Around here we live good design. Like paths thru the woods, the more familiar and less onerous the path, the more likely we are to use it.
This is the new Aldi parking lot near my house. It’s a former Winn-Dixie grocery store. The parking lot is huge and further from the store than typical for an Aldi store.
It shows the contrast between an original design and not.
And contrast highlights choices and trade offs.
Most of the time we plug along.
Most of the time we see life as it is.
But sometimes we notice contrast and ask, why is it that way?
Will Ahmed is the founder of Whoop, the fitness tracker. In July 2025, he told Rich Roll:
“So maybe there’s a focus group on a band and the focus group sort of leans one way versus another on which direction the band should go. And I feel an incredibly strong pull towards the other direction.
I might just do the other direction. That, though, is a very sort of trivial example, I think. What’s been more interesting for me in my life is these moments where I’ve felt a deep sense of knowing something, and a lot of people have disagreed with it.”
Ahmed was obsessed with the progress (this is Moesta’s JTBD language) a subgroup (elite athlete) wanted to make. It’s such a clear example of Jobs Theory – though Ahmed never explicitly says that.
Focus groups don’t work for many reasons: people don’t actually know what they want, people are obsessed with status, people only think in the existing solution space. JTBD (jobs to be done) theory gets around that by focusing on the progress individuals want.
Ahmed discover that HRV matters a lot for rest and recovery. That led him to discover HRV needs constant monitoring. That led to this breakthrough:
“You needed to be able to measure it (HRV) continuously. And that was another breakthrough in hindsight of the whole idea for WOOP, was this idea of continuous data. Continuous data is the reason that this doesn’t have a screen.
It’s the reason we invented a modular battery pack. It’s the reason that the bands have all sorts of different looks and feels and colors. It’s the reason we’re not a watch, because we don’t want to compete with other watches.”
“Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time.”
Money is important and how someone thinks about money should be how you communicate about money.
Money is something you trade your life energy for.
Did the internet need another post about money? Yet here we are.
But maybe what we’re really talking about is spirit. It’s philosophy. It’s spiritual. What am I supposed to do? What is a life well lived? Posing the easier question shifts the topic to money.
Alan Waxman told Patrick O’Shaughnessy they want to hire a certain kind of person:
“So people that are over themselves, no politics, no egos, no BS, just so we can all talk to each other. So those are the values. We always said we wanted to be the largest startup in the industry.
That’s literally day one. We want people that can play tennis so they can debate, not that my baby is the prettiest type people.”
Throughout the episode Waxman references “playing tennis”.
It’s so common, it’s probably an internal figure of speech too.
And it’s a great example of how to argue well. Not to hard, not too soft. Engage in an enriching way. Aim for improvement, not defeat.
It’s a good organization if someone can play some tennis.
“So we’re all forced to make stuff up, whether it’s being a scientist or being a doctor or being an Olympic athlete or climbing Mount Everest. And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.
And if they don’t have it, they’re really, really unhappy. And I do think that a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction.”
I (finally) bought Thinking in Systems: A Primer in June 2025. It was an early summer read and focused a lot of summer thinking (before back to school gears up) on systems thinking.
But maybe it plays a more central role in the system.
Maybe friction is akin to vanilla in baked goods: Gotta have it, but just the right amount.
A fellow teacher told me she’s ready for her students. Summer break (we get seven weeks) is too long. We had a similar feeling. One night everyone at cereal the kitchen was a mess. This is what degenerates look like, I explained. The current patterns of summer don’t have enough frictions. It’s what people crave with schedules. It’s why people run races. Competition is friction. Constraints are frictions.
We’ll end in the spirit of Tyler Cowen: Friction is underrated.
One of the (few) calculations for my Business and Entrepreneurship class is customer acquisition cost. I’m a fan.
Rewriting the text for the upcoming year forced me to reemphasize and reiterate the value of a low CAC. Especially in the world of social media marketing and influencer marketing where CAC is sometimes zero. It’s an incredibly powerful idea.
But anything zero or low coast can be. Especially when part of an equation that divides (zero by many) or one that multiples many by a low cost (such as almost zero).
Talking with Chicago Fed Chair, Tyler Cowen asked about this very thing.
COWEN: What would be an example of something with a marginal cost of zero?
GOOLSBEE: [laughs] Well, I don’t want to reveal anything about our operations and get myself in trouble about the Federal Reserve operations. If you look at marginal cost of zero things, opening meetings to include others and having folks work together, sharing of information can often have very low cost — if not literally zero — and strong benefits.
Maybe this is the engine of alchemy. Find something that costs nothing (or very very very little) and do more of that. If it’s valuable (or very very very valuable) do a lot more of that.
Parenting two teenagers is difficult. Most of it comes down to remembering two things.
The first, my wife said this too shall pass. From the very beginning that has been good advice.
The second, when I was a boy of 14 my father was so stupid I could barely stand him. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned. That’s from Mark Twain. Maybe.
There might be a third to the list.
“Quantitative stuff can survive doing some horrifically stupid things in isolation. If 53 percent of the time increasing is a good word, then 47 percent of the time you were stupid. Turns out natural language processing or NLP, if we want to sound like the cool kids, that is taking that same data and training a ML model to say what predicts and what doesn’t predict.”
From Money Stuff: The Podcast: Cliff Asness, Jun 20, 2025
And parenting is kind of like that! Everyday Asness makes bets and everyday we get to be with our kids. If we can just be mostly right, things work out just fine. Or at least they have for Cliff.
“You exist at home and everything is nice and comfortable, and stress has come in, but they’re in the form of emails and deadlines and things just get predictable. Go out into a place that is totally unfamiliar, do something that’s going to be challenging to you, go with the wind, you will find things that will really enhance your life, that will make you feel, as Joseph Campbell put it, the rapture of being alive”
The rapture of being alive.
From Huberman Lab: How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter, Jun 16, 2025
This book, opens Bob Moesta and Michal Horn, does not tackle getting into schools or how to rank different schools based on their features.
“Instead, if you are considering getting more education, this book will help you answer a more foundational question first. That question is why?”
Asking “Why” is a good way to be happier.
In the post from last week, we highlighted Kris’s comments about framing housing. In that same post he writes, “Neither of us wants to find ourselves servicing interest payments to some mimetic trends.”
Why do we want this house? The answer better not be The Joneses.
Moesta’s and Horn’s book Choosing College gives a framework for answering that question. “Why?” is a tough question. It’s hard to answer with a blank slate. But the authors suggest there are five Jobs to be done by going to college, and figuring out the progress shifts from the blank canvas to a paint by numbers masterpiece.
“Why?” to be happy. And when needed a book like this to help with the “How?”.
Kris is buying a house. This is how he and his wife think about it:
Personal thinking: whether we rent or own, we ask ourselves “At what level do we want to consume housing at?”. Even if we can afford more, we try to be ruthless about what is a must-have vs nice-to-have and not let the nice-to-have creep out like a wolf spider hatching. Neither of us wants to find ourselves servicing interest payments to some mimetic trend. The cost is not just denominated in dollars but in utils of resilience and optionality which are key to peace of mind and lower stress.
At what level do we consume housing?
Great line.
Good framing asks a different question. It’s the same information, but a new view changes the image.
This frames views versus vacations, countertops versus career changes, and intentions and time.
The Waiter's Pad 