Dru's Notes

Day 389 the cold water stopped scaring me, and that is the day it stopped being a courage challenge. Clinicians call the mechanism exposure therapy: repeat the thing that frightens you until the fear drains out, then climb to the next rung. Featuring: Maya Angelou, Jia Jiang, Barbra Streisand, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sara Solovitch Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Disco...

Five good habits can be one bet wearing five coats. Mine all covered my health, and nothing else in my life had any cover at all. Three hydraulic systems ran through one DC-10 tail, two flight computers ran one piece of software, and millions of banana plants were one plant repeated. Each looked like redundancy and each failed in a single stroke. Featuring: Ray Dalio, Wendell Berry, Ed Thorp, Jose...

Egypt dammed the Nile to stop the yearly flood, and two years later the sardine catch off the delta had fallen from about 15,000 tons to about 550. Britain tore out close to a million kilometers of hedgerow and now pays farmers to plant it back. India walked away from its stepwells until the taps started running dry. Three things that still worked, cut because nobody was watching them any more. Fe...

Chris Ferguson had already won a World Series of Poker Main Event when he ran a fresh bankroll from zero to ten thousand dollars, and he never put more than 5 percent of it on a table. Poker players run four tests before they move up in stakes. The same four decide when to raise the floor on a daily habit, and passing them is still a separate question from whether you should. Featuring: Chris Ferg...

Coke swapped a recipe that worked and 40,000 people wrote in to complain. The bicycle, the honeycomb and the QWERTY keyboard each show a different way a design stops changing, and why touching a finished one costs you. Featuring: Donella Meadows, John Kemp, Christopher Sholes, Thomas Hales Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. htt...

Her best proof that her hair formula worked was her own bald head. She carried before-and-after photographs into church basements and told the story herself. Featuring: Madam C.J. Walker, Booker T. Washington, Sara Blakely, Tyler Perry, Aaron Draplin 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...

I dug the same grave 5 times. All 5 climbed back out, some more than once. A habit that outlives my judgment is one worth keeping, and a crocodile that has worn the same body for 200 million years explains why. Featuring: Thich Nhat Hanh 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 m...

I gave up rest days and paid for it with 3am binges. The harder a day runs, the more I need to decompress before bed, and the day never leaves room for it. Featuring: Geneen Roth, Daphne K. Lee, Ancel Keys 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. h...

Three years of zero income ended two hours after a member of my first mastermind told me to pivot and send the message that day. The room mattered as much as the advice, and the same pattern runs through Florence, Iten, St. Louis and Bell Labs. Featuring: Eliud Kipchoge, Brian Eno, Alfred Marshall, David Rudisha, Rex Sinquefield Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Dis...

Bill Gates spent more than a billion dollars making high schools smaller and later wrote that test scores barely moved. Crime is worse in big cities, so the same reasoning is running on them now. Featuring: Garrett Hardin, Bill Gates, Geoffrey West 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 co...

A voice cuts through the track and asks, "What if I fall?" The answer follows: "Oh but my darling, what if you fly?" Erin Hanson wrote those lines at 18. The math underneath them is real, and Sam Bankman-Fried skipped the part that keeps a miss from ending you. Featuring: Ed Thorp, Erin Hanson, Sam Bankman-Fried Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets...

I stay up late to catch up on my day and the catching up puts me further behind. The clock reads close to 1am and I'm still scrolling. Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Charles Duhigg, Bill Wilson, Bob Smith, Paul Volcker, Jeff Bezos 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. Befor...

Yvon Chouinard told his staff to surf when the surf comes up. The trick isn't skipping the work, it's banking it ahead so a free morning is already paid for. Featuring: Yvon Chouinard, Oprah Winfrey 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://...

For the past 170 mornings, my writing streak depended on me showing up. This morning it stood on its own. Habit banking turns spare effort into a reserve, and a full reserve is what buys a whole day on one thing. Featuring: Oprah Winfrey, Paul Graham, Gary Keller, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Bill Gates Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportun...

One cup of tea almost broke my 108-day streak. At ten I stop caffeine for the day, and a late start meant choosing between the cup and the cutoff. A record of kept promises is your reputation with yourself, and it pays out as confidence. Featuring: Naval Ravikant, Will Durant, Jim Rohn, Chris Moneymaker, Sammy Farha, Sister Ignatia Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc:...

My friend paid off a three percent mortgage to sleep better. The same payoff would keep me up at night. Money is the one resource that fits on a spreadsheet, so it wins arguments by default against attention, energy and sleep. Featuring: Oscar Wilde, Maya Angelou, Terry Pratchett, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and op...

You can pay for a risk you never take. One email cost me a month of dread and thirty minutes of work, Kodak buried a working digital camera to protect film, and Blockbuster laughed off a fifty million dollar Netflix. Standing still is its own bet, and usually the expensive one. Featuring: Mark Zuckerberg, Erica Jong, Harvey Cox, Steve Sasson, Octavia Butler Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brou...

For years two brothers threw their best product in the trash. You've probably eaten it. The archive of work you already finished is raw material for the next thing you keep planning to build from scratch. Featuring: Austin Kleon, Twyla Tharp 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 competito...

Keyshia Cole sold a million copies of an album about love, then used one bridge for a bigger instruction: know your focus. Life seats you at several tables at once and the chips are attention. Featuring: David Senra, Warren Buffett, Alice Schroeder, Ed Thorp, Bernie Madoff, Keyshia Cole Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https:...

It costs me thirty-four seconds of cold water a day to stay in a good mood. My business growth charges more: thirty-four minutes of marketing a day. Each goal has a price. You choose how to pay it: in habits or in sporadic effort. Featuring: Henry David Thoreau, Anthony Trollope Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends...

A working habit is the one in danger. Once your effort clears its hurdle rate and starts compounding, the only threat left is your own hand reaching to push it further. Here's how to tell when raising the bar is earned, and the three forces that move it. Featuring: Nicolai Tangen, Leo Tolstoy, Rick Guerin, Tiger Woods, Nicolas Cage, Kevin Hart Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by:...

My chess wins are funded by other people's losses. Every rating point I take comes off someone else's number, and the same is true of status: rank in a crowd has to be taken from someone. Some goals charge the iron price. Others charge gold. Know which one your goal charges before you chase it. Featuring: Naval Ravikant, Adam Smith, Warren Buffett, Leon Trotsky, Lewis Carroll Watch on YouTube Read...

I promised myself 20 minutes of outbound sales. Two hours later I was still doing targeted outreach. The small number was bait. Going from zero to one costs more than everything after it, so shrink the first step until it's too small to refuse. Featuring: Ali Abdaal, Hillel the Elder Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://t...

My worst weeks start right after I improve something. For years I couldn't see the pattern, until I noticed each dip followed a habit I added or dropped. Constant tinkering resets a working system before it can compound. Featuring: Charlie Munger, Octavia Butler Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://trends.vc/ HeadsUp: Kno...

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.