Health

Forming habits is surprisingly easy. Breaking them is often less difficult than we initially believe, with notable exceptions like nicotine addiction, which is notoriously challenging to overcome. I read Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, which despite its verbosity, presents a solid core concept: begin with small, manageable actions and gradually build until behaviors become automatic. The inverse applies to breaking habits—quitting abruptly frequently fails, while incremental reduction often proves more effective.

I’ve made my share of bad predictions. I’ve had plenty of good ones too. But being right often doesn’t matter, because few people will remember if you were right or wrong, and when it comes to placing bets on your predictions, timing is incredibly difficult to nail down. Some of my best predictions include my general bullishness on software and the internet since the 90s (when the dot-com bubble saw the NASDAQ rise over 400% from 1995-20001), betting on Airbnb (now valued at $86B+), and Bitcoin (up over 30,000% in the last decade). In the case of Bitcoin, I was right about the bet, but got the timing wrong. Bitcoin’s journey from $0.09 in 2010 to nearly $69,000 in November 2021 represents a staggering 76,000,000% return, making it the best-performing asset of the decade by orders of magnitude. For context, an investment of just $100 in Bitcoin in 2010 would have been worth over $76 million at its peak.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai Imagine a technology so destructive that it kills 1.3 million people annually, consumes vast portions of our cities, and contributes significantly to climate change—yet we’ve designed our entire society around it. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the reality of our car-dependent world.