Dru's Notes

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.

For years I built businesses that went nowhere. Then one took off, once I held a daily floor of experiments. Below the floor your work falls behind a drifting world. Above it, it compounds. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Pushing one habit harder than it needs steals from the habits still below the line. The durable move is the smallest version that still compounds. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

After a month without rewriting my principles by hand, the impulses they keep in check started winning. Copying them onto a fresh page each week is what keeps hard-won lessons from fading. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I count my output by what I finish, not the hours I sit. Flannery O'Connor watched the clock; Stephen King counted words. A 17-day launch burnout taught me which one to trust. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Most plans stall because several separate problems got bundled into one decision. Split them, ship the piece that stands alone and the freeze breaks. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I made the case for cutting rest days. Then the binges started: every two weeks or so, a Thursday ending at 3am, with the brain collecting the rest I refused to schedule. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

The great idea shows up after you start. Build the "dumb" one and the problems you hit along the way become your next products. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

One day the turkey wakes up and it's Thanksgiving. Comfort feels like safety, but it lets risk pile up quietly until it hits all at once. The fix is to take small risks on purpose, while a miss still costs little. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A goal doesn't have a hurdle rate. Habits do. Break the goal into the habits that feed it. Find each one's input level. Make experimenting the habit that carries you when the destination is uncertain. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Most experiments fail, and that's the point. About 1 in 20 becomes a material win that keeps paying, and you can't tell which before you run it. So run more. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

You hit the goal and the win fades by tomorrow. The target was never fixed: reach it and you want the next one. Chess ratings and jiu-jitsu belts turn out to be the same trap in different clothing. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A pre-sell to 7,000 subscribers got zero sales. The failure forced a free-plus-upgrade model that broke a three-year income drought and became Trends.vc. The target I missed was smaller than what the miss handed me. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A fraud alert in a foreign country almost became a permanent rule. The real fix was a backup card. Most bad experiences don't deserve a lifetime policy. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I cut from two operations days a week to one and watched email slow down while support got faster. That gap exposed a trade-off that was never real, and a way through it. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

There are two ways to be careful with money. One group tracks what they pay. The other tracks what they get back. Only one builds wealth. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I drank tea before I meditated and the day went sideways. The habits were identical. Only the order changed. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

The anger you aim at a public figure is aimed at the wrong target. The role was open and the pay was good, so someone was going to take it. The person is replaceable. The game stays. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

A single curious question became Multi and the biggest payoff of my year. You can't tell how much an experiment will pay off before you run it, so run more of them. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Day one of a habit is an inertia problem. Day 89 is a boredom problem. The challenge changes as a habit ages, and naming the level you're on tells you which fight you're actually in. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Three weeks of planning a habit I never started. The first step felt too steep. I set a timer for one minute, worked on the launch, and did it again the next day. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

John Rawls wrote a thought experiment about the original position. Imagine you're behind a veil, about to be born, but you don't know where. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

You can be consistent and still be dying. Every habit has a hurdle rate: the minimum input it needs to clear the entropy working against it. Show up below the rate and you lose ground daily, even while the streak holds. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I ran for half an hour and ten minutes became my new normal. Most habits break because the daily target has no room above it. Put the habit on a range with a floor and a ceiling, and the ceiling buys the buffer that keeps the habit alive on bad days. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Every rule I set to stop scrolling at night broke until I added jazz. Imperfect substitution beats failed abstinence because it leaves you with progress while pure willpower leaves you with nothing. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I sat down to play one game of chess. Twelve hours later, I deleted the app. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Great operators run two stacks every day: the work stack and the distribution stack. This episode maps how writers, founders and investors build both, and why one stack alone leaves great work unseen. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Three years of zero income ended in two hours because someone in a room saw what I couldn't. The five things a mastermind does that solo work can't replicate. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Charlie Munger said this when asked how to live a good life. Your learning rate is your investment rate. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

For 15 years I believed meditation had to be the first thing after waking. One experiment with sun exposure dissolved that 15-year belief in 48 hours. The more experiments you run, the more fit you become to your environment, and the more accurate your model of the world. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

I sat down to play one game of chess. Twelve hours later the day was gone. Five lessons from the board that run my work and my life. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.