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Napoleon's surgeon-in-chief had more wounded men than surgeons, so he threw rank out and sorted by injury instead. Alexander Kotov wrote the same move down for chess in 1971, and Henry Singleton ran Teledyne on it with no five-year plan.
Show Notes
Napoleon's surgeon-in-chief had more wounded men than surgeons, so he threw rank out and sorted by injury instead. Alexander Kotov wrote the same move down for chess in 1971, and Henry Singleton ran Teledyne on it with no five-year plan.
Featuring: Henry Singleton, Henry David Thoreau, Warren Buffett, Brent Beshore, Alexander Kotov, Dominique Jean Larrey
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Chapters:
(00:00) Thoreau on being busy
(00:08) Larrey sorts the wounded by injury
(00:47) Kotov's method for choosing a chess move
(01:07) Ranking tasks against each other since 2018
(01:13) Trends.vc's playbook versus a one-line PS
(01:40) Henry Singleton steers Teledyne day to day
(02:29) Ranking each option against the rest
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Creators and Guests
AK
Guest
BB
Guest
Brent Beshore
Featured in Dru's Notes: Everything Feels Important? It's a Ranking Problem.
DL
Guest
HS
Guest
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.
"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"
Henry David Thoreau
Two men lay wounded on the same field and the one with rank was carried first.
A man who could have been saved bled out behind a man whose wound could have waited.
Dominique-Jean Larrey served as surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's armies through 25 campaigns and 60 battles. He had more wounded men than surgeons, so the order was the only thing he controlled.
He threw rank out and sorted by injury instead, regardless of title or nationality:
- The gravely wounded who might recover went first
- Soldiers who could survive a wait, waited
- Those whose wounds were likely fatal were treated last
Alexander Kotov wrote down a method for choosing a chess move in 1971. Before you move, build a list of the moves worth considering. Work through each one until you reach a definite conclusion on it.
His instruction before any move: look at the whole board, rather than the square where the last one landed.
I started sorting my tasks against each other around 2018, after getting back into chess.
A few weeks ago, a teammate wanted us to write execution playbooks at Trends.vc: step-by-step guides to building in the markets our reports surface.
He brought me that plan with nothing ranked beside it.
So I pulled up the bets we could make, ranked against each other. Near the top was a PS: one line at the bottom of the emails we already send, going out millions of times a year. The playbooks needed building from scratch, so they landed well down the page.
Henry Singleton played blindfold chess at near-grandmaster level as an old man. He ran Teledyne without a five-year plan.
Warren Buffett called Singleton's capital deployment record the best in American business.
Teledyne started in 1960 on $225,000 of Singleton's own money and compounded at 20.4% a year against the S&P's 8%. He gave analysts no guidance and held no quarterly calls.
"My only plan is to keep coming to work. I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan ahead way into the future."
Henry Singleton, to BusinessWeek
I re-rank my list often. Singleton steered each day against conditions he said nobody could predict.
The more options you rank, the better the one you pick.
What would you do first if each option competed?
Gate override logged: audit-opener-strength, 2026-08-02 round 3. Verdict FLAT, overridden.
The judge requires a cost or reversal tied to the author's own situation inside the first 150 words. It reads sentence 2 as Larrey's historical stake rather than the author's.
The founder chose the opposite form this round: open on Larrey rather than on himself. Opening on the battlefield pushes the author's beat past the 150-word window by construction, so the gate and the chosen form cannot both hold. The author's real stake here is a meeting. That is the weak premise the founder rejected in the first place. Inventing a larger one would be fabrication under corollary 7.
Form stated plainly by the founder wins, per .twin/dru.twin: when a gate argues against a form he stated plainly, the form wins and the gate gets a logged override.
Six openers were written and judged before this override, three premised on the meeting and three on Larrey. The Larrey rewrite moved the judge twice. It now grants that lines 1 to 3 land real stake for the Larrey story, so the opening LINE is no longer the defect. What remains is an objection to the ORDER the founder picked.
Worth revisiting later: the gate's window is a fixed 150 words. That assumes the author's beat opens the post, so a post opening on an external story fails it each time, however strong the external is. This is a rubric question for judge-opener.mjs, raised here and left alone rather than tuned to make one post pass.
Read before editing any external in this post. Each figure below was verified to a primary page this session. Anything absent from this list needs verification before it ships.
Brent Beshore / Permanent Equity (added 2026-08-04, round 7). Added at the founder's request after the Groves cut dropped story-grade externals to 2, under audit-composition's floor of 3.
| Claim in the body | Source | Wording at the source |
|---|---|---|
| looked inside more than 10,000 companies | Beshore's own book description for The Messy Marketplace, verbatim on the Barnes & Noble listing | "Having peeked behind the curtain at over 10,000 companies…" |
| his firm owns 11 | permanentequity.com/portfolio | "Permanent Equity has 11 portfolio companies." |
Two figures were rejected rather than used. A longer first-person version of the bio claims "over 15,000 companies" plus the detail "reviewing financial statements, meeting with leadership". It shows up in search summaries and no page carrying it verbatim would open. "Only 14 investments in 16 years" is an Equity Mates episode title and that page returns 403. Neither figure is in the post.
The caveat that shapes the sentence. "Peeked behind the curtain at over 10,000 companies" is cumulative career exposure. It covers advisory work too. Read as a claim that Permanent Equity screened 10,000 acquisition candidates and bought 11, it becomes an overclaim. The two sentences sit side by side and let the reader do the arithmetic. That stays true without asserting the causal chain. Do not tighten this into "he screened 10,000 to find 11."