Jason Leow

Bug report: background and divider styles of site got messed up. The unused Bootstrap CSS is really annoying urgh! Time to rethink relying on it for just the carousel feature

I just hit 1300 day streak on Makerlog!

It’s been 3.5 years, one of the longest streaks I’ve ever maintained.

Some thoughts and recollections:

HOW I STARTED
The year was 2018. It’s a rainy December in Ubud, Bali. I was digital nomading and working on my products, and decided to finally try Makerlog, right about the same time I started a daily writing habit. 7 Dec was my first writing post, so I presume it’s also my first log on Makerlog. I thought, ok since I’m going serious into indie hacking, this community might be fun to join. I’ve been logging every task I do and every small win for all my products since.

BENEFITS
• I use these logs to do my monthly reviews, track progress for each product. It’s great! I often do more than I think I did every month, and the logs are a great reminder for that.
• The product pages are also a great way to look back at the progress for each product.
• Surprising developer benefit - the logs also serve as developer/versioning notes. I get really granular and share my thought process behind each feature I created (especially the important features that were hard to develop, like say the streak algorithm for Lifelog). That way if I forgot how the function works, I can still look back and refresh my mind.
• Overall, the Makerlog community had also been great for learning, connecting and support as an indie hacker. The hype and high energy in the chat group and community had somewhat died down after 3 years, but everyone’s still plugging at it, making products and commenting on one another’s launches.
• It’s a funny thing to say, but around and after the 2 year mark it became more about the benefits from logging than the streak. Yeah I’ll probably get sad for a few minutes if I lose the streak, but the benefits I get from capturing my progress is still there. And I’ll still keep doing it.

LEARNINGS
Will I hit 2000? 10000? I don’t know.

What I do know: My approach is “one more day”. I know I’ll try one more day tomorrow…

Just one more day.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

A gem from James Clear’s newsletter today:

"If you’re always right, you’re not learning.
If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.
The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.
But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential."

– James Clear

That puts a counterintuitive but so-damned-true point of view on winning and being right, isn’t it?

The key word here is “always”.

Nothing wrong with winning or being right, per se.

But if you winning 100 out of 100 times (or even 99 times out of 100), then it very likely means one thing:

The game is too easy for you. You’re not really taking risks, not really pushing yourself, not getting out of your comfort zone.

The winning thus gives a false sense of success. There’s actually little progress to be said, zero growth to be had. The worst kind of success you’d want, actually. Because it lulls you into a false sense of superiority where there’s none. It creates a mirage that you don’t actually live in.

Of course it’s not to put failure and losses on a pedestal and start giving trophies out to every loser. That’s affirmative action for the wrong reasons. Also if you’re failing 100 out of 100 times, the game is too hard for you too. You need to change the game, change who you play with, or change the rules.

The key seems to be finding the right zone of challenge versus competency.

Maybe 60:40 fails to wins? I can live with that.

Tl;dr - Always winning means you actually losing.

Somehow the old Google Scripts web app stopped working and gives an error message "Authorization required to use this script".

Had to manually go into each subfolder to edit! Time to automate this shit

Platform went down for ~1h but no one noticed. Says something about user usage behaviour... 🤔

Instead of setting grand visions and ambitious goals, do just one more day.

Examples:

“So are you planning on staying sober for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to stay sober for one more day…”

“How much are you willing to commit to this business? A decade?”
“I don’t know… but I’m going to stick to it for one more day…”

It’s an interesting motivation hack, for sure. Especially useful for infinite games. Because with infinite games there’s no end point, no destination (except death perhaps). Your goal—even if you have one—is never done done. Like sleep, health, mental fitness. Like being an entrepreneur, a creator, a maker.

It’s a lifestyle, not an exit.

When there’s no end, it’s hard to feel motivated to keep pushing, isn’t it? Or when you have a vision for how success should look like, it can feel overwhelming or frustrating that you’re currently so far off from it.

All these are about becoming disembodied from the present and getting lost in a future that had yet to arrive… if ever.

The solution? By just focusing on the next step to take. By being present. Being embodied, in the present.

By saying, “Just one more day.”

Honestly… I don’t know if I can stick to this creator-entrepreneur journey long enough to hit my goal of $5k per month, or if I can ever achieve my dream of making a good living from indie hacking for me and my family. It sucks that there’s no results after so many years.

I don’t know, but I’ll do it for just one more day, tomorrow…

Stagflation is when slow economic growth and joblessness intersects with rising inflation. Basically: Your future money shrinks, your current money also shrinks.

Worst of both worlds.

That’s what’s happening in the external world.

I feel I’m going through a stagflation too as a creator.

Creative stagflation.

Slow product growth, personal growth stagnation intersecting with motivation inflation.

Product growth had definitely slowed. Lifelog sign-ups had stopped. Sheet2Bio too, and so had my other products. Only my Carrd plugins continue to move onwards on its own.

They say, your product grows as fast as a founder grows as a person, as an entrepreneur. I think it’s true. I feel so. That means I’m stagnating in inner growth.

If motivation is the currency of inner growth and thus outer growth, then I’m definitely hit by inflation. Somewhat same motivation but I do less, achieve less with it.

What can I do?

How does one get out of a creative stagflation?

- Building 100% useless but 100% fun projects. To kickstart a ailing engine with new fuel by lowering the bar of builds to the lowest.
- Building my way out of my burnout is one. More projects but slightly more serious ones to keep the creative fire burning.
- Meanwhile learn to play more defense. Survive at all costs. Don’t incite more frustration by seeking to thrive when creative stagflation happens. Do the bare minimum to keep maintain your current lifestyle or creator flywheel. Look out for the opening where I can break through the stalemate.

What else can I do?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Carrd/comments/vrt1fx/mobile_navbar_menu_for_carrd/

Example:

Impressed so far, more than Hootsuite:
- There's a auto-schedule comment/reply feature that's useful if you want to add a link to the comment (in LinkedIn)
- Higher limits for free drafts, scheduled posts, accounts
- Longer post history, and can schedule longer ahead

All these lack of results from my products is making me want to give up. But not the giving up you think.

It's making me give up on things I used to do that I thought helped but not really.

It's making me give up on ideals and narratives I had how about things *should be* done.

It's pushing me to re-examine what I thought success looks like, to reimagine what it really is.

'Shoulds' like:

- Being impatient and expecting 'immediate' results (within months, or 1-2 years). Recently I said to myself that I'll commit a decade. It was a huge relief and provided perspective.
- I saw having monthly recurring revenue as the only way to success, but I'm giving that up and now I'm open to one-time revenue.
- I only wanted to earn money from my products and drop my consulting, but now I see that anything that allows me to keep going as a solopreneur is fair game. Survive first, not thrive before surviving.
- I wanted to succeed by building SaaS products, but even that I'm giving up now. It's okay to earn from info products, digital downloads, freelance. My Plugins For Carrd had been the huge opportunity right under my nose for the longest time, yet I continually neglect it for my SaaS. No more. I’ll follow where the money and opportunity is.
- I disliked the whole trend of maker making products for other makers, so I avoided it on moral high grounds. But that's just an egoistic position. A product that's useful is useful is useful. Why so pretentious? I don't get extra credit for being so idealistic and elitist...
- Building a product for Twitter audience. Similar to the makers makings for makers trend. Since I'm on Twitter, I know the needs of the people using Twitter fairly well. So why not make something for it?
- Giving up on the nice-to-have habits like daily affirmations, $2 jar. It's simply not moving the needle for me even though it feels like it would. Now I just wake up, and get to work.
- (Over-)crafting tweets that I'm proud of. The past few months I've spent maximum effort on writing tweets I can take pride in, frequently spending hours crafting and tweaking the tweet over multiple rounds. But I learned that the effort:reward ratio didn't make way I play worthwhile. For ephemeral content that disappears after 1-2 days, I should be just spending minutes on it, not hours. Spending hours follows the curve of diminishing returns. Also leaning on the point about committing a decade, I'm in this Twitter game for the long run, so no need to over-compensate all that effort upfront. Sure, I should still ensure some level of quality. But adjust accordingly. Same reasons why I started batching my tweets 1 week ahead instead of scheduling it on a per day basis - it's just not worth the effort.
- Avoiding LinkedIn as a marketing channel because it's "cringe". It's not, and just like Twitter, it's mostly about following the right people, curating your feed, and engaging the way you want.

Question to myself: What other 'shoulds' should I give up?

It’s been too long since I last travelled. That got me thinking: Where would I go if I could leave right now?

Bali
Few places restore me as well as Bali. In particular, Ubud. The lush green, the peaceful locals, the daily prayers. I used to take solo year-end retreats there annually. Just calm, great food, nature-bathing, and scooting around in a scooter, for one month. It was divine. Much needed now, after two years of living through a crisis.

Japan
If I had a past life, it would be in Japan. Even though I speak no Japanese, there’s no other place where I felt more at home being myself than in Japan. Especially Kyoto. People keep to themselves but respect others. Craft and craftsmanship is still deeply valued. Tradition meets modern. A blend of polarities, a contradiction, an irony yet it exists.

Iceland
There’s no other place where I felt the Earth being more alive than in Iceland. The ground upon my feet wasn’t just some inert, passive, quiet thing – it burped, it hissed, it moved. The lava landscapes were alien to me. If you take me away blindfolded and dropped me on Iceland, I’d think we were on the moon perhaps. The air of fairy magic makes me almost expect elves and unicorns to jump out behind boulders and trees. It’s inexplicable.

India
I’ve been to India for yoga retreats. And not gonna lie… India is hard. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with my experience traveling there. There’s so much to it, yet it’s really challenging to dig deep enough through the surface to get there. The smog, the crazy traffic, the infrastructure, the crowds. All stand in between you and the wisdom that India has to offer. But perhaps that’s the whole point.

I can’t travel to these places yet…

But wishful thinking is always nice.

I've been doing analog weekly recaps for a few months now. Just physical notebook, a real pen, and coffee in a nice, quiet cafe, writing to these question prompts:

What's adding energy?
What's draining energy?
What moves the needle?
What to reduce/remove?

But over the months I've began to observe a pattern. The 4 questions are not created equal. One works 10x more effectively than the rest. Guess which one?

It's #4 "What to reduce/remove?"

That's surprising to me. I assumed it would be #1 or #3, the questions that affirm the positive, that add to life. But ended it it's the question that aims to decrease or omit things that work. I realised after every weekly recap, I'll go and remove/reduce exactly what I wrote. Week on week, I'll do that and it's gone. And I'm significantly better off. Every single thing I wanted to remove, I did, as I flip back to reread past recaps. The contrast here is the things that added energy and moved the needle, I didn't always follow through. I always assumed it would have been more intuitive and natural otherwise.

Which kind of makes sense, because as humans we're simply hardwired to loss aversion more than rewards. We fear losing what we have a lot more intensely than we look forward to what we want. It's definitely a great way to sustain motivation on something for sure. Removing pain is always easier to keep at it than to gain a benefit.

The other plus point is what Nassim Taleb talks about in *Antifragile* - the *via negativa* approach. It's much easier to get to a life you love by removing what you dislike versus trying to add more of what you like. Subtract what you hate, and you make space for the things you like to enter your life. Life abhors empty space, just as Nature abhors a vacuum.

I wonder if this is also a good approach to my creator journey, to making products.

Just remove or reduce what I hate about my products, or what I hate doing for my products. To give space to let the good things enter – revenue, profit, users, traffic, page views.

Instead of pursuing a grand vision for my SaaS, look to removing tiny to big things that me and my users hate. This gets me to keep working on it, and seems more impactful to users.

Via negativa for products!

It’s summer now. But I feel like I’m going through a creative winter. Much like the crypto winter, or the bear market, or bears going into hibernation.

It’s easy to want to fight this season. But over the years I noticed a pattern. That seasons are a necessary process for creativity.

We’re human beings, not machines. Nature has seasons, machines don’t.

(Though huge confession: Sometimes I daydream of being a machine. You can do so much more.)

Nature pulse and pause. The flurry of life in the spring, eventually gives way to the dying down of life in winter. The calm before the storm, and the calm after.

If creativity is a lot more similar to Nature than machines, then we can expect seasons, pulsing and pausing, living and dying, highs and lows too.

I get it. The lows are difficult to get through sometimes. Give me the heat of the summer over the biting chill of winter. But often the best way to get past the valley is by letting it be low.

Acceptance.

I accept my creative winter. Say that out loud. Say that one more time.

I accept my creative winter.

I’ll dwell in my winter till it’s time for spring.

For as long as it takes. For as long as it needs to take.

After all, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

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