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Emotional Work

Day 338 and Effort

The real world rewards talent. It largely doesn’t give a fuck about effort. Sure, we like it when someone with talent works hard at honing their gifts. But if you just work hard it is largely ignored. The end result still matters most. Talent more easily gets the desired outcome. This is a sort of […]

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 330 and Vitamin Not Pill

I was reading a fellow investor’s thesis page and noticed one lens they use for investing is whether a product is a “vitamin or a pill” with the insinuation that pills are inherently better investments than vitamins, as one is a nice to have for a business and the other is a must have. Now […]

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Preparedness

Day 324 and Seneca

I was once asked by someone how I can act so quickly on major life decisions when they needed to mull a change over for months. I found the question confusing as I don’t think of myself as being particularly fast or even impulsive. Well, that’s a lie, I’m impulsive about lots of shit but […]

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Emotional Work

Day 310 and Short Burnouts

Is it possible to have brief periods of burnout? I’d always associated it with the years on the other side of a startup. If you’ve put in long hours for an extended period it makes sense to have a year or more of recovering from dipping into reserves for too long. But I wonder if […]

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Emotional Work Politics Reading

Day 306 and Shortcuts

I never really thought of myself as a perfectionist. But I have impossibly high standards for myself that may be unproductive. While I’m sure some of it innate, some of it is nurture. I went to a school system called Waldorf Schools that didn’t have grades. Every child was evaluated against their individual performance and […]

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Emotional Work

Day 291 and Self Control

Self control is a form of self abuse for me. Early in life I learned that I could control others by controlling my emotions. Instead of showing my feelings, I’d distort my emotions into whatever got me attention from adults. That’s pretty clever for a child, but is the road to misery once you’ve grown […]

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 280 and Scooping

I first started blogging in college because a friend of mine pointed out that I needed to own my digital identity. I had written something about designer jeans in the lesser school newspaper and another student was dunking on me in her personal blog. Unless I acted swiftly, Google results would be tainted forever he […]

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Finance Startups

Day 275 and Manifesting

I had a really terrific September. Everything just started going my way. Projects that I’d been pushing on had significant breakthroughs. My deals got hot. My focus and health improved. Even when I had setbacks and failures I was able to execute on quick recoveries. But mostly I didn’t give in to past bad habits. […]

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Emotional Work

Day 272 and Small Steps

I talk a lot about pacing and routines and rhythms but it’s mostly because I struggle with it so much. As soon as I notice something is going in a direction I dislike, rather than course correct a little bit, I love to run in the opposite direction as fast as I can. Why be […]

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Internet Culture Reading

Day 271 and Correspondence

I love writing to others. I had some pen pals as a child but it wasn’t until as a teenager that the Internet gave me the chance to correspond with practically whomever I liked. And it’s been one of the great joys of my life to reach out to others for conversation. I developed a […]