THE LEAFLET
December 18 2025
drip vs droplet, when you lack data, how to find your next read
DRIP VS DROPLET
Crude binary alert. Let’s say work breaks down into two categories: the drip and the droplet. Each requires its own standard and pattern. Each rides forward on a distinct obsession.
The drip is a steady output. The obsession is consistency. Showing up, doing the thing, clocking in, clocking out. There will be better and worse instances of your output as the days pile up. What matters, the way you win, is that piling up. Gradual accumulation trumps a grand arrival.
The droplet is a singular product. The obsession is precision. You refine, you polish. You may only get one shot. You’re on stage, the spotlight turns on, and you have to deliver your very best performance right then. No re-dos, no take backsies.
A couple related observations:
Often the expert droplet-makers have mastered a drip. They’ve built a system for showing up, off stage and off camera, that leads to the immaculate droplet at the end.
Often the expert drip-makers fool you into thinking they’re droplet-makers. Your experience of the thing they’ve done a thousand times and will do a thousand times more is singular and special. You feel like you’re getting a precious droplet. They are good at hiding the humble piping that they’ve built and patched over and over, piping that yields a drip for way more people than just you.
-eric
Read the rest here.
THINGS YOU CAN SENSIBLY DO WHEN YOU LACK DATA
It would be really so helpful if you – newcomer to the scene, start-up in a phalanx of legacy orgs, candidate with no name recognition – had sharp, trustworthy, comprehensive, tailored data on your market and your impact and all the little tactical pieces of your operation. You’re no fool! You don’t want to make decisions based on vibes and hope.
When you’re scrapping at the start, you might not have that data. Often that data is expensive to get. Often it is jealously guarded by legacy players. Often you have it, but it’s a few buckets of bits awash in a mixed sea of them. You don’t have the time or the team to filter it.
What to do? A couple options to consider:
Get some data with a small-scale experiment. Track what’s happening for a week or a month. Give yourself some standard of comparison for what comes next. This data will be incomplete and shaggy with caveats. Still better than vibes alone.
Use values instead of vibes. If you don’t have data that obviously steers you and the data you can collect from a short experiment is too fickle to act on, return to the core reasons your venture exists. What are the characteristics of your team and your work at their very best, ie, achieving their mission against the odds? Choose a next step that most tightly aligns with those characteristics, those values.
-eric
Read the rest here.
READING THINGS THAT AREN’T THE SAME THINGS EVERYONE ELSE IS READING
Ben convinced me a long time ago that strong leaders are avid, open-minded readers. As a young teacher fresh out of grad school, I was ready to douse the management books he recommended to me with a gas can’s worth of lefty, hipster skepticism. I had seen some of these books in airport racks, for crying out loud. What could they offer?
A lot, it turned out, even if the prose often made me grit my teeth. This was a turning point for me in my reading life and my life as a teammate and leader. I realized I was too tied up in a personal aesthetic and a set of artificial categories. Reading a lot and reading beyond the taste of a narrow elite made me a better teacher and (I think, I hope) a kinder, more understanding person. The habit eventually made me a better CEO.
In the years since, I’ve come to value more and more the curators who read a ton, deliberately going beyond bestseller lists and award-winners, and share their favorites. Here are a few of those curators (or paths to them):
Ryan Holiday: I have never read any of his books but I usually grab 1 or 2 from the recommendations he makes in his monthly email.
Tyler Cowen: He writes up a year-end best-of list for fiction and non-fiction every year and regularly shares “what I’m reading” posts. I’m not sure there’s anyone who reads more than he does. He got me into picture books. And 14th century British history.
Hanif Abdurraqib: A poet and a music critic. He posts volubly on Instagram.
John Darnielle: the founder and frontman and lyricist for The Mountain Goats has also written several excellent novels in recent years. He dishes on all kinds of obscure-to-Americans stuff on his Goodreads page. Mostly fiction.
Kiese Laymon: an outstanding essayist and memoirist who uses his platform to promote the work of up-and-coming black writers.
Maria Popova: Her newsletter The Marginalian is a lovely, recurring curation. Often I find my way to lesser-known pieces by well-known folks because of her rapt excerpts.
NYT “By the Book”: A goldmine. Where you find your favorite writer’s favorite writers. In a couple cases (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Ondaatje) I’ve assigned myself the job of reading all (or close to all) of the things one of these authors cite. This led me to some favorites I never would have touched otherwise.
In addition to those, I like the advice in this piece (h/t Tyler Cowen for the lead): if you like a book, dig into the endnotes of that book and pick your next books from there.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Poet Matthew Arnold on love:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Essayist Kiese Laymon on basketball and art and basketball as art:
I understood, the very first time I saw the painting, that wherever there was space, a ball, a hoop, and one human, there was the possibility of a miracle made possible by human ritual.
Writer Sophie Elmhirst on the golden days:
And then what? After the wedding, after the honeymoon–well, then it’s just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric