People. Process. Product.

When my now-wife and I lived in New York City, I walked past Gramercy Park every day on my way to the office in Union Square. For no reason at all, I always went around it counterclockwise. Going to work: counterclockwise. Coming home: counterclockwise.

I never broke the pattern until our last day in New York, just before we moved to Los Angeles. My wife hadn’t even noticed I was doing it until I told her.

That’s the ideal stupid tradition: unnecessary, mostly private, and delightful.

I have another one with the woman who cleans my teeth. I started seeing her about a year and a half ago, forgot her name somewhere along the way, and we have now gone so long without using each other’s names that I’m curious to see how long we can keep it going.

But my favorite started when our dog Graham was a puppy.

We took him to Petco for bones and decided to make him a tag. The machine gave me two lines. I put “Graham” on the first. I didn’t have anything useful to put on the second, so I typed “The Dog.”

Graham The Dog.

Every tag after that said the same thing even when I started laser-cutting them myself. Then some friends adopted a cat named Vito, and naturally his tag became:

Vito The Cat.

None of this matters. That’s exactly why it’s good.

Start a stupid little tradition of your own, or tell me about one you already have!

It’s peak summer in Venice. The windows are open, the temperature is perfect, and the ocean is just above 70 degrees. The days start to blur together and, hopefully, they’ll stay that way until mid-October.

LA has problems. Weather is not one of them.

Every day, I walk to the beach and stick my feet in the water. No headphones. I just stand there for a few minutes and enjoy where I am.

I’ve been doing it for two weeks now. The streak is fun, but that’s not the point. The point is having one small ritual that makes me notice.

What’s your version of sticking your feet in the water?

In art school, we had a saying: the last 20% is the last 80%. That final stretch: details, revisions, the faffing about, is where good design becomes exceptional.

AI has flipped the beginning of that equation. It can give you 80% of an output with 20% of the effort. And because so much appears so quickly, it creates the illusion that the work is done.

It isn’t. You may have 80% of the output, but you still have 80% of the work ahead of you.

The remaining work is slower and less gratifying. It’s editing, questioning, refining, recomposing, removing, and staying with the piece long enough to notice what everyone else will miss. It can take four, eight, even ten times longer than generating the first pass…exactly!

That’s the part people skip! The speed of the first draft makes diligence feel boring & inefficient. How wrong they are. The boring work nobody cares to examine IS THE work.

Details haven’t become less important because the draft arrived faster — they matter more. Everyone can produce something reasonably competent in seconds. Taste lives in taking the time and care to making careful boring decisions for hours.

See AI Is an Elaborate Pencil.

Remember when Uber rides were cheap?

VC subsidized your rides for a decade. Taxis died! The plan was never to stay cheap. The plan was to make you dependent.

Once you've offloaded your writing, code, strategy, memory, thinking, workflows…They can raise the price. What are you going to do, learn to think again?

The one thing keeping the market honest is, of all things, China. Alibaba ships Qwen for free. It runs on my Mac Studio. Every time Anthropic raises a price, an open model lands. The communists (China’s communist, right? I have no idea anymore) are the antitrust now.

So here's the move: assume the cheap part ends. Keep one foot on something you can run yourself.