These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
Morgan Housel with a big truth:
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works… We’re all biased to our own personal history.
2
Being grumpy is stupid. There’s no benefit to it. The person you’re grumpy with comes away thinking less of you. And perhaps more important: you come away not liking yourself much either. Classic lose-lose. I was too grumpy last year. No more of that shit.
3
Just had my first $20k month and I kind of assumed when I got to this point that I’d have it all figured out and would feel all relaxed and self-assured. But not so much. It feels good, definitely. But there’s still self-doubt and an awareness that there’s lots left to learn.
4
We can’t stay in the apartment, so we take a taxi up into the hills, a place with an oval lake. The lake has frozen over. We venture out on the ice, testing each step. Feels fairly solid. I think about how much someone would need to pay me to try walk the hundred meters across.
5
Random memory of snorkeling off a sailboat at the San Blas Islands. One of the most picture-perfect places I’ve been. I saw a shipwreck and a manta ray while roaming about. Back on the boat they’d cooked us up some fresh-caught lobster for dinner.
6
Some of my affiliate streams are fairly well established now, bringing in $1000’s per month consistently. Weird how I get used to them after a while and find it more exciting to see new streams reaching $5 or $10 a day. Guess I’m a sucker for novelty.
7
A fishing enthusiast for 15 years, says he now wants to build a successful online business on a tight budget in only 30 minutes a day. I reply:
Someone comes to you and says they want to catch 100 fish per day but they don’t know much about fishing, they don’t have much money to spend, and they can only devote 30 minutes per day to the project. What would you tell them?
8
Fridays are a bit of a blur. That’s newsletter day, when I let myself fall down and explore many rabbit holes, see what interesting ideas and stories I can find to share with folks. Always ends with me rushing to get everything written up and sent out before it’s too late.
9
There’s a list of things I try to do every morning but these are the most important: 30m stretching/exercise, short meditation, free writing session, deep reading while eating breakfast, then a power hour of work before checking emails.
10
Years back, only a few weeks after we broke up, an ex told me she was glad because I was too optimistic and in love with the world. I remember thinking, “And that’s a bad thing?” Easy for those traits to fade as you get older though. I have to take care not to become too cynical.
11
We live off one of the main avenues in Tbilisi. Head two clicks down that avenue and you hit Liberty Square. Rewind the clock 114 years and you’d see Stalin there, watching unfold a heist he planned. Guns and grenades and 40 people killed. Just a statistic.
12
You know the type on social media: little experience, certain they’re right, unwilling to consider a different perspective. Best not argue back and forth with folks like that. I like to reply once and never check what they come back with, leave them shouting into the void.
13
COVID finally hitting home, ripping through loved ones back in Ireland. Scary shit. When it’s that close and personal, you get angrier still with all the anti-maskers and other folks making things worse with their stupidity and selfishness.
14
Try remember something you haven’t remembered for a long time. I remember having chicken pox as a kid and my grandmother taking care of me, giving me a bath. She used to make me sandwiches with butter and honey. Your turn.
15
Another legal threat. Wrote that review 9 months ago and sent it to them for feedback. Never got a response. Now they’re saying they’ll sue if the “inaccurate statements of fact” are not removed within 48 hours. They don’t specify which statements they’re referring to.
16
So obsessed with this new idea that I’m not sleeping great, can’t switch off, giving myself a headache. But that’s okay. Feels a bit like that idea I had two years ago to start eBiz Facts. This would be the next evolution. It’s exciting… and a bit terrifying.
17
Today I wrote a few lines of silly poetry and thought about the words of a Frenchman who died eighty odd years ago. He wrote:
“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
18
Feeling blah today. Don’t want to do anything but don’t want to do nothing either. I want to watch something but I don’t want to watch anything. In that kind of mood. Like everything sucks but nothing does either, and then I feel bad for not being more appreciative.
19
Email from a reader today:
I want to generate $800,000 so I can buy a three bedroom condo at the beach, Jacksonville, Florida.
I wouldn’t bet on that person being successful. Not until they change the focus away from what they want, and become obsessed with helping other people.
20
Traffic spike. A weird one. Contact my host and they check the logs, tell me it looks like my database has been hacked, injected with spam links. Then tons of bot traffic directed my way. Seems someone is trying to get me deindexed from Google. Pretty sure I know who.
21
Database wasn’t hacked after all. They weren’t that good. It was a negative SEO attack, like the one a few months back. A bit more advanced this time, but should also amount to nothing. If these guys could only put as much time and effort into building a legitimate business…
22
I often wake up earlier than I’d like and can’t get back to sleep, mind off to the races. What’s helped lately is listening to podcasts. Usually about history. This morning I feel back asleep to the story of Francisco Macías Nguema, former mad bastard dictator of Equatorial Guinea.
23
Put a good bit of research into the new idea this week. Brainstormed and battle-tested it with a few people on Zoom. The deeper I go, the more it makes sense. Still not sure if we can pull it off, but convinced we need to give it a shot. Little to lose, lots to gain.
24
I keep telling myself that this needs to exist, that it should exist. And if I don’t do it, then someone else eventually will and I’ll be left kicking myself. But then that raises the question: if it’s such a brilliant idea, why hasn’t someone done it already?
25
Down the rabbit hole today of sentiment analysis. Software scans the web, tells you if people are saying mostly positive or negative things about a chosen topic. Not quite good enough yet for my needs. The trouble with sentiments is that many of them can’t be trusted.
26
Lying there in my underwear, and this woman I just met sees the scar below right of my navel. I thought you said you’d never had any surgeries? That was my appendix almost 30 years ago. Didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Still not going to tell her about the other three.
27
I tend to believe that one of the best ways to accomplish something is to find people who’ve accomplished the same thing already and learn as much as you can from them. Study their breadcrumbs, reach out and ask if you can pay for an hour of their time.
28
On a call with someone I admire greatly. He’s interviewed more than 2,000 high-level entrepreneurs, was kind enough to jump on a call and discuss this new thing. Was expecting more critical feedback, but he loves the idea. Alright then. Full steam ahead.
29
A couple of trusted advisors have told me they don’t think much of the name eBiz Facts. I’m not in love with it either. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, doesn’t click when you first hear it. I’ll likely do a rebrand eventually, but that’s far down the list of priorities.
30
There’s a place in the Pacific called the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the farthest on Earth you can get from land. 2,688 kilometers away form the nearest dirt. Sometimes the closest people to that point are astronauts on the International Space Station when it passes above.
31
According to one study of “1.2 million observations” – whatever that means – happiness by age is a U-shaped curve. People are generally more happy in their younger and older years, and less so in between. Is your life following that curve?