Doing the right thing and living a good life is difficult, because it’s not straightforward. There’s 3 types of lives to live: a short-term oriented life, a long-term oriented life, and an examined life. Short-Term Oriented Life These are the ‘losers.’ They focus on short-term pleasures only and are driven by hedonistic desires. They are heavy in debt, each junk food, and use drugs to get through life. They live a very happy short-term existence by deferring all their problems, but in the long-term:...

I talked about my experiment a bit in this popular Reddit thread here. These are genuine stats, too. I considered buying upvotes to “seed” the post with social proof (much like how Hallal Guys put 10 $1 bills in their tip jar when they open for social proof to encourage tipping), but I was too cheap to pay the $25 to do it. A more updated / detailed version below:...

An insane work ethic and having elite level discipline is the starting point of a successful career or business. If you don’t even have that, I gotchu. Go here and follow the instructions to hack your way into excellent work ethic and discipline. With discipline, you’ve “entered the game” of business. Without discipline, you haven’t even reached the starting point of doing business. You’re just playing wantrepreneur. Why Hard Work Isn’t Enough The janitor wakes up early and cleans up the office before the first employee even goes in....

This is a long post, so if you stick with it I promise you 2 things: You’ll be well-positioned to build a habit and stick with it. I’ll give you a tool that’s worked for me. Discipline is simple, but it takes time. Below is a typical day (yesterday): 6h34m of software development — for a side project — and I have a full-time job in hardware engineering....

Many speak about how they ‘lack motivation’ to do things. Motivation is an unreliable source of work ethic. This is because motivation comes and wanes. In order to compete in the ultra-competitive world of entrepreneurship, you can’t be working hard some days, and taking it easy other days. This allows your competitors with consistent discipline to catch up and surpass you, easily. This means if you need ‘motivation’ to do anything, you’ll never win in the game of business....

As a startup, I should be focusing 80-90% of my efforts in marketing, and only 10-20% in development. That would be the right thing to do. I went ahead and did the wrong thing. I made Wraith Scribe, which is a platform that lets you use AI to write and edit blog posts. Updates I Am Making I’m improving this old editor which leverages ToastUI: To a custom-built editor:...

In my previous post, I gamified my SaaS business journey and I defined level 5 like so: Level 5: Getting To Minimum Wage (<=$1000/mo) I’m quite stuck there. In fact, my MRR went from $200 to $60 due to a $99/mo cancelling and due to 3 debit cards having insufficient funds in their account. So I’m faced with 2 problems: Not enough customers. Something wrong with my product....

My Product And Its Main Purpose I made a tool that’ll let you write complete, SEO-optimized articles in 2 clicks. It’s usefulness lies in: Saving time for business owners that want to generate organic traffic, because then instead of spending hours writing blogs, they can just spend 10 minutes. This frees up time for biz owners to focus on higher ROI activities. I think of it like this: biz owners have some X hours per day to do work....

Problem: Boredom is required to win, but I hate it. One of the biggest issues with building a business is that it is tedious. And the person who can endure the most boredom will have a successful business at the end of it. After the initial rush of starting a business, it’s all: Hardcore development Marketing / sales More marketing / sales Customer emails A lot more marketing / sales Improving the product …Did I say marketing and sales?...

March, 2022. I got ripped off my some New Zealander (who still owes me about $2K BTW) in an e-commerce partnership. Disgruntled, I decided I’d pursue something else. I’ve already tried / gave up in quite a few ventures, including but not limited to: Driving for Lyft Airbnb Arbitrage Out-of-state single family rentals Social media marketing agency But I’ve had one success in the midst of all my business ventures:...

A Hard Look I had millions of things I wanted to do. My main objective, like everyone else, is to make money so I can reach financial freedom. Thus, I had to ruthlessly cull certain things. Here were all the things I was doing/thinking about doing, what they are, and their pros/cons: Quant Stuff: To algorithmically find alpha in the market, like Quant Quiver. Pros: Interesting. Cons: Extremely difficult and competitive and time-consuming....

What’s Asymmetry? Consider a coin-flip gain where you earn $1 if you guess correctly and lose $1 if you guess incorrectly. The coin’s fair, and so your expected winnings are $0. Your odds here are said to be symmetric. Consider now the same game, except you lose $1 if you guess incorrectly, but win $3 if you guess correctly. The odds are now in your favor and the win-loss sides are asymmetric....

The Need For Control It’s human nature to be a “control freak.” We all want control. We want to control how much money we have coming in. We want to control how our coworkers behave. We want to control our chronic health conditions. We want to control our reputation. We want to control our problems. We want to control how other people perceive us. Control is certainty. And it’s human nature to want certainty because as hunter-gatherers, certainty means survival....

How We’re Trained In school and at work, we’re trained with the concept of certainty. School: We are told exactly what to do. We get homework. We apply verbatim what we’re taught in the homework. We get good grades and graduate. Work: We do what we’re told and we get a paycheck at a regular frequency. In other words, schools and 9-5 jobs go in a straight line. But that’s not how any large payout endeavors (like entrepreneurship) works....

What Is Backtesting? Technical analysis (TA) magicians in stock trading look at charts and indicators to forecast if a stock will go up or down. Since they all recognize this is black magic, they “backtest.” Backtesting is merely converting their trade strategies into code, and then looking backwards in time to validate whether or not their strategy works. Example: A trader might have an idea that if a stock exceeds the trailing 20 day’s volume by 15% and has a breakout of 5%, they might place a trade in the same direction to “catch the wave....

Don’t Force It, Most Of The Time Forcing outcomes can be good in some cases, but pretty bad in most cases. Here’s some examples of what I mean: You have some bad codebase and there’s a bug. The outcome is to just patch the bad code so your manager doesn’t breathe down your neck. You “force” the outcome by writing really ugly code to fix the bug. The code becomes even more unmaintainable....

Suckiness In my previous post, I talked about how the vast majority of people and businesses suck. This post is a proposal on how to make the latter better. Instead of the carrot, I think one factor missing in a lot of businesses is the stick. How To Punish Your Customers Properly One thing United does poorly in Spain is they are too lenient on idiotic customers. There were these 3 amateur travelers, and they had about 8 giant luggages each....

99% Of Everything Is Garbage Trying to go back to the US from Spain and flying United. Was at the airport and in the check-in counter they were super slow. 50 passengers lined up and only 1 counter open. And no, they weren’t understaffed. It was one person working on a counter and 5 people stsanding behind her playing with their phones. I recorded this because I wanted to make fun of them on social media....

Freedom Is Important Freedom to go anywhere you want, whenever you want is important. I believe it’s one of the main ingredients for a fulfilled and happy life. Consider this: given the same health and money, would you prefer to have more options in life or less? Answer’s obvious. This post shows the high-level framework that I think is important in achieving max freedom. Framework > Results Only People have grandeur plans of financial freedom (FI)....

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) Is Bad For Money You see a stock go up and you want to buy. You buy and it plummets immediately. You tell yourself “I’ll never purchase an asset again based on FOMO,” only to repeat the mistake again a few months later. Conversely, you buy something that’s profitable. You don’t sell because you fear you’ll miss out if the stocks skyrocket. It plummets back below your purchase price and you lose money....