Upstream Thinking

I think it takes a certain brand of courage to realize that this shit isn't working.

And then comes the hard part of figuring out what to do about it.

I strive to be pragmatic, I strive to head in the direction of becoming a polymath, and then I actually examine the behaviors that I follow through on. A lot of it is just chilling, large swathes of empty time being used to just spend time on social media and the internet in front of my devices.

I've successfully enabled fixes through things like VPNs for example, but these aren't really good motivators at the level of actually enacting long-term change. These are all merely band-aid fixes.

Some of these desires may resonate with you, or they may not. These are the goals that I consistently struggle with:

• Going to sleep earlier
• Reading consistently (5 books/mo)
• Going to the gym
• Putting out high-quality output consistently
• Mastering multiple arts. In my case, I would love to learn how to scream and sing in a metalcore band, do more creative coding, sculpting, and authoring books. Outside of my currently existing skill stack of programming, I feel like I haven't really fulfilled my desires with the rest of those skills.

In order to be a good upstream strategy, it has to consist of changing core beliefs and taking advantage of leverage. I think that I've decided that my new identity, or perhaps just a leveraged version of my current identity, is a prolific high-quality website that stores my day-to-day book reviews and a scientific journal-like output of my creative progress. That should be able to be postable every day, especially with technologies like Wispr Flow for speech-to-text and Ghost for blog publishing and YCB for digging up resources.

In other words, I am going to use this website as a crutch to trick myself at a higher level to have more on target motivations.

As such, this is the first example of what this experiment is going to look like: me just ranting about my current status with these things. I guess I'll break them down one-by-one, at least the ones that I'm pursuing in any given day.

Reading

I've been stuck with my current books for a while. I haven't made much progress in them. I'm still reading "Power Broker", I'm still reading "Sadly, Porn", and I'm still reading "Constantines Sword". I haven't added a new book to the stack in a while. Instead I've been spending a lot of time just kind of fooling around on my phone looking at nothing in particular. Today I feel proud because I did crack open each for a few minutes (about 5 minutes each).

I actually skipped forward pretty significantly in the "Power Broker" because it was starting to get repetitive, and I wanted to get to the end of Robert Moses' career in life to hear Robert Caro's overall take on his power, and because the vignettes were becoming a bit overwhelming and repetitive. "Constantines Sword" is actually going pretty well. I liked that book. I'm at a part of the book where we're discussing Constantine's mother Helena, and how she became an icon for the Christian religion and what that caused for the anti-Semitic arc of Christianity towards Judaism. And then finally, I'm reading "Sadly, Porn" which I really like because it's largely just a rant against dream analysis and the current chapter (if you could even call it that) is focused on media manipulation of men and women and how men and women have different motivations for creating and watching porn.

YCB

Today's update for YCB isn't much of an update at all. It's still just a continuation of basically where I was at when I posted briefly yesterday. I've been thinking a lot about the B2B space for a few reasons:

1. I've kind of hit major feature parity within the application and am experiencing some level of product-market fit in the sense that the market is the people who I've introduced it to, and they're using it every day.
2. But I don't really want to scale yet, and I also don't feel comfortable attaching just an arbitrary pricing model.

So I feel like consulting is both a pragmatic and realistic way for me to bring money into the organization (and pay my bills), but it does require more focus of my time, and of course takes me away from development on the application itself. So I've just been using it and letting some of my frustrations about certain things build up, so I'll hopefully be inspired to try and figure out a way to fix some of the bugs and add a few more features that have been percolating at the edges of my consciousness, including:

• A history feature so that you can see the entries that you've seen
• A cache feature that caches entries on device so it doesn't need to fetch them multiple times
• An extension of GPT or language model compute on entries so that each entry has topics attached to it that you can click and you can search internally or externally through the web view

So those are the main features that have really stuck out to me as things I want to integrate into the application, but I haven't really felt the desire to do those because I've just been so focused on getting the B2B off the ground and sending out emails and just trying to reach out to people and see who would be willing to partner with me or who would be willing to engage at the level of offering.