Dru's Notes

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Most plans stall because several separate problems got bundled into one decision. Split them, ship the piece that stands alone and the freeze breaks.

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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.

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The great idea shows up after you start. Build the "dumb" one and the problems you hit along the way become your next products.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I drank tea before I meditated and the day went sideways. The habits were identical. Only the order changed.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I sat down to play one game of chess. Twelve hours later, I deleted the app.

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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.

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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.

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Charlie Munger said this when asked how to live a good life. Your learning rate is your investment rate.

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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.

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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.

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I draft most posts on walks now. One experiment, voice-to-text, changed how much leverage every post gets.

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Say the word investor and most people picture money. Money is one resource among several you trade every day to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

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I broke my meditation practice many times over fifteen years. The pattern was always the same. A working practice, the impulse to make it more efficient, and a feedback loop too delayed to catch in time.

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Three types of experiments — mental, physical, social — cost different amounts of energy. The type you avoid most is usually the one to lean into next.

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Lee Kuan Yew built one of the most efficient states in modern history and engineered the legal toolkit that kept his party in office for fifty-six years.

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Each day I'd open my notebook and copy yesterday's principles to a new page by hand. Some lines I wrote without thinking. Others slowed me down.

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Each day I remove three things. A physical item, an app off my phone, a subscription on autopay. A jellyfish has no brain and has lasted 500 million years.

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I came up with a term to describe something I value. If tardigradity is the probability a thing keeps going, it has to come from somewhere.

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