Hey there!

So, I was reading “Building a Second Brain,” and it had this quote that really got me thinking:

Imagine if every time you wanted to remember something, you had to climb a huge mountain first. You’d probably just forget about it, right?

If you're not new here, you've probably read this quote on a recent issue. This time I want to take it a step further.

There’s this thing in behavioral economics called “friction.” It’s basically anything that makes stuff harder or takes longer to do. Think of it like trying to ride a bike through mud. It’s possible, but way harder than on a smooth road.

In “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which is another cool book by Daniel Kahneman, he talks about two ways our brain thinks:

1. The quick and easy way, like grabbing a cookie from a jar or choosing the next plate to wash. It’s like our brain’s autopilot.
2. The slow and careful way, like writing an important note or doing a tricky math problem. This is when our brain really has to focus and think hard.

So, when I’m choosing how to do something, I always keep these rules in mind.
Like, when I was writing this note, I had a bunch of choices. Should I use Apple notes, Notion, or Obsidian? Where should I save it so I can find it again? While I’m thinking about all this, I sometimes forget what I actually wanted to write. Annoying, right?

This is just like when I use my tools. Tmux is great because I don’t have to worry about picking a terminal window. My session plugin saves me the trouble of remembering where I opened a new project.

Neovim is super cool because it just feels natural, like it’s part of my hand. And Brain.fm? It chooses the best music for me to focus, so I don’t have to.

When I pick a new technology, let alone build one, I try to think: “does this remove friction?”, if it does, I go on a deep dive to learn everything I can about it, so I build another muscle memory around it.

Then, when system 2 kicks in, its as free as possible to perform the task at hand with little to no distraction at all.

Here are some cool things I discovered this week:

• Mixo, is an AI based startup landing page creator. You provide a prompt, and it figures out the rest. If you have a micro saas idea just give it a go for free and see what is comes up with: https://www.mixo.io/
• Assuming you’re building a small project with the above, how about an open source mini backend, that can run as a small binary with everything you need? DB, authentication admin dashboard and more? Here’s https://pocketbase.io/

Have a great weekend!

Thank you for reading, feel free to reply to this email with ideas and thoughts.

Omer