Dru's Notes

Ten years back, my interior designer wanted to put a bar cart in my house. Put liquor in plain sight and you're subconsciously primed. Move it out of sight and the thought doesn't form. Featuring: Leonardo da Vinci Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://h...

Kiese Laymon ran at least six miles a day for 2,564 days straight until his body broke. With most good things, more does less each time. With a few, more starts producing the harm it was protecting you from. Featuring: Kiese Laymon, Dongfang Shuo Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Bef...

Blue team defends a system. Red team breaks in. The defender needs to be perfect, while the attacker only has to find a single error. Featuring: Biggie Smalls, Cory Doctorow, Phil Hellmuth Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any...

Unlocking your phone by face is instant. A passcode adds a few seconds of friction where you decide whether to keep going. Featuring: W. Clement Stone Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. https:/...

I ran a daily standup for 2,000 days. Hundreds of founders joined and logged 44,110 standups, but ending it took years. Featuring: Milton Friedman Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. https://mak...

I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host asked what move had a payoff that wildly outran its cost. Curfew was my answer: an app that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm. Featuring: Gustave Flaubert, Jonathan Franzen Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers...

I thought bigger muscle just meant more strength. Then a health podcast on a run split capacity from firing. Two fishermen showed why waiting to feel ready is just not starting. Featuring: Dickie Bush, Flannery O'Connor Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. http...

I tried to learn Spanish for years and never consistently found the time. Any hour I gave it came straight out of something else I needed to do. Featuring: Kevin J. Anderson, Nilofer Merchant, Alice Walker Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bo...

Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile and within two years dozens followed. Proving that a threshold is possible destroys the mental hurdle and ratchets belief forward. Featuring: Roger Bannister, John Landy Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://hea...

I paid two to three times what the same condo cost outside the city. It was the tail end of a three-year mini-retirement. Featuring: B. F. Skinner, Wilbur Wright, Lee Robins Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a...

My shirt rubbed my nipple raw when I moved my run from 55 minutes to 89. Dehydration arrived at the same time. Featuring: Safi Bahcall, Emil Zátopek Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. https://m...

On the show Creator Lab, Bilal Zaidi asked me whether I would take investors for Trends.vc. I said no. Featuring: Bilal Zaidi, Phillip Knowlton, Craig Newmark, Jim Buckmaster, Travis Kalanick, Fawzi Kamel Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot...

I got the thing I'd wanted my whole life and then I stopped growing. Doing hard things when your back is against the wall is survival; courage is doing them when nothing is making you. Featuring: Søren Kierkegaard, Jia Jiang, Tim Ferriss Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your...

I tried more than 20 businesses before one of them worked. One or two made a little money, but none of them got big despite working hard on each one. Featuring: Thomas Reid Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a...

Markus Frind built the largest dating site in the world by himself, ran it on about an hour a day and sold it for $575 million to a single shareholder. Then he bought more than 1,100 acres in the Okanagan and went back to farming. Featuring: Markus Frind, Annie Frind, Kevin Burton, Frank Giustra, Lady Gaga Watch on YouTube Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https...

Each day I ask one question: what's the one thing I can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary? Putting a time estimate beside the answer forces a mental simulation before you lift a finger. Featuring: Sun Tzu Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. h...

When I wrote my first Trends.vc reports, I focused on density. Each good piece of content either makes you afraid to stop consuming or unable to stop consuming: the signal-to-noise contract or the escapism contract. Featuring: Flannery O'Connor Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Befor...

Habit systems, airline networks and 17th-century warships all fail the same way: not from a catastrophic shock, but under the weight of too many reasonable additions. Featuring: Hyman Minsky, Courtland Allen, Michael Santoro, Lyn Montgomery, Klas Fleming, Joseph Tainter Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ Head...

Send me an email on Tuesday and you hear back the following Monday. That lag buys six days of unbroken focus, the same way Costco's 14% markup cap and Southwest's single aircraft type bought each company the thing it actually sells. Featuring: Thomas Sowell Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know whe...

Avoiding the work does not mean you are lazy. It means the step in front of you is too steep. Featuring: John Steinbeck Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. https://makemulti.com...

Erik Seidel folds king-nine because a weak side card leaves you drawing to second-best. Warren Buffett skipped that fold in 1962, spent 20 years buying looms for a dying textile mill and put the bill at over $200 billion in forgone compounding. Featuring: Erik Seidel, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Maria Konnikova, Doyle Brunson, Derek Sivers Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by:...

I gave up daily writing in my early 20s. Life got chaotic and the habit felt expendable. Featuring: Henri Frédéric Amiel Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. https://makemulti.co...

A packed schedule breaks from overuse. An empty schedule atrophies from underuse. Without a deadline tomorrow, tonight slips to midnight because of Parkinson's law: give a night no reason to end and it stretches. Meanwhile, stacking back-to-back commitments works like corporate financial debt: one unexpected fire wipes out the entire day. Morgan Housel runs his days at 80% capacity for the same re...

Sugarcane farmers in India get paid once a year at harvest. Tested on cognitive puzzles before and after, the score gap matched a lost night of sleep or 13 IQ points. Daily habit streaks create the exact same bandwidth tax: the daily worry of missing a day creates dread that makes the habit feel heavy. Habit banking removes the daily deadline pressure by building a forward reserve, letting you kee...

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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. https://headsup.bot Multi: T...