Jason Leow

https://sheet2bio.com/ryu/

What’s the dollar value of my version of f**k you money? $1M? $10M? $1B? Everyone’s price is different. Thinking through, I thought maybe—just hypothetically—$10M is a good figure.

So too poor, you’re enslaved by your monthly salary and you’re unhappy. Too rich, and you’re enslaved by your liabilities and you’re unhappy too.

Now I’m wondering if I even want that $10M after all…is it even about the money?

Because ultimately the f**k you money is just an enabler right? Money isn’t the endgame here. It’s the freedom it buys. Money is just one facet out of many. So how does that freedom look like for me?

A blank calendar where I get to decide when and how often I work.
A bank account where my family and I can live comfortably, take a few vacations a year, not worry about not having enough.
Creative freedom - not needing to work with people I don’t want to work with, having autonomy in how I run my own projects
Location independence - being able to live in another country or city for extended periods of time
I can probably get to that vision of freedom without my hypothetical f**k you money of $10M. I might not even need $1M to achieve that!

Money is just a convenient resource that makes making it easier to make that vision happen. But it the only the only resource that can make that happen.

Running your own lifestyle business.
Creating your own products.
Being able to work remotely anywhere.

All these are resources too.

Seem like… f**k you money is overrated.

Not sure who needs to hear this but… MRR is not everything.

Because $1 earned is $1 is $1, whether MRR or 1-off revenue.

I drank too much of the SaaS startup koolaid and put MRR on a high moral pedestal.

Letting that go was a huge relief.

There I said it.

Based on my notes from the book How Luck Happens:

https://golifelog.com/posts/how-to-be-lucky-1651454937208

I wrote about how to be lucky yesterday, so now is the time to think about what I want to do. I once wrote a checklist to synthesize the book notes, so I’m going to apply the checklist to think through what I can do right now for my work.

My little brand acc
@golifelog
, chugging along since Dec 2020..

Just hit 500 followers!🙃

Took a different approach - just 3 QTs/day, zero replies.

A knowledge resource for writing for creators.

If you like accounts that's not chatty, quietly doing it's thing, this is it.

Not sure who needs to hear this but... MRR is not everything.

Because $1 earned is $1 is $1, whether MRR or 1-off revenue.

I drank too much of the SaaS startup koolaid and put MRR on a high moral pedestal.

Letting that go was a huge relief.

There I said it.

https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1520402984965787648

Sharing my notes from the book How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh, as a way to refresh and rethink how I want to approach my #30daysofluck challenge.

It’s an insightful book on why some people are more lucky than others, and what we can do in order to be luckier.

In other words, luck is part SKILL, something that I can practice, hone and get better at.

I love how luck is a blend of habit formation, antifragility and complexity/systems science. Foresee that I’ll be borrowing concepts from James Clear (Atomic Habits), Nassim Taleb (Antifragile)!

But in the first place, why luck?

I found myself thinking a lot about luck because it’s such a huge unsaid factor of success in stochastic environments like entrepreneurship and social media. I wanted to learn how to better leverage opportunities, chance and curiosity, as I had been doing for the past two months and planning to do so for May.

It also aligns to one of my identity-based goals is that of an Opportunistic Trickster... To be honest, I’ve always struggled to see how I can improve on that goal. it isn’t something that’s easy to measure as well. But (re-)discovering these notes on luck and how it links to being opportunistic and trickstering, was just the solution I needed! Now I have some tips on how I can approach that identity goal. So this month is a month of levelling up on that identity!

April was a good, promising month. Let’s make May even better and brighter.

I’ve been following my curiosity and creative energy for March and April, chasing opportunities to good results.

I asked about how to switch on the opportunist eye as a default mode. The conclusion then was that I needed to break routine intentionally, get out of comfort zone in small ways more often.

I explored how to better spot opportunities. The non-obvious traits of good opportunities were: 1) non-routine, 2) potential for scale, 3) inspiration-based.

I want to keep going and explore this theme that’s at the intersection of complexity, chance, curiosity, and chasing opportunities.

In summary, luck.

Or how to be lucky.

I recalled I’d read a book on luck before, and wrote good notes on it. The book is How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh.

These notes will be a useful guide for me to experiment with in May. Will share more notes in the days to come.

So… 30 days on how to be lucky.

A #30daysofluck challenge.

Remaining tasks:
- fix gradient bug
- pin down landing page design (how to use html vibe but not hurt conversion??)
- confirm pricing
- payment gateway

New features! Progress bar, charts, icon selection

📈Current MRR: US$138 (all from Lifelog)
📊 One-off revenue: ~US$125
🐦 New Twitter followers: 406

Got 1 churn on Lifelog, MRR down by $5.

Now: $138 MRR

But what's surprising - my nonchalance to this.

Just 1-2 months ago, every churn was like a stab in the heart.

Deciding to drop my MRR obsession to focus on revenue instead, & restarting small bets, really helped! 💪

By learning from my failures in entrepreneurship, I’ve been doing it ALL WRONG.

I’ve always prided myself in learning from my failures in life. Personal or in entrepreneurship. But I see now that I might have gave it too much weight. I had over-reached into seeing lessons where there might be none.

Because in a stochastic situation, failures aren’t easy to attribute to any single cause. It’s chance, it’s skill, it’s talent, it’s connections, or none of the above. It all blended together, and had that outcome called failure. By attributing it 100% to my own fault, I’m giving myself way less credit than I deserved. Because someone with my skills and work ethic but at a different timing might have succeeded.

Perhaps I was learning the wrong lessons from my failures.

I can stop beating myself up over it now. Time to acknowledge and move on…and try something else, something small, something again.

May we all sleep better tonight with our past, and for all the nights ahead.