Now
An ongoing high-level journal of what I'm up to and where I'm at physically and mentally.
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An ongoing high-level journal of what I'm up to and where I'm at physically and mentally.
Last updated
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Reading, Watching, Analyzing
4000 weeks
Make Time
Lenny's podcast
researching, looking for that interesting problem that'd tickle my brain
Reading, Watching, Analyzing
Trillion Dollar Coach - the story of Bill Campbell, a well-known Silicon Valley executive coach and advisor -
Pluto -
Getting to Yes -
Of Interest:
Two minute long product demo video on your website is the new elevator pitch. Works the best to get attention, makes me continue into a walkthrough. Keep onboarding into 2 steps maximum. - As I researched 50+ products a week that overlap in functionality.
Give people what they want until they want what you want to give.
Selfish individuals will beat altruistic ones - Trillion Dollar Coach
If you are targeting professionals hitting that 7-9am spot is good, before they get to work emails. then target the crapper time post lunch
People, people people. - Trillion Dollar Coach - Being heard, being treated with respect, dignity. We have so many tools for improving our hard skills, but few for soft skills.
Social Media content is like walking through a noisy market and then you smell something. It's attractive and that's what you buy. The noise of the market doesn't matter. - Oliver King
When data fails we look for search, when that fails we look for curation.
we find psychological safety in long feedback
"At one point you will drop a baby on its head. Things will happen you cannot predict." - Annie Duke on Lenny's podcast
Alignment is bad word. Understanding of each other after nominal discussion. I hear you but we are doing it this way. Both can be true to be heard and make hierarchical decision. Its coercive to seek alignment. - Annie Duke on Lenny's podcast
Finding audience - start with google trends, google news, subreddit size and change of community growth over time; bonus point if its a lifestyle - reinforce identity; there is a trend -> secondary audience creators attach themselves to a trend and then theres community around teh creators/ who’s the anti-trend always anti-audience
"Scroll stopping." - Greg Isenberg
What are people paying competitors for that you can offer to them for free?
if you were to hire me right now, where best would you utilize my skills right now? end of the interview. piratessoftware
good groove at work
Revisiting "Anecdotes" - Can we fix the problem of trust in business and non-business relationships by leaving a verified trail of breadcrumbs (anecdotes) along the way?
Reading, Watching, Analyzing
Fallout (TV Show) - sets looked great, amazing service to fans of the game, turned into a western flick way more than I anticipated. 4/5
Of Interest:
Ask a question at the dinner come back the day after with answer. (on how to make for interesting family dinners)
Curiosity as a way of survivability adaptability
Delta-4 by Kunal Shah: What would a customer rate the existing solution on a scale of 1 to 10? What would they rate your solution? Your solution needs to be +4 better for anyone to care about your product.
Toronto trip, learned to not miss a flight in the early morning
Weather picked up, biking around NYC
Found a new place to move to in June
Focusing on my paid job and personal relationships.
Reading, Watching, Analyzing
48 Laws of Power
Maestros
How to Live
Done with Future Assembly for now. Manifesto is out. After much research I feel the project deserves attention I cannot provide it at the moment. My hope is to bump into someone who'd love to refine the use-cases and share the workload.
Of interest
Every social app looks exactly the same. Like literally the same. It’s all short-form videos and algorithms optimized for time spent. There will be a breakout social app that looks nothing like what we’ve got going on right now and it's going to be glorious. - Greg Isenberg
The days of a computer science intern getting $10k/month right out of college are soon gone. - Greg Isenberg -- agreed the value of junior hard skills (design, analysis, programming, copywriting, translation) has diminished with generative AI.
Visited a couple of PM meetups, beautiful little chat with new people. The hiring market is still in shambles.
After hitting a low of the winter depression, the sun arrived to NYC and my warmed soul.
spent 10 days in Miami (first time). I miss walkability of NYC. Keys were beautiful.
Go to: Dante's HIFI for good night vibes, Keys for nature, Taste of R Cuisine (TRC) for burger, Rubell Museum for culture, the beach
Don't go to: Downtown/South Beach for more than 2 nights
Reading:
48 Laws of Power
Storyworthy
Killed the google doc to do for personal use. Became too cumbersome. Replaced with Coda. Miss the offline access when internet is spotty on the phone. Notes on iphone seems to be the best bet there. Continuing to use gdoc for job. Works fine as most of it is to do, that gets killed quickly.
Spent a good amount of time on Future Assembly to get the first idea through the door some time March.
continuing to grow my favorite project maybegreat.com. Added a section Talking to People to keep what I've learned about hiring, interviewing and or even general chatting with people.
experimenting with AI voice recording -> podcast/writing creative pipeline for my work. Still uncomfortable with the overhead it creates when I'm talking out to myself. I generally say too much and this adds a step by having to edit a lot more of unnecessary fluff. Writing keeps me more concise and as open in my discovery of ideas.
Continuing to use a central google doc To Do across my personal and professional work for the past few months. It has been working really well and makes me think whether this would make a good simple product to build. Might write about it, but feels early for now.
read a bunch. I've been better about actually analyzing and taking the time to ingest the lessons of books I read, instead of slamming through the content and forgetting it next day.
2024 is supposedly going to be the year of the raw (not overproduced) content. Can't wait. Will follow suit.
Kicked off work on Future Assembly
After collecting all the physical writing I've done over the past few months finally seeded throughout at maybegreat.com. Added a section Living Grateful, Today I Learned and other sections.
Took a week off from work at the end of the month, to do both physical and digital Spring cleaning - organizing my work, reprioritizing all the good stuff.
felt a little burned out by my job, but found solace in a loving relationship
restarted my yearly affection for coding on Drilldown. Trialed several of the AI-assisted tooling and tried to cultivate my curiosity in the AI by working on active project that previously failed due to lack of knowledge. Lasted for about two weeks, before I just shifted my priority to other work.
Spend two weeks in Japan with friends after three years of Covid delays. Had a blast of a time and definitely want to come back. Had a revelation that I really don't want to create a big large company, but rather a smaller of dozen or couple dozen people, who are aligned a purpose. Would love to make a retreat home in teh middle of nowhere for artists to come and help it grow through labor, or by adding their work. Japan would be a perfect place for it. Took pictures, wrote poetry - Japan Osaka Lovenight Mt. Fuji
More heavy dating and just having fun in the sun
met with a neighbour, had a lovely few chats about videogames, writing, arts and businesses
I decided to treat myself this year in hopes to improve my mental health.
moved to a new fancy apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (beautiful view, indoor pool, amenities). Knowing full well, this is not exactly my kind of living but found enough excuses to make the move.
Restarted dating efforts
How to Live by Derek Sivers ()
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers ()
The World of Edena by Moebius ()
The largest employer in the world is inefficiency. -
Product dictators are often responding to their own lack of leadership capability. They’ve never learned how to effectively do things like set strategy and goals, develop high functioning org structures and product processes. They’re poor communicators. -
If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority. Focus. -
Previous eras of creativity have mostly looked a bit like sculpting. A sculptor takes a block of material and carves it, slowly but surely, into shape. Nothing happens without her hand. ... So too with writing, or programming, or painting. This era of creativity is going to look more like gardening. A gardener doesn’t grow plants directly. Instead, she sets up the conditions for the garden to grow. She takes care of the soil, the water, and the sunlight—and lets the plants do their thing. -
The best managers know what they want and how to talk about it. The worst managers are the ones who say, “It’s not right,” but when asked, “Why?” can’t express the problem. - -- no vision
“It’s essential to work on something you’re deeply interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could. When in doubt, optimize for interestingness.” —
handling emotions:
added to maybegreat.com. I tinker too much not to share my favourites.
Mentally I've been on edge as the January brought in freezing cloudy winter to NYC and with it seasonal depression + got an extra food poisoning in the mix.
added ton of stuff to maybegreat.com - writing on products I've done in the past, videogames, together with videos and screenshots, to function as a portfolio. In short I've finally collected all my multi-disciplinary creations under one place where I feel it's easy to incrementally extend it. It's still missing my music that's sitting in three years of recordings on my phone and in .