Dru's Notes

Two years of thinking never told me why I struggle to disconnect from electronics by 10pm. One week of experiments did. The fix came from treating my own habit like broken code: change one variable, watch what moves. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Sears died in the gap between Walmart and Nordstrom. The NBA deleted its least efficient shot and scored better than ever. A habit set on a single middle number carries the same hidden tax: cut the middle, keep the floor and the bar, and the range gets stronger. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I broke my own meditation practice the same way for fifteen years. Then an AI playing Atari Breakout taught me to tell a wall I should accept from a door I could walk through. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Some nights I'd binge until 3am, sometimes 5, then wake up ashamed. For a long time I read those nights as a discipline failure. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I sent an email about putting my habits on a range instead of a single number, and a reader asked why. The answer says something true about every model worth using, from a subway map to Newton's laws. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

My sleep app shows a debt. Skip an hour of sleep and it adds that hour to the total. A few short nights running and I owe eight hours, then ten. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I sat down to meditate for one minute a day, fifteen years ago. The sitting now runs up to two and a half hours, and the same math built a business, forty-seven novels and the biggest carmaker in the world. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Rick Guerin had the same returns as Buffett and Munger. He borrowed to get there faster and lost his seat at the table. The same leverage runs through a hedge fund of Nobel winners and my own daily habits. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

One line in my task queue said "set up an email address." It was really nine steps across two domains. Breaking a task into its real steps is what turns a stuck line into work you can start. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

If you rewound your life and took the fastest route to where you stand right now, you'd see how much time got burned on things that didn't matter. A quote from Julian Shapiro sent the exercise off, and here are the four things it surfaced. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Confidence is a trailing indicator. The feeling follows the evidence, and the evidence comes from reps. A neuroscientist's work on addiction explains why pep talks fade like a drug while months of showing up move the baseline for good. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

The British Navy cured scurvy, then optimized the cure away without noticing. The habit whose benefit you can no longer feel is the one you're most likely to cut. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Two rules I keep for unrelated reasons (no caffeine after ten, no food before two) quietly banned coffee with milk. The same thing builds computers inside a math game, leaves a baby stateless, and lets a fortune pass untaxed: simple rules stacking into outcomes no one designed. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

The investors who traded the most underperformed the market by a wide margin. I traded my habits the same way, swapping working routines for new ones and ignoring what each trade cost the whole system. Locking my habits for the month is what stopped the crashes. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Jews are 0.2% of the world and have won 20% of the Nobel Prizes. A poor kid in Salt Lake City has the best odds of reaching the top of any big city in America. Seventh-day Adventists outlive their neighbors by a decade. Five repeated rituals explain it, and you can borrow them without the belief. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I sold a habit this week: 389 days of cold showers, closed out and swapped for a daily courage challenge. Your life is the blended return on the habits you hold, so run them like a portfolio: hold the winners, reallocate when a better use appears and stay concentrated. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I turned down someone I was interested in because their party started after my 10pm shutdown. A look at the rules about what I won't do and what each one pays back. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

For years I kept swapping working habits for better ones. Each swap reset the momentum, until I capped my habits at 13 and locked the portfolio so it could only change in the first five days of the month. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A habit set on a single target snaps the first hard week. Set each habit on a range instead, with a floor low enough to clear on your worst day, and the streak bends rather than breaks. Fibonacci bands turn one number into three states: floor, normal and stretch. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I made my cold shower longer for months while my business barely grew. The willpower I poured into a habit that already worked was willpower the bottleneck never got. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

An AI, asked what separates the ultra successful, named tolerance for ambiguity. Most people resolve the not-knowing too early and call it prudence. Running experiments daily is how you train the opposite. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A jellyfish survives 500 million years with no brain, every decision made at the edge. Where decisions should live, at the edge or in a center, decides whether an organization wins. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A poker trainer hands you the right move in a fraction of a second. Pulling the trigger is the hard part. Knowing the expected value was never the blocker. Nerve is. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Cutting the price of Trends Pro changed who signed up. Support rose, engagement thinned, the room shifted. Raising the price back filtered for people who arrived ready. Price selects your market before anyone reaches your inbox. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

ConvertKit auto-upgraded my bill the hour my list crossed a tier, then held the higher price when it dropped back under. Their own logs later admitted about $936 in overcharges across eight months. The math from the vendor's side is the real story. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.