Last week’s challenge report:

Expectation: I’d be taking my phone on my daily walks and photographing gorgeous waterfalls, fjords, rainbows, and wild animals resting on the prairie.

Reality: I was stuck at home for the whole week and had to come up with random things around the house. Except on TV marathon day. I decided taking pictures did not count as a biological break.

The results are here (if this makes you want to unsubscribe, I’d totally understand. Joking. I absolutely would not!!!)

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I put some effort into this one.

First, I thought I wanted fewer temptations in my life. Sugar cravings, YouTube, you name it.

But that alone wouldn’t solve my overthinking problem.

So I decided I want less fragility in my life.

If you’ve read “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb, that’s exactly what I’m referring to.

If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. I haven’t finished it either - too many words.

Taleb’s idea is that fragile things suffer when life gets messy. Antifragile things get stronger from it.

Instead of deleting one app a day, I deleted a bunch on day one.

Grok, Claude, Journal (yup, the Apple app), Reddit, Amazon, Flolio (no idea what it does), Todoist (switching to Reminders in anticipation of the new Siri), Stocks (never check it on my phone), and ToteScan.

ToteScan was an easy one. I built my own “inventory” management system with AI + Notion, and it’s way better.

Still undecided about Lyft and Uber. Haven’t used either in more than a year. Not sure what exactly I’m saving them for.

For the next week I picked:

Report in a week.

I was standing in a grocery store, choosing a yogurt.

One was plain Greek yogurt with a short ingredient list.

The other had protein, probiotics, organic ingredients, and a non-GMO label.

It also had more sugar, more calories, and cost twice as much.

Yet it still felt like the healthier choice.

I had no intention of pleasing the marketing team behind it, so I bought the plain yogurt.

Yes, I know.

Predictable and boring.

But the expensive yogurt made me think about what people actually mean when they say they want to eat healthier.

A smoothie feels healthy because it contains spinach.

A sandwich with the same spinach is not called healthy nearly as often.

The smoothie may also contain banana, dates, peanut butter, honey, oat milk, protein powder, and 700 calories.

Still, it is green.

And once a product already looks healthy, the labels on the package finish the job.

The first one I usually ignore is non-GMO.

I keep seeing Instagram influencers recommend cereal or some other product because it is non-GMO.

And on sale, of course.

Apparently, that is all the nutritional analysis we need.

They rarely explain why the non-GMO part matters.

Maybe because it often does not.

GMO does not describe what the food does to your body.

It describes how scientists gave a crop a particular trait.

For example, the crop may be designed to:

That tells you nothing about whether the final product is nutritious.

Non-GMO cookies are still cookies.

In the US, most corn and soy comes from genetically engineered crops.

That means ingredients from GMO crops are already common in processed food:

So I mostly ignore the label.

It tells me how the crop was produced.

It does not tell me whether I should eat the product.

This is more interesting.

Organic is mainly about how the food was produced.

No genetic engineering, stricter limits on synthetic chemicals, and a few other important rules I will not bother you with.

This means certified organic food is already non-GMO.

But non-GMO food is not automatically organic. (The only thing I remember from a logic course in college.)

So when a package says both “organic” and “non-GMO,” read it as:

Which is technically, true.

Anyway, our brains love shortcuts..

We see “organic” and assume the whole product is healthy.

Then we end up with:

Organic sugar is still sugar.

Organic chips are still chips.

The label may matter if we care about farming methods.

It says very little about how much of the product we should eat.

I usually pay attention to organic when I am choosing between two otherwise similar products.

At the same price (never), I care deeply about farming methods.

That is about it.

“No sugar added” does not mean sugar-free. Fruit, milk, and juice already contain sugar.

It only means no sugar was added during production.

So the front can say “no sugar added” while the nutrition label says 15 grams of sugar.

Both statements can be true, but the second feels a little more honest.

Sugar is not the only number getting special treatment.

Protein is now printed on almost everything.

Coffee with 20 grams.

Cereal with 15.

Ice cream with 30.

A protein coffee can contain 400 calories and plenty of sugar.

But “27 G PROTEIN” is on the front, so it feels like a healthy stuff.

Drink two, and you are at 800 calories with no food involved. Good deal!

Also, why grams?

Americans (we Americans, apparently) measure people in feet, roads in miles, and drinks in ounces.

But put “23 grams of protein” on a yogurt, and everyone suddenly understands the metric system!

Maybe because “0.8 ounces” sounds less impressive.

Apparently, we have not reached peak protein yet.

So, if you are looking for the next billion-dollar idea:

The phone case is my favorite.

People already hold it for eight hours a day. The market is ready.

Anyway, if I’ve learned anything from grocery shopping, it’s this:

The front sells it. The back explains it.

Till next time.

A receipt printer cured my procrastination - 11 min read.

A $150 receipt printer to cure procrastination sounds exactly like the kind of thing I’d buy instead of doing the work. But the idea behind it is actually pretty smart: make tasks tiny, get instant feedback, and keep progress visible.

Stop brainstorming - 13 min read.

Bad news for anyone with “brainstorm” on today’s calendar. Turns out people often come up with more ideas alone. This article digs into the research and explains why putting everyone in one room may actually make creativity worse. Great look at why traditional brainstorming often fails - and what teams actually need instead.

What’s the Goal of the Goal? - 12 min read.

A useful question if you’re working hard toward something: why do you actually want it? Dan Heath argues that once you answer that, you may realize there’s an easier way to get there.

The author makes the case for treating goals as experiments instead of fixed plans. Try something small, see what works, and adjust. A good read if you’d rather test things first and decide later.

Ha! When I hire editors, researchers and cleaners (in reverse order, of course), this is what our corporate office will look like.

Delegation by the Numbers: A three-day audit showed Ryan Serhant that he was spending about 10 hours a week organizing email and eight on bookkeeping. He hired help for both, and the bookkeeping review dropped to a weekly summary that took under 15 minutes.

Reversible Risk Test: Before joining reality television and later starting his brokerage during the 2020 pandemic, Serhant asked what would actually happen if it failed. In both cases, he believed he could go back to the work he was already doing, which made the risk easier to take.

Several Ideas Before One: When preparing to sell a property at 77 Greenwhich in New York, Serhant’s branding team started with the renderings, features, strengths, and weaknesses, then developed several names and concepts before choosing one to show the developer.

15-Minute Blocks: Serhant often schedules calls, pitches, showings, meetings, even filming in 15-minute blocks. If one goes badly, there’s another thing on the calendar right after it.

Three Kinds of Follow-Up: Serhant splits follow-up into three jobs: recent prospects, promises he still owes, and older contacts worth reconnecting with. He calls them follow up, follow through, and follow back, and schedules them in the morning.

You Can’t Predict the Good Posts: Serhant says some posts his team loved went nowhere, while others they did not expect much from performed well. His solution is simple: keep publishing and see what people actually respond to.

The 1,000-Minute Rule: Serhant starts with 1,440 minutes in a day, subtracts sleep and meals, and says that leaves about 1,000 usable minutes. A meeting is not “half an hour.” It is 30 minutes gone from that total.

Finder, Keeper, Doer: Serhant divides his schedule into three types: Finder time for getting new business, Keeper time for managing the business, and Doer time for completing the work already on his plate. That way, being busy with current work does not mean he stops looking for new business.

Taking more notes doesn’t always help you learn. If you’re mostly copying things down, you’re not doing much thinking. This clip shows a better approach: write a few keywords, connect them, and reorganize as you go.

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