Micro Misconcepts The marginal utility of a better cup of coffee 10th July 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org David and I are specialty coffee enthusiasts. Over the years we've put together a real setup. An Aeropress, a Kaffelogic for home roasting, a Flair Pro 2 for manual espresso, a DF64 grinder, a V60, a Subminimal NanoFoamer, a Hario Switch, and most recently an OXO brewer for soup shots. With this collection, we can make almost any coffee you'd want. But there's also plenty of coffee gear...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Micro Misconcepts Striving from sufficiency 3rd July 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org A couple of weeks ago, I came across a line from author James Clear I haven't stopped thinking about. "A lovely blend: Always reaching. Already enough." It touches on a tension most of us feel and treat as a binary choice. Contentment or ambition. As if choosing contentment would lead to complacency. But what if the two are not mutually exclusive? What if the reaching actually gets better once you already feel...
20 days ago • 3 min read
Micro Misconcepts What money actually is 26th June 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org Before money, people traded goods directly. Apples for eggs. Cattle for fabric. It worked, but only to an extent. Some goods were perishable. Some were difficult to transport. And prices were impossible to standardise. So we invented coins. Then paper. Then digital accounts. Each iteration lighter, easier to carry, easier to transact, but also one abstraction further from the original value it represented. Money...
27 days ago • 2 min read
Micro Misconcepts Rules of thumb 19th June 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org In 2020, friends and family were urging us to buy a house. Nearly everyone around us was buying. House prices were surging. The message was clear: get in before you miss out. We chose to miss out. Buying property as a good investment is one of the most widely held rules of thumb of our generation. And that was exactly why we paused. People love a good rule of thumb. They feel like inherited wisdom, passed down through...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Micro Misconcepts The cost of the crowd 12th June 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org Here is a thought exercise. If the herd was running toward a cliff, would you run with it? We all say no. But we do it every day. The investment everyone is piling into. The career path everyone around us takes without question. The opinions we quietly change when the room disagrees with ours. We do it because we are social animals. For 99% of human history, social disapproval was a literal death sentence. So we...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Micro Misconcepts The market's most bulletproof product 5th June 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org I came across this video on YouTube recently and it stopped me cold. Somewhere on Mount Tai, one of China's most sacred mountains, you can now pay someone to climb alongside you. Not as a guide, but as a companion. A hired friend of sorts, whose job is to listen, encourage, and make you feel psychologically safe on the way up. This is one example of 情绪价值, or Qíngxù Jiàzhí, which translates directly...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Micro Misconcepts Ego from good iterations 29th May 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org Centuries ago, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius noticed something that bothered him enough to write it down. "I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others." – Marcus Aurelius This stings. Because most of us can see a bit of ourselves in it. We know we...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Micro Misconcepts Are You Optimising for Growth or the Appearance of It? 22nd May 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org You can spend years looking like you're growing without actually growing. At first, the gap is invisible. Same vocabulary. Same confidence. Same apparent interest in new ideas. But underneath, a completely different optimisation function is running. And over time, the gap shows. One person is asking: Am I actually figuring this out? The other is asking: Do I look like someone who...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Micro Misconcepts Problems Never Go Away (That's Not the Issue) 15th May 2026 | Read on misconcepts.org You solve one problem and another appears just behind it. You get the promotion, and now the workload is crushing. You finally feel stable, and something shifts at home. You buy the house, and the roof is leaking. Most of us have experienced that feeling of constantly running but never arriving. And underneath it is a model that says “if I just get enough of my life sorted, the problems...
2 months ago • 2 min read