Weekend Briefing No. 621
The Reading Apocalypse -- Your Accidental Operating System -- The Motivation Equation
Welcome to the 1st weekend of 2026.
Prime Numbers
760 - The price of new vehicles in the United States is up 33 percent since 2020. As of November, the average monthly payment for a new car clocked in at $760.
84 - NFL kickers now convert 84% of attempts from 40-49 yards, up from 70% a quarter century ago, as the league's specialists outperform historical baselines by 6.1% and have even begun excelling in clutch situations where they previously faltered.
30 - Nearly 30% of Americans in their 70s say they're living their best decade right now, part of a survey finding that every age cohort disproportionately picks their current years as their finest, defying nostalgia and suggesting happiness may be less about age than we assume.
Essentialism
I just finished reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown. It’s the firs book I read every January. At this point it’s a ritual that reminds me to do less better. Essentialism, as Greg McKeown frames it in his 2014 book, is a philosophy built on three moves: explore what actually matters to you, eliminate everything that doesn’t align with that, and execute on the vital few things that remain. It’s not quite minimalism, though they’re cousins. Minimalism tends to focus on physical possessions. Essentialism is broader: it’s about attention, commitments, and how you spend your time. The core premise is that most of what we do is noise, and the disciplined act of saying no to almost everything creates space to do the essential things well. It’s less a productivity system than a filter for asking: is this thing I’m about to do actually connected to who I want to be? Essentialism (8 hours)
Boring Builds Wealth
The largest source of income for America’s top 1% isn’t hedge funds or unicorn startups. It’s owning regional businesses that sell car mats, rip up elementary school carpet, and distribute beer. Since 2001, the number of these owners worth $10 million or more has more than doubled, as favorable tax treatment and low rates quietly boosted valuations. The pattern suggests a counterintuitive path: find the niche nobody knows about that everybody needs, then own the whole thing. Wall Street Journal (7 minutes)
Watched, Tracked, Targeted
People in Gaza stopped carrying backpacks, switched to transparent bags, and began extinguishing their own thoughts, as if the listeners could see inside their heads. The piece’s haunting turn: during the author’s interrogation, a soldier asked about his son’s lung infection from a hospital stay in Dubai two years earlier, something he’d never written about or told anyone. The file existed before he did. This is what surveillance becomes when wielded by those with unlimited power over a captive population, built in part with American tech, and it’s not ending with the cease-fire. It’s expanding into who gets to go home at all. New York Magazine (35 minutes)
The Reading Apocalypse
Half of teenagers now say they “hardly ever” read for fun, a complete reversal from the 1990s when daily readers outnumbered non-readers. This isn’t about kids being lazier—it’s about everything converging into streamed video, where YouTube now commands more viewing time than Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros combined. The stakes: we’re watching the cognitive infrastructure of an entire generation shift from text-based processing to visual consumption, and early research on short-form video shows “moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory” among heavy users. If you’re building anything that requires sustained attention or deep thinking from users, you’re swimming against a current that’s been building for 25 years. Derek Thompson (4 minutes)
Your Accidental Operating System
The author’s chaotic work period accidentally created a coffee ritual—same mug, same timing, same two-minute silence—that became the calmest part of her day, and she didn’t understand why until studying neuroscience years later. The insight: rituals aren’t just habit or tradition, they’re psychological software that quiets your amygdala (calm), activates your prefrontal cortex to reduce decision fatigue (clarity), and triggers oxytocin during shared experiences (connection). Most people passively inherit rituals from culture, but you can deliberately design micro-rituals for your specific stress points—transition moments when you feel scattered or disconnected. If you’re building products or teams, recognize that people’s brains are already wired to respond to patterned behavior; you’re either intentionally designing those patterns or letting chaos design them by default. Big Think (3 minutes)
The Motivation Equation
Motivation isn’t mysterious—it’s math: Value × Probability × Return on Effort ÷ Distance. The insight that resolves every contradictory piece of motivational advice: harder goals can simultaneously demotivate (lower self-efficacy) and hypermotivate (higher marginal value of effort), and which effect dominates depends entirely on your starting position. Most procrastination isn’t anxiety or perfectionism but psychological distance—your brain treats “write an essay due in two weeks” as fundamentally different from “write one sentence right now,” even though the latter compounds into the former. For builders creating tools or systems: productivity software fails when it doesn’t collapse distance, and goal-setting features backfire when they lower self-efficacy more than they raise perceived value. The real work is diagnosing which variable in the equation is broken, not applying generic advice about discipline versus enthusiasm. Scott H. Young (3 minutes)
The Energy Equation
High-achievers don’t have one kind of exhaustion—they’re simultaneously experiencing physical fatigue (body depletion), cognitive fatigue (mental fog from decisions and focus), and emotional fatigue (psychological drain from managing people and expectations), all while hidden drains like decision fatigue and context switching burn through reserves invisibly. The framework that cuts through generic wellness advice: COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation) must align simultaneously—knowing what to do (capability) and desperately wanting change (motivation) fails completely if your calendar is structurally impossible (opportunity). Most professionals waste their 3-4 peak cognitive hours daily on email and meetings, then attempt strategic thinking when cognitively fried, which is like trying to write code on a dying laptop battery. For anyone building productivity tools or managing teams: you’re not fighting laziness, you’re fighting chronotype mismatches, decision budget depletion, and environments that make energy-draining behavior the default path—fix the system architecture, not the person. LifeHack (4 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
Less but better. - Dieter Rams
This is brillant synthesis! The motivation equation (Value × Probability × Return on Effort ÷ Distance) finnally explains why I can crush hard projects at work but can't seem to write that novel. It's not the difficulty—it's the psychological distance and uncertain probability of sucess. The ritual section hit different too because I've been unknowingly using coffee as transition software between contexts. Started setting a 2-minute timer after pouring just to sit with it, and my context-switching headaches dropped noticeably. Really needed this framing to start the year.
Excellent read per usual. One of the few emails I make a point of reading end-to-end each week. Thank you!