I have, over the years, come to appreciate process. And if I’m being completely honest, admitting that makes me a little sick to my stomach. It feels incredibly corporate. Every day, I worry that I am slowly mutating into some kind of corporate goon.

But here I am, getting ready to extol the virtues of a written process. Because the reality of the complexities of the universe demands it.

If you take a leadership assessment of my natural tendencies, “process” ranks at the absolute bottom. I am an idea guy. I like spinning up new projects and surfing the wave of what’s next. But that is exactly why I need process more than anyone. Without a system to capture and execute ideas, you end up doing a thousand things and finishing nothing.

The “Vibe” Problem: Stop Babysitting Chaos

Let me be entirely clear: “Living in the moment” is the worst operational process you can have.

I have been continually humbled by how real personality temperaments are. There are people who float entirely on “vibes” and abstract ideals. They try to be helpful, but they are a constant idea machine with zero bearing in reality. For a long time, I tried to build production systems around people like this. I tried to give them tools to help them succeed.

I was wrong. If you give a chaotic person a productivity tool, it doesn’t make them productive; it just gives them a new way to blow shit up.

You cannot process-engineer a person whose fundamental temperament is chaos. You cannot rely on people who require you to watch them like a hawk just to ensure the basic work gets done. As a leader, you have to systematically eliminate them from your core system.

Writing It Down: Constraining the Complexity

Real process starts by simply writing things down. It doesn’t even have to be good at first. The very act of writing out a process exposes your gaps and forces you to confront what you actually know.

I am dealing with extreme complexity right now building a TypeScript to Go compiler. The code in the common libraries I have to interact with is utterly obnoxious. There are endless borderline edge cases. The only reason I haven’t drowned in this project is because I defined the process of how we would work before we ever started the work.

Everybody wants to just jump in and build the thing, but building the thing is always harder than you think.

The Management Triad: Time, Quality, and Cost

When building any system—whether it’s a compiler, an investment portfolio, or a physical property—I rely on a strict management triad:

• Time (The Ultimate Constraint): Time is the absolute number one thing I control for. Time is precious. If I make time work for me, I can own the highest number of things I actually want.
• Quality (The Standard): Quality is second. I only sacrifice time if the lack of quality makes the end result worthless.
• Cost (The Distraction): Cost is dead last. There is an endless number of things you can own in this life, so you better be absolutely sure you are spending your time and money on the thing you actually fucking want.

If I look at my camera gear it shows this. I wanted a specific multi-camera setup. I have highly cinematic, un-portable rigs, and I have tiny Blackmagic pocket cameras. I bought exactly what I wanted to remove the tool as my limitation. I could have bought a $100,000 camera for a 1% incremental improvement, but I didn’t, because I don’t want to be a full-time cinematographer. I got the features (And then some) that I needed – my quality, and I spent enough (more than I might like, but its done now) of time investigating which ones I should get. Cost came in as I chose appropriate to what I needed them. (It wasn’t the biggest driver).

Prioritizing What Actually Bears Fruit

Process is what protects your time, especially when you have zero motivation left.

There are times I am existentially tired—bone-tired from just doing, doing, doing. I look outside and see the yard needs to be weed-whacked. Some people spend hours every week edging their lawns to look perfectly neat. They grow absolutely nothing of value, but by god, the grass is short and things are edged.

They, because of their value set, of prioritized their time to what they matter. I value producing, so I don’t prioritize “things looking nice”. I’d generally recommend everyone adopt that value…

Next year, we will eat tons of asparagus. I can walk out right now and fill a bowl with gooseberries and currants. I’m growing dwarf cherries, black raspberries, and propagating hazelnut cultivars. I don’t have time to edge a pointless lawn because I am ruthlessly prioritizing what actually bears fruit.

(Yes I mow my lawn)

When Process Kicks Your Teeth In (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

Here is the hardest, most humbling lesson about process: It isn’t a magic wand that guarantees success. It is a discovery tool that forces reality to give you feedback.

Right now, my overarching goal is to become a strategic business investor. I want to deploy capital to acquire businesses like laundromats that will yield serious passive income. To get there, I set up two processes:

1. The Options Trading System: I built a process around trading options to manage capital. For months, it was working. Then, over the last couple of weeks, I got my dick kicked in so hard it invalidated almost all my recent efforts. I have trades heading for max loss that will wipe significant percentages off my portfolio. Doesn’t mean this was a bad idea, it just means executing on “good ideas” probably are a lot harder than just saying them.
2. The Direct Mail Acquisition Pipeline: I started a process of sending direct mail to laundromat owners. I’ve sent multiple rounds of letters over the last six months. Crickets. Not a single fucking call back. Doesn’t mean, it doesn’t work, it means I likely need to build in MORE parts of this process.

It is incredibly hard to know when to jump ship and when to keep going. But you have to realize that this is the process working.

Without a process, I would be acting on pure emotion right now. I might just go blow a million dollars on a random business out of frustration. Instead, because I have a system, I have hard data. I am sizing down my trades. I am re-evaluating the acquisition approach.

The Bottom Line

Process isn’t there to make your life easy. Process is the bridge between your ideas and real-world execution.

It is the guardrail that catches you when you are existentially exhausted, and it is the mechanism that tells you the truth when reality punches you in the mouth. Stop relying on the moment. Write it down. Build the system. Face the feedback.

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