Dru's Notes

New York's sanitation workers broke a state law to strike in 1968, and with every driver out at once they won their raise. An anesthesiologist earns more than $350,000 while a nursing assistant earns about $42,000, and...

TLC's CrazySexyCool sold over 10 million copies, and a year later all three women filed for bankruptcy. Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris and earned nothing from it for about 12 years. Featuring: Tionne Watkins, Lisa Lopes...

My first rule is focus on what you control. Roughly 80% of my anxiety comes from losing sight of it. Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve shows why a rule you know still slips and why I reread mine each morning and...

Antidepressant side effects start within days and the benefits take two to four weeks, so some patients stop before the drug ever works. The mathematician Tanya Khovanova kept wearing a sleep apnea mask that gave her...

In 2017, China's two biggest bike-share apps, Ofo and Mobike, both cut monthly passes to 1 yuan. Mobike sold for $2.7 billion. Ofo ran out of cash and left over 10 million riders waiting for their deposits. Featuring...

Five days after he won the 2016 Formula 1 world title, Nico Rosberg retired. To beat Lewis Hamilton he had pushed like crazy in every area, while Haruki Murakami writes ten pages a day and stops at ten even on days he...

Uber lost over $1 billion a year in China and sold out to its rival. In the US, the same bet won. When the winner takes most of a market, losing money now can raise your odds of winning it. Featuring: Jack Ma, Chris...

Each use of your willpower draws from the same depletable reservoir. Ray Bradbury, Ed Viesturs and Andie MacDowell show three ways to save it: change your environment, automate decisions and delete decisions. Featuring...

I launched a product a day and burned out 17 days in, because the habit counted launches and rewarded nothing else. An Output Habit counts what you finish and an Input Habit counts the time you put in. Bill Atkinson...

Comedians get better after a bad night because whatever happens to them becomes stories for the next set. Trevor Noah tries new things knowing they'll either work or give him comedy. Massimo Bottura turned a dropped...

Reddit priced the Apollo app out of business, Kayla Newman was never paid for "on fleek," and Nipsey Hussle bought the strip mall he once sold CDs in front of. Why I post every essay on a site I own first, then share it...

Bryson DeChambeau's first year of bulking bought him about 20 yards. His second bought him less than two. Anatoly Karpov led Garry Kasparov 5-0 in the 1984 world chess title match, then lost about 22 pounds and watched...

I just heard someone explain the biggest misconception about Transcendental Meditation: that you're supposed to stop thinking. In TM you silently repeat a word called a mantra, your mind wanders and you come back to it...

Pieter Levels runs two apps alone on one server. April Dunford's fees stop the week she does. WeWork raised round after round until it filed for Chapter 11. Eleven plants map to eleven kinds of business. Pick the one...

To prove my friend wrong about habits, I sent him a photo of Thai chilies. His meme said discipline makes each day look the same, and one of my habits is to run experiments each day. Featuring: Ralph Waldo Emerson...