These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
The older I get, the less public I want to be. Not sure why. I used to crave attention and recognition, worked hard for it. Now I’d rather stay under the radar. Give me a $100k business where I can be low key, rather than a $200k business with my face all over it.
2
Doing my morning stretch routine, Marc Randolph in my ears with words that hit home:
I’ve realized that the key to being successful is not how good your ideas are, it’s how good you are at being able to find quick, cheap, and easy ways to try your ideas.
3
This morning I wrote down the names and descriptions of several people I met 10+ years ago and haven’t seen since. They were beginning to fade from my brain. Memories can die if you don’t recall them every so often, chunks of your life as if they never happened.
4
The Penny Hoarder sold for $102 million a few weeks back. The Hustle just sold for $27 million. I’m earning peanuts compared to those figures but I find it entirely plausible that I can achieve a similar level of success in the next 10 years or so. Call me crazy.
5
Is there anything worse than an abuser playing the victim? Like an abusive boyfriend blaming his partner for inciting him. Happens online as well. Scammers getting exposed then acting like they deserve sympathy because they have to endure so many “haters.”
6
I’m a disaster today. Stayed up til 2am reading Monte Cristo and playing a silly game on my phone. Didn’t get enough sleep, yet still stayed in bed until noon, doing more of the same. I used to have these self-destruct days far more often. I guess that’s something.
7
This new thing we’re doing is a stretch. Constantly rubbing up against the limits of our abilities, intelligence, communication skills. One day we’ll feel like we’re making great progress. The next it’s like we’re back to square one.
8
At a country fair in 1906, there was a competition to guess the weight of an ox. 787 people people entered. Afterwards, a chap named Francis worked out that the average of all those guesses was 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds.
9
It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Is it though? Wouldn’t it be better to never be a parent than to have a child for ten years and then watch that child die? Losing a kid is the worst thing I can imagine.
10
She’s had to deal with bullies, too. Three times she’s been threatened with legal action, one time got a cease and desist letter. Stood her ground and nothing came of it, kept the content on her site. I like hearing that.
11
The blatant scammers are easy to deal with. It’s the sneaky fuckers that bug me. All their little lies and half-truths, none of them too bad in isolation. Ultimately you realize that these people absolutely cannot be trusted, but there’s no smoking gun you can point to to explain why.
12
Annoyed because I have to find a print shop, print out two documents, sign them, go to the post office and snail mail those suckers to Ireland. Should be able to do it all digitally nowadays. But when something like that annoys me, you know I’m leading a privileged life.
13
Reading about friendships ending during COVID. People who take it seriously find it hard to stay friends with people who call it a hoax, break restrictions, spread misinformation. Makes sense. Imagine you had a loved one die from COVID and then your friends doing that shit.
14
From the book Superforecasting: “finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight.” In other words, you can be happy most of the time or you can be right most of the time. Few people manage to achieve both.
15
One of those rare evenings that you could write up as sales copy and convince people to buy some make-money-online course: baking cookies, drinking wine, playing board games… check my email after and see $700 in commissions earned while enjoying all that.
16
Over time I’ve developed a great appreciation for nuance, and now tend to believe that the best answers often start with the words, “It depends.” But I have to be careful not to take it too far. Too much nuance is as bad as too little.
17
It’s easy to fall in love with your ideas. But most ideas suck and you can waste tons of time on one before you realize. So the first thing to ask when you have a “great” idea: how can I prove that this idea sucks? Then go try prove it. If you can’t, you might be on to something.
18
We sometimes have this image of nature as being all peaceful and nurturing. But the life of pretty much every wild animal is brutal. Die serenely surrounded by loved ones? Never happens in nature. It’s usually death by murder, starvation or exposure.
19
A year ago I was coming to the end of my time in Ubud, Bali. I have fond memories of my mornings there. I’d get up, do some quick stretches, then walk to a local cafe with excellent breakfast and coffee. Get there right at 7am and I’d nab the best table by the window.
20
There’s this game online that drops you somewhere in the world with Google Street View, then you have to move around and figure out what country it is. You end up learning a lot about what different countries look like and where they’re located.
21
Sitting on my ass most of the day, I don’t get physically tired from my work, but mentally tired. When I push it too far and get burned out, it’s like my brain can’t properly process information any more, even basic information. Small decisions become paralyzing.
22
Making slow but steady progress with the crowd-sourced reviews stuff. We’ve been figuring out the questionnaire and the algorithm, seeing how we’ll weigh different factors. Started reaching out to students of one course today, asking if they’ll share their review.
23
I spent $15,000 on 6 months of “high-performance coaching” back in 2018. Can’t say I got much out of it. Nothing obvious anyway. The stinger is that it actually cost me more than the $15k, because I sold some Tesla stock and Bitcoin to pay for it.
24
Podcasts are great but I listen to them so often now while walking, washing the dishes, shaving, etc… that I give myself far less time to think and daydream. I’m constantly feeding myself other people’s thoughts and ideas instead of creating my own.
25
Been mocking up the new review page. Gone through several versions of it. Started off with all sorts of bells and whistles on the interface, and have been gradually removing bits and pieces. What we’re left with is fairly clean and minimal. I reckon that’s good progress.
26
Tigers fascinate me, perhaps more than any other animal. They look like perfectly designed hunting machines. And yet, apparently 90-95% of their hunts end in failure. Lions, wolves and polar bears don’t fare much better. But they all keep trying. They have no choice.
27
Sign of the times, attending a Zoom wedding. About 130 other people logged in. The actual ceremony is in Singapore. I think we’ll see plenty of this even after the pandemic: a small real-world guest list, and everybody else tuning in from home.
28
Every now and then I’ll get an abusive email from a subscriber. Younger me would have tried to think up the perfect response, kill them with kindness. Now I don’t reply at all, just unsubscribe and blacklist them. Why waste time on people like that?