The Advantage #07: The Aisle Stops Selling, Environments Start Winning, and Friction Becomes Freedom

Thanks for tuning into the seventh episode of The Advantage. A short, weekly note where I share what I am working on, something worth watching, a lesson from history, and one practical edge you can try right away.

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At Cutting Horse, we spend our days dissecting the P&Ls of food and beverage businesses in the $1M to $20M revenue range. We look for the outliers, the brands breaking out of the noise. Across categories spanning frozen, spices, condiments, oils, and center-store staples, one existential question keeps surfacing.

Where does discovery happen now?

For the high-value early adopters, the cohorts that drive momentum, word of mouth, and eventual acquisition multiples, the answer is increasingly binary.

It is not the aisle.

Today’s primary household shopper has effectively outsourced the trip to a workflow. Whether via pickup or delivery, the sensory experience of walking the store has been replaced by the efficiency of the interface. What once rewarded browsing now rewards speed, defaults, and habit. This is not merely a change in logistics. It is a change in brand physics.

We believe the industry is currently passing through a structural tipping point. Below is the data-backed thesis on why the physical shelf is becoming a lagging indicator of brand health, and how the Davids of tomorrow are using this shift to outmaneuver the Goliaths.

Quick intro:
This week’s Worth Watching is a 28-minute YouTube video adaptation of Atomic Habits by James Clear called, “How to become 37.78 times better at anything.” I love this for two reasons. First, Atomic Habits is an excellent book that reframes how habits form in a way that feels immediately actionable. Second, it’s a great example of some really cool stuff you can find on YouTube. At the risk of dating myself, this reminds me of CliffNotes, but on steroids. If you haven’t read the book, this is a fantastic place to start. Even if you have, the format is worth your time.

What I loved about it:
The video and book don’t pretend that motivation and discipline don’t matter. They do. But they make a clearer, more practical point: habits stick when motivation is supported by an environment that makes the right behavior easier and more rewarding. Most people already know what they should do. Where they struggle is expecting willpower to carry all the weight. It is February, and some of those ambitious New Year’s goals and habits we were trying to form are falling off. This is a great time to lean back in.

The visuals make this obvious. You can see how small changes in setup, what’s visible, what’s frictionless, what’s nearby, quietly determine what actually happens day to day. Once you see it this way, habit formation stops feeling like a character test and starts looking like a design problem.

Here is my 20-second recap if you do not have the full 28 minutes:

This is one of my favorite explanations of how habits actually stick, and a great example of why YouTube has quietly become a serious learning medium, not just entertainment.

What Happened: Television was demonstrated in 1927, and consumer sets were available in the United States by 1939. For more than a decade, it stayed a novelty, expensive hardware, thin programming, limited reach, and no settled habit. Then the curve broke. It took until 1951, when TV reached the magical 20% penetration rate. By 1958, it was 83.2% of households. The adoption of the first 20% of households took 27 years, and the next 60% took 7 years.

Insight behind it: The early curve is slow because the world around the product is still missing. People misread that slowness as a permanent ceiling. The tipping point is when adoption becomes self-reinforcing. Content gets funded because the audience is real. Distribution expands because demand is obvious. Prices fall because scale is finally safe. At one in five, the incentives flip, and the rest follow faster than anyone expects.

Modern application: If you are watching a behavior shift, do not wait for consensus. Watch for share. When a new technology (i.e., AI, VR, Driverless Cars, Online Grocery Shopping) starts approaching 20% of market share, the debate is over, even if the headlines have not caught up. That is when growth stops being persuasion and becomes default. The mistake is treating the next five years like the last five. The standard is simple. If you see one in five forming, you assume acceleration and plan accordingly. The pattern is called the Diffusion of Innovation and is very repeatable across the history of technology adoption.

Why it works: Social media is not TV. TV may waste your time. Social media steals your attention, then charges you for it with anxiety. This will be useful for everyone, but I am writing it primarily as a reminder for myself. As I said earlier, it is February, so it is time to double down on those New Year’s goals.

These apps are a slot machine in your pocket. They are engineered to addict you. The more you scroll, the more they learn what spikes your emotion. Then they feed you more of it. Not to inform you. To keep you there. For a huge portion of users, the output is not entertainment. The output is stress, comparison, and manufactured anxiety.

I am not the first to tell you this, so I will just jump on the dogpile. You really should quit social media.

The data supports it:

Instagram is a comparison engine. Multiple studies link Instagram use to upward social comparison and show that upward comparison is associated with lower self-esteem and higher depressive symptoms. When the default content is curated highlights, the default psychological move is to measure your behind-the-scenes against someone else’s best frame.

X is a volatility engine. Outrage travels because it performs. Work on moral outrage and sharing shows that outrage is a powerful accelerant for online diffusion, and, more broadly, that emotionally provocative content spreads faster because it captures attention and prompts responses.

How I use it:
I started two years ago with Instagram. I was a forty-something-year-old in a happy relationship, successful at work, and every time I opened IG, I felt like shit. None-the-less my scrolling became a default pattern. If I had a minute, I would look. It was dopamine addiction. Getting off it was as hard as quitting booze.

Next was X, which was more challenging. I have only been off it for a little over a month. I used it as my news source, so I felt I needed it. Then I realized the things I was getting all worked up over were far outside my control. All it did was add stress.

Now I would say I am about 95-97% percent off social. I still have my accounts, and I occasionally check DMs. Very occasionally, I post. Doom scrolling is almost completely gone. My usage is under 5 percent of what it was this time last year.

The proof is simple. Stress levels are way down. Outrage is way down. I gained back at least one hour a day, sometimes two. The biggest shift was realizing how much anxiety and stress it was causing before I removed it.

The 30-day challenge:

Delete the apps, from your phone & tablet for 30 days. Instagram, X, Facebook. You can keep the accounts open.

Note: If you are doomscrolling LinkedIn, you may have some serious issues!

If you cannot delete the apps, set a hard Screen Time limit. Your phone allows you to set limits on apps. I suggest under 15 mins. FWIW, I tried that first, and it did not work. Deleting is the move. It makes the habit meaningfully harder.

Then use the Atomic Habits playbook (watch the video above).

At the end of 30 days, decide if you want to reinstall.

I promise you, you do not realize how anxious you are until the noise is gone. Your mood stops being held hostage by strangers.

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