paulgorman.org

< ^ txt

Thu Jul 15 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from eleven-thirty to seven without waking. Mostly cloudy. Chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 80s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph becoming southwest 10 to 15 mph with gusts to around 30 mph in the late morning and afternoon. Chance of precipitation 70 percent. Twenty-minute walk in the morning, before the rain. Humid and overcast, but not excessively hot yet. Work ---------------------------------------- - 10 AM business team meeting Done. - unforward extension 100 calls to 110 Done. - tell Sherri how to forward her phone Done. - investigate LT NVR Done. - IP info for PW?? Done, eventually. - review credit card statement No. - investigate RG NVR A bit. In the business team meeting, Julie said that the sale will be publicly listed in about a week. She will not be surprised if there's a sale within a month (though it may take two or three months to close the sale). Health insurance? There will probably be a COBRA option, but they don't have to offer one. If we're all fired, and they terminate the insurance plan, we will immediately be eligible to sign up for a plan on the insurance market. Another twenty-minute walk at lunch. Mostly cloudy and warm. Home ---------------------------------------- https://typesense.org/blog/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-just-showing-up-everyday/ > I set myself a simple rule: I shall write some code everyday before or after work. > > That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. > > With no self-imposed time pressure, I was able to focus on just one thing: showing up every day and writing some code. Some features took an hour to implement, some took several hours spread over days, some even stretched into weeks, but it did not matter because there were no deadlines of any sort. > > Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule. > > The road we have taken goes against several prevailing conventional wisdom about launching a company. > > We did not quit our day jobs to start working on Typesense full-time immediately. We did not seek venture capital or attempt to “corner” the market by chasing hyper growth. We did not have personal brands or wide networks to tap into. We did not even earn the first dollar till the 5th year. > > Yet, we had an almost-infinite run-way because we excelled at our day jobs even as we plugged away at Typesense. By playing the long game, we were able to dive into Typesense full-time only when we had sufficiently de-risked that option. > > If you want to find some modest success and independence by launching your own product, and wished to do so without too much risk, I invite you to try this playbook: > > Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well. > > By choosing an idea that is not a fad and doing so in a large and preferably growing market, you can afford to take a much slower route. As long as you keep plugging away at the problem, at some point, you will have enough of a product to start charging for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27833064 > If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1] > > It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time. > > This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2] > > In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can't cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an "unschedule" where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I've applied this to different projects, it's amazing how much more I'm able to accomplish. > People overestimate how much they can get done in the short term but they underestimate how much they can get done in the long term. Watched some anime. Meditated for ten minutes. Minutes spent packing: 60 Servings: grains 3/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 1/3, nuts 1/0.5 Brunch: pineapple, egg, coffee Lunch: wrap with beans and cucumber, banana Dinner: carrots, potato chips, ice cream -32

< ^ txt