have fun!

reporting on Tuesday December 2 that yesterday was a GREAT DAY. and today it continues.

tbh after getting home on sat, sunday was terrible. i wrote my EOM update anyways, as i promised my first investor Brian i would. but you can read in between the lines...

the other principled thing i did sunday was going for a run. these 2 things set up Monday to be glorious. but first let's dwell on sunday's terrible terrible

i wasn't feeling amazing or ambitious at all. i gave myself the day off. my clothes were strewn everywhere. my bed was unmade. don't even remember what happened.

mostly i guess i scroll binged some random anime Seraph of the End. (not great after first few episodes, don't recommend, try Frieren / Violet Evergarden / Solo Leveling instead.)

despite all this, i had already scheduled some calls. so i needed to wake up early Monday and get to work. ended up doing a lot of stuff afterwards...

the apartment demanded to be cleaned. kitchen was out of dishes and stanky. in addition to laundry, i forwarded a box of my old roommate's remaining belongings.

such chores can take much more than the half hour at USPS in mental energy, but i managed to tick enough boxes to get the juices flowing. there was crazy salmon next to the post office (more on that in a future post), so i bought some groceries.

we don't often celebrate our wins, or at least i don't. i'm usually gravitating towards bottlenecks. everything is a project that needs fixing.

this is partially why a slow day feels depressing, rather than a vacation, especially in this phase of life now as i blog to the void and rarely get replies, simultaneously burning massive chunks of my savings, and subconsciously crying all the time about my measly 25 subscribers after a month of thankless youtube edit grind.

part of my scrolling sunday was re-discovering Coleman Hughes as my classmate for 2014 prez scholars... was googling after youtube rabbit hole on T Chamalet's glory, and he popped a YoungArts ref. bro Coleman has been a bestie guestie on All In. his show got Sam Harris and 300k views first try.

but anyway

yesterday and today have been better. infinitely better.

all that changed was i actually
did work.

i faced down the Resistance. i showed up anyway.

i was NOT my authentic self. my authentic self is lazy and watches shit anime.

today i lifted weights in the gym, came home, scarfed down food, and kept working. i don't like lifting weights. i don't like being sweaty.

my hands were cold on the handlebars of my bike to the gym. there's a shit hill i gotta go up on low gear—standing, panting—to get home from the gym.

i took a freezing cold shower because my heat is on in the apartment. and i would sweat more if i didn't cool off in the shower, cuz i'm back to my desk treadmill now.

the shower was painful. i turned it off after 20 seconds of breathing into the pain. Wim Hof addicts are annoying. But a dose works? why do i do this to myself, next.

etc

of all my blog posts, i only remember 2 other vastly positive ones which i wrote in a euphoric state of mind, aside from this one right now.

the first was a recent poem thing kinda like this unpunctuated vomit

the second was "These Are The Days". which came in a lull between two difficult times, a little more than a year into my first company as it slid downhill...

it's a distant memory now, so i have to go by blog posts to really get the arc of that time in my life. looks like the previous Sept i was feeling stuck enough to write a different blog post entitled "I Suck". By the end of the year, we had not made much progress on the Venmo for Ecuador P2P idea,

so i pivoted to building more B2B "Plaid". this refocus was energizing, prototype enabled me to talk to real businesses and startups managing nontrivial payment volumes, get some contracts floating. i wrote my happy blog in that zone.

but soon after implementing a pilot, everything blew up. i shut that down too, sigh

by "blowing up" i don't mean literally—i simply had gathered enough signals and shifted away from payments... then Ecuador entirely.

one can glorify this process or lament it. if you care you can read my investor updates, they're open sourced along with the final brutal failure letter.

fun times.

we have to rack up a lot of losses before we get to the wins. and even when we're winning it's not easy to have fun.

turns out very little in this blog post was really about having fun lol. i guess that will come in a future one.

writing this and not editing too much is fun enough i guess

oh right, right—that section in the middle about meaningful struggle and hard work being satisfying. yes that's it.

sometimes we all need a little reminder...

What's blocking you from having fun?