# Persona Roster — selection rationale & priority

Why each persona is on the roster, what each adds *given what's already captured*,
and the order that maximizes marginal coverage. BUILDPLAN Phase 1e holds the
checkboxes; this doc holds the reasoning. Selection criteria: fit to James's
goals × capture feasibility (corpus depth, distinctive voice, misattribution
risk) × marginal value over existing captures.

## James's goal areas (2026-07)

1. Software product building (bootstrapped, highly automated businesses)
2. IC → later-in-life entrepreneur transition
3. More involved dad (two boys, 9 and 11 as of 2026)
4. Better husband
5. Finishing what he starts; picking up after himself
6. Craftsman lifestyle over pack-rat clutter; many hobbies, circled back to eventually
7. Agentic tools / building things he's proud of, then automating them into businesses

## Already captured — what's covered

- **Naval Ravikant** — leverage (code/media), automated income, judgment,
  desire-management minimalism. Covers most of goal 7's philosophy and part of 1/2.
- **Steve Jobs** — product taste, focus-as-saying-no, simplicity, craftsmanship
  *standards*, shipping, marketing-as-values. Covers the "bar" half of goals 1 and 6.
- **Racing four** (Stewart, Bentley, Code, Hill — queued) — Phase 2 sim/moto crew.
- Socrates + Aurelius/Senna refreshes — original spec-stress roster, unchanged.

## Mentor roster — priority order (marginal value over the above)

**Next deep slots (capture in this order):**

1. **Jason Fried** — *focus: calm bootstrapped software product building.* Jobs
   gives standards; Fried gives the process a tiny team uses to meet them:
   Shape Up appetites, six-week cycles, scope hammering, no-VC economics.
   Active-goal leverage now. Corpus: Rework/Getting Real/Calm books + decades of podcasts.
2. **John Gottman** — *focus: marriage as practice (bids, repair, Four Horsemen).*
   Zero overlap with anything captured; 40 years of research corpus. Goal 4's anchor.
3. **Fred Rogers** — *focus: presence and emotional attunement with children.*
   Zero overlap; deepest "how to be with kids" corpus in American media; ages 9–11
   are his sweet spot. Era guard 2003; heavy misattribution folklore — firewall matters.
4. **Adam Savage** — *focus: workshop practice, finishing projects, managing many
   hobbies without drowning.* Every Tool's a Hammer; lists, shop organization,
   loving diverse hobbies as a feature to manage. Dad-of-boys maker angle. Huge
   Tested video corpus. Goals 5/6 at personal scale, where Jobs doesn't reach.

**Sequenced later (real value, but overlaps captured ground):**

5. **Cal Newport** — craftsman-lifestyle operating system (Slow Productivity, Deep
   Work). Overlaps Jobs (focus) and Naval (attention); the *system* angle is new.
6. **Seth Godin** — shipping + strategic quitting (The Dip — the precise medicine
   for circling hobbies) + marketing when products need selling. Overlaps Jobs on
   shipping/marketing.
7. **Derek Sivers** — automated business, radical minimalism, "hell yeah or no."
   Broadest single fit on paper, but heaviest overlap with Naval; his warmth and
   finisher energy are the distinct part.

**Tier 2 — candidates, capture on demand:** Jocko Willink (discipline/ownership;
Warrior Kid books target the boys' exact ages; move up if the drill register
motivates), Paul Graham (essays on procrastination and doing what you love;
text-heavy, stylized voice fine), David Allen (open loops / GTD; system > persona),
Matthew Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft; moto + craft philosophy), DHH (Fried's
combative half; Le Mans class winner — racing overlap).

**Considered and skipped:** Marie Kondo (translated corpus — style fidelity risk),
Pieter Levels (best automated-solo-business story of the era, thin long-form
corpus), Esther Perel (Gottman fits maintenance-and-repair better), hustle-culture
founders (pull against the whole roster). Agentic-era building has no deep corpus
yet from anyone — Naval + Sivers + Fried cover it by principle.

## Coverage matrix

| Goal | Primary | Backup |
|---|---|---|
| Software product building | Fried | Jobs (captured), PG |
| Later-life entrepreneurship | Sivers | Godin, Naval (captured) |
| Involved dad | Rogers | Savage, Jocko |
| Better husband | Gottman | — (Perel if needed) |
| Finishing / anti-clutter | Savage, Godin | Allen, Newport |
| Craftsman lifestyle | Newport | Sivers, Crawford, Jobs (captured) |
| Agentic automated business | Naval (captured) | Sivers, Fried |

## Usage model (drives prioritization and runtime features)

- **Live voice sessions: one, at most two personas at a time.** Phase 2's racing
  crew already specifies the dual-persona pattern (primary/secondary hierarchy,
  distinct voices); the same pattern generalizes to any mentor pair (e.g.
  Fried + Jobs on a product decision).
- **Text panel mode (future):** several personas answering the same question in
  one chat. Changes the overlap calculus — overlapping personas become
  productive tension (Jobs's taste-maximalism vs. Fried's calm scope-cutting)
  rather than redundancy. Not scheduled; revisit after Phase 2. When specced,
  needs the standard Agentic Version treatment per root CLAUDE.md.

## Maintenance

When a capture completes, move its line to "Already captured" with a one-line
summary of what it now covers, and re-rank what remains by marginal value.