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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.
Show Notes
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.
Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Ray Dalio, Sara Blakely, Howard Marks, Maya Angelou, Yvon Chouinard, Brian Chesky, Naval Ravikant, Jack Dorsey, Tim Ferriss, Marc Andreessen, Cal Newport, Patrick Collison, Peter Thiel, Austin Kleon, Pieter Levels, Tyler Cowen, Ryan Holiday, Casey Neistat, Paul Graham, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Hayao Miyazaki, Stephen King, David Lynch, Mason Currey
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Creators and Guests
MC
Guest
Mason Currey
Featured in Dru's Notes: Habits of Great Writers, Founders and Investors.
PL
Guest
Pieter Levels
Featured in Dru's Notes: Habits of Great Writers, Founders and Investors.
What is Dru's Notes?
One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind."
Haruki Murakami
Look at the daily lives of great writers, founders and investors. You see the same shape every time. A small set of rituals. Each one specific. Each one non-negotiable.
A ritual here is one practice with a cadence.
Most surveys of great operators (Mason Currey's Daily Rituals is the canon) show only the creation rituals. Creation without the distribution is misleading. Two thousand words a day in a drawer is two thousand words in a drawer. Creation is necessary but not sufficient.
Work:
- Begins at first light
- Writes standing at a chest-high bookshelf or typewriter
- Stops only when he knows what comes next
- Tracks the daily word count on a hand-drawn chart on the wall
- Pegs 500 words as a good day
- Spends the afternoon fishing, swimming or drinking
- Re-reads the manuscript from the start before writing more
Distribution:
- Charles Scribner's Sons handled trade
- Files an Esquire "Letter" essay roughly monthly from 1933 to 1936
- Sits for staged photo shoots with his boat, his rifle and the marlin
- Travels to bullfights, safaris and wars as press fodder
- Sat for the Paris Review's "Art of Fiction No. 21" interview (1958) that locked in the writer-as-craftsman myth
Work:
- Wears the same outfit every day (black turtleneck, Levi's 501s, New Balance 991s)
- Walks long loops with whoever he wants to talk to instead of holding office meetings
- Sits cross-legged on the floor barefoot during early Apple meetings
- Eats the same one or two foods for weeks at a stretch
- Returns to the same Zen monastery near Los Altos for retreats
Distribution:
- Apple's products and retail did most of the marketing
- Rehearses every keynote for weeks before delivery
- Delivers four to six keynotes a year at Apple events
- Granted personal interviews sparingly and only to chosen reporters (Walt Mossberg, Steven Levy, Brent Schlender)
- Sat for the 2005 Stanford commencement address that became the most-watched commencement speech of all time
Work:
- Spends five to six hours a day reading newspapers, filings and books
- Drinks five Coca-Colas every day
- Orders McDonald's breakfast based on whether Berkshire's stock is up or down
- Tap-dances to work, in his own words
- Plays bridge twelve hours a week online
- Holds his calendar mostly empty by design
Distribution:
- Writes the Berkshire annual letter every year since 1965 (never missed)
- Hosts the Berkshire annual meeting in Omaha (six hours of unscripted Q&A, 40,000+ attendees)
- Appears on CNBC's Squawk Box for scheduled interviews each spring
- Lets the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett (HBO, 2017) be filmed at home
- Sat for the Snowball biography (Alice Schroeder, 2008) over 2,000 hours of interviews
Work:
- Wakes at 4 AM
- Watches the first light come in before writing
- Drinks coffee before any words
- Writes on yellow legal pads in longhand
- Reserves the pre-dawn block for fiction while raising two boys and editing at Random House
- Edits standing at a tall lectern in the afternoon
Distribution:
- Random House published her (and she was a senior editor there until 1983)
- Gives public readings on a touring circuit around each book release
- Holds a permanent residency at Princeton (1989-2006), building literary community and press access
- Won the Nobel Prize in 1993 (which then re-marketed every prior book)
Work:
- Arrives at Studio Ghibli around 11 AM
- Stays until 9 PM, seven days a week during production
- Sleeps on a cot in the studio when a deadline closes in
- Walks the neighborhood at 3 PM for fresh air and ideas
- Hand-draws every key frame himself
- Smokes outside the office under a small awning
Distribution:
- Studio Ghibli's distribution deals (Disney internationally, Toho in Japan) handled trade
- Sits for full press tours around every release
- Subject of the NHK documentary series 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki and Never-Ending Man
- Opened the Ghibli Museum (2001) as a permanent marketing artifact
Work:
- Walks the Sandwalk three times a day on a quarter-mile loop
- Counts pebbles on each lap so his mind can wander
- Holds three writing blocks of about 90 minutes each
- Lets his wife Emma read aloud to him after lunch at 3 PM
- Plays backgammon with Emma every evening
- Writes six or more letters by hand each day
Distribution:
- John Murray (publisher) printed On the Origin of Species and sold out the first run of 1,250 copies in a day
- The 6+ letters a day to Hooker, Lyell, Huxley and Wallace were both work and the entire scientific press apparatus of the era
- Coordinated the Linnean Society reading of his theory alongside Wallace's paper in July 1858
- Sends complimentary copies of Origin to 250 named scientists before publication
- Let T.H. Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") run the public debate
Work:
- Holds no meetings before 10 AM
- Saves high-IQ decisions for the morning
- Sleeps eight hours, every night
- Opens every meeting with thirty minutes of silent reading of a six-page narrative memo
- Refuses to read PowerPoint slides
- Treats a handful of decisions a year as "Type 1" and gives them concentrated time
Distribution:
- Writes the annual shareholder letter every spring (since 1997)
- Appends the original 1997 letter to every subsequent letter
- Delivers keynotes at AWS re:Invent each year
- Sat for a CBS 60 Minutes feature in 1999 that broke Amazon mainstream
- Bought the Washington Post in 2013 as both investment and permanent press capital
Work:
- Reads across psychology, biology, history and physics every day
- Sits in a chair for an hour or two doing nothing but thinking
- Inverts every problem before trying to solve it
- Refuses meetings without a written agenda
- Eats See's peanut brittle as a fixed habit
Distribution:
- Hosts the Daily Journal annual meeting Q&A (separate from Berkshire's)
- Delivers one or two major university speeches a year (USC commencement 1986 and 2007, Harvard Law 1995)
- Let Poor Charlie's Almanack (2005) compile his speeches as the canonical artifact
- Sat for podcast interviews with John Collison, Tren Griffin and Acquired in the final years
Work:
- Wakes at 4 AM
- Writes for five to six hours straight
- Stops at ten pages even if a sentence is half-finished
- Runs 10 km or swims 1,500 m every afternoon
- Reads or listens to music in the evening
- Lights out by 9 PM
- Holds the same schedule for six months at a stretch while drafting a novel
Distribution:
- Knopf (US) and Shinchosha (Japan) handle trade
- Sits for almost no interviews and runs no book tour
- Publishes short stories in Japanese literary magazines on the cycle between novels
- Wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Running as a personal-brand artifact about the running itself
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
- Has held the same meditation practice since 1973
- Eats the same lunch for years at a stretch
- Drinks seven Cokes a day during peak production years
- Sketches in the same notebook he carries everywhere
- Watches the weather every morning before starting work
Distribution:
- Studios and festivals handled film releases (Cannes premiered Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive)
- Recorded a daily weather report on his own YouTube channel from May 2020 to his death
- Released music albums, sold paintings and sold David Lynch Coffee as branded objects between films
- Hosted the Festival of Disruption in LA and Brooklyn as recurring marketing events
- Wrote Catching the Big Fish (2006) as the personal-brand artifact for the meditation practice
Work:
- Walks Madison Avenue for an hour every morning
- Records every taxi fare, meal and tip in a hardback ledger
- Calls Pat Hackett every morning to dictate the previous day's events for the diary
- Keeps a tape recorder running through dinners and parties
- Carries a Polaroid camera to every social event
- Photographs almost everyone he meets
Distribution:
- Leo Castelli Gallery (then Iolas) handled sales
- Hosts open-door parties at the Factory most evenings
- Founded Interview magazine in 1969 as his own owned media channel
- Appeared in TV commercials in the 1980s (Diet Coke, TDK, Pioneer, Drexel Burnham)
- The Polaroid photos themselves doubled as an art-and-press feedback loop
Work:
- Asks himself "What good shall I do this day?" each morning
- Takes a one-hour air bath naked by an open window each morning
- Swims in open water several times a week
- Tracks thirteen virtues on a printed grid every day
- Asks himself "What good have I done today?" each evening
- Writes the next day's plan the night before
Distribution:
- Founded The Pennsylvania Gazette as his own newspaper in 1729
- Wrote Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1733 to 1758
- Self-published most of his pamphlets
- Built the postal infrastructure (postmaster of Philadelphia, then deputy postmaster general for the colonies) that distributed his own work
- Wrote the Autobiography as the founding self-help title in American letters
Work:
- Takes two "Think Weeks" a year, alone in a forest cabin
- Reads a stack of papers and books submitted by employees during each Think Week
- Reads for hours on Sundays
- Rocks back and forth while concentrating
- Travels with a tote bag of physical books
Distribution:
- Publishes a GatesNotes year-end letter every December
- Publishes a summer reading list every June
- Publishes a year-end reading list every December
- Does Reddit AMAs on a regular cadence
- Delivers TED talks on a regular cadence
- Filmed Inside Bill's Brain (Netflix, 2019) as a three-part marketing artifact
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
- Logs every disagreement with colleagues in a daily Issues Log
- Records every meeting at Bridgewater on audio or video
- Reviews each important decision against his written Principles
- Sleeps seven and a half hours minimum
Distribution:
- Sends "Daily Observations" to Bridgewater LPs daily
- Wrote Principles (2017) and ran a multi-year marketing campaign around it
- Filmed Principles for Success (animated YouTube series, 30M+ views)
- Posts on LinkedIn regularly
- Sat for TED talks and CNBC scheduled interviews
Work:
- Spreads the day's pages on the dining table at the end of each afternoon
- Pours one drink and reads back what she wrote
- Sleeps in the same room as the unfinished manuscript in the final week
- Keeps a notebook in her bag at all times
- Tests every sentence by reading it aloud
- Re-types the prior day's pages before starting new ones
Distribution:
- Knopf published her
- Publishes long-form essays in NYRB, Vogue and Saturday Evening Post between books
- Sat for the documentary The Center Will Not Hold (2017) directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne
- Granted the Celine ad campaign (2015) that turned her into a fashion icon at age 80
Work:
- Wakes at 5:30 AM
- Hails a cab to the gym before her body wakes up
- Says "the cab is the ritual, not the workout"
- Trains in the gym for two hours
- Starts each new project by placing a labeled cardboard box on the floor
- Drops every clipping, sketch, recording and note into that box for the project's duration
Distribution:
- Performance venues (American Ballet Theatre, Broadway) handled the work
- Publishes a book every several years (Push Comes to Shove 1992, The Creative Habit 2003, The Collaborative Habit 2009, Keep It Moving 2019)
- Each book seeds the next decade of speaking and teaching work
Work:
- Counts out sixty coffee beans per cup at breakfast
- Composes from sunrise to midday
- Eats lunch at the same tavern most days
- Walks the woods through the afternoon with a notebook and pencil
- Writes nothing musical after dark
- Goes to bed by 10 PM
Distribution:
- Vienna's noble patrons (Lobkowitz, Rasumovsky, Lichnowsky) underwrote him with annuities
- Publishers Breitkopf and Härtel and Steiner printed the scores
- Self-produces a subscription concert (Akademie) every year or two to premiere new work
- Prints and distributes his own subscriber bills before each concert
- Negotiates with multiple publishers in parallel to drive up prices
Work:
- Drives a "faux commute" in circles before working from home
- Journals five minutes each morning
- Keeps an "embarrassment list" of mistakes
- Adds to that list every week
- Writes the day's intention before opening her laptop
Distribution:
- Sat for The Oprah Winfrey Show in November 2000 that broke Spanx national
- Spent 18 months seeding press relationships before that single appearance
- Department-store buyers (Neiman Marcus first) handled retail
- Tells the "fax machine and $5,000" origin story at every conference she speaks at
- Posts to Instagram on cadence with hand-on-camera selfie videos that read as personal
Work:
- Visualizes a trade in detail before placing it
- Checks the 200-day moving average on every chart before reading any news
- Risks no more than 1% of capital per trade
- Writes the trade thesis down before opening the position
- Marks the calendar five years out from anniversaries of past losses
Distribution:
- Founded the Robin Hood Foundation in 1988 and hosts its annual gala (one of the largest fundraising nights of the year in New York)
- Sits for an annual Bloomberg or CNBC interview around the gala
- Allowed Trader (1987 PBS documentary) to be filmed, then bought up copies for years afterward (the suppression itself fed his mystique)
Work:
- Writes 2,000 words a day
- Same desk, same chair, same start time
- Writes seven days a week including his birthday and Christmas
- Plays loud rock music while drafting
- Refuses to leave the chair until the quota is met
- Reads four to five hours a day on top of writing
- Walks four miles in the afternoon
Distribution:
- Scribner / Viking publish him
- Writes "The Pop of King" column in Entertainment Weekly for eight years (2003-2011)
- Tours bookstores for every hardcover release
- Runs a Q&A page and reply system on stephenking.com
- Wrote On Writing (2000) as a permanent marketing artifact for the catalog
Work:
- Programs every day even as CEO
- Reads forty-plus minutes every morning before opening Slack
- Stops work at 5:30 PM and goes home for dinner
- Skips most meetings as a rule
- Sleeps eight hours, no exceptions
Distribution:
- Shopify owns the merchant channel and does most of the marketing for the brand
- Tweets and replies on X daily
- Publishes the annual Shopify Investor Day letter
- Public memos to his org that he then posts externally (the 2023 "We're not a family" memo went viral by his choice)
Work:
- Writes a long-form memo to clients several times a year
- Walks his dog for an hour every day as thinking time
- Reads every memo aloud to himself before publishing
- Avoids macro forecasts entirely
- Re-reads his own old memos every few years
Distribution:
- Memos go to Oaktree clients first, then public
- "bubble.com" (January 2000) and "The Most Important Thing" became investing canon
- Published The Most Important Thing (2011) and Mastering the Market Cycle (2018) as memo aggregations
- Sits for podcast interviews on cycle around each new memo
Work:
- Rents a hotel room by the month at $200 or so
- Brings yellow pads, a Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible and a deck of cards
- Asks staff to strip the art off the walls
- Arrives at the room at 6:30 AM
- Writes lying on the bed
- Leaves by 2 PM
- Reads the day's pages aloud over a glass of sherry in the evening
Distribution:
- Random House published her
- Performs her poems aloud at every public appearance
- Read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993
- Records audio of her own work as a parallel artifact
- Toured the lecture circuit at $50,000+ per appearance through the 90s and 2000s
Work:
- Closes the office when the surf is up
- Surfs in the morning when the waves break at Rincon
- Climbs at least once a week well into his 80s
- Eats a long sit-down lunch with employees in the company canteen
- Spends a full month each year on remote rivers fly-fishing
Distribution:
- Patagonia catalogs are long-form essays and photography, designed to be kept rather than thrown out
- Published Let My People Go Surfing (2005) and The Responsible Company (2012)
- Ran the "Don't Buy This Jacket" full-page New York Times ad on Black Friday 2011
- Gave Patagonia to a trust in September 2022 in the single largest marketing event in company history
- The Footprint Chronicles makes supply-chain transparency a recurring content stream
Work:
- Refuses to take a position without conviction
- Reviews every open position before bed
- Stays quiet in meetings until he sees the data
- Concentrates 80% of capital in one idea when conviction shows up
- Sells positions immediately when the thesis breaks
Distribution:
- Delivers one Sohn Investment Conference talk per year. That's the entire ritual.
- Sits for almost no interviews outside that single venue
- Lets the track record speak
Work:
- Wakes at 5:30 AM
- Pays a servant to bring coffee at that hour
- Writes 250 words every fifteen minutes by pocket watch
- Targets 2,500 words before 8:30 AM
- Starts the next novel on the same page if one finishes mid-session
- Heads to the post office for a full day's work after writing
- Treats writing as a craft on the same schedule as cobbling
Distribution:
- Negotiates every publishing contract himself
- Serializes new novels in Cornhill, Pall Mall and Saint Pauls before book release
- Tours America in 1861 and Australia in 1871 and 1875 to seed those markets
- Publishes the Autobiography (1883) as the marketing artifact for his collected works
Work:
- Holds 1:1 meetings with every direct report each week
- Stays in an Airbnb listing somewhere in the world several weeks a year
- Sends a company-wide email every Sunday night
- Walks the floors of Airbnb stays as a customer
Distribution:
- Airbnb's marketplace and brand operation do most of the marketing
- Posts many of his internal letters publicly on X or the Airbnb blog (the 2020 layoffs letter became a case study)
- Hosts the annual host conference ("Airbnb Open" and successors)
- Sits for the Masters of Scale podcast and How I Built This on cycle
Work:
- Keeps an empty calendar by default
- Takes meetings on walks instead of in offices
- Reads physics, philosophy and math an hour or more a day
- Picks one book and reads it ten times before moving on
- Eats one or two meals a day with long fasts in between
Distribution:
- Posts on X (since 2009)
- "How to Get Rich" tweetstorm (May 2018) was a single session that became a book
- Sat for The Joe Rogan Experience and The Tim Ferriss Show as career-defining appearances
- Allowed Eric Jorgenson to compile The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (free book, 2020) from the tweets and podcasts
- Hosts the Naval podcast on irregular cadence
Work:
- Puts on his only suit each morning
- Rides the elevator down to a basement maid's room with the other working husbands
- Hangs the suit on a hanger
- Writes in his boxers all day
- Puts the suit back on to ride the elevator home
Distribution:
- The New Yorker published 121 of his stories over 40 years
- Knopf published the collections
- Each New Yorker story was a teaser for the eventual collection
- Sat for the Paris Review's "Art of Fiction No. 62" (1976) the year of his comeback novel Falconer
Work:
- Walks five miles to work each morning
- Eats one meal a day, in the evening
- Fasts all day Saturday with only water
- Takes an ice bath every morning
- Sits in a 220-degree sauna three times for fifteen minutes each in the evening
- Sits for meditation twice a day, twenty minutes each
Distribution:
- His own product (Twitter / X) was his marketing channel for a decade
- Posts personal photos of ice baths, fasting and sauna routines as a content stream
- Sat for the Tim Ferriss podcast and Joe Rogan as career-defining appearances
- Uses Bluesky and Nostr now as parallel channels
Work:
- Keeps an "anti-todo list" of tasks he refused
- Reads four to five books simultaneously, one per slot in the day
- Sleeps nine hours a night
- Sits for ten minutes of mindfulness each morning
- Naps in the afternoon when the schedule allows
- Lifts weights and walks the trails near his house
Distribution:
- Built a16z as a media company that invests
- Operates a podcast network, a magazine (Future), a content team
- Posts on X constantly
- Wrote The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (October 2023) as a market-positioning artifact
- Sat for Lex Fridman, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh, Joe Rogan in 2023-24 as a coordinated press cycle
Work:
- Plans every minute of the workday on paper at the start of the day
- Stops work at 5:30 PM regardless of state
- Runs a written shutdown ritual ending with the words "Schedule shutdown, complete"
- Walks for an hour or more a day as thinking time
- Reads five books a month minimum
- Avoids social media entirely
Distribution:
- Publishes a new book every 2-3 years (Random House / Portfolio)
- Sends a Sunday newsletter
- Hosts Deep Questions podcast weekly
- Writes long-form essays in The New Yorker on cadence
- Avoids the X / Instagram / TikTok game entirely and lets the books carry the brand
Work:
- Maintains a public reading list of every book he finishes
- Reads 100+ books a year
- Memorizes long technical papers by re-reading them
- Walks San Francisco for hours when working a hard problem
- Replies to email in batches
Distribution:
- Stripe owns its developer channel and runs Sessions (the annual conference)
- The public reading list at patrickcollison.com is itself a marketing artifact
- Founded Stripe Press in 2018 to republish books (Stubborn Attachments, The Dream Machine, Working in Public)
- Publishes essays in The Atlantic (with John) on progress studies
- Funds Arc Institute and Fast Grants as ongoing marketing through philanthropy
Work:
- Plays chess at near-master level
- Drives one big idea per book, conversation or essay
- Eats a meat-heavy paleo diet
- Lives across multiple cities on rotation
- Returns to René Girard's work as a fixed re-read
Distribution:
- Founders Fund and Palantir do the institutional work
- Published Zero to One (2014) based on his Stanford CS183 lecture notes (Blake Masters compiled them)
- Sits for one or two long-form interviews a year (Dave Rubin, Stanford, Tucker Carlson, Honestly with Bari Weiss)
- Hosts the Hoover Institution intellectual circuit
Work:
- Reads a print newspaper every morning and makes a blackout poem from it
- Walks three miles a day, rain or shine
- Writes morning pages by fountain pen
- Reads physical books for an hour before sleep
- Goes to bed by 9 PM
- Keeps screens off before 10 AM and after 10 PM
- Sits for ten minutes of meditation before starting work
Distribution:
- Sends a Tuesday newsletter every Tuesday for 12+ years
- Posts daily to his blog at austinkleon.com
- Workman Publishing publishes the books (Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going)
- The blackout poems themselves are public-facing (many originated as social posts)
- Wrote Show Your Work (2014) as a manifesto for the distribution ritual itself
Work:
- Works from a single laptop with no second monitor
- Codes in cafés instead of offices
- Lives in a different city every few months
- Ships one feature or one new product per week
- Posts live revenue numbers in public
- Eats one meal a day
Distribution:
- X (Twitter) is his only marketing channel and he posts to it multiple times a day
- Posts every product launch, every revenue milestone, every milestone customer
- Publishes live revenue numbers on nomadlist.com/open
- Builds in public continuously, with the build-log being the marketing
- Wrote MAKE (2018) as the indie-hacker handbook that compounded his audience
Work:
- Reads five or more books in parallel, one per room of the house
- Drops any book the moment it stops earning its time
- Eats lunch with a different person each week
- Travels to a new country several times a year for the food
Distribution:
- Writes a Marginal Revolution blog post every day, including holidays (since 2003, over 20,000 posts)
- Writes a Bloomberg Opinion column on cadence
- Hosts Conversations with Tyler podcast every couple of weeks
- Funds Emergent Ventures grants (the grant program is also marketing)
- The daily blog post is the work and the marketing at the same time
Work:
- Writes from 8 AM to noon, dressed for the job in jeans and a button-down
- Journals in two notebooks before any other writing
- Runs five miles every evening
- Walks his ranch with his family for three miles when the day ends
- Reads 100 to 250 books a year
- Carries a memento mori coin in his pocket at all times
Distribution:
- Sends a Daily Stoic email every day since 2016 (never missed)
- Runs The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, TX as a physical marketing artifact
- Posts annual reading lists
- Penguin / Portfolio publishes the books
- Posts to Instagram and YouTube on cadence
- Records The Daily Stoic Podcast daily
Work:
- Wakes at 5 AM
- Edits in chronological order without rewinding to fix earlier cuts
- Skateboards through New York for transit
- Runs a marathon or longer at least once a year
- Goes to bed by 10 PM
Distribution:
- Posted 800 daily vlogs in a row on YouTube (2015-2016). The streak IS the marketing.
- Sold Beme to CNN for $25M in 2016 and used the news cycle as press
- Tweets and posts to Instagram daily
- Runs sponsored content as part of the vlog format, blending product and story
Work:
- Reads a physical book every night before sleep
- Wakes at 5 AM
- Holds a regular blue-sky half-day for thinking with no agenda
Distribution:
- Records a new Invest Like the Best episode every week as a forcing function to learn and to market
- Built the Colossus podcast network on top of the show
- Sends regular reading recommendations to a private list
- Writes the annual year-end review
Work:
- Walks while thinking, several times a day
- Writes by editing his own draft over and over
- Reads only at night, never during work hours
- Writes between school drop-off and school pick-up
- Walks his sons to school every morning
- Re-reads his own old essays continuously
Distribution:
- Posts new essays at paulgraham.com sporadically (40-200 over each year of YC's life)
- The essays themselves are the marketing for YC
- Posts on X constantly
- Y Combinator's batch system (Demo Day, the network) does the institutional marketing
Work:
- Sits for Transcendental Meditation twenty-one minutes every morning
- Makes his bed first thing
- Does five to ten reps of a bodyweight movement before the day starts
- Drinks "titanium tea" each morning (turmeric, ginger and pu-erh blend)
- Writes in the Five-Minute Journal for two minutes
- Takes a two-to-three-minute cold shower or plunge
- Holds a three-day water-only fast once a month
Distribution:
- Sends 5-Bullet Friday email every Friday since 2014 (1.5M+ subscribers)
- Publishes The Tim Ferriss Show podcast on a roughly 2x/week cadence since 2014
- Writes a year-end review post every January
- Self-promoted The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) by submitting it to twelve podcast hosts simultaneously, which seeded the podcast era
- Posts on X and Instagram on cadence
Two daily stacks separate the names you remember from the footnotes you've never seen.
What was the first daily ritual you held long enough to compound?