These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
Resonating with Matt Giovanisci, saying he no longer wants to share his entrepreneur journey online. It was largely an ego thing for me as well. But now I’d rather keep my head down, make a ton of money from my business, and never tell the internet.
2
Cold calling is easier some days than others, but I try to show up regardless. Didn’t feel like it at all today, but dialled a bunch of numbers anyway, made some connections, sent some videos. We’ll see if anything comes of it. Make the calls, plant the seeds, generate the leads.
3
I’m a huge Denis Villeneuve fan, but Enemy doesn’t do it for me. I like movies with deeper meanings and hidden themes, but not to the point where I come away wondering, what the fuck was that about? and I need a 20-minute YouTube explainer to figure it out. The Lobster was like that, too. Surreal movies, not my thing.
4
He didn’t show up for the onboarding, ghosting me now. Always amazed that one business owner can be so disrespectful to another. The game is already hard. Let’s not make it even harder on each other. But fuck it, gonna use this extra time to refine and improve my outreach game.
5
Started doing it some 30 years ago, just some random foolishness: opening Easter eggs by banging them off our heads. Somehow it has become a tradition. He sends me videos of his kids doing it each year. And I send one back.
6
The Hawthorne effect. About 100 years ago they tried altering some working conditions in a factory outside Chicago. They found that it wasn’t so much the alterations that made a positive difference, but the workers being aware that they were being studied and observed.
7
Thinking to adopt an alter ego for my cold calling, similar to how Beyonce becomes Sasha Fierce for her live performances. A more confident, badass version of herself. My alter ego could be Neil, modeled on Neil McCauley from Heat. Competent, confident, thoughtful, economic with his words.
8
Many things other people find annoying or boring, I don’t mind doing. Cooking, cleaning, getting groceries, exercising, studying Spanish, working, etc. The issue is feeling short on time, rushing through one thing to get to the next. Anything can become stressful and annoying when you feel the clock ticking loudly.
9
Evening wind-down playlist…
- Chet Baker – Almost Blue
- Nina Simone – Wild Is The Wind
- Chrisy Moore – Beeswing
- Enya – Boadicea
- Frank Sinatra – One For My Baby
- Nina Simone and Emil Latimer – Black Is The Color
10
Watching Mystic Pizza from 1988, one of Julia Roberts’ first starring roles. About three young women in Mystic, Connecticut. A comment on the movie that rings true…
When you’re young all you want to do is escape your hometown, and when you get old all you want to do is move to a town like this.
11
Franz Kafka, writing in 1912…
time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres… fatigue of any kind shows itself better and more clearly in writing than anything one is really trying to say.
12
- 0-9 = lucky
- 10-19 = unlucky
- 20-29 = lucky
- 30-39 = lucky
- 40-49 = tbd
13
Reading back over old journals, six years ago in Bali, before the business took off, around the time Kobe died. I’m glad I kept those journals. I kept a physical journal in my teenage years. Burned those pages in my 20’s, wanted to forget those years. But the older I get, the more I want to remember.
14
Hardest thing about building an agency isn’t providing the service. It’s convincing the client to let me provide the service. Even if they badly need what I have to offer, they don’t just magically trust me. I have to earn that. And even after they’ve signed up, I have to keep selling them so they stick with the process long enough to see results.
15
Cold calling this business, a woman answers the phone, give her my opener, says she’s not interested. Push a little to test that response. She assures me she’s not interested. Then someone knocks and before she hangs up I hear her say, “Don’t open the door, I’m naked.”
16
From Everything is F*cked…
self-denial is paradoxically the only thing that expands real freedom in life…
You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself. You can choose to wake up earlier each morning, to block your email until midafternoon each day, to delete social media apps from your phone. These limitations will free you because they will liberate your time, attention, and power of choice.
17
I already use AI regularly for things like…
- Spanish conversation practice
- ACT therapy
- Health research
- All kinds of work tasks
- A replacement for Google Search
Every month I use it more and more. I’d be lost without it now.
18
Morning at a cafe, reading a book, resisting the urge to check last night’s NBA highlights and deplete my dopamine. My routine is to save such highlights for the afternoon, but that will be more challenging now with the Playoffs starting. Writing about it here might help.
19
Some folks blame Henry Murray for the Unabomber. But he also co-created the Thematic Apperception Test in the 1930s. You are shown a painting or drawing and asked to interpret it. Your interpretation can say a lot about you. Makes me want to visit a museum with a friend.
20
That day of the year again, has me missing the bit of boldy, off limits here in Andorra. Fast forward a few decades and I like to think we won’t be so silly about this stuff. That the likes of gambling, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food will be more restricted than a little weed.
21
Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn were both in their mid-40s when they starred in Robin and Marian (1976). Someone uploaded the entire movie to YouTube and the top comment reads…
When you’re still strong enough not to think about getting old, but old enough to feel it, you’ll find this film very sad.
22
You can usually hear traffic on the main road from our apartment. But not so much this time of year. The river drowns out other sounds, full and loud from the snowmelt. Down the Valira to the Segre to the Ebro, before feeding the Mediterranean a hundred miles below Barcelona.
23
I worked all day, morning to night, breaks only for meals and a few household chores. I check the final log and I’ve clocked only 7 hours. Trying to recall my old 9-to-5. No way I was clocking more than 6 actual work hours there every day = 30 hours a week. Didn’t realize how cushy I had it.
24
The woman in the cafe this morning, after tying up her dog outside, subtly dancing in the line ahead of me. Now here in my office, window open, shutters closed, slats of sunlight sneaking through, along with the sound of someone singing. I’m grateful for these people.
25
Most unrealistic thing in movies: people coping well with extreme situations. I like to think of myself as pretty level-headed and capable, but I’d likely be frozen in a state of shock if I were thrown into some crazy movie plot. Most of us would.
26
If you had to choose, would you rather have the thing you desire, or the desire itself? I guess the ideal is to have both, but hard to keep desiring a thing once you have it. Rumi reckons desire itself is more desirable…
Seek less for water; acquire thirst, so that water may spring up from above and below.
27
Cutting up pumpkin after a long work day. Podcast time, Simmons and Lowe talking basketball. I wonder if you’re like me, spending more time listening to a particular podcaster than anyone else in your life. It’s that easy, passive listening, nothing required of you.
28
Window seat at the cafe, people walking by. Bright morning, deep thought, song about a blue raincoat. Time playing tricks, or maybe revealing itself. I see the old man in the teenager, the young girl in the old lady. The new construction across the way, crumbling and overgrown many years from now.
29
Several weeks back, instead of saying he changed his mind and requesting a refund, a client ghosted me and claimed fraud on the payment. I disputed it. Resolved today, in my favor. Not much money, but it scratches my ever-present fairness itch. I wonder if he’ll learn anything from this.
30
Every now and then, I like listening to melancholy music on YouTube, reading the comments, and feeling my heart swell. A comment on Adagio in G Minor…
I chose this piece for my brother’s funeral while his body lay in an open casket before the alter. He was just 26 and it was a tragedy. My family was in great pain but by having this performed no verbal expression of that pain was required. Everyone in that church that day wept and understood our pain.