February 5, 2023
News
I’m cheating a little, it’s Tuesday and the next week is well underway. Last week I worked a lot, there is a project at work that is supposed to be done soon so I was working all day Friday through Tuesday on that.
We finished moving all of Ilana’s stuff out of her condo and her renter moves in today. It’s official!
It feels like spring in Atlanta. It’s been raining all the time and during the day when I run I’m sweating.
I found out that a gym I considered joining, but did not join and never signed a contract for, has been charging my credit card for the monthly membership fee for the past 2 months. Motherfuckers. Apparently the gym went out of business at the end of January. It had a parent company though so I called them and they issued a refund.
I was signed up for to run a race in Atlanta on Sunday. Except on Saturday afternoon I found out the race was not Sunday, but Saturday. Oh well. After that I decided I’m gonna stop training as hard as I have been. I can only focus on one thing at a time in order to do it really well. I’m gonna keep exercising everyday but I’m switching my focus and obsession to programming. I have too many ideas I have been sitting on that I’m excited to build. It’s only been recently that I feel my skills have gotten good enough to build something worthwhile on my own. So now is a great time to start.
Travel
Why do I have such a deep desire to go to the beach? It got a little bit warm here (65 degrees) and now I am dreaming of the beach. Winter is very depressing, and summer is amazing. I’ve never complained about summers in Georgia, I love the heat and humidity and the sun. I’d even live in Florida, which I think most people would disagree with me on. Someone asked me where I would live if I had no restrictions. Charleston, South Carolina. It’s perfect there.
Ilana and I are going to the mountain house this weekend and she got some psilocybin mushrooms for us to do. We are just going to do a small amount. It will be nice to have a sort of mental reset which I feel I have been needing. Stress accumulates and it changes my brain so that I get so egotistical and only thinking logically about things and stop failing to appreciate things in life. So the mental reset and just having some fun together for the day will be great.
Opinion
Everyone should own a nice pen. A few weeks ago I got a nice pen, a fountain pen that cost $30. Some will say this is way too much to spend on a pen, and until very recently I would have agreed. But I noticed this week that I have been writing more than I ever have before. It’s not any serious writing, just writing out my thoughts and writing when I am thinking through a problem and writing just to write. Because the pen is so nice, it makes me want to write. So I noticed that I have been thinking more and thinking more rigorously, because I am writing out my thoughts. There is a quote that is famous quote that says “if you are not writing you are not thinking, and if you are thinking you are writing.” The idea is that it is impossible to have thoughts that make any coherent sense when they only live in our heads, we have to write in order for our thoughts to keep any semblance of a straight line. I think that thinking without writing is wonderful in that it allows us to come up with the beginnings of ideas…. a flash of inspiration or an inobvious correlation between some other ideas. But writing is necessary to expand on these initial ideas in any coherent fashion. Another perspective is that writing so much traps one in their own thought pattern and then one is spending time, effort, and more thought expanding upon ideas that are fundamentally flawed. I expect that I do this often.
Business
I have shifted my obsession from running/sports to programming. In context, this is a shift back to programming. When I graduated from college I obsessed over programming because I wanted to get good enough to be employable and succeed at my job. This continued until I reached a place in my career where I was comfortable and didn’t feel the need to obsess over programming in order to stay on this track that I have been on. So to keep myself challenged and occupied, I began starting to get into physical activity and running. I tried out a lot of things, but running races became the activity that compelled me the most. So I have done that for a bit, but I am ready to switch back to programming.
Why? Because until recently, I had not seriously considered that it was a possibility for me to create something on my own that I could sell and make a living from. But I am beginning to think this is possible. I have been reading and following a lot of people online who do exactly this. I don’t see much fundamentally different between the types of ideas I am having and the skill level between these people and myself. Doing the math on some of my ideas, a few of them seem viable. Viable, meaning, I see a clear path towards executing on these ideas and generating monthly revenue of at least $5k per month.
Of course, this all assumes that my ideas have a product-market fit, which is a big assumption. So the first thing I need to do is built out MVPs and put something out there to see if anyone bites. Outside of my day job, I have been working as much as I can to do this. There are two ideas I am building out right now and I am going to try to get the MVPs out at about the same time for each of them. Maybe working one two ideas at once isn’t the best idea, but I’d like to put as much as I can out there and see what sticks.