The napkin
Napkin 10 of 21
The denominator: the winners you can see on top, and underneath, everyone who played and never posted.
If an idea does not fit on a napkin, it is probably not an idea yet. Redraw this one on your own.
Everyone in your feed seems to be getting rich, and you’re afraid you’re the one left behind.
Everyone files this under greed, which is why nobody handles it. Greed is an appetite. This is dread: the feeling in your chest at eleven at night when someone in the group chat posts a screenshot, the fear of being the one too slow, too careful, too dumb to see what everyone else saw. It isn’t stupid, because the feed really is built for it. You’re comparing your ordinary Tuesday to the single best day of ten thousand strangers, selected by a machine for maximum effect.
The math underneath it is survivorship. You see the numerator, the winners who posted. You never see the denominator, everyone who ran the identical play and lost, because losers don’t post. The cost is buying relief from a feeling, and the price of relief is almost always the top, often with borrowed money that deletes your right to wait. There’s a quieter cost too: every hour spent measuring your life against someone’s highlight is an hour your own thing didn’t get.
Before acting on someone’s win: where’s the denominator (how did everyone who ran this play do)? And whose scoreboard am I using? The feed shows numerators only.
Before you act on anyone’s win this week, ask two questions and write the answers down. Where’s the denominator? How many people ran this exact play, and what happened to all of them, not just the one holding a phone? Expect to dig. Then: whose scoreboard is this? If you didn’t choose the number you’re measuring yourself against, stop playing until you do.
The denominator: the winners you can see on top, and underneath, everyone who played and never posted.
If an idea does not fit on a napkin, it is probably not an idea yet. Redraw this one on your own.
It runs your own compounding, so you measure your pace against your plan instead of other people’s screenshots.
The system is free and it works alone. If you want a second set of hands on the wheel, that is what the Purpose Pit Stop is for.