Hey Everyone - Welcome back! I hope you’re having a great holiday season. I have some (hopefully) great ideas to start your new year off right!

Let’s dive in.

As new AI tools launch almost daily, a quiet tax is emerging. Decision fatigue. Every new model, agent, or workflow tool carries the same implicit question. Should I switch, or should I go deeper where I already am.

Most people answer this emotionally. They chase novelty. They fear missing out. They install everything and master nothing. The result is shallow leverage and constant context switching.

A better approach is to adopt a simple framework.

Start with this question. Is the tool I am already using likely to do this well soon.

If the answer is yes, depth usually beats novelty.

Take Claude Code. I use it daily. When a new coding agent launches with an interesting feature, there is immediate economic pressure on Claude to adapt. If the feature is genuinely useful, it will almost certainly be integrated or matched quickly. That means my time is usually better spent improving my environment, refining prompts, building reusable workflows, and getting faster at the tool I already depend on. The returns from mastery compound.

This is the mistake most people make. They confuse access with leverage. Using ten tools at a surface level feels productive. Deep customization of one tool is what actually changes output.

The second question in the framework is this. Do I get higher returns from going deeper with my current tool, or from switching to something new.

If learning a new tool costs weeks and only marginally improves results, it is probably not worth it. If staying put unlocks speed, intuition, and reuse, depth wins.

But there is a clear exception.

Hyper specialized use cases reward specialization.

This is where new tools make sense. If a team is spending all day thinking about a single narrow problem, they will outperform a general purpose setup almost every time.

Newsletter Hero is a good example. Our entire focus is using AI to help people research, write, and grow newsletters. Rebuilding that level of domain specific intelligence in a generic environment would take an enormous amount of time. It makes more sense to defer to tools built by people who live in that problem space.

The same logic applies to tools like Opus Clip or Descript. These are not just wrappers around AI. They encode thousands of small decisions about a specific workflow. That accumulated judgment is the real product.

So the framework becomes simple.

Go deep on general tools that are central to your work and under strong competitive pressure to improve.

Go specialized when the use case is narrow, repeatable, and already being obsessed over by a dedicated team.

Ignore everything else.

This framework reveals something deeper about a post AI world. When intelligence becomes abundant, scarcity shifts. Judgment, taste, focus, and responsibility become the differentiators. In that environment, chasing every new tool is a form of avoidance. Depth is not a preference. It is a strategy. AI will keep making execution easier. It will not choose where your attention goes or what you commit to. In a world where AI is everywhere, discernment is no longer optional. It is the skill that decides who compounds and who gets left behind.

I’m working on a lot of things right now. I have my YouTube channel, this newsletter, a local newsletter I started with a friend, and newsletter hero. I have my hands in more pies than at any other time in my entire life.

And I’m less stressed about it than I’ve ever been.

What is different now is that all of these projects are working in the same direction. They all feed off of each other. Creating newsletters helps me draft YouTube content, it also helps me do market research for newsletter hero. Everything is beautifully complementary.

These projects are also seeing compounding growth. In my newsletter I recommend my other newsletters and YouTube content. As these grow, all of my other channels grow as well.

Even my ad spend gets a higher return. Paying to get local newsletter subscribers often results in subscribers to some of my other content as well.

By running my businesses in parallel lanes I’m getting better ROI for every dollar I spend.

Unfortunately, I do my best work when I am busy with a bunch of things. This time it is different because all of those things are pointed in the same direction.

Things I Learned

Content I Made

While AI keeps getting better at doing things for us, this week’s survival skill is one we are actively losing: Learning to focus.

Focus shows up at three different levels, and most people only think about the first one.

The first level is focusing on the task at hand. Sitting down and working on something without checking your phone every few minutes. Being able to stay with a problem long enough to actually make progress. This is the most basic form of focus, and it is already rare.

My dad used to train this by studying in intentionally distracting places. Coffee shops, noisy rooms, anywhere it was hard to concentrate. I would not recommend this approach. It builds toughness, but it also builds stress.

Better ways to train this kind of focus are simpler. Meditation helps. Pomodoro works for a lot of people. One of my favorites is just working five to ten minutes past the moment when you want to quit or switch tasks. That edge is where focus actually grows.

The second level of focus is sticking with something for a long period of time. Years, not weeks. This is where most people break. The novelty wears off. Progress slows. Doubt creeps in. AI makes this worse because there is always something new and shiny competing for your attention.

Long term focus is less about motivation and more about identity. You stop asking, “Is this exciting today?” and start asking, “Is this the kind of person I am trying to become?” Systems beat willpower here. Regular schedules. Public commitments. Small visible wins that remind you why you started.

The third level of focus is choosing to work on a few things instead of many. This is the hardest one for me personally. I like ideas. I like starting things. But every new project splits attention and slows everything else down.

There is a quiet power in subtraction. Fewer projects means deeper work. Deeper work creates leverage. Leverage creates momentum. Momentum makes focus easier instead of harder.

I am not great at this yet. I am actively working on it as I write this. But the direction is clear.

In a world where AI makes it easy to do more, the real advantage goes to people who choose to do less, better, for longer.

Focus is no longer just a productivity skill. It is a survival skill.