Lifelog

Biggest realization about luck so far, for myself.

Luck and opportunities come when I’m relaxed, open, having fun, playing, not busy, not over-worked, not stressed out, slept enough and slept well, feeling healthy, energetic, having exercised enough, have happy time with my family.

Luck begins from a frame of mind, a lifestyle choice.

So the solution?

Be less busy. Self care

It’s like… to optimize for luck, you got to look at your whole lifestyle, way of being, your moods and internal state. It feels like you got to look it it the same way a professional athlete looks at every aspect of not just his training but his lifestyle, schedule and habits to find micro-improvements to compound towards.

Update: Turns out, he signed up to roast Lifelog sign up process!

https://twitter.com/nathanjpowellUX/status/1522612718393561089

https://youtu.be/FYGmVpagSgY

The best lessons in life, I learned from hanging out with a 2-year old.

I always thought children teach us adults more than we can ever teach them. Even as a parent, sometimes my role is reversed. The teacher becomes the student, and the student turns into a teacher.

So very often, I found that the very things we say to them, we should really also be telling ourselves. Like:

“Are you hungry?”
“Drink more water.”
“Eat your greens.”
“This is good for you.”
“Don’t eat the whole bag"
“Good morning.”
“Good night.”
“I love you.”

Our children are our mirrors.

We didn’t birth them to show them the world, they came to us to show us our world.

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.

📈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.

Since writing the course outline for our cohort-based writing course for introverts, I got a bit stuck.

A few hard questions and polarities I’m dealing with:

1. Write daily versus write as-and-when - consistency vs intensity?
2. Peer learning versus trainer-led coaching - what's the best mix?
3. One man’s thrash versus another man’s treasure - how to accommodate everyone's goals?

Wrote to think in this post here.. would love to hear what you think of the hard questions, and my proposed solutions!

Imagine: A subdomain marketplace for Carrd, where people can trade, exchange, buy or sell their .carrd.co subdomains with one another.

Kind of like domaining (or negatively known as domain squatting) but for just within the Carrd ecosystem. I think these domains might work well if you’re building a product/service for the Carrd ecosystem, so that the domain name is an exact match (e.g. selling Carrd templates using templates.carrd.co is a great domain name to have).

It’s a beautiful day today. A day that’s two years in the making.

Today is the day when the government lift most of the social distancing restrictions for Singapore. So it’s almost Freedom Day for us.

What it really means to me:

Relief.

That it’s finally over. We made it.

We made it through a global pandemic, the crisis of our generation.

Now, time to heal. And to re-build.

What I learned about domain-driven business from Peter Askew aka @searchbound, I used it in my side business Plugins For Carrd

• Get a domain name that’s descriptive - says directly what it is/does
• Create a product/service with said domain

Yep, no fancy startup-ish names! And for my plugins, not even a .com domain!

I just checked today, and it’s the #1 Google search result!

Writing to think is one of the main reasons why I stuck to writing daily here on Lifelog. And I do the same when building a product.

So often I start writing my daily post here with no inkling of what point I’m try to make. I take the seed of an idea, a barely formed title, and just start typing. As the words form, the thoughts form. As the thoughts form, the original idea evolves. And I loop through this multiple times to eventually end up ‘discovering’ the real point I was try to make, the realisation I was try to get to.

The point, the insight, is an emergent property of the writing. I could not have ever predicted what will come out of the writing. The outcome, the end result, is unknown and can never be certain prior. The only thing I’m certain is: The writing will show the way.

Likewise, I realised I like doing that with my products.

There’s more to just launching a scrappy MVP in the style of an indie hacker trying to validate product-market fit. It’s not the minimum version of a pre-formed vision of the product I have in my head. Maybe many other indie hackers do that, but not for me.

I build to figure it out.

Talking to @knight about unlimited nocode productized service got me thinking about the idea I had for Carrd:

Unlimited design and support for Carrd.

I DMed Carrd founder AJ to ask what he thinks about it:

“despite carrd being pretty easy to use there are still a lot of folks who’d rather have someone else handle it for them”

That was a nice affirmation! Carrd being so much easier to use than Wordpress is one reason why I thought unlimited design/support might not work for Carrd… but if he thinks otherwise, that’s promising! Also, looking at the questions I see being asked all the time in Carrd communities (some are even simple ones covered by the documentation), seems like there’s definitely an opportunity here.

I might start off with this pricing:

• $199 unlimited Carrd web design + support for 1 site
• $499 unlimited Carrd web design + support for unlimited sites

Carrd tasks includes:
• creating a marketing landing page
• setting up a Carrd template
• adding payment buttons
• improving SEO
• setting up custom domain
• integrating Carrd plugins
• integrating 3rd party apps like Mailchimp or Zapier
• no custom coding
• troubleshooting anything required

Next: To go launch that quick and scrappy Carrd landing page to test if there’s demand!

What do you think?

In my hurry to get to the future that I envision and desire, I think I might have over-compensated and looked past the value of my past.

This is about my career.

I wanted my products to work so bad, that I unknowingly high-nosed my past expertise in design consulting.

But now I truly accept it back into the fold of my portfolio of businesses.

I mean, nothing’s changed. It was in my portfolio before, and it still is.

What changed is the mindset and intention. And the effort put into it.

I was kind of being ungrateful for that past career, and failed to see how it supported me thus far. I stopped putting effort into getting myself out there in terms of consulting, so gigs dried up.

Yet there’s so much potential still. Wasted opportunity.

That’s why I’m re-starting my content distribution on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/jasonleowsg), only this time, it’s not about writing or for Lifelog but about design.

It certainly feels great to have a channel now to push all the insights I built up and learned over the 8 years being a design consultant in the public sector. Already it’s showing more views than my previous writing content!

Design innovation in government is something I’m good at. It’s something I can still grow in. I should acknowledge it.

I want to acknowledge it. Now.

I’m back.

This concept of $10 work vs $10k work by @khemaridh is interesting.

It’s tedious, low impact admin work vs work that truly moves the needle.
It’s a way to think about and to prioritize your tasks at work.
It’s about “penny wise, pound foolish” in productivity.
It’s tactic vs strategy.

In particular, I like the 2x2 matrix

$10 work - low skill, low leverage: Checking email
$100 work - low skill, high leverage: Writing documentation
$1000 work - high skill, low leverage: Developing a keystone skill
$10,000 work - high skill, high leverage: Spotting an opportunity that will 1000x your revenue

The key question to ask is:

Where are the $10k force multipliers in my work?

Let’s take stock.