Introduction

The Promise of Easy Mode

In 2020 my tech-heavy stock portfolio was up 37.55% for the year. I thought I had figured something out.

What I had figured out was that everything goes up in a bull market. By the end of 2023 I was liquidating overly optimistic, over-leveraged positions in tech stocks and crypto at prices that hurt, and the version of me who had spent two years clicking Buy was someone I no longer recognized. I had kept calling it conviction. It was Hard Mode.

It was also not the only place I ran that program. The same setup turned up in my work, my mornings, and how I decided what to ship. By the time I noticed the pattern, the routine wasn’t the problem. The setup was. I had built a life that only worked on days I felt like a hero.

What kind of person designs a life like that? Apparently me, for about four years.

Easy Mode is what I started building when I gave up on being a hero.

It isn’t a productivity system. It’s the boring scaffolding that keeps you going when you don’t feel like it. The right meal in the fridge before you’re hungry. The one page on your screen before you open your laptop. The friend you already told what you’re shipping, so quitting becomes the awkward option. Easy Mode is not lazy. It’s engineered.

It’s also not about doing less, which is the part most people miss. Easy Mode is how you make a hard thing doable, mentally, physically, and emotionally, so you can keep at it on the days you don’t feel like it. You need a floor you can always hit, even tired, even sick, even sad. And here is the part nobody tells you: keep hitting that floor and it rises. The load that would flatten most people slowly becomes your normal. From the outside that can look like talent. It isn’t. It’s a floor you raised so gradually you barely felt it move.

Paul Graham has a line I keep coming back to: the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it’s to kill. He wrote it in 2008 about startups surviving a downturn. The same math applies to a person. A life that costs a small amount of effort to maintain can survive almost anything. A life that runs on motivation can’t.

Three moves do most of the work. Remove friction from what you want. Add friction to what you don’t. Use defaults so you don’t have to decide twice.

The book leans on a second framework I want to credit up front, because most of what I say about shipping is a paraphrase of it. Elon Musk has an “algorithm” his teams run on every part and process at Tesla and SpaceX, described in detail in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography. Five steps in a strict order: question every requirement, delete what you can, simplify what remains, accelerate the cycle, and automate last. Musk’s rule of thumb is that if you don’t end up adding back at least 10% of what you deleted, you didn’t delete enough. His sharpest warning is the one I have personally violated the most: automating a broken step, or optimizing a step that shouldn’t exist, is worse than doing nothing. I run this loop on my own work about once a quarter. I call it the Subtraction Loop in the chapters that follow. The lineage belongs to Musk.

The friction moves are about defaults. The algorithm is about shipping. The thirty chapters that follow are short walks through what both look like in real situations: shipping work, saying no, choosing tools, protecting mornings, running a one-page business. Each one is short on purpose. The aim is for you to read one chapter, install one default, and close the book.

A note on what this isn’t. It isn’t a guide to becoming exceptional. There’s no shortage of those, and I’ve read enough of them to know they assume a version of you that exists only on your best days. This book assumes the version of you that shows up tired, distracted, and slightly disappointed in last week. That version is the one your life is actually built on.

A note on what it’s. It’s the small set of moves I run when I’m too worn out to think. Some I figured out the hard way, mostly by losing money. Most I borrowed from people smarter than me. Paul Graham. Luca Dellanna. Naval Ravikant. Pieter Levels. Elon Musk’s algorithm. None of it’s novel. The point is that it’s reliable.

If you only take three ideas out of this book, take these. One outcome at a time. One page is enough. Question, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate. In that order. The order is the whole point.

Read the chapters you need.