These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
Off a call with an old friend there, his online business has exploded the past 18 months or so. Talking 10x revenue, up to $40k/month now. Asked if he’d be down for an interview but he’d rather his competition doesn’t know what he’s doing. Understandable. Has me buzzing though, wondering if I should take a similar path.
2
Well fuck, it’s 24 hours later and I’m rethinking my entire business. Had a plan for the new year but it’s complex and not all that exciting to me. Whereas my friend’s approach is much simpler and more appealing. Not easy, by any means, and it would likely take several months to see any significant return, but I’m having a hard time convincing myself it wouldn’t work.
3
I’ve now talked with three trusted friends and savvy business owners and can’t find a good reason not to do this. So I’m doing it. Will have to quit the daily Facebook Live videos though, take a short break from YouTubing, might have to let a few other things drop as well. Focus, focus, focus. Can’t make this happen without prolonged, laser-like focus.
4
Almost nine in the evening, sitting at a street side food truck, waiting to be served pad thai by a chap with an impressive mustache. Today was a good day. Eased into it, couple of hours of client work, lots of planning for the new project, nice chat with a friend I hadn’t met yet, gifted a free pass at the coworking, and quality time with my favorite lady.
5
Napoleon Hill, the mad yoke, once said that “in every adversity lies the seed of an equal or greater opportunity” I reckon the reverse is also true: In every opportunity lies the seed of an equal or greater adversity. In other words, every gift can be a curse. For example, I love to help people, but sometimes I jump in to help so readily that I deprive them of the opportunity to help themselves.
6
Off a three-hour coaching call and I can walk a minute down the street, cough up $9, and promptly enjoy an hour-long massage at one of the best rated places in town. Mind has been racing lately with the new thing, finding it hard to sleep, so having this kind of service on my doorstep is a godsend.
7
“The first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.” – Charlie Munger
8
On a visa run to Myanmar, get stuck beside a Canadian lady, super loud and enthusiastic about everything. I’m really not in the mood, so I try to be short with her so she’ll stop talking to me. I fail miserably. Even though there’s zero negative consequence to this lady thinking I’m rude – I’m actually far more likely to get what I want if she does – I can’t stop myself responding pleasantly to her conversation.
9
The inner walls of the White Temple might be more spectacular than anything you see outside, and that’s saying something. To the east, as you enter, are scenes of death and destruction… and superheroes and cartoon characters, the world coming to an end while we’re distracted by pop culture. The west wall is peaceful, a meditating Buddha representing self-awareness, compassion, restraint.
10
My wheels have been spinning like mad the past ten days, diving deep on this new project, planning, researching, strategizing. Sleep hasn’t been great, hard to shut down at night, and I wake up mid-thought while it’s still dark out. But that’s okay. Feeling like I’m making good progress. Going to ride this giddy wave as long as I can.
11
I’d spent several months in Chiang Mai before, but the big difference now is I’m with my lady. That solves the biggest frustration I had here in the past: the dating scene. With that no longer a factor I’m appreciating the place a lot more. Warm weather, good food, super low cost of living, all the essentials within walking distance here in the Nimman area…
12
The problem I’m trying to solve: there are so many different ways of making money online that it’s all very confusing and fragmented. Given that, it’s very difficult for a newbie to make a smart decision on how/where to get started. Without a clear view of the online business landscape, how are they supposed to know how best to enter into it?
13
It’s like a big jigsaw, except you’ve lost the box so you’re not sure what the final image is supposed to look like, and each piece is invisible until you snap it into place. Trickier still: the pieces are such that, even when you put one in its proper place, you can’t quite tell if you’ve reached the edge. That might be as far as you can go in that direction. Or there might be plenty more beyond.
14
I haven’t felt this engaged working on something since three years ago when I was building my course. I was putting in serious hours back then, working on it day and night, focused like a tiger on the hunt. This is similar. So many things I considered important a month ago have fallen by the wayside. I sleep less than six hours and find myself tap dancing back to work.
15
Woke up before five again, but that’s okay. Packed my laptop and en route to a 24-hour cafe down the street. I like being out early in the morning, watching the world rub the sleep out of its eyes. I walk past a flock of pigeons pecking at crumbs, a lady frying up some churros, a security guard scooting to work. These are the happiest days of my life.
16
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a celebrated United States Supreme Court Justice in the early part of the 20th century. As a young man, while fighting in the American Civil War, he was shot in the neck and chest. He also sported an incredible mustache. But I really only knew about the man through these wise words:
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
17
Keyword research today. Never took it all that seriously before, but now skipping it seems insane to me. Say you have two blog articles in mind to write. Wouldn’t you want to know if one was likely to attract ten times as much traffic as the other? Of course you would. You want your stuff to reach and help as many people as possible. Keyword research is essential to achieve that.
18
Might have pushed my luck a bit too much, on the verge of getting sick now, can feel it in my throat. I remember a decade ago having this same feeling after a week of drunken Mardi Gras revelry. Back then it was the partying and alcohol that did the damage. Now it’s the work that does it. Which may sound sad, but I’d much rather be here than there.
19
Forced day off to get healthy. Binge watching The Wire, on season three. Some say it’s the best TV show ever made. They might be right. Humans are messy and complex. So is the world we live in. The Wire does a good job of depicting that. Lots of nuance, shades of grey. Shows how people can do bad shit for good reasons. And how rare it is to have complete closure.
20
Feeling good about my plan for 2019, reckon it’s going to be a big year. But then, I remember thinking the same thing a year ago. And the year before that. I wonder if it’s foolishness, getting my hopes up every twelve months, getting myself all excited. Or maybe it’s a good thing, that thing Churchill described: “the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.”
21
When do you lose all sense of time? Is there any activity you engage in where you experience that? Writing is definitely one of those things for me. So is web design. Got lost redesigning my site today, the minutes and hours melting away. Seem to remember doing the same thing in this same town several years ago.
22
Gotta admit, I’ve been very one dimensional lately, obsessed as I am with this thing. Haven’t done any intentional exercise or stretching in weeks. No meditation. Reading fewer books. Haven’t checked Facebook notifications since November. In many ways, my life has been falling apart. And yet I haven’t felt this focused or engaged with my work in years.
23
He makes a distinction between people who are like-minded, and people who are on your level. Back in the US, where everyone was working 9-to-5, he wasn’t meeting like-minded people. Here in Chiang Mai he meets plenty, but most of them are only getting started building a business. He’s been doing it for years. He’s on another level.
24
Lots of tedious work to be done for my site redesign, so I jumped on Upwork to hire some help. Received almost 50 proposals in a few hours, most of them crap, as usual. I sort by lowest rate and scan through until I find someone good, can usually tell by the first two lines of their cover letter. Guy I ended up hiring charges $5/hour.
25
I’d probably hate working Christmas Day at a regular job, even if it was double pay. But here I am working for myself all day on the 25th. No double pay. Just doing exactly what I want to be doing at a nice quiet coworking space. Helps of course that I’m in Thailand, where it’s business as usual today. If I was back in Ireland things would be different.
26
Spent less than $3 on lunch and dinner combined. Lunch was a nice fried rice dish at a local restaurant near the coworking. Dinner was fresh-made sushi from a food stall at the mall. Eating out here gives you a taste of what it’s like to be a millionaire. No need to look at the prices on any menu. Just order whatever you want.
27
Heard this on a podcast yesterday: the role you play growing up in your family – eldest, youngest, whatever – is the role you tend to default to when you’re out in the wider world. I’m the youngest of three boys. When I walk into a room, I tend to scope out the situation, see how everyone else is behaving, look for a lead to follow.
28
Wasn’t going to review work online opportunities that pay less than $10/hour. Changed my mind for two reasons. First, $10/hour is damn good money in many parts of the world. Here in Thailand, for example, the average salary is less than $500/month. Second, there are easy affiliate opportunities in such reviews. And for me to make this thing sustainable, I gotta grab those.
29
At a cafe built for Instagram. Having coffee and cheesecake while multiple photoshoots happen around us. It’s all a bit surreal. Nobody’s here for the food and beverage. They’re here to capture themselves looking happier, healthier, wealthier than they actually are. I get it. I do the same sometimes. But it’s getting a little out of hand, no?
30
I used to rail against television, but now I watch YouTube pretty much the same way. Been reading less, replacing books with mindless screen time. Need to make an adjustment there. My attention span is shrinking, finding it harder to concentrate on one thing for a stretch.
31
Our apartment building has security everywhere. This building doesn’t. We walk through the lobby, take the elevator to the 15th floor, climb a flight of stairs, and find ourselves alone by a rooftop swimming pool. We’ll spend an hour here, watching lanterns floating in the breeze and fireworks lighting up the sky, thinking about the year gone by and the one to come.