Episode · · 04:56
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...
Episode · · 02:47
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 som...
Episode · · 01:33
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 afte...
Episode · · 03:16
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 ...
Episode · · 03:13
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: chan...
Episode · · 01:44
Sears died in the gap between Walmart and Nordstrom. The NBA deleted its least efficient shot and scored better than ever. A habit set on a single middle number carries the same hidd...
Episode · · 03:37
I broke my own meditation practice the same way for fifteen years. Then an AI playing Atari Breakout taught me to tell a wall I should accept from a door I could walk through.
Episode · · 01:00
Some nights I'd binge until 3am, sometimes 5, then wake up ashamed. For a long time I read those nights as a discipline failure.
Episode · · 02:54
I sent an email about putting my habits on a range instead of a single number, and a reader asked why. The answer says something true about every model worth using, from a subway map...
Episode · · 06:25
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.
Episode · · 01:48
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 bigges...
Episode · · 03:43
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 a...
Episode · · 01:58
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 ca...
Episode · · 02:01
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 th...
Episode · · 02:22
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 w...
Episode · · 03:47
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.
Episode · · 03:49
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 ...
Episode · · 02:42
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 cos...
Episode · · 07:37
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...
Episode · · 02:22
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 p...