A thought I've been having lately: Stoicism drives clarity and focus, while emotion / empathy drives action and progress. A balance of both is needed to do big things.

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something. And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy. Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output. This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work. I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution. Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook. With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it. My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day. There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed. Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work. I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things. I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master. Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

Too many people want to change the world, and not enough want to change it for the better.

happiness is the joy felt moving towards your potential.

men in their 40s used to have cool midlife crisis but now they just have agentic workflows

Peter Thiel: "Do One Thing"

.@lulumeservey on how founders can break through the noise: "I looked up the literal definition of 'white noise.' It's basically: maximum intensity, at every frequency, altogether, so that it's mushed into this nothingness. That feels like the information environment that we're in." "The only way to break through the white noise is: you don't compete on being loud. And competing on temporary intensity is not it. But one, normal volume or quieter note, that is sustained for a long period of time, actually does cut through." "People love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express, articulated into words that they wish they could have thought of."

I think this is a brilliant observation from Lulu: people root for you when they think you deserve more than you've got, and root against you when it's the opposite. It captures an essential element of good comms...how can you help people think you're underrated rather than overrated? People are very motivated to correct the record in either direction, or as Lulu puts it, "We're all kind of reputational karens."

Sensing our shared humanity and the smallness of the world is one of the best feelings.

Others' Beliefs Become Your Reality This is called the Pygmalion effect. If people around you say you'll never grow, you probably never will. Surround yourself with people who believe in your potential.

have been having too much fun on tradle.net lately, and just vibe coded an art history guessing game, modeled after my college art history class final. art-time-quest.lovable.app/ feedback welcome

It only takes five minutes to break the cycle. Five minutes of exercise and you are back on the path. Five minutes of writing and the manuscript is moving forward again. Five minutes of conversation and the relationship is restored. It doesn't take much to feel good again.

Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Your entire life will change the moment you stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have. Get your dopamine from action.

universally the most successful and happy people I know if you shadowed them for a day would look like professional readers regardless of what their jobs actually are. the greatest freedom is making money from chasing interesting and rare information