Nov 30, 2025
Erik’s Newsletter: Frameworks Beat Willpower
Issue #85
This month felt like a theme: use simple frameworks to make hard tradeoffs—at work, at home, and with AI. When life gets noisy, frameworks become a moat. I’ve started codifying my frameworks and have been using AI to leverage them in my daily work.
🗓 Today at a Glance
Quote: “Start with the customer experience.” — Steve Jobs
Podcast: Trader Joe’s
Tactics: LNO Framework
Try: The Boredom Block
Tweet: The more you contribute, the more expensive it is
💬 Quote I’m Pondering
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Start with the customer experience.” — Steve Jobs
A reminder that most people don’t know what they want until they feel it. Create a better customer experience than they can imagine and then let them feel it to get their reaction. If you over-optimize on customer feedback, you get an abomination.
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🧠 What I’m Thinking About
Frameworks > willpower.
- LNO (Leverage / Neutral / Overhead) is becoming my prioritization framework of choice. Planning Friday forces me to acknowledge tradeoffs before Monday chaos sets in. Most “overwhelm” is unmade decisions.
How to win early in your career.
- Compounding > compensation. Pick people, skills, and reps that compound. Decode what your company needs right now and deliver that.
Decoding your role
As a Product Manager, you either need to be “Product” —> builder or “Manager” —> Management. If you can’t do either, well, you’re kind of screwed.
You need to be excellent at at least one. Ideally both. But if you bring no customer insight and only surface technical detail, you’re a project manager with extra steps.
Ship faster by designing for decisions.
- Daily demos. Single-owner DRIs. Smaller PRs. Default to motion. Challenge corporate dysfunction by naming it and replacing it with mechanisms.
Agents need better surfaces.
- Agents aren’t end-to-end; they’re middle-to-middle. They need stable IDs, forgiving APIs, clear state, and fewer puzzles.
Make your staff AI agents.
- Take recurring SOPs and turn them into agents with human-in-the-loop exceptions. Most companies underestimate how much “hidden glue work” is agent-automatable.
Boredom is underrated.
- Intentional 45-minute “no input” blocks produce surprising clarity. Without stimulation, your brain finally processes the backlog.
UX beginners’ mind.
- “To be good at UX, be dumb.” Ask the “obvious” questions. Often they’re the ones everyone else is afraid to ask.
🎧 Podcasts Worth Your Time
**Trader Joe’s
**//acquired
A masterclass in counter-positioning: tiny SKU count, bad parking, no e-com… yet $2k+/sq ft. A reminder that focusing on taste can beat focusing on scale.
AI Evals, Error Buckets & Better Prompts
//howiai
Use evals to optimize your LLM. Use LLM-as-judge. Build error buckets. Treat prompts like code with tests. If you’re building AI products, this is required listening.
🧰 Tactics & Tools
**LNO Prioritization Framework in practice
**Block 30 minutes every Friday evening to map next week with L / N / O:
L (Leverage): 10X impact; protect long, fresh hours.
N (Neutral): good work; timebox.
O (Overhead): “do a deliberately okay job” or delegate.
Start with Shreyas’s LNO primer and weekly planner.
Rent vs. Own (best calculator I’ve found)
The Ultimate Home Calculator (Swell) compares wealth over time, not just monthly cash flow—ideal for 5–10+ year horizons.
🧪 Things to try out
The Boredom Block
A scheduled 45 minutes of no input: no phone, no laptop, no reading. Just sitting, walking, or staring.
Why it works:
Your brain finally has time to process unresolved loops—decisions you’ve deferred, ideas that never had space, half-formed strategies.
Test:
Do one block. Write down everything that surfaces in the 10 minutes after. If you get even one useful insight, it’s worth keeping.
🐦 Tweets That Made Me Stop and Think
Demanding careers + kids: seasonality, explicit tradeoffs.
https://x.com/nwischoff/status/1977751285248991623
How to win in your 20s: chase compounding.
https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1977805435874029585
The more you contribute, the more expensive it is.
https://x.com/jameygannon/status/1981096339032461585
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Uber surveillance pricing based on WTP based on origin/to locations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1og759r/two_phones_are_showing_drastically_different/
When you find an Ingrid, hold on.
https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1985458556808671631
To be good at UX, be dumb.
https://x.com/frantzfries/status/1986067371354714577
Systems vs. relationships lens.
https://x.com/artemisconsort/status/1986963360471261349
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Make your staff AI agents.
https://x.com/yuris/status/1988984094332776811
Ship anything; momentum compounds.
https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1990073384022020290
Tipping arbitrage. There is a 40 cent exploit on a dollar of value in a tipping marketplace. This is why tipping maximizes overall value for companies.
https://x.com/travisk/status/1991282453852692969
How to be a 10/10 candidate.
https://x.com/aschwags3/status/1988595762335248513