Start Here: The Best of Lazy Leverage

I've written roughly 390 of these things. Reading them in order would be deranged, so I pulled the useful ones into one place.

I write about AI, operating systems, service businesses, and occasionally being a dad while my brain is occasionally elsewhere.

The whole thesis

AI and Global Talent Are the Same Bet

I keep making the same bet in two different forms: push commodity work down so good people can spend their time on judgment, relationships, and the weird stuff.

AI & agents

• I spent $1,200 in two days on GrokBot (and it was worth it)
  I spent $1,200 discovering a workflow with a monster model, then pushed the boring, repeatable pieces down to cheaper models, APIs, and code.

• I built an agent that mails a custom picture of your own house (Creepy?)
  An agent pulls property data, makes an image of the prospect's actual house, and mails it. Useful, a little creepy, and much better than another chatbot demo.

• The Brown M&Ms Test
  Use AI aggressively. Inspect the output before it reaches a customer. Be Roth.

Operating systems & GTD

• Your Brain Is Not a Filing Cabinet
  Capture first. Get the seventeen open loops out of your head so your brain can do something more useful.

• Problems Are Projects
  If the same problem comes back every Tuesday, stop squashing it. Define done and give the fix a project.

Service businesses, talent & management

• Architect the Way the Work Is Done
  Find the scarce person and get the medium-value work off their plate. A dentist doing data entry is an expensive clerk with unusually nice tools.

• $6M → $25M Plumbing Company in 3 Years
  A plumbing company went from $6M to $25M by designing small, sharply defined roles and buying business functions. Nobody needs forty hours of filler to justify doing the right five.

• How to Develop Your Team's Autonomy
  The ladder from “tell me what to do” to judgment and initiative, without pretending people become autonomous because you asked nicely.

The human running the systems

The Perfect Dad Paradox

A note to myself about keeping my body and brain in the same ZIP code.

Pick one. If it gives you something useful, hit reply and tell me what you're trying to fix. I read the replies.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon