Dru's Notes

If you understand the base rate and avoid the risk of ruin with each attempt, success stops being a question of if. It becomes a question of when. Featuring: Pieter Levels, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Octavia E. Butler, Maria Konnikova 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. Be...

I fast on a range from 12pm to 2pm. Most days I make it to 2pm. A range helps your habit survive volatility. Featuring: Ron Hill, Bruce Lee, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Darwin 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: Tur...

When you eliminate real friction from a comfortable life, an idle mind manufactures artificial danger to replace it. Stillness has its place, and so does a demanding climb. Featuring: Yoshida Kenko, Stockton Rush, Michael Easter 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...

Every time a technology makes something cheap, it makes something else scarce. Money never flows to the abundance. It flows to the new bottleneck. When writing made remembering cheap, reading got expensive. Today, artificial intelligence makes intelligence cheap. What gets expensive when generating answers costs nothing? Featuring: Melvin Kranzberg, Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, Karl Benz, Robert Solow...

When you have no position to defend, you can afford to take big swings. Starting from zero feels like a disadvantage, but it gives you total freedom to run wild experiments. Featuring: James Baldwin, John Bogle, Kool Herc 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...

He had one lap before the engine turned into a lump of molten metal. In 1986 Formula 1 let teams run as much turbo boost as they dared in qualifying. Featuring: Teo Fabi, Gerhard Berger 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 M...

Mental state is a lagging output of physical state. When your energy drags, the default move is to fight your mind directly, but biology responds to physical triggers in seconds. Featuring: Joseph Pilates, Charles Czeisler, Matthew Walker 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...

Finance splits an investment return into beta and alpha. Beta is what the market gave you just for showing up. Alpha is what your skill added on top. A founder who catches a rising tide can drift forward and mistake the current for their own stroke. When multiple scientists discover calculus or the telephone simultaneously, the era's beta did the heavy lifting. Alpha shows up when the result depen...

A flywheel accelerates bad trajectories as easily as good ones. Oscar Wilde's fatal libel suit reveals why intelligent people walk straight into obvious blunders when momentum takes over. Featuring: Oscar Wilde, Annie Duke, Trent Reznor 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 mo...

The drugs were killing people. In April 1989 the safety board stopped the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. Testing an assumption exposes you to temporary downside to discover what actually works. Featuring: Annie Duke, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stewart Brand, Lewis Carroll, Orville Wright, Otto Lilienthal, Ignaz Semmelweis, Roberto Goizueta Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by:...

He turned down the extra guns and rode in anyway. In the summer of 1876, George Custer was offered Gatling guns before marching to the Little Bighorn. He said no. Featuring: Sam Altman, George Custer, Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, Brian Hunter, Shaan Puri Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Know when your compe...

Turning off a phone at 10pm protects sleep, making the next morning's schedule far more likely to hold. A refusal requires zero runtime execution, so you can maintain dozens of boundaries without cluttering your day. Featuring: Steve Jobs 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...

I cut my team's one-on-ones from every 2 weeks to once a month. Stretching the schedule looked like a clean win: fewer calls and more hours back. Alignment broke instead. Reconciling the drift took more time than the calls I set out to save. Each habit has a hurdle rate: the minimum input the system needs to clear what pushes back on it. In 1966, 3 weeks of complete bed rest cost young men 27% of...

He built the biggest jewellery chain in the world. Then he stood up at the Royal Albert Hall and called his products crap. Featuring: Gerald Ratner, Rabindranath Tagore, Carl Jung 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...

Nelson Mandela broke rock in a quarry all day, went back to a cell about 7 feet across and ran 45 minutes on the spot. He kept that routine for most of 18 years, and he wrote down what it was for. Featuring: Nelson Mandela, Charles Dickens, Gabrielle Roth, James Blumenthal Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ H...

3 months of mornings bought one Saturday's worth of information. In 2012 I coded before work every day on a product nobody had agreed to buy, then found out the truth in an afternoon at a car dealership. Thirteen years later the same test cost hours instead of months and produced a paying customer before a line of code existed. Featuring: Saras Sarasvathy Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brough...

A single digit between -4 and +4 scores each day. Two questions follow it each night. An app called Apex correlates a year of those scores against habits, sleep and mood, which ranks cold showers at +0.7, phone off after 10pm at +0.7 and laptop off after 9pm at +0.6. Featuring: Margaret J. Wheatley Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportuni...

METR sizes an AI's capability by the longest job it can finish, measured against how long a person would take, and through 2025 that length doubled roughly every seven months. A model counts as finishing when it comes out right half the time, so what you get is a coin flip you still have to check. Featuring: Margaret Atwood Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover...

Charlie Munger accused venture capitalists of screwing their investors, then called the business legitimate if you do it right. Two strategies sit behind that contradiction, one betting on what changes and one on what endures, and the choice between them turns on which fits you. Featuring: Paul Graham, Niels Bohr, Charlie Munger Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets...

One drop of solder came off each kerosene can and kept paying Rockefeller for as long as the plant ran. Rockefeller, Amazon, Voyager 1, a 272-year-old shark and the co-founder of HubSpot all run the same rule: lower what a thing costs to run and the advantage keeps paying. Featuring: Dharmesh Shah, David Senra, Vicki Robin Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and o...

Two men who won the Nobel Prize for pricing options helped found a fund that lost 4.6 billion dollars in four months. Ed Thorp ran the formula that names the right bet size and spent 19 years betting half of it, because you can count your odds at a blackjack table and only estimate them in a market. Eliud Kipchoge, an Okinawan dinner table and the race to the South Pole all run the same rule at di...

I put off a book for 15 years and finished it before lunch. The notebook it came out of had been filling since 2013, which is the whole point: Johan Cruyff's academy, a bankrupt royalist's letters about clover, and a Vanderbilt grandson who kept every dollar all run the same pattern at different speeds. Featuring: Johan Cruyff, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Guan Zhong, Samuel Hartlib Watch on YouTube Read...

James Dyson built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times in an unheated coach house while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. Four years on one problem bought him a position nobody else could follow him into, and the same shape shows up in a Michigan State lab, a Johns Hopkins operating room and a Toyota plant. Featuring: James Dyson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Richard Lenski, Vivien Thomas, Al...

Napoleon's surgeon-in-chief had more wounded men than surgeons, so he threw rank out and sorted by injury instead. Alexander Kotov wrote the same move down for chess in 1971, and Henry Singleton ran Teledyne on it with no five-year plan. Featuring: Henry Singleton, Henry David Thoreau, Warren Buffett, Brent Beshore, Alexander Kotov, Dominique Jean Larrey Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought...

Each book Neil Gaiman writes gets written twice. He writes the first draft by hand, because a pen is slow enough to think a sentence all the way through, then types the whole thing up. Lucretius, Darwin's finches and Chris Rock all ran the same test. Featuring: Neil Gaiman, Chris Rock, Stephen Greenblatt, Poggio Bracciolini, Peter Sims, Rosemary Grant, Jonathan Weiner Watch on YouTube Read the ful...