Dru's Notes
Self-Improvement
About
One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
Episodes
- Why Some Habits Stick: 12 Tardigrade Traits | Daily Essay
This episode introduces the concept of 'tardigradity' as the probability of persistence, linking it to the development of habits. The host explores 12 traits associated with this concept, drawing parallels to tardigrades.
- Buy the Red Ocean | Daily Essay
This daily essay discusses how founders can interpret the presence of many competitors in a market. It suggests that operating in a red ocean can be advantageous for buyers and market dynamics.
- When to Give Up on a Business: Force or Flow? | Daily Essay
This episode discusses the concept of 'flow' in business, distinguishing it from forced effort. It suggests that market feedback is the key test for determining whether to continue or abandon a business venture.
- Ray Dalio's 42-Year Daily Habit | Daily Essay
This episode discusses Ray Dalio's practice of meditating twice daily, drawing inspiration from biographies of notable figures. The host shares their own experience testing a midday meditation session to observe its effects on sustained fo…
- How Meditation Eats Stress | Daily Essay
This episode explains how meditation metabolizes stress, offering two modes of practice: clearing the table or going deeper. Life's stressors are unavoidable, and meditation provides a way to process them.
- Satoshi Nakamoto: Absent Authority | Biography
This biography examines Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation of a decentralized currency, the timing of its release, and Nakamoto’s subsequent disappearance, establishing them as a pivotal anonymous figure in financial history.
- Mental Toughness via Meditation
This episode discusses how a daily 2.5-hour meditation practice builds mental toughness. The practice trains the mind by resisting the urge to stop or check the time, strengthening a mental muscle that applies to various challenges.
- From Self Taught Programmer to Senior in Under 2 Years
The speaker details their journey from a self-taught programmer using Vim to achieving a senior role in under two years. They emphasize how early high-friction learning experiences became a foundation for rapid skill compoundment.
- Willpower Is Finite (How to Do Hard Things Anyway)
Dru's Notes explores the concept that willpower is a finite resource, despite beliefs to the contrary suggested by figures like Stanford researchers and Henry Ford. The episode notes that willpower drains regardless of belief.
- The Morning Habits That Stick (Why Order Matters)
This episode discusses how the order of morning habits impacts their success, suggesting that positioning and tracking streaks are key. It highlights that willpower is finite and interruptions accumulate, making the first habit slot the mo…
- Eat Your Own Cooking
This episode discusses the common bug reporting process where issues are handled by multiple people, often losing the original context. It suggests a more direct approach to fixing bugs is possible.
- Flywheel Explained: One Action, Many Wins
This episode explains the 'flywheel' concept, referring to a single action that generates multiple positive outcomes within a system. The method, called a 'tap', efficiently turns a morning post into a YouTube video by lunchtime.
- Manifesting Is Learned Helplessness in Reverse
This episode of Dru's Notes explores the concept of manifesting, relating it to prediction markets where market prices not only reflect but also influence crowd beliefs.
- Launch First, Name Later
This episode discusses the importance of launching and shipping code quickly, even before a final name is decided. The host shares a personal experience of delaying development due to naming concerns and how deploying on a subdomain allowe…
- I Deleted Social Media. Here's What I Kept.
This episode of Dru's Notes covers the decision to delete social media, acknowledging the user's awareness of the costs associated with app usage. It touches upon how algorithms that initially teach skills can also consume free time.
- Do Less, Get More: The F1 Math
This episode discusses the F1 engineering principle of removing weight to improve performance, suggesting this approach can also enhance productivity by doing less.
- Warren Buffett vs Y Combinator: Two Strategies, One Rule
This episode discusses investment strategies, contrasting Warren Buffett's methods with Y Combinator's. It highlights the principle that successful investment strategy evolves with the environment, rather than being based on personal prefe…
- The Tardigrade Test: How to Build Habits That Last
This episode explores tardigradity, the probability that a practice continues even through difficult times. It highlights a key trait of habits that survive, which is unrelated to discipline.
- How I Get Business Ideas
This episode of Dru's Notes explains a method for generating business ideas by maintaining a backlog of blog post ideas. The host applies this same habit to create business concepts.
- Simulation Thinking: How to Make Hard Decisions
This episode discusses simulation thinking as a superior method for making difficult decisions, contrasting it with simply choosing between descriptions. It highlights how AI can be used to run simulations for any important decision.
- The Hidden Cost of Moving: Decision Fatigue
This episode of Dru's Notes explores the hidden costs of frequent moving, identifying decision fatigue as a significant drawback. It suggests that designing one's environment can effectively reduce the number of daily decisions required.
- Time Is Not Your Most Valuable Asset
This episode of Dru's Notes differentiates time and money as assets, arguing that time, unlike money, cannot be recovered once spent. It introduces a seven-layer hierarchy of resources, placing money at the bottom and awareness at the top.
- How to Prioritize When You Have Too Many Ideas
In this episode of Dru's Notes, the host discusses how to prioritize tasks when faced with an overwhelming number of ideas. Two specific filters are used to decide which experiments to pursue first.
- I Had Too Many Habits. Here's What Saved Me.
In this episode, Dru discusses the overwhelming nature of accumulating too many habits, likening it to collapsing sand. Dru shares the limit established to prevent this issue and the subsequent adjustments made when the limit interfered wi…
- Most Habit Trackers Miss the Point
This episode reflects on the limitations of relying on memory to track personal change and habit adjustment. Dru proposes implementing forced review checkpoints as a solution to track shifts over time.
- How I Build Habits That Don't Break
Dru discusses a habit-building strategy that replaces the typical boom and bust cycle with a range-based system, featuring a floor, target, and ceiling. This method aims to create more consistent and sustainable habits.
- How to Close a Chapter Without Regret
Dru shares how they concluded a six-year, 2,000-day run of daily standups, logging 44,110 standups. Instead of ending silently, this chapter was closed with the publication of a book.
- What an AI Playing Breakout Taught Me About Reality
A DeepMind AI's novel strategy in Breakout, called "tunneling," which was not intuitive for human players, is discussed. This strategy is then compared to similar natural phenomena that have occurred over billions of years.
- Why Smart People Underperform
This episode explores how environmental factors influence performance, comparing the output of AI coding models in different IDEs to human behavior. It argues that just as environment affects AI coding quality, it also acts as a multiplier…
- The Cure For Anxiety Is Doing More Of It
This episode discusses overcoming anxiety through increased exposure to the feared activity, using the host's experience with daily blogging as an example. The host suggests that consistent action is the key to reducing anxiety.
- We Live in the Wild. Not the Zoo.
The episode argues that societal systems are designed around consumption and mass production, often neglecting individual wellbeing. It encourages listeners to accept that they are responsible for their own wellbeing and outcomes.
- How I Use a Paper To-Do List to Finish What Actually Matters
In this episode of Dru's Notes, the host explains a paper-based to-do list method where daily rewriting and carrying forward unfinished tasks highlights what truly matters. This process signals the most important tasks to focus on and comp…
- Long-Haul Luxuries: Why I Only Buy Things Built To Last
Dru shares an experience of buying a $150 chef's knife, inspired by a recent trip and the feeling of using a good quality tool. The episode touches on the concept of 'long-haul luxuries' and investing in items built to last.
- Why I Call Everything v0.1 Before I Launch
The episode discusses the strategy of labeling projects as v0.1 to manage user expectations and enable faster shipping. This approach permits quick iteration before users can form potentially incorrect assumptions.
- The Second-Time Rule: Turn Fixes Into Systems
The Second-Time Rule is a strategy for transforming one-time fixes into sustainable systems by establishing protocols. This approach ensures that initial efforts provide ongoing benefits.
- What 2,000 Days of Building in Public Proved
This episode discusses a 2,000-day project where 546 founders shared daily standups. It was observed that the most committed founders tended to write the most ordinary initial entries.
- Do Less, Get Better: I Removed a Good Chapter
In this episode of Dru's Notes, the host discusses the decision to remove a chapter from their habits book. Despite the chapter being good, the book is ultimately improved by its exclusion.
- Why the Simplest Version Takes the Most Work
This episode discusses the value of simple code, highlighting its benefits for fixing, reading, and maintenance. It emphasizes that the process of reaching simplicity is the most demanding part.
- Ship Before It's Ready
This episode covers a functional, though flawed, demonstration of creating a WordPress post via a terminal command. The process, while rough, successfully executed from start to finish.
- Justified Complexity
In this episode of Dru's Notes, Dru details how he intentionally made his render pipeline five times more complex, a decision that contrasts with his usual emphasis on simplicity.
- I Left My Job in 2017. Here's What 10 Years Proved.
This episode of Dru's Notes covers the speaker's decision to leave their job in 2017, which was initially met with skepticism. After nearly 10 years, the speaker reflects on how the seemingly safe career path proved to be the riskier one.
- The Nobel Prize Got Loss Aversion Wrong
This episode challenges the Nobel Prize's definition of loss aversion, arguing it's not a cognitive bias. Mathematical examples illustrate how recovery from losses is not always possible or proportional to gains.
- Why Rest Days Made Everything Harder
This episode explores how implementing weekly rest days unexpectedly made activities harder due to the 'reactivation energy' needed to resume habits after a break.
- Prediction Markets Are Accurate (That's the Problem)
This episode discusses the accuracy of prediction markets, noting they aggregate real information from individuals with stakes. It also touches upon the real influence some participants can exert on market outcomes.
- The Trade You Make 100 Times a Day
This episode discusses how every choice is an investment of resources like time and energy. It prompts listeners to evaluate the return on investment for these daily decisions.
- I Run Every Business Idea Through These 11 Filters
Dru shares 11 filters used to evaluate business ideas, such as personal use, market size, and revenue proximity. Three ideas—HeadsUp, Multi, and Charm—have successfully passed these filters.
- Will AI Take Your Job? The Rebuttal Is Incomplete
This episode of Dru's Notes discusses the common rebuttal to the question of AI taking jobs, using the analogy of plastic in tea bags to illustrate how problems can lead to further complications. The host suggests the standard rebuttal to…
- Why I Went to the Gym at Midnight (The Streak Method)
This episode of Dru's Notes discusses the Streak Method and the host's personal experience with going to the gym at midnight. The content focuses on the 'why' behind this unusual gym visit.