Dima reads #12
I share highlights and reflections from my reading — spanning marketplaces, technology, productivity, AI, sci-fi, and whatever else grabs my curiosity
The High Agency Tax
George Mack’s brutal observation: “A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school are rewarded in adulthood, and a lot of the behaviours you were rewarded for in school are punished in adulthood.”
School systematically trains us into what Mack calls the overthinking trap - spending nearly eight hours per day lost in imaginary thought. That’s equivalent to losing January through June every year to mental loops instead of action.
School teaches you to ask permission to use the bathroom, wait for someone to tell you what to read next, and never copy from the smart kid. These aren’t just behavioral rules - they’re psychological programming that creates low-agency thinking patterns. You learn to ruminate on problems instead of solving them, to seek consensus instead of acting, to follow prescribed paths instead of hunting for what matters.
Reality rewards the opposite playbook. The highest performers have quietly unlearned the need for permission and replaced overthinking with rapid experimentation
PMF Isn’t Enough Anymore
Everyone obsesses over product-market fit, but Brian Balfour’s latest framework reveals why that’s incomplete. He maps four distinct fits that determine startup success: Product-Market, Product-Channel, Channel-Model, and Model-Market fit.
The insight that’s reshaping how operators think: products must be built for the channels where customers discover them - channels don’t mold to products. A freemium product with $10/month pricing can’t succeed through enterprise sales teams, just as a $50,000 annual software license can’t rely on viral social media growth.
Even when you nail product-market fit, the wrong distribution channel or pricing model can kill momentum.
AI-Native vs AI-Added
While everyone adds ChatGPT integrations to their apps, Brian Chesky shares about what actually matters: AI-native, not AI-added. He argues most apps today just slap AI onto old interfaces - “a pre-AI design with a jet engine behind it.”
Meanwhile, Scott Galloway calls AI “the Ozempic of the corporate world” - switching off companies’ appetite to hire more humans. But here’s the reality: almost nothing is truly AI-native yet. We’re in the awkward phase where everyone claims AI transformation while essentially building the same old products with smarter autocomplete.
Week’s takeaway
Everyone gravitates toward the flashy, obvious moves while the highest leverage lies in unsexy foundational work.
Take overthinking as a perfect example: most professionals obsess over productivity hacks, time-blocking apps, and calendar optimization—but they’re still burning thousands of hours looping on past regrets or future worries that could be closed with one phone call, one email, or one conversation. The surface-level fix is better task management; the foundational restructuring is building the agency to act instead of ruminate.
These ideas are my intellectual breadcrumbs. Some will resonate, some will provoke, some you’ll dismiss - and that’s the point.
Dima