Jason Leow

- the most efficient way to reply to replies to my own tweets is going to my own profile, clicking on the tweet and replying from there (not clicking on each notification of the reply)
- the most efficient way to open all profiles of accounts you want to engage with daily is creating a Chrome Bookmarks folder containing links to each profile page and clicking open all

Saw a funny meme on my social media feed the other day about bullshit jobs:
------
"If you can’t describe your job in 3 words, you have a bullshit job.
❌ 'I’m a SaaS-based fintech sales analyst.'
❌ 'I develop and maintain automated capabilities.'
❌ 'I create systems to record blockchain data.'
✅ 'I catch fish.'"
------
Describe your job in 3 words” is a also great exercise to get some clarity on what exactly do I do.

The format is this:

“I .”

For me: I create tools.

What do you think? How would you describe your job in 3 words?

- Looks like the most efficient way to engage other accounts is opening all their profile pages and replying to their tweets there, rather than using Lists or Turn On Notifications (too much noise from their reply tweets)

Here’s a product idea: Investing as a subscription.

• Take a mobile app for investing.
• Subscribe to it at $5, $10 or $100 per month based on your investing appetite.
• Set up a portfolio - select a few stocks, ETFs, crypto or bonds that you want to buy.
• Let the app automatically choose from your portfolio and buy the these assets every month, using the Dollar Cost Averaging approach.
• Watch your investing compound. Or not.

But the old ways of investing and trading makes it too difficult to navigate. Why can’t investing be as simple as buying groceries from Amazon?

Who’s with me on this?

Always felt these tutorial walk-throughs are the real value of the plugins, not the code. The next value-add is the tech support (by yours truly). The code is simple, nothing to brag about tbh. It's the tuts that enable nocode Carrd users to leverage the custom code for their own sites, without learning how to code.

We should all write our own creator manifesto. Sort of like a personal user manual but for our creatorship. All the personal truths you live by—or try to live up to—in the process of running your creator business. The process of writing it would be great way to gain clarity on what’s important to oneself too.

Here’s some that I try to live by, that you may agree or disagree with:

• Make friends first, business maybe.
• Give 99%, take 1%.
• Be human, be real, be vulnerable.
• There’s actually 7.9B ways to success
• Money buys happiness, but only to a point.
• Money is an enabler, not endgame. It’s all about time, location and creative freedom.
• Small is beautiful: A 1-person $1M lifestyle business over a 1000-persons $1B unicorn corp.
• Embrace being generalist.
• Portfolio of small bets over a singular focus.
• Help others succeed.
• Slow growth over hyper growth at all costs.

What are some personal truths you live by as a creator?

Time to add to the store to sell!

- break down something important that I do for Lifelog - it can be marketing, product etc. Share value!
- use a timer to timebox my engagement on Twitter

The MRR increase is nice and all, but I'd rather have willing customers who are using my product.

Tough call between profit and biz model, but I sleep better this way.

I have a long list of “shoulds”. Things I tell myself “I should do”. My list of “musts” on the other hand, is few. Things that I want to do, that “I must do”, should really be the longer list but it isn’t.

Here’s my list of shoulds vs musts:

I should:
earn more
exercise more
eat better
sleep more and better
launch more products
work harder
work smarter
work less
......

I must:
write this post
create a new product
sleep more and better
get fit af
manage my money better

Of the two lists, only a handful of shoulds and musts overlap. Flipping the ratio between should and must had always been my deep why of going down the whole creator, indie hacker route. Or at least having a more balanced ratio. Yet, it’s the hardest thing.

At least this post was something that I “must” write and it’s done. First baby step in a long journey of changing the proportion between the two lists.

Inspired by @therealbandonwilson’s explorations, I decided to experiment too and got some quantum energy products from Leela to try out - 1 for money and 1 for health/sleep.

I’m no stranger to consulting healers, but this field is so new that it all sounds like new age woo woo.

Am I being scammed here? Yet:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

But what got me off the fence were Dave Asprey recommending it as a means to block EMF exposure for health and sleep. And of course, Brandon’s own ongoing experiments. An authority and a peer both trying it out, and I trust them. And as any biohacker will say, experiment and experience it for yourself first before you make any judgement.

So rather than waste bandwidth thinking about it, I decided to just get them and see for myself. if it doesn’t work, it’s just a few hundred well invested to learn that.

Will report back.

My toddler son has way too many toys. He plays with one set for a day or a week, gets bored, and then moves on to the next set. In time he returns to it, but plays it in a different way, or learns how to play it ‘properly’ (if the toy was previously above his developmental stage).

Somehow, the way he learns is emergent on how he plays.

Learning loops. Always coming back, then relearning but learning just a bit more this time. Until he had learned all there is and he moves on, permanently.

I like to think that as builders and makers, our projects are our ‘toys’. And we could take a cue or two from the way children play. In this case, how we can rotate through our projects, and learn in loops, getting better with each loop.

Truth is, I’ve been hammering away at the same 1-2 ‘toys’ for many months now. And the best way get a break-through is to acknowledge that I’m bored, stop playing, and move on to other projects for a while.

That’s the upside of having a portfolio of projects instead of being all in on one.

Do as a child would. Move on unapologetically once you get bored, and just keep on looping through, iterating.

Most of all, play.

Just have fun.

- Don't reply to each reply to your tweet in the notification feed. Wastes time to click on and wait for page to load each time. Open up the tweet page and reply from there direct

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.” - @naval

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

But I could never embody them. But Gary Vee changed my mind:

"Ambition and tenacity are amazing things to have, but if they go unchecked, they can lead to some negative effects like anxiety, lack of self-confidence, and burnout. The best way to keep your ambition under control is by having an equal amount of patience to balance it out."

My mental and physical health is important to me. Now I see it. Now I’m convinced.

All the impatience is doing is it’s making me anxious. Anxiety makes me over-clock on work, and then burnout ensues. It’s not sustainable.

Who looks like they are having more fun than everyone else, and yet making a ton of money in the process?

Mr Beast, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk.

That’s the counterintuitive part about the role of fun in wealth.

We often think, fun ≠ money.

Fun is a hobby. Hobbies don’t make much money. And if a hobby does make you money, it ceases to be fun. It becomes work. Anytime there’s money—especially big money—involved, then it’s serious. Not funny. Not fun.

But as these three guys show, that’s the secret. A simple and open secret.

“Just have fun.”

So simple but so hard to do. Because when things scale, it gets harder to have fun every day, isn’t it? Yet fun and the ensuing joy, is the ultimate differentiator.

Joy is the ultimate creator.
Fun is the ultimate wealth generator.

#notetoself

Added actual example tweet, and linked it to Twitter source. Also added explainer link. Add placeholder for randomizer button.

I’m feeling stuck bootstrapping my SaaS. The success I seek isn’t quite panning out.

But reading Daniel Vassallo’s thread made me realise perhaps going for success is the wrong approach. Simply not failing is better.

It’s more about removing chances in order to avoid my worst case scenario, than increasing chances to achieve my best case scenario. At least when starting out.

Prevent downsides first. The upsides will come once you got the downsides managed.

Survive, then thrive.

I want to see what happens when I try launching low cost, effort-capped small bets even if they weren’t the most enjoyable things.

Cockroach > unicorn
Not failing > succeeding
Survive > thrive