Lifelog

What’s your chief regret as a creator/solopreneur?

Mine is listening too much to others who are more successful than me, and not being embodied and trusting of my own instincts and inner wisdom.

Talking about this on Twitter and then one comment from @mattli8020 resonated loads:

“Sometimes I feel like I’m doing it all wrong, but I decided a while back that win or lose, it’s going to be my way.”

And that’s what I will aspire to do from now on.

Win or lose, I’m gonna do it my way and my way only.

F**k the advice from all the success stories from folks whom I look up to too much. I love you guys but I can’t keep being enamoured by what you do and following it like a script.

Maybe I’ll get it wrong more often because of my newfound stubbornness to be my own person and solopreneur.

But at least it’s my own. That independence and freedom is ultimately why I started on this path in the first place. If I wanted to let others decide my work and my fate, I might as well go back to employment.

It’s my way or the wrong way perhaps.

But when I do get it the right way, I know it’s truly mine.

All mine.

I've always been a methodical person. Wait, correction: I'm not naturally a meticulous from young but got conditioned into it by school and work.

But that's how I am now out of force of habit. Doing things in terms of priorities, in a methodical fashion. Even if I don't feel like it. Acting with integrity and duty, in accordance to a righteous code of ethics and values.

[Lawful good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Alignments), they say.

But struggling with a client report lately forced me to try something else: the chaotic evil approach.

That means no regard for rules, method or sequence. Just doing what feels good and is aligned to my own desires without much regard to how it affects others or other parts of the system. Essentially, not behaving themselves.

So for my work, it looks like this:

- Lawful good: I would always plan to finish A first before going to B. Methodical, meticulous, sequential.
- Chaotic evil: Do whichever I prefer or feel for. Even if piecemeal. As long as there's progress, any bit goes.

Following that chaotic evil energy felt especially powerful when feeling stuck. And it was pretty effective in getting momentum going to eventually work on the sections where I feel more stuck on.

Which made me think: ***What if I did this for my entire indie solopreneur approach?***

That's what my [Opportunistic Trickster identity-based goal](https://golifelog.com/posts/identity-based-goals-1634279678058) is about, isn't it? Traits like:

- Has too much fun, oftentimes at the disapproval of others
- Takes nothing too seriously, even when others are serious
- Keen sense of asymmetric chances to win big
- Acts on asymmetry and actually wins
- Doing random is second nature

Are all about following chaotic evil energy without guilt or shame.

For the longest time, following this particular identity-based goal out of the 4 had been the hardest for me, because being lawful good is ingrained. I also found it imagine ways I can practice that identity. It was hard to make it tactical and tangible. But feels like I'm on to something tangible here.

Chaotic evil > lawful good.

Big lesson in entrepreneurship: NOTHING guarantees success.

Yes there's lots of necessary factors that lead to it. Things like hard work, consistency, enjoying the process, capital, luck, being smart.

But none itself are sufficient.

It's not enough to just work hard.
It's not enough to consistently show up everyday.
It's not enough to enjoy the process or product.
It's not enough to have access to capital.
It's not enough to be lucky.
It's not enough to be smart.

In fact, put them all together in one person or business, and it still doesn't guarantee anything.

Another way to debunk it: For every necessary factor, you can find a success stories where said successful person didn't have it or need it. Lazy people winning the game is the kind of stories we hate to admit exists.

So all we're doing is to up the odds of winning the game. Our real job is just to do things that increase probability of success.

Nothing more. It's all probability.

And anyone who says "Do X and you'll succeed" is just trying to make money off your naivety and hope. We do that to ourselves too, because we *want to* have hope that our efforts and pain mean *something*. It's comforting to deny that reality is a dice game.

Every growth hack, entrepreneur trick, savvy business move - are simply odds increasers.

And we're all gamblers.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Another gem from James Clear:

“What appears to be a rapid shift is often preceded by a gradual process. Our results gradually explode or vanish thanks to the small habits we repeat each day.
What radical change are you slowly marching toward? An incremental explosion or an incremental vanishing?”

I love the last two questions. Great pause for ponder.

What incremental explosion or implosion am I marching towards?

Which habit streaks are serving me towards that future, even though the gradual and incremental progress in the present doesn’t seem like it will?

How will that explosion or implosion look like when it finally comes?

• Sleep biohacking – Restful sleep with daily sleep scores above 90%. Great sleep quality with more than 1.5h of deep sleep and REM sleep per night. Feeling rested and jumping out of bed when I wake. Not needing naps or coffee in the day. Peak productivity.

• Diet – Enjoys eating healthy and wholesome foods. Free from gut issues or metabolic/inflammation ailments. No more dad bod and tummy. Slim, healthy, alert. Peak sense of wellbeing and wellness.

• Indie solopreneurship – Hits $100K per year consistently from my portfolio of products and services. Creating new products just because it’s fun. Connecting and learning from and with others.

• Writing – Clarity. Joy. Gratitude. Creativity. A tool to time hop back and reflect. A bank of words that says who I was, who I’m becoming. A library of work that helps me in my work.

New habit streaks that I really want to add to the list:
• Fitness – Strong, lean, great posture, glowing. Even in my 70s and 80s. Strong but healthy. Able to run 5km anytime, walk all day. Fit AF.

• Money habits – Money is no longer “dirty”. Savvy at using money to grow money. Street smart at investing in stock market, businesses, crypto.

• Family relationship – I’d really love to have a habit streak that gets me to put in incremental effort in terms of relationships for my family - wife, son, parents. No idea how yet but they are so important that I thought I shouldn’t miss out mentioning it!

Onwards!

Saw this line on LinkedIn today:

"And so it's over. So many things that went wrong. But also many things that went right."

Thought that's a great epitaph. Could go on my list of possible contenders for my tombstone for sure.

But the curious follow-up question is: What went right?

If I had to make a future, post-humous list of the things that went right for my life:

- Came back as a human - that's the one in a trillion lottery win already
- Got born in a nice part of the world where I can not just survive but thrive
- Born with limbs and things intact
- Had lovely parents
- Found love
- Got married
- Had a kid
- Loved them all
- Travelled the world
- Found peace
- Died happy

I made up the last three. But if I can achieve them by my deathbed, it'll be sufficient.

Doing such thought experiments always gives such a good overview effect.

What of MRR? Revenue? Going viral? Having huge following? Creating great products that delight people? Earning a million dollars? How about a billion dollars? What of all these things and goals you want in your career and life?

Yeah they're good. *Nice to have.* But not fundamentally important. Not mission-critical. None that can be equal to anything on my list.

So many things that could go wrong, had went wrong.

But also many things that could go right, ended up right, or better. And more to come.

https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1579835465779118082

Chanced on a good question from [@SimonHoiberg](https://twitter.com/SimonHoiberg/status/1578386243381071878) from the Twitterverse:

"If someone gave you $500K to quit your job and build a SaaS Product... What would you build?"

Most people will say "I'll use it to build X, my dream product." Basically, they'll choose to ***spend*** it. Looking at success rates of startups, 90% will end up draining the $500K pot dry from trying and failing.

I have a better answer.

I'll ***invest*** it. All of it. And use the returns on investment to fund my runway to experiment and build a portfolio of bets, including SaaS products.

Say I invest it in S&P500. Historically over decades, the returns are at least (conservatively) 10%.

10% of $500,000 = $50,000

That's $50K a year. While not necessarily enough to feed me and my fam, it can already cover a major part of it. I can top up the rest with gigs. I can imagine $50K to be more than enough for an indie solopreneur who's single, living as a digital nomad in Bali for example.

And living off that, you'll have almost infinite runway to keep trying, even if you fail.

Spending it on a ***single*** (SaaS) bet is actually a worse-off decision. Because you don't know if that's the one bet that will work. You might need many more tries on the slot machine called the market. But you went all in on that one bet with a 90% probability of failure.

Better to use it to fund all your future bets, and you stay in the game.

Only when you survive do you have a chance at thriving.

Entrepreneurs should be as good investors as they are at business, don't you think?

What's the classic indie hacker's playbook?

- Pre launch a landing page or build a scrappy MVP to validate interest
- Build in public, sharing progress and revenue updates
- No paid marketing, no ads
- Little to no SEO content, all organic reach by going viral
- Obligatory launch on Product Hunt
- Bootstrap your product to ramen profitability, without investor funds

Tweet Hunter's success story is pointing to a new indie hacker playbook in the making. [Ayush wrote a great article](https://www.listenupih.com/tweethunter/) summarising their story, and many of the growth hacks are more uncommon to indies:

- Partnering influencers by giving equity to the startup, pairing technical chops with marketing fitnesse
- Growth hacking through building viral side projects that bring attention to the main projects
- Acquiring smaller projects with good traffic from other indies to redirect attention to the main project again
- Micro equity partnerships with 12 other influencers, where they each get tokens from a pool, and will get returns if Tweet Hunter gets acquired in future
- Use of ads on Twitter to market the product
- SEO content
- Organic reach through founders' Twitter accounts

It's really just a mix of startup tactics with indie methods, isn't it?

These methods had always been around, just not often used by indies because it can be costly (e.g. ads) or just too difficult (influencer partnership assumes you got something worth partnering with). There's also the back story context where the founders had a lot of experience starting startups and failed a lot as well, so the classic 10 year grind had paved the foundation here.

Despite their huge success, I wouldn't go so far as to say go replicate their approach for your indie product.

But it definitely does open up new thinking, new distribution channels and growth opportunities where I would have previously shrugged off simply because it's not in the "indie hacker playbook".

Whatever that means.

I asked myself that question yesterday, and I couldn't recall the last time I had fun.

If there's one, it most likely would be during pre-COVID, pre-fatherhood times. Maybe it's the last time I was in Bali, in December 2019. So it's been at least 3 years.

**3 looong years.**

Through a global catastrophe, a local crisis, and a personal upheaval. Time is relative, they say. And truly, it felt like 30 years not 3.

> "I can't recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I'm naked in the dark." – Frodo

Like Frodo in the *Lord Of The Rings*, I can't even remember how to have fun anymore, after those long dark years. My muscle memory on how to do it... all gone. Everything now is revolves around work or care, duty and responsibility. Even when it's supposed to be a fun leisure activity, I'm 'working' in some capacity - as an entrepreneur, a dad, a husband, a son. Always having to look out for others, care for them.

I thought I was burned out from work, from hustling.

Instead I think I'm burned out. From everything. From life itself.

*How do you take a vacation from life itself?*

I wish I knew the answer, but nothing's coming through... yet.

Or maybe I just need more sleep...

Sunday mornings are always special.

No traffic. No work. No commitments.

Everyone sleeps in, even the birds. It’s so quiet I can hear the world breathe.

I put on some chillstep music, sip on my double espresso, and stare at the screen. I start typing, but after a few words, I stop myself. The sound of my keyboard is spoiling the quiet.

I give up.

I spin 90º to the right, and just look out the window into the morning sky, and just soak it in. It’s a rare beautiful morning sky. Golden light emerging behind the cloud curtains.

Why do I even want to work through such mornings?

I should be out there. I should be walking and soaking it in. I should be breathing in that clean crisp morning air, bathing in that refreshing golden light.

Yet here I am. In my little dusty domain where I rule as king.

They don’t call it lazy Sunday mornings for nothing.

I don’t need to rush. I don’t need to get out there. I don’t need to do anything. I don’t need to be anywhere.

I can be content here and now.

Just being and breathing.

More and more I think my real job of being an indie solopreneur isn't running a business but running myself. My inner mental game, my productivity, creativity, motivation and energy.

And just finding way to maintain the game within myself is the mission.

Like they say, the real product isn't the product but the factory that makes the product. In this case, the factory is me.

And one of the most important parts of managing me, myself and I is my learning rate and progress rate. [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/october-6-2022) explains it well in his latest newsletter:

> "Balancing success and failure is a tricky thing. I'd say 8 or 9 times out of 10, you should be succeeding. Build momentum. Accumulate advantages. Feast on the feeling of success and let it feed your desire to do more. But 1 or 2 times out of 10, you should be failing. Push yourself and reach beyond your current grasp. Force yourself to try uncomfortable things. Occasionally you will surprise yourself and the rest of the time you will learn.
>
> Win enough to keep progressing. Lose enough to keep learning."

That last line is so dope. And a perfect summary of what my real job is.

Set up enough small wins to keep feeling like I'm progressing, no matter how incremental. But don't get too comfortable winning all the time. Push things outside of my comfort zone a bit so that 10-20% of the time I'm losing *in order* to learn and grow.

That perspective on losing is pretty crazy in a way, isn't it? Seek out loss ***intentionally***, in order to learn.

That way, losing is no longer a stain in your success story track record. It *literally* is a stepping stone amongst many to success.

Failure is just research. Loss is learning.

Seeing this way, there's no way you *can't* win.

Killer question I learned this week from the great Elon Musk:

"What did you get done this week?"


Big tech CEO:
Elon: "What did you get done this week?"

😂😂😂

Tech memes and jokes aside, I found that to be a simple yet piercing question. It's the simple questions that's always the most arresting. Especially when asked because someone sees through the BS, from CEO to CEO. Can't imagine how it feels like to be on the receiving end of that text message!

I love collecting beautiful questions. A great answer stays fixed in time, and might become wrong when the context changes. But a beautiful question is evergreen, always inspiring to reflect on. Ask it each time and you get a different answer. And the most beautiful questions are often the simplest and most unassuming.

This is a great question for self-reflection and journaling, as an entrepreneur, maker, creator.

Did I make anything that moved the needle this week?

Anything that has concrete impact on the mission?

What did *I* get done this week?

When employed: Company pays a monthly subscription to you for your work. You're answerable to your boss.

When indie: Customers pay a monthly subscription to you for your work. You're answerable to your customers.

Let's get real here... is there *really* a big difference? 🤔

I'm usually the first one to put my hand up that there's a HUGE difference for sure. I'd shout "Because I want to master my own fate!" But lately, been reflecting on it, and I'm not so sure there's a *huge* difference.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's NO difference. There's definitely differences between being employed versus being an indie solopreneur. But I'd argue that the day-to-day experience is **a lot less different than we (want to) think it is**.

Think about this:

- On job it sucks to have a bad manager. When indie, it sucks to have to deal with an unreasonable customer. Both feel the same. Both shit on your day the same way.
- On job you're selling your time. In business, you're selling your time to the product—building features, marketing—in exchange for customers. Sure you get equity and you're building a potentially scalable asset, but it's not like it's 100% passive. Nothing is. You still got to show up to work in exchange of your time for financial returns, right?
- On job, answerable to whims of a single person - your boss. When indie, answerable to whims of customers, co-founder(s), investors(s). No business is an island. You still have to make decisions being accountable to or constrained by others. Total autonomy is a false illusion.
- On job you get arbitrary income ceilings. When running a business, you get market 'ceilings', where winner takes all. There's a power law at work here. Most earnings is consolidated in the top few creators in Patreon, while most of the rest don't earn a living wage.
- On job you risk getting fired. But you can job hop and choose from hundreds of potential employers. As entrepreneur you diversify risk from a single point of failure (your job) to many customers, and you can fire any one customer out of hundreds/thousands, but that's assuming to get to that many customers in the first place. You risk your startup failing first (at an even higher risk than being fired).

So let's get real... on balance comparing between the two, is the lived daily experience really all that different? Feels like for every pro there's a con on both sides. Not one is better over the other in any definitive way.

Ultimately, I feel the main difference is in values and taste. In the same way I say I like eating chocolate versus someone who hates the taste.

Truth is, despite saying all the ways it's a lot less different than I thought, I'd still choose indie solopreneur path. Because that aligns to my values and taste, for autonomy, creativity, meaning.

But at least talking this through, I'm drinking less of the entrepreneurship Koolaid. I'm under less illusions, less enamoured of the benefits of self employment over employment. So that I get a more balanced view and expectations of my own path.

In Annie Duke's *Thinking In Bets* book, she talks about decision-making skills from playing poker. Poker's not all that different from entrepreneurship I feel. And "thinking in bets" is definitely how I relate to running a business, making products. It's not called "a portfolio of small bets" for nothing!

One line in particular—about learning from success and failure—stood out:

> "You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t."

**Mindblown.**

Gosh I'm so wrong. Again.

You see, I'm kind of a personal growth geek. I love learning. I like improving myself. I enjoy reflecting on my progress. Above all, I love extracting lessons from successes, and especially failures.

I'm always asking: "What did I learn?"

Maybe that way of learning worked well in a predictable world in school, sports and later in work, where it's easier to isolate and observe how your effort play out against the results you get. It's easier to learn from success and failure.

But not so for entrepreneurship.

Because of the volatile, uncertain and complex and ambiguous nature of running a business, it's not always possible to isolate and observe results from inputs accurately. Sometimes it just circumstantial, or plain dumb luck.

So in "You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t.", when I succeeded, the things I did aren't necessarily the right things. That I can understand, due to factors like luck. But what's more mindblowing was realising that when I failed, the things I did aren't necessarily the *wrong* things!

Learning from failure (or success) isn't always as helpful as we thought!

If we shouldn't emulate success stories of other entrepreneurs because we can't isolate the factors that led to success, then we certainly shouldn't read too much into failures.

**Learning from both success and failure are overrated.**

*What should I do then?*

- Don't form lessons and learnings. Form hypotheses. and experiments. Don't take anything as solid truth until I've acted on and applied it, and that it's shown to be replicable and reliable.
- Even things that I tried, worked, and repeatable on one of my products might not be useful on another product I run. Same person, but different product, different business context. So always be ready to review.
- See lessons as suggestions, learning from the successes/failures of others as brainstorming ideas to try, not new rules to follow.
- It's tempting to extract new rules to follow when doing post-mortem reviews from failures. DON'T. It's still ok to do reviews. But be highly suspicious of anything resembling a new rule. Form my next hypothesis instead.

Above all, aim to be your own person.

Interesting insight about the nature of our likes and dislikes:

"If you like coffee, you don’t really like coffee. You like coffee at a certain dose and frequency. Change the dose and frequency, and what you like and dislike changes. Applies to almost everything." – @dvassallo

Dosage and frequency is an important nuance on our likes/dislikes.

I love coffee, but past 3 cups a day, I start to hate what it does to me.

Likewise, I say I love making products, but really it’s at a specific dosage and frequency too. Focus on one product for too long, and I start to get bored. That’s why I have a portfolio of products to vary my dosage.

I say I love being an indie solopreneur, but in actuality it’s at a specific dosage and frequency. The fun parts has to be a bit more frequent in dosage than the not-so-fun parts (like doing taxes, admin, burnout). The moment the pain is more than the fun, it gets hard to keep at it.

Likewise, the same for dislikes. I used to say I hate coding. But that’s because my dosage and frequency was too low to experience the benefits, to build confidence from competency. Past a dosage point, I started to say I like coding!

Tl;dr - Our likes and dislikes are not fixed. It can change, depending on context (like dosage and frequency). Don’t over-identify with it.

Just saw this insight in [James Clear's newsletter](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/september-29-2022):

"In sports, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing how to play the game.
In life, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing which game to play."

For the longest time, I just played the game the same way everyone else played, in sports and in life. I was an athlete and also played lots of sports in school. All sports and games had their own rules, and you didn't get to decide which rules made sense to follow and which ones didn't. We don't get to make the rules, we had to just accept them as they are and win or lose against them. Same for life in those early years. You just went to school, and complied. Those best at compliance get rewarded, gets called a "good boy or girl". Again, no student makes the rules in school. And after years in school, even if you were given the chance to make rules as a student, you wouldn't even know how. This is worse in good students. I was a good student.

So it's easy to imagine the downstream impact... After more than a decade in such an environment, the muscle memory is set, and you go on in work and life the same way. Just following the rules of whatever games you find yourself in. And the only choices or freedom available to us is choosing how to play the game.

*We've never been invited to even consider which game to play in.*

This I find, is the one thing I'm constantly having to unlearn and relearn in entrepreneurship. The hardest thing about entrepreneurship for me had been how there's really no rules. There's not even a standard game.

It's like a footballer, basketballer and golf player came together to play a game with each other based on the game rules they follow separately in their own field, and the only thing they had in common is that they all deal with a round spherical object.

That's entrepreneurship.

And therefore lies the danger – the moment you try to emulate any one of your entrepreneur heroes, you might be unwittingly getting yourself into someone else's game. Where you (again) have to play by someone else's rules. Just like in school.

I want otherwise now.

I feel a strong desire to align this whole entrepreneurship thing to my own inner game. I want to invent my own rules, play my own game.

Sure, I still want to learn from others, feel inspired by stories of other indie solopreneurs. But selectively and mindfully. And with a discerning eye. Collective learning that helps me play my own game better, not get pulled into someone else's game.

So... ready player one (and only)!

What was one thing that you sucked at but grew to be passionate about?

I dare say it’s coding for me.

I truly sucked at it. Like an abusive relationship, I fell in love and fell out of love multiple times. Each time starts with lots of enthusiasm and optimism, but always fizzles out into boredom, then frustration. Every time, we broke up. I told myself, “I’m just not good at this sort of work. It’s too technical, too logical, too much like Math.” I hated it.

But somehow I kept going back. I still wanted to make products, even though I hated coding.

I tried. Then I tried again.

One day, by fluke of luck and circumstances, it stuck. I did #100daysofcode. I made loads of tiny apps that can be made in a day to a few days, for learning. I had a mission to help other writers find a home by building a writing SaaS. I listen to coding podcasts to pivot my identity, not just learn new knowledge.

It crossed the threshold from “I suck at coding. I hate coding.” to “Oh that’s not so bad. I might enjoy this.”

Now, I enjoy the figuring out process. It’s like a fun puzzle, and I don’t rest till I solve it. I often use it to help others, in my Carrd plugins especially.

I can now say, I’m passionate about coding, about developing software.

There’s few things in life where I sucked at something but stuck through it and emerged with passion at the end. In fact, I’m not sure I can come up with anything else besides coding.

But this does show that it is possible… to suck at something but grow to be passionate about.

Sometimes, you don’t need to start with passion.

Sometimes, passion finds you.

Setting intentions for October:

### Gratitude
- I liked how I was grateful for the consulting gig in Sept and just focused on delivering it well. Some love practising gratitude by journaling, but that always felt forced to me. How I prefer to express gratitude – through actions. So maybe Oct can be similar – find something I'm grateful for, and focus on doing it well out of gratitude.
- Not difficult to come up with one. My consulting gig is still ongoing, in the final stages of post-production, report-writing. I'll continue to focus on that.
- On top of it, there's a shorter consulting gig for 1 week in mid Oct - will also focus on being grateful for it.

### Alignment
- [Alignment](https://golifelog.com/posts/alignment-1664233941852) is working. Being genuine in how I want to project myself online and how I live had been a deep source of satisfaction. It feels good. I want to continue aligning to my inner compass this way.
- [After having this epiphany about how I succeed when I help others](https://golifelog.com/posts/i-succeed-when-i-help-others-succeed-1663551944694), I think I'm onto something big here, for myself. That could be the driving mechanism I can make my product(s) succeed. Just find a way to consistently help people directly. The rest will follow.

### Groundwork
- Lay groundwork for product work to come in Nov
- Prepare mentally, think through what I want to do, how I will review and do things differently. I feel a new, different season coming. A new season to how I work on my products, how I show up, how I project myself, how I connect.
- Plan how I will do things differently, not based on what someone successful said but based on real data.

Onwards.

📈 Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $119 (↑$10)
📊 One-off revenue: $351 (↑$6)
💵 Total revenue: $470 (↑$16)
🏦 Total profit: $430 (↑$16) (excl. salary and consulting costs)

👀 Tweet impressions: 240k vs 254k vs 183k
💙 Likes: 2.1k vs 3.1k vs 2.8k
💬 Engagement rate: 3.9% vs 4.2% vs 4.9%
🏡 Profile visits: 36.6k vs 43.1k vs 38.2k
📣 Mentions: 996 vs 1726 vs 1441
👣 New followers: 211 vs 254 vs 141
📧 Emails: 36 (↑4) subscribers

My one goal in September:

Go all in and do well for my consulting gig.

And looking back, I think I achieved that. I prepared myself for the physicality of the consulting by taking self-care seriously, sleeping enough, taking long naps on rest days, eating well, eating more. And then committed my 100% to the consulting work. Feedback from the client had been pretty positive.

I also feel more relaxed and feel less burdened by expectations about growing my products. I like this. It opens up mindspace to have more fun, to take risks, and be opportunistic. That’s how I always preferred to work, and somehow it’s falling into place all on its own. Not sure what changed that led to this.

Overall I’m thankful for a fruitful September, with more opportunities on the horizon. Grateful for being provided for.

New learning about Twitter algorithm. Tweeting alone isn’t enough. I just tried it on the @golifelog Twitter account. Just tweets. 1 quote tweet a day. No liking or replies to other accounts.

I did that for about a month as I was busy with my consulting.

The result? Zero new followers. Zero likes on any of my tweets.

ZERO.

In fact, my follower count started going down because there’s always a base of people were unfollowing.

Then I got less busy, and continued doing the same (1 quote tweet per day) BUT plus liking other tweets. An occasional reply.

The difference is pretty significant: More new follows. People liked my quote tweets.

My hypothesis from this?

The Twitter algo doesn’t show your tweets to your followers if you don’t engage with other accounts.

That’s why just tweeting alone isn’t enough.

Caveat: Of course, if you just like and reply but tweet zero of your own stuff, you won’t give people a chance to know what your account is like, and they’re less likely to follow. So tweets still matter as a basic hygiene practice. It just isn’t the pivotal thing when it comes to growth.

It’s not called social media for nothing. The social aspect is the prime activity, not broadcasting or content creation.

Replies + likes > tweets

People love asking advice from successful people. They all want to know the secrets to their wealth, fame and achievements. How did they do it? What was different about them? How can I be the same?

But here's the thing: ***Successful people are likely the worst people*** to ask advice from. Not because they're bad people in an ethical way. But this:

> Successful people have trouble answering the question "what's the one thing that worked for you?" because they did SO MUCH STUFF it's hard to pinpoint which one worked best. Like shooting 1,000 times and asking which bullet hit. No clue.
>
> – [@OneJKMolina](https://twitter.com/OneJKMolina/status/1574122810154295300)

By their success it's highly likely they are prolific and productive. That's usually what led them to their success. But because they are super productive people, they would have done a lot. Tried many ideas. Executed on loads of hacks. In that complex dynamics of trying so many things in an equally complex business environment, it's likely hard to have 100% certainty which efforts led to which results.

I know. You know.

It's like the saying of throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. You know something stuck. But we can never be sure why, or if it's just [plain dumb luck](https://golifelog.com/posts/its-plain-dumb-luck-all-the-way-down-1663717145073). All you know is to keep trying.

Trying to get some deep insight into that chaos in order to replicate it, is just difficult, if not impossible.

And by the same reasoning, don't believe them if they tell you that ONE thing that led to their success (even if you're the one who asked).

Better yet, don't ask that kind of question that invites post-hoc narrative shaping (intentionally or unintentionally). Seriously, reality is 100-x more nuanced and complex. Most of the time, they might not even know. But because you asked them and they want to appear polite and because as a "successful person" they want to appear to know their sh\*t, they force an answer where there's usually none.

If you fall for it, you become a victim of insight porn.

I like to see advice more like ideas for doing your own experiments. That way you don't blindly apply them. You test them, analyze, discard what didnt work in your context, refine what worked, to make them your own.

I like to ask questions that gets to the broader context:

- What did you try but didn't work?
- What factors contributed to your product's success but you felt was outside of your influence?
- What was the business environment like then for your product?
- What was your life stage and family situation like?

Ask for facts. Ask for direct experiences and stories. Don't ask for opinions or inferences. Make your own inferences and discern your own patterns from the raw data, not the constructed interpretation of the data.

Tl;dr - Don't believe 99% advice, ***especially*** from prolific, successful people.

Weird. I felt emotional pinning a tweet to my Twitter profile. First time ever.

*From pinning a tweet.*

This is the [tweet](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1562801975967641601) in question:

> I once wanted my products to earn $1,000,000/year
>
> Now I'm happy with this
>
> 

I wrote a post in August based off this tweet, about how [life is made of memories not money](https://golifelog.com/posts/memories-not-money-1661467751049). And that feeling had since grew within, from a faint whisper to a loud rally cry.

That this is who I am. This is how I roll.

That this is authentic to my motivation behind on indie solopreneurship now.

And this is how I wish to align my internet presence and real life to.

No more pitching of products in the pinned tweets.
Less of selling and marketing on Twitter, more genuine transparency and authenticity.
Lower the noise on building an audience, crank up the volume on building my best self in public.

Then, [give 10x before asking 1x](https://golifelog.com/posts/give-10x-ask-1x-1662073070823).

I find the FOMO on needing to constantly market loosening its grip inwardly. I care less now. I've let it go...mostly.

I just want to log my journey, grow as a person, build relationships and have fun.

Alignment, online and offline, inwardly and outwardly.

And it never felt more right.

I never felt prouder.

I often say I'm in indie solopreneurship for the long game. That I'm committed to a decade of trying at this to succeed. And observing many other successful peers, they do seem take a decade to get to some place noteworthy.

But I recently realised it's not really about time spent. Playing the long game is just a mind trick to manage my expectations. It's all an inside job. Outside, in physical reality, time is relative. [Time isn't the problem. Effectiveness is.](https://golifelog.com/posts/time-isnt-the-problem-effectiveness-is-1664063381663) Playing the mental long game simply helps me to be more effective by lowering my expectations, by not being impatient and seeking suboptimal short cuts. The long game helps me perform better by being more objective, less swayed by emotional ups and downs of the entrepreneurship journey. It essentially helps me get out of my own way.

So the long game isn't about actually spending a decade on something.

It's simply about *being willing* to spend a decade. Whether you do end up spending a decade or just a few years has nothing to do with it. External time is inconsequential.

The long game is a mind game, not a time game.