Jason Leow

You know that iconic conversation near the end of Lord Of The Rings when Sam and Frodo were near the volcano:

Sam: "Do you remember the Shire, Mr Frodo? It’ll be spring soon and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket and they’ll be sowing the summer barley on the lower fields and eating the first strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
Frodo: “No Sam I can’t recall the taste of food nor the sound of water or the touch of grass.”

I feel like Frodo now when it comes to feeling hopeful for the future. The past 2 years of the pandemic had felt like his arduous journey into Mordor. I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to something. I can’t recall the taste of anticipation nor the sound of optimism or the touch of hope.

I recall how, before the pandemic, I used to create these beautiful countdown landing pages for my trips and life events. Search on Unsplash for a gorgeous image of the country I’m heading to. Create a Carrd countdown landing page. Publish and share. Refer to it constantly. Being able to see the days and hours counting down, inching ever closer to the D-Day filled me with a sense of anticipation. The days were bright, not just because the present is beautiful but there’s a beautiful future to look forward to.

I wish to daydream again. To feel future-hopeful again. To drink from that wellspring of optimism again.

Perhaps it’s time to try making these pages again. And in turn, to make the plans for such pages to exist. Countdown pages as a mechanism for engineering hope.

Anything to taste that anticipation again…

Paranoia is the belief that everything and everyone is out to get you. The opposite of paranoia is pronoia, the belief that everything in the universe is conspiring to help you.

This is like my latest favourite word.

It’s like the scarcity vs abundance mindset. You can see everything as scarce and zero sum game, or you can see everything as inherently abundant and positive sum.

Of course, it’s not always 100%. It’s not always homogeneous. This isn’t a statement of fact about reality, but more a personal stance one takes when encountering reality.

The classic half empty half full situation. Optimism vs pessimism.

This word caught my attention because it’s exactly what I think I need now. I’ve not been feeling very optimistic or hopeful lately. I did a quick list in my head of all the major changes in my life in the past 2 years:

• Becoming a father
• Surviving through a generational crisis (aka pandemic)
• Switching careers for real (from consultant to indie maker)
• Switching chronotypes (from night owl to early bird)
• Switching diet to meat based
• From working only outside in cafes to working from home exclusively

Each one would have been more than enough to handle singly, but all at once? No wonder I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water. It’s easy to start feeling paranoid, like everything’s working against me. While I have mostly no control over what happens externally, I do have control over some aspects, and especially inwardly. I need pronoia instead.

So yes, pronoia. Let’s go get pronoid now.

Next, to schedule the 1155pm time slot for 1 week

Ok so I said I will build my way out of burnout.

What will I build then?

It has to have these criteria:

- One-off and micro in scope
- Timebox the effort to just a few days
- No need for monetization
- Can be for jokes and laughs
- Be given to others for free
- For play, for fun
- Goalless
I have some ideas, some more serious ones, some fun ones:

1. Writing prompts Notion template - I have over 70 writing prompts saved in Lifelog. Always wanted to convert them into a free Notion template on Gumroad
2. Writing email course - another free product for Lifelog. Just a 7-day email course on writing. Leveraging stuff I’ve already written on the Lifeblog
3. Sleep biohacking guide/directory - all the pins and resources saved in the 5am creators Telegram chat group, categorised and tagged, searchable.
4. Twitter 101 guide - I’ve already wrote this out in this series of posts here, so might as well create it as another free guide
5. Life goals/bucketlist countdown - I used to use a free countdown micro-SaaS to countdown to upcoming trips and events that I’m looking forward to. I loved it - it gave me so much hope and anticipation to life. I’ve been wanting to recreate that for myself ever since.
6. AI-generated art card deck (using DALL•E or midjourney) - a text-to-image side hobby that’s been so much fun. It started with using conjure.art (which now closed down), and now I have access to DALL•E and midjourney.
7. Indie hackers ikigai calculator - It started from this popular tweet about how I decide if a product is worth making. I thought why not make a matrix calculator to help indie hackers like myself decide?
8. Canned replies site (spin off from notyourcustomer.carrd.co) - people loved it. That made me wonder: canned replies directory for all the canned replies we often have to send to people over email, text messages
9. Revive something from Google’s graveyard and build something fun
10. Build something fun with GPT-3. Use it to generate colourful, funny insults?

What else can I build?

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42, then what about 43?

The supercomputer in the book points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was, and itself was unable to produce the question.

Jokes aside, I think perhaps turning age 43 is about finding the question. Not that I knew the answer when I was 42. Far from it. And if I knew any answers last year, they are probably as meaningless as the answer “42”, because everything changed.

So yes, I’m turning 43 today.

I have no pithy wisdom to share.
No 43 things about turning 43.
No lessons I wished someone told me about turning 43.
… thankfully.

43 is a number.
It’s meaningful but also arbitrary.
It matters, it also doesn’t matter.

And birthday wish?
All I want is more sleep.
That’s how it is for sleep deprived parents.

And intentions for the new birth year ahead?
I’m just gonna be that dumb idiot who doesn’t have a plan but is happy, than (try to be) the smart-ass genius who has the best plan but is unhappy.

Onwards!

- No more free trial, just money back guarantee, no-questions-asked refund
- Added bring-your-own custom domain + analytics for $25 one-time

I read this recent CNBC article, bemused:

“The biggest retirement challenge that no one talks about, in my experience, is finding purpose.”

Really? Is retirement still a thing?

I’ve always felt retirement as a concept doesn’t make sense. If you hate what you do, then why keep doing it till 65? If you love what you do, why should you stop doing it at 65 just because of some arbitrarily set time called “retirement” age? I think at the base there’s this view that work is unsavoury, and had to be done with eventually.

Here’s my hot take:

“Retirement” is overrated. Work is misunderstood.

At least in the traditional definition of it where one retires by kick backing and doing nothing.

My own take:

Work should continue. But the reason you do it can change. If you have retirement savings and assets, then work becomes an opportunity for personal exploration, adventure and fun of something you never had chance to do when you needed to work to live.

“Fuck an early retirement. I want to die doing what I love.” – @SaasSavant

From work to live… to live to work.

(Of course, obvious caveats: This is a higher income bracket 1st world problem. Continuing to work well into your 70s-80s because you need to work to live is a different set of issues altogether…)

Work can be a way of life. Work can be a way of being. I can’t talk about it any better than my favourite author poet Kahlil Gibran, so here’s it in verbatim:

"On Work
in The Prophet

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine...."

Work is love made visible indeed. I couldn’t have said it any better.

If work is love made visible, why stop work to retire then? Does your love for yourself, others, life and the world stop at 65?

Nope.

Why stop then? Why stop at all?

Sheet2bio with custom apex domain - https://greglim.co

Counterintuitive as it sounds, yeah I think I’m gonna do that.

Build my way out of burnout.

It might sound stupid and will backfire since it seems like I’ll just be working more.

But here’s where it’s different:

I feel most alive when creating something from scratch
I’ll make something one-off and micro in scope
I can timebox the effort to just a few days
No expectations for monetization
It can be for jokes and laughs
I’ll give to others for free
It’ll be play, for fun
Still goalless

I’ve always done this. Back in first year of the pandemic, I was locked down, stressed, sleepy, tired, going crazy. I went on to build over 10 products for social good.

It helped. A lot.

We often think of rest as doing nothing. But active rest works too, if not better in some case. Especially true where the root cause of burnout isn’t because of working too hard physically, but a burnout of the spirit. Stuff like working hard with little results or rewards (depletion of motivation), stressing out over money, and just accumulated ‘PTSD’ from the pandemic (worries over something out of my control).

All an inner game.

Hopefully, the life-giving joy of creating would top me back up.

Gotta fix the CSS for body padding!

I saw this the other day on my social feeds:

"some of us never found time to be happy because we were too busy trying to be strong." – @PoemHeaven

I felt that. I felt that a lot.

I think my past two years of the pandemic had been about being too busy trying to be strong.

Being strong as the sole breadwinner.
Being strong as a new dad for my firstborn.
Being strong as a husband for my post-partum wife.
Being strong as a son for my elderly parents (who lives with me).
Being strong as a Singaporean for Singapore, and everyone else within.

And being strong for my dreams of being an indie hacker, despite all my failures.

I’ve spent so much time trying to be strong that I’ve never really found much time to be happy the past two years.

No time for fun.
No time for rest.
No time for play.
No time for laughter.
No time for happiness.

It’s no wonder I can feel the flames of an approaching burnout singeing the edges of my spirit. I have to act soon. I have to act fast. Else it can downward spiral real fast.

Or maybe not act at all.

Maybe that’s why I went for a goalless month. Too much action, not enough non-action.

Pulse and pause.

How I know I’m not successful (yet):

I’m waaay too busy.

6 months ago I wrote that I’m not successful because I’m too busy.

6 months later, nothing’s changed…yet.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I do enjoy working.

Work is fun.
Work is satisfying.
Work gives me purpose.
Work feeds me and the family.
Work drives me to grow as a person.

But yet there’s always this conflict, this unhealthy loop:

I enjoy work. I work too much. I feel burned out. I want to be less busy. I work less. I feel rested. I get bored. I start work again. I enjoy work. I work too much…

Rinse and repeat. I’ve been looping through this for maybe the past 10 years perhaps? Ever since I went self-employed.

My relationship with work is not the healthiest, but it had worked for me so far. Maybe that’s the problem. It had worked in the past, and I assume it will work now and onwards into the future.

Is it time for revision? Now, as a husband and father?

Truth is, I’ve always struggled with rest, with being lazy. I felt it held me back from what I want to achieve, the future I’m striving so hard for. But now with my experiments in being opportunistic trickster, I realising the real benefits of flaneuring, having time to wander, having downtime. Being lazy actually helps me get to my goals faster. Now I can’t say no to that.

Hunt like a lion instead of grazing like a cow, @naval says. Hunt, eat, rest instead of grazegrazegraze endlessly through the months and years.

Perhaps it really is time to rethink this. And to act as a different person.

I probably said the same thing 6 months ago. Yet, 6 months later, I’m still here. This is one of those problems that feels like it’ll take my life’s work to disentangle.

One day, I will. One day…

They always say, don't watch your competitors. Just do your own thing, run your own race.

There's certainly wisdom in that.

It helps with focus. It doesn't distract you from your work. It won't lead to unnecessary comparison.

But there's also lots of underrated opportunities and advantages from watching your competitors in ways that doesn't affect your focus/motivation:

- Watch when they introduce new pricing, new redesigns - did it trigger a mass exodus of disgruntled customers? Can you capitalize on that and grab some of that market share?
- Watch their reviews on Google or other platforms. What are users complaining about? What features are missing? What existing features can be improved? Go build those missing features (of course, the ones that **also** align to your product vision), go market how your product doesn't have that problem.
- Watch Google Trends for searches for "X alternative", whether the trend is growing. @jakobgreenfeld(https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/1535260530830479360) talks about this well for popular SaaS tools like Ahrefs, Sendgrid and Miro and checked for each of them if people are hungry for alternatives.
- Watch news of your VC-funded competitors shutting down due to the economic downturn, and see if you can rush in to fill the market gap. What didn't work at VC-funded level can work for indie hacker bootstrapped level.
- Watch if they stumble, get bad PR, have downtimes. Can you capitalize on that? Make a funny meme or joke about it? Of course, always remember only to punch up (if your competitors are huge enterprises). Don't be mean if your competitors are other indies.

*What other opportunities are there from watching your competitors?*

Figured out how to deploy a separate site from a subdirectory in my sheet2bio github repo, which means I can then set up a custom domain for that netlify.app site, which THEREFORE means I can offer custom domains for Sheet2Bio customers!

When was the last time you said “I don’t care”?

Was it really because you didn’t care, or you couldn’t handle it well and not caring was an easy way out?

Thinking back, I think there’s way more occasions where it’s the latter than I want to admit.

This tweet truly prompted some deep reflection:

"It’s easier to say you don’t care about money than to admit you’re unskilled
It’s easier to say you don’t care about dating than to admit you’re awkward
It’s easier to say you don’t care about getting fit than to admit you’re lazy
Think of this next time you say “I don’t care”
– @WrongsToWrite"

Like when I said I don’t care about money, it’s about freedom. It’s true, ultimately freedom is my metric of success but money isn’t unimportant either. Both are necessary, but neither alone are sufficient. Especially pertinent lesson from the past 2 years when survival needs were always a concern. I do care about money, just to the point of enough. And when I said I don’t care, it’s more out of rebellion, out of not knowing how to make and deal with money. More out of exasperation with my relationship with money.

I often said I don’t care about socializing. I’ve always preferred to be alone, in peaceful solitude. I’d always said people tire me. But truth is, I do care. I do care about my wife, son, parents, family. I do care about some friends. I do care about socializing, but just in a way that energizes me instead of drains me. Fact is, I don’t know how to set up that to serve me. People always hold sway over me, pulling me away from what I feel I need the most, for myself. I don’t care because it’s easier to run away than to learn how to deal with it.

I always said I don’t care about approval and validation of others. But truth is, I do care, even if I don’t want to. Someone says my product sucks, and it still stings, even if I don’t know the guy. I show it to someone I look up to, and hope he or she likes it. We are after all human. Imperfect in keeping to our beliefs, and unavoidably social. Not caring is an aspiration, caring is inevitable. We can’t control others and their responses. So we say we “don’t care”.

"People claim apathy when they can’t handle failure. – @AlexHormozi"

How often is apathy just inability in disguise?

I don’t think I’ll ever look at “I don’t care” the same way again.

The next time I ever catch myself saying it, I know I need to probe deeper.