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Dru Riley
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Dru's Notes
Why I Can't Drink a Latte (and Billionaires Pay No Tax) | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-29
03 min
Dru's Notes
Stop Trading Your Habits Like Stocks | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-29
02 min
Dru's Notes
Why Mormons Get Rich and Adventists Live to 100 | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-27
07 min
Dru's Notes
Your Habits Are Your Investment Portfolio | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-27
02 min
Dru's Notes
Anti-Habits: The Discipline of Saying No | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-25
02 min
Dru's Notes
I Optimized My Habits Until They Broke | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-25
03 min
Dru's Notes
Your Habits Are Only as Strong as Your Worst Day | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-23
02 min
Dru's Notes
My Cold Shower Got Better. My Business Didn't. | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-23
00 min
Dru's Notes
An AI Named the One Trait That Predicts Success | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-21
01 min
Dru's Notes
Centralize or Decentralize: How to Actually Decide | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-20
02 min
Dru's Notes
How to Make Hard Decisions When You Already Know | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-19
01 min
Dru's Notes
How to Attract the Right Clients With Your Price | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-19
01 min
Dru's Notes
Customer Lifetime Value: What ConvertKit Got Wrong | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-18
02 min
Dru's Notes
How to Adapt to Change Fast Enough | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-17
02 min
Dru's Notes
Consistency Over Intensity: What Pushing Harder Costs | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-16
02 min
Dru's Notes
Think on Paper to Keep Your Principles Sharp | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-14
00 min
Dru's Notes
Get More Done by Counting What You Finish | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-13
01 min
Dru's Notes
Analysis Paralysis Is a Bundling Problem | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-12
03 min
Dru's Notes
I Stopped Taking Rest Days. The Binges Started. | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-11
02 min
Dru's Notes
How to Get Startup Ideas: Build the "Dumb" One First | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-10
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life: The Turkey Problem | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-09
02 min
Dru's Notes
To Achieve Your Goals, Aim at Your Habits | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-08
01 min
Dru's Notes
Fail Fast, Fail Often: My 1-in-20 Hit Rate | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-07
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Achieving Goals Doesn't Make You Happy | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-06
01 min
Dru's Notes
Turning Failure Into Success: 7,000 Subs, Zero Sales | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-05
01 min
Dru's Notes
Don't Hard-Code Trauma: How to Let Go of the Past | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-05
01 min
Dru's Notes
Not All Trade-Offs Are Real | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-04
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Smart People Stay Broke | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-02
00 min
Dru's Notes
Your Morning Habits Work. The Order Doesn't. | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-01
00 min
Dru's Notes
Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Niche | Daily Essay
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.
2026-06-01
00 min
Dru's Notes
How to Get Good Ideas | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-31
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Good Habits Get Boring | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-30
01 min
Dru's Notes
The One Minute Rule for Habits That Stick | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-29
00 min
Dru's Notes
Warren Buffett's Ovarian Lottery: Are You Born Lucky? | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-27
00 min
Dru's Notes
Consistent But No Progress? It's the Hurdle Rate | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-26
01 min
Dru's Notes
How to Make Habits Stick When Life Pushes Back | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-25
00 min
Dru's Notes
Substitute, Don't Subtract: How to Break a Habit | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-24
01 min
Dru's Notes
Engineered Addiction: Why I Deleted the App | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-23
01 min
Dru's Notes
Habits of Great Writers, Founders and Investors | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-22
06 min
Dru's Notes
What a Mastermind Group Actually Does | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-22
01 min
Dru's Notes
Charlie Munger's Learning Machine (In Plain English) | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-21
01 min
Dru's Notes
Don't Believe Everything You Think. Test It. | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-20
01 min
Dru's Notes
5 Things Chess Teaches Us About Life | Daily Essay
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.
2026-05-19
02 min
Dru's Notes
Build Systems So Your Work Runs on Easy Mode | Daily Essay
I draft most posts on walks now. One experiment, voice-to-text, changed how much leverage every post gets. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-18
00 min
Dru's Notes
We Are All Investors | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-17
01 min
Dru's Notes
The Optimization Trap That Broke My Meditation Habit | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-15
01 min
Dru's Notes
How to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone, Faster | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-15
01 min
Dru's Notes
Lee Kuan Yew: Engineered Sovereignty | Biography
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. Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-14
11 min
Dru's Notes
Why I Rewrite My Principles by Hand | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-13
00 min
Dru's Notes
The Minimalist Philosophy of a Jellyfish | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-12
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Some Habits Stick: 12 Tardigrade Traits | Daily Essay
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. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-11
03 min
Dru's Notes
Buy the Red Ocean | Daily Essay
Most founders see 15 competitors and feel deflated. They should feel relieved. The buyer's move in a red ocean is to switch seats and let the market do the work. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-10
01 min
Dru's Notes
When to Give Up on a Business: Force or Flow? | Daily Essay
What's forced falls apart. The line between effort and force is flow, and the test is whether the market is returning what you put in. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-09
01 min
Dru's Notes
Ray Dalio's 42-Year Daily Habit | Daily Essay
Most people treat their morning routine like a battery that runs all day. It doesn't. Meetings, decisions and small frictions bleed it dry by noon. Reading through biographies of Dalio, Dorsey and Harari, I kept hitting the same detail: all of them meditate twice a day. So I added a midday session to test what a second reset actually does. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-08
01 min
Dru's Notes
How Meditation Eats Stress | Daily Essay
Stress is raw material. Meditation metabolizes it. Life supplies the stressors whether you want them or not, and the practice has two modes: clearing the table or going deeper. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-07
00 min
Dru's Notes
Satoshi Nakamoto: Absent Authority | Biography
Satoshi Nakamoto built money that could run without personal trust, then protected it by becoming impossible to find. This biography traces the technical record, the political timing and the deliberate disappearance of the most consequential anonymous person in financial history. Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-07
20 min
Dru's Notes
Mental Toughness via Meditation
I sit still for two and a half hours each day. Meditation trains a specific muscle: each minute is a rep against the urge to stop or check the time, and that muscle transfers to hard runs, heavy lifts, tense negotiations and cold showers. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-06
01 min
Dru's Notes
From Self Taught Programmer to Senior in Under 2 Years
I learned to code alone in Vim, with no one to unblock me. A single bug could cost a month. The high-friction years built the foundation that made everything after compound fast. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-06
02 min
Dru's Notes
Willpower Is Finite (How to Do Hard Things Anyway)
Stanford says believe hard enough and your willpower becomes unlimited. Henry Ford said the same thing a century earlier. Turns out the battery drains whether you believe it or not. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-05
00 min
Dru's Notes
The Morning Habits That Stick (Why Order Matters)
I keep my habits in an app that tracks how often I do each one. The ones at the top of the list have longer streaks. Position is the lever. Willpower is exhaustible. Interruptions stack. The first slot has the most fuel and the least drag. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-03
00 min
Dru's Notes
Eat Your Own Cooking
Most bug reports travel through three people before anyone fixes them. By then the pain is a paragraph in a ticket and the person who felt it has moved on. There's a shorter path. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-02
01 min
Dru's Notes
Flywheel Explained: One Action, Many Wins
I write a post each morning. By lunch, that post is a video on YouTube. One action that touches more than one node in your system at once. I call this a tap. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-05-02
01 min
Dru's Notes
Manifesting Is Learned Helplessness in Reverse
One line from my prediction markets video kept looping in my head. The market price was supposed to reflect what the crowd believed. It was reflecting those beliefs. It was also changing them. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-30
01 min
Dru's Notes
Launch First, Name Later
I spent two days on a name and shipped zero code. Domain searches across a dozen tabs. Then I stopped, deployed on a subdomain and started shipping. The name came later. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-29
01 min
Dru's Notes
I Deleted Social Media. Here's What I Kept.
You already know the cost before you open the app. You open it anyway. The algorithm that taught you a skill in a month is the same one eating your evenings. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-28
01 min
Dru's Notes
Do Less, Get More: The F1 Math
Most people behind on their work add more. F1 engineers know better. The math says removing weight wins. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-27
01 min
Dru's Notes
Warren Buffett vs Y Combinator: Two Strategies, One Rule
Most investors argue about concentration versus diversification. The best ones think evolutionarily. Strategy follows the environment, not preference. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-26
02 min
Dru's Notes
The Tardigrade Test: How to Build Habits That Last
Most habits die during your worst weeks. The ones that survive share a single trait that has nothing to do with discipline. This episode introduces tardigradity. It's the probability that a practice keeps going. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-25
01 min
Dru's Notes
How I Get Business Ideas
I have a backlog of 200+ rough blog post ideas. When I sit down to write today's post, the idea is already there. The same habit works for business ideas. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-24
00 min
Dru's Notes
Simulation Thinking: How to Make Hard Decisions
I built five books in one day to pick which one to ship. Why simulation thinking beats picking between descriptions, and why AI makes it runnable on any decision that matters. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-23
02 min
Dru's Notes
The Hidden Cost of Moving: Decision Fatigue
Five years of moving to a new city every few months felt like freedom. The real cost was thousands of invisible daily decisions a settled person never faces. Why environment design is really decision reduction. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-22
02 min
Dru's Notes
Time Is Not Your Most Valuable Asset
Time goes one way. Money goes both ways. You can earn back a dollar. You can never earn back an hour. Treating the two as the same is a category error. This episode breaks down a seven-layer hierarchy of resources, from money at the bottom to awareness at the top. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-21
01 min
Dru's Notes
How to Prioritize When You Have Too Many Ideas
Each day I run experiments. Most days there are more experiments in my queue than I can run. Two filters decide what gets picked first: does this remove something from the system, or does this build something future experiments depend on? Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-21
01 min
Dru's Notes
I Had Too Many Habits. Here's What Saved Me.
Habits pile like grains of sand. Add enough and the whole stack collapses under its own weight. Here's the cap I set to stop the collapses, and the split I had to make when that cap started blocking habits I wanted to add. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-20
02 min
Dru's Notes
Most Habit Trackers Miss the Point
You can't trust your memory to measure change. I add and remove habits regularly. Three weeks later I can't remember how I felt before the change. The water temperature adjusted and I adjusted with it. My solution: forced review checkpoints. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-18
01 min
Dru's Notes
How I Build Habits That Don't Break
For years my habits lived in boom and bust cycles. Then I replaced banking with ranges: a floor, a target, a ceiling. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-18
01 min
Dru's Notes
How to Close a Chapter Without Regret
I ran a daily standup for six years. 2,000 days. 44,110 standups logged. Here's how I closed the chapter with a book instead of silence. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-17
01 min
Dru's Notes
What an AI Playing Breakout Taught Me About Reality
One scene from The Thinking Game documentary stopped me. A DeepMind AI found a move no human player would try. I named it tunneling, then found nature doing the same thing for billions of years. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-16
04 min
Dru's Notes
Why Smart People Underperform
The best AI coding model writes bad code inside Antigravity IDE. The same model in Cursor or Claude Code performs much better. The same law applies to people. Environment is the multiplier. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-15
01 min
Dru's Notes
The Cure For Anxiety Is Doing More Of It
My first blog post took hours. Three months of daily posts later, I write, publish and move on. If you're anxious about something, the answer is usually more exposure. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-13
00 min
Dru's Notes
We Live in the Wild. Not the Zoo.
We live in the wild, not the zoo. The systems around us are built for what we buy, what we click and what can be mass produced. Our wellbeing is a side effect. Once we accept that no one is looking out for us, we start taking accountability for our own wellbeing and outcomes. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-12
01 min
Dru's Notes
How I Use a Paper To-Do List to Finish What Actually Matters
Each day I rewrite my to-do list on paper. The things I finished get crossed off. The unfinished things only get carried forward if they're worth rewriting. The longer an item survives that process, the louder the signal: this is the one to finish. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-11
01 min
Dru's Notes
Long-Haul Luxuries: Why I Only Buy Things Built To Last
I paid $150 for a chef's knife last week. A recent trip taught me what a good knife feels like. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-10
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why I Call Everything v0.1 Before I Launch
One label manages expectations before users can form the wrong ones. It gives you permission to ship fast. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-09
00 min
Dru's Notes
The Second-Time Rule: Turn Fixes Into Systems
The second time you do something, turn it into a protocol. One-time work that pays off each time. A rule for turning fixes into lasting systems. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-08
01 min
Dru's Notes
What 2,000 Days of Building in Public Proved
546 founders wrote daily standups for 2,000 days. The most committed founders wrote the most ordinary first entries. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-07
01 min
Dru's Notes
Do Less, Get Better: I Removed a Good Chapter
I cut a chapter from my habits book. The chapter was good. The book is better without it. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-07
00 min
Dru's Notes
Why the Simplest Version Takes the Most Work
Simple code is easier to fix, easier to read, easier to maintain. Getting to simple is the hard part. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-05
00 min
Dru's Notes
Ship Before It's Ready
I ran one command from my terminal and a post showed up on WordPress. It was rough. But it went through, end to end. Flawed but real. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-04
01 min
Dru's Notes
Justified Complexity
I talk a lot about simplicity. This week I made my render pipeline 5x more complex. On purpose. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-03
00 min
Dru's Notes
I Left My Job in 2017. Here's What 10 Years Proved.
I left my job in 2017. People thought I was crazy. Almost 10 years later, the safe path turned out to be the dangerous one. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-03
01 min
Dru's Notes
The Nobel Prize Got Loss Aversion Wrong
Loss aversion is called a cognitive bias. But the math says otherwise. A 50% loss requires a 100% gain to recover. Some losses have no recovery at all. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-04-02
01 min
Dru's Notes
Why Rest Days Made Everything Harder
I kept a rest day each week for years. It made everything harder. There's a hidden cost to any gap in a habit: reactivation energy. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-03-31
01 min
Dru's Notes
Prediction Markets Are Accurate (That's the Problem)
Prediction markets aggregate real information from people with real stakes. The accuracy is real. The influence that some participants have over the outcome is also real. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-03-31
01 min
Dru's Notes
The Trade You Make 100 Times a Day
Each choice you make is an investment. You invest time, energy, attention, willpower. Sometimes money. The question is: what's your ROI? Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-03-30
01 min
Dru's Notes
I Run Every Business Idea Through These 11 Filters
I've run hundreds of business ideas through 11 pass-or-fail filters. HeadsUp, Multi and Charm survived. Each filter covers personal use, daily frequency, platform potential, counter-positioning, portfolio fit, energy, revenue proximity, marginal costs, market size, passive value and evidence of demand. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-03-28
02 min
Dru's Notes
Will AI Take Your Job? The Rebuttal Is Incomplete
Most tea bags contain plastic. Switching to loose leaf solved one problem and created another. Problems beget problems. And when it comes to AI and jobs, the rebuttal everyone repeats is incomplete. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.
2026-03-28
01 min
Open Threads
3+ Years of Nomad Life with Dru Riley
Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc, returns to the show to talk about his life as a digital nomad for 3+ years.Brian and Dru's conversation was recorded on November 20th, 2023.(00:00) - 3+ Years of Nomad Life w/ Dru Riley (01:10) - Where in the world is Dru? (03:18) - Why choose the digital nomad lifestyle? (06:48) - Favorite places (so far)? (07:55) - Working across timezones (11:00) - Processes for life as a nomad (12:33) - Researching upcoming destinations (14:05) - Finding places to stay (15:54) - Social scenes as a digital nomad (17:35) - Challenges of living and working as a nomad
2024-01-17
19 min
Open Threads
Growing a Newsletter Business with Dru Riley (Trends.vc)
Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc joins me to talk about building his Newsletter and Community business and the systems and processes he’s used to grow it.Brian and Dru's conversation was recorded on November 20th, 2023.(00:00) - Systems to run & grow a newsletter business w/ Dru Riley (Trends.vc) (01:17) - Newsletter + Community (04:23) - Breakdown of revenue channels (07:18) - Launching a podcast for Trends.vc (10:46) - Pro membership model (12:55) - Process and delegation (18:02) - Choosing the right topics (21:38) - Marketing funnel
2023-12-20
27 min
Indie Bites
Behind the success of Trends.vc - Dru Riley, Trends
Dru Riley is the founder of Trends.vc which at its core helps people discover new ideas and markets through expertly researched reports. Trends is a bootstrapped company that makes money through it’s Trends Pro reports and community.In 2017, Dru took on a mini-retirement, sold a second home and set out with 3-5 years of savings to strike out on his own. After launching various newsletters, products and even book he eventually landed on Trends, which didn’t actually make any money for the first few months. But just 6 short months later, he was at over $20k MR...
2022-04-29
14 min