Gary Vaynerchuk has a question that stuck with me: wouldn’t it be fascinating if you had a documentary of every single day of Warren Buffett building Berkshire Hathaway?
I agree. It would be.
Buffett started buying shares in 1965 — classic cigarette-butt investing, stock trading below its working capital. By the time he’s writing the famous shareholder letters, the pattern is set: here’s what happened this year, here’s what we learned, here’s what we’re doing about it. The letters are a running log of the work.
That’s what this is.
I go on nightly walks — what the Jewish meditation tradition calls hitbodedut: isolation sessions where it’s just you, yourself, and whatever you’re thinking about. A lot of what ends up in these logs starts there.
The honest version of building something is messy. Business Topologies is my overarching research project. Simple Product Feeds is one of the work items within it — a Shopify app, an experiment in whether building genuinely well makes a material difference. These are not separate things.
The question I keep returning to is cognitive load. Not as an abstract concept — as a constraint. You only have so much conscious attention to give in a day. Where you put it is the decision. Everything else flows from that.
More on this in the next entry.