Dru's Notes

Expedia got about 20 million calls a year from people asking for a copy of their itinerary. The cause was a confusing email. A pediatrician traced kids referred for ADHD to life at home. I traced a snooze back to 7:30 the night before. Featuring: Taiichi Ohno, Ryan O'Neill, Nadine Burke Harris Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities...

Each night I ask one question in my daily review: what surprised me? Norbert Wiener's anti-aircraft predictor shows how logging each surprise makes you a better predictor. Featuring: Norbert Wiener, Julian Bigelow, Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before yo...

For days my HeadsUp landing page was broken, and the board I read each day kept counting visitors. GitLab's backups warned the team each day, mice without dopamine starved beside their food, and Frank Meeks read the Pentagon's pizza orders before three invasions. Featuring: Richard Palmiter, Frank Meeks Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opp...

For years I believed the bigger my habits were, the bigger my anti-habits needed to be. A 6-hour eating window, a 4pm finish, a century of fire suppression in Yellowstone and Marc Randolph's Tuesday nights show where a rule starts working against the goal it guards. Featuring: Marc Randolph, Aldo Leopold Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and op...

Noise canceling headphones flip a sound wave upside down so the 2 waves cancel out. The same move put out a burning gas well, ended the panic of 1825, saved Wag Dodge at Mann Gulch and turned one computer worm against another. Featuring: Wag Dodge, Norman Maclean, Jeremiah Harman Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Kn...

A farming habit repeats the same action for a return you can count on. A hunting habit keeps time open for whatever opportunity shows up, and the stories of Jesse Livermore, Ronald Wayne, Andre Geim and Sara Blakely show what each one costs and buys. Featuring: Jesse Livermore, Stu Ungar, Carl Fisher, Ronald Wayne, Kenny Chow, Alvah Roebuck, Andre Geim, Steve Wozniak, Sara Blakely Read the full po...

I've spent 6 years studying businesses for Trends.vc. Lately a new kind of customer shows up in the companies I study: the AI agent. Featuring: Paul English, Nick Gray, Benjamin Houy, Nikita Shamgunov, Ivan Burazin, Will Bryk, Guillermo Rauch, Zeno Rocha Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your...

Each day I sit for insight meditation. When I write morning pages first, the meditation goes much deeper, and George Carlin, Sonny Rollins and the surgeon Butch Rosser each had a pair like it. Featuring: George Carlin, Sonny Rollins, James Rosser, Aidan Levy Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competito...

Each day I do a few things that scare me. Before I start one, I give it a score out of 100 for how hard I expect it to be. Featuring: Annie Duke, Ray Dalio, Colin Bryar, Bill Carr Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. Multi : Turn any content into a YouTube vide...

I've written a daily essay for almost 300 days. Most days what I publish falls short of what I imagined. Ira Glass explains why and what closes the gap. Featuring: Ira Glass Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. Multi : Turn any content into a YouTube video. Chapters: (00:00) Al...

A year of life gets reviewed in about an hour when each night's notes roll into the week, the month, the quarter and the year. Surgeon Ernest Codman read his own records back, found 123 mistakes and published them all. Featuring: Ernest Codman, William Mallon Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before...

Sleepy drivers who drank coffee and then took a nap of under 15 minutes cut driving incidents by 91%. Caffeine alone cut them by about two-thirds. Some pieces unlock an ability none of them has alone, on the chessboard and in habits, money and teams. Featuring: Louise Reyner, Jim Horne, Katy Milkman, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart Watch on YouTube Read...

Travis Kalanick believes a company has to solve problems at least as fast as it creates them. Each problem you solve creates new problems, so the problem you work on decides which new ones you get. Featuring: Travis Kalanick, Mike Isaac, Peter Senge Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your custo...

Three years of mobile apps and SaaS ideas ended with one question: what could I see myself working on the longest? That became Trends.vc, and Rovio's 52nd game shows why the question works. Featuring: Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen, Kim Dikert Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before y...

I've lost more chess games to the clock than to bad moves. Last week I spent a two-and-a-half-hour deep work block ranking my to-do list and never started the top item. Featuring: Sam Hinkie, Joel Embiid, Bryan Colangelo, Yaron Weitzman Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your c...

Each day I open a board with my business numbers and ask one question of each: am I above or below my 30-day median? John Walker's bathroom scale shows why one day is the wrong unit. Featuring: John Walker Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. Multi : Turn any c...

Ten minutes of a podcast teaches me more than an hour with most books. Dale Carnegie, Yuval Noah Harari and Jerry Seinfeld all worked their material out in front of people before it reached a page. Featuring: Dale Carnegie, Yuval Noah Harari, Jerry Seinfeld Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitor...

New York's sanitation workers broke a state law to strike in 1968, and with every driver out at once they won their raise. An anesthesiologist earns more than $350,000 while a nursing assistant earns about $42,000, and ASML keeps 29 cents of each dollar while Kroger keeps under 2. What becomes valuable as AI does more of our work? Featuring: John DeLury, Vincent J. Cannato Watch on YouTube Read th...

TLC's CrazySexyCool sold over 10 million copies, and a year later all three women filed for bankruptcy. Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris and earned nothing from it for about 12 years. Featuring: Tionne Watkins, Lisa Lopes, Rozonda Thomas, Perri Reid, Alexey Pajitnov, Dan Ackerman, Warren Buffett Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities....

My first rule is focus on what you control. Roughly 80% of my anxiety comes from losing sight of it. Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve shows why a rule you know still slips and why I reread mine each morning and most nights. Featuring: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Zig Ziglar Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when yo...

Antidepressant side effects start within days and the benefits take two to four weeks, so some patients stop before the drug ever works. The mathematician Tanya Khovanova kept wearing a sleep apnea mask that gave her headaches, and the author Debra Parmley quit sugar through a headache until carrots and strawberries tasted sweet again. Featuring: Alok Kanojia, Tanya Khovanova, Debra Parmley, Jean-...

Matt Affleck went all in with two aces at the 2010 World Series of Poker as a 77% favorite and lost on the last card. With FedEx down to $5,000, Fred Smith played blackjack in Las Vegas against odds that favor the casino and won $27,000. Annie Duke calls judging a decision by how it turned out "resulting." Featuring: Matt Affleck, Fred Smith, Annie Duke, Zhuge Liang Watch on YouTube Read the full...

Five days after he won the 2016 Formula 1 world title, Nico Rosberg retired. To beat Lewis Hamilton he had pushed like crazy in every area, while Haruki Murakami writes ten pages a day and stops at ten even on days he wants more. Featuring: Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, Haruki Murakami, Naval Ravikant Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and oppor...

Uber lost over $1 billion a year in China and sold out to its rival. In the US, the same bet won. When the winner takes most of a market, losing money now can raise your odds of winning it. Featuring: Jack Ma, Chris Dixon Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp : Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. Mu...

Each use of your willpower draws from the same depletable reservoir. Ray Bradbury, Ed Viesturs and Andie MacDowell show three ways to save it: change your environment, automate decisions and delete decisions. Featuring: Ray Bradbury, Ed Viesturs, Andie MacDowell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp...