could recover. The Flemish planted clover on that resting third instead. Wheat needs nitrogen and clover pulls it out of the air into the soil, so the third that rested also fed the next crop.

Samuel Hartlib printed Weston’s letters to his sons in 1650 and the practice spread. Farmers in Norfolk stopped resting their third and sowed it instead. Their wheat averaged 14 bushels an acre in the early 1700s and 23 by the early 1800s.

Weston died in 1652, roughly 150 years before those 23-bushel harvests.

I publish each day without knowing which posts will still be read next year.

Cornelius Vanderbilt spent his life building the family’s railroad fortune. His grandson William Kissam inherited $55,000,000 of that fortune in 1885. He died in 1920 with $54,530,966.

In 1901 the grandson told the Minneapolis Journal:

“It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness.”

Keeping it was the job he was handed.

The day starts before the day starts.

What you do inside one day, season, career or generation is what the next one starts with.

🌅

What could you do today that tomorrow depends on?

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“Learning comes through suffering.”

Aeschylus

A man built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage.

James Dyson worked from 1979 to 1983 in an unheated coach house behind his home in Bath. Each build was one cycle: make it, test it, change one thing.

He counted as he went: prototype 627, then 1,243, then 3,418. The 5,127th one worked.

By then he was four years deep into one problem and nobody else was in there with him.

In 1988 Richard Lenski started a count in generations rather than prototypes. He put 12 identical populations of E. coli bacteria into 12 flasks in a Michigan State lab.

Day after day, someone has moved a drop from each flask into fresh broth.

The broth holds sugar the bacteria can eat, plus a second food called citrate they cannot.

For 30,000 generations none of the 12 populations could touch the citrate.

Around generation 31,500 one of them evolved the ability to eat it.

The other 11 are past 75,000 generations now and still eat only the sugar.

That ability came out of a drop moved day after day for thousands of days.

In an Atlanta condo I started publishing one market report a week, free, on my personal site.

Readers kept coming back, so I registered the trends.vc domain.

The weekly report became a company.

Vivien Thomas spent two years operating on dogs in a Johns Hopkins lab, working out how to route blood around a malformed heart.

He built his instruments himself.

On 29 November 1944 a 15-month-old named Eileen Saxon went under.

Thomas stood on a stool behind the surgeon Alfred Blalock and talked him through the procedure.

Blalock had the medical degree.

The operation worked because Thomas spent two years learning how to do it.

Toyota workers file roughly a million small fixes a year, most of them small changes to the work in front of them. Those workers built the biggest carmaker in the world.

An edge built out of accumulated practice is what Hamilton Helmer calls process power in 7 Powers. A competitor can rebuild it and cannot buy it.

That practice adds up to judgment.

Judgment comes from being wrong in a specific way and finding out why.

The longer you stay on one problem, the shorter the list of people who can follow you in.

⛏️

Which problem would you give your next hundred cycles?