“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.
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What could you make cheaper so it runs for decades?
