Writelier is closing tomorrow. But there’s some options now for those who still wish to write daily. Some members of Writelier had been busy making replacements, myself included. Check out these sites! 

It’s been two full years of daily writing since I started writing here on 8 Dec 2018. Today will be my last post here.

A counterintuitive snippet of wisdom, from the series The Crown:

Just when you thought you learned the lesson, life throws one last test at you, just to be sure. Often it happens sneakily. The big lesson has been taught and learned, and it’s been some time since the last relapse. Things are now going smooth and peachy, and you’re starting to wonder that perhaps this time is really the last time you’ll ever pass through this mental landscape. You feel glad and grateful, proud even. Well done, you pat yourself on the back. 

The expose article that Forbes wrote to understand the context of Zappos’ visionary CEO Tony Hsieh’s passing made me think about about how signal relates to lack. It seems like—based on personal observation and heuristics, nothing scientific—the more someone signals something, the more likely that person lacks that particular something. Tony Hsieh was well-known for “delivering happiness”. Yet, there seems to be a major void in him. Allegedly, at least based on what the reports from his close friends had said. 

What if we were wrong about the phrase “One step forward, two steps back?” Something I came across on Instagram:

Just the encouragement I needed. To be honest, it’s not been easy learning 2-3 new frameworks and tech stacks at the same time, while trying to create a production-ready app. I recently chanced upon Strapi, and it was fun enough for me to try making a headless API backend from it for my new writing platform. Strapi is built on mainly Node.js, with a bunch of other dependencies like Koa.js and Express.js. Prior to this, I had never touched Node.js before, much less the other two backend Javascript frameworks (or libraries, whatever). In fact, I don’t even know much Javascript prior to this – I’m used to Rails, which is very opinionated and does much of the backend stuff under the hood for you. Moreover I’d always been more comfortable with frontend development, so working on backend is already a toughie. Imagine wading in the dark and unknown waters of new frameworks, yet not knowing how to swim. That’s how I felt.

Yet another Deep December. I didn’t even need to think of a catchy alliteration. Just had I had done a Deep December last year, so will I this year. End of the year seasons had always been for reflection and rest for me. Typically I would be in Bali on a personal retreat for one month. But with the COVID-induced travel ban, figuring out an equivalent in Singapore will be challenging.

I wished I had achieved more this month, I really do. But waking up multiple times every night to baby cries is no joke. It’s hard to do my best work when most of the time, my brain is just mush and my energy and motivation is an all-time low. But I try, anyway.

After the past few months of coding daily, I’m beginning to notice a bad coding habit starting to emerge. I call it zombie mode. Usually it starts when I hit an error, and I jump right into troubleshooting it. I google for the error message, and browse through the results and start to fall into a rabbit hole of the internet. After the third or fourth results, my eyes start to glaze over. My brain start to turn to mush, exhibiting signs of information overload. Classic cognitive overwhelm. And I just sit there flipping through web page after web page, really determined to solve the problem, yet not really thinking clearly to hunt down the right answer, but just kind of mindlessly consuming and being bounced around while in this “zombie mode”. It’s not the best for productivity, and it’s mentally draining. 

@brandonwilson wrote about this chapter in Seth Godin’s book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. Reproducing in whole below because it’s just too good and on point for my work, and the whole indie makers movement:

It’s coming to the end of the year. Time to retreat and reflect. And something wise came along today to nudge me along:

The soft glow of blue light at dawn. Breathing, meditating, savouring the silence. The first literal early birds singing to first light. The world in half slumber yet gently waking. The only sounds are my fingers hitting the keyboard, a calming rhythm to warm up and wake up to. I sip on my morning coffee, the aroma of fresh roasted beans bathing my senses, awaking my spirit to the possibilities of a new day, a new life ahead. 

Move fast and break things, they were known to say at Facebook in the early days. That could very well be a marketing tagline for indie makers too. Just ship it, they say. 

I used to say, Ubud for restoration, Kyoto for inspiration. I even wrote a post about this before, hidden somewhere in the depths of my 700+ posts. But with the travel lockdown due to COVID, I need new sources and spaces for restoration and inspiration, right here back at home. 

Overheard on the interwebs today:

So it is. 8 Dec will be my last post here on 200wad. Inspired by @brandonwilson who’s cutting it off at his two-year mark, I thought this will be a cool milestone to finish off my own journey too. 

I’d been following this trauma-informed, integrative psychotherapist’s IG account @seerutkchawla, and love the tiny nuggets of wisdom that she shares. This one caught my eye today, about self criticism versus self assessment.

Today on platitude Twitter:

James Clear’s tweets are as much a goldmine as his newsletters:

So I’m now in the middle of trying to create a writing platform to continue where 200 Word A Day / Co-Writers / Writelier will leave off when it shuts down in Dec. Actually to call this new things a writing platform is probably not accurate. It’s more about setting goals, and writing your way towards your goals. The writing is a means to an end. So it’s less about getting good at writing, or writing your next novel (unless of course, you set it as a goal). That’s mostly how I had been using this platform most of the time, and since I got to migrate somewhere, I thought might as well create something that works for me.

I started off my daily writing streak here at night. Writing always felt right done at the end of the day, but recently due to parenting responsibilities, I had to switch to writing in the daytime, starting off after lunch but now increasingly in the mornings instead. It felt weird initially, but I’m now coming round to it. Here’s the pros and cons of day versus night:

Complete the following sentence:

This popped up in my social feeds today: 

A community service announcement: In lieu of the shutdown of 200 Words A Day / CO-Writers / Writelier, I created a way for anyone here to upload your archive of posts into the internet, for FREE. This is great for anyone who want to archive their posts somewhere online for reference. If you’re savvy with Github, it can even be your new blog.

Overheard on the Twitterverse today: 

There’s a saying in Asia that “In crisis there’s also opportunity.” Saw this on Twitter, which just about sums up the disruption COVID had on businesses:

Saw this shared around on Facebook today, a neat little framework by the author Adam Grant. He talked about how to take feedback seriously, and there’s three inter-related factors at play:

The impending shutdown got me thinking about what I want to do with all the posts I have here. I feel like I want to start on a clean slate on whatever new writing platform I end up on. Yes, starting from streak ZERO, again! That’ll be interesting. So that means that I likely won’t import over my content here. But I do wish to host it online, somewhere. It’s more shareable, but I don’t foresee any readers for it. At least for my own reference, if anything. 

There’s few apps that get me excited these days. But when I saw the Countdown Widget Maker, I knew I got to have it. It’s an app that allows you to create custom widgets on iOS 14, so that you can see the countdown right on your phone screen.

Building in public is something of an indie maker credo. Almost every maker on Twitter I follow are doing it. It has its benefits – building social capital, growing an audience, building-as-marketing, thought leadership, influence. It’s the maker equivalent of being a social media influencer, basically. When you cross a certain number of followers threshold, things get easier. More people buy whatever you’re launching. Your followers are your word-of-mouth marketing agents to amplify your message/product. 

So it’s begun. This site 200 Words A Day will shut down by 22 Dec 2020. @brandonwilson started this idea of the countdown, and I’m jumping on too since it’s a great way to celebrate the beginning of the end.

It’s raining all day. And it’s the weekend. Somehow the weather changes the mood for everything. I was planning to work, but now work feels vulgar, almost. I just wanna:

Literally saw the titled words seconds ago in my social feed just before I started typing, and now I want to write about it. I think that’s got to be my life aspiration and number one rule to live by now.

@dvassallo is quickly becoming one of the few Twitter influencers who I enjoy reading, especially when he talks about antifragility:

Straight from James Clear on Twitter:

Back in the day, I often find myself saying yes to everything, just because someone asked. Sometimes they didn’t even ask and I would help. Probably out of naivety of being a naturally an agreeable and helpful person, the lack of street-smarts to tell if someone genuinely needs help or just taking advantage, the desire for approval from others, or even just out of plain old social obligation.

Since thinking about starting my social impact patronage, I thought I can put together some data about the stuff I had done and the numbers behind each of my 11 tech for good projects.

It’s been a normal and easy past few months, and I feel ready to take things up a notch and get nuttier on my work, even as I continue to live by the themes from the past months (like following my energy in Oct).  

The whole point of Opportune October is to adopt a new mindset, a new overall approach to my goals and tasks – to surrender to opportunities and energy that might emerge, whatever it may be.

Straight from James Clear’s newsletter:

So here I am. My proudest streak yet:

I never thought I’ll say this, but I’m really digging remote conferencing for work. As a self-professed introvert, I’d mostly learned how to switch to extravert mode when I need to join in a discussion or facilitate one. I can do it and do it well, but I’m usually super exhausted at the end of the session. Something about being in the physical presence of people, having to vibe into their energy and speech that’s draining. If anything, that’s one thing about my near-perfect fit of a design consultancy career that I could never quite lean into. 

I saw this list of nine criteria that @TaylorPearsonMe uses when deciding whether to take on a project or not, and it’s so good that i have to try it out myself. The project in question is whether I should really build my Custom Carrd Co, a productized service that sells customized code snippets for Carrd, for UI features that Carrd doesn’t (yet) have.

Today on Twitter: 

There’s this website called Sweaty Startup which I chanced upon recently, and in this page he listed out the businesses he loves, businesses which are low tech and low competition, yet market is growing and costs are low to start. Great odds for winning.

From the ever-impressive newsletter by James Clear:

Saw this on the interwebs today:

I know I previously complained about nocode distracting me from diving deep into learning how to code, because nocode was so easy and fast that it set up unrealistic expectations of coding. But I’d never shared how the opposite can be true too. Actually nocode does help lower the barrier to learning how to code. 

It’’s been three months since I started my latest streak – an hour of code every morning, every day, without fail. Most days I touched actual code, hand-typed them out. Some days I would do conceptual learning, reading up a lot of docs, blog blogs, tutorials. I started on 21st July, and had since documented my progress every month that passed, including some of the days in between as well.

I know I talked about losing Strapi to get back to Rails. Made lots of solid reasoning and observations about this new shiny tech stack, compared to good ol’ Rails. But over the past week, I couldn’t get my ass back to Rails, even though I knew ‘rationally’ I should. I kept going back to the Strapi browser windows I got opened, kept checking their forum to learn new things, even answering some questions. Today I even got back to trying out one of their Youtube tutorials about tweaking the findOne GET request to be by slug than by id, a tutorial which I failed at previously. And guess what, I got it to work! What the hell, Strapi, you’ll be the death of me. I wanted to walk away but I kept looking back. Using Strapi still excites me. Using Rails, not so much. I love the JAMstack way of making products, and Strapi is right smack in it. Is it wrong to be tech-centric, to love using certain tools to get to an outcome even though I’m less competent with it, it gets me there slower and with less certainty? In the recent past, yes. I was an entrepreneur who happens to be a maker/developer, who just wants to get to the destination, the objective, the outcome. But weirdly, I find myself moving down the opposite direction now. I’m so drinking all the KoolAid on all things developer, even the culture and the geeking out on tech. And so even though Rails was the logical choice in my head, my heart didn’t. And more and more, the heart seems to be the head pilot of this flight. Teething problems with new tech and difficult to get support, yeah it isn’t the most efficient and practical to get into Strapi right now, but eventually it can be solved…right? Technical problems are just that. Technical. But the problems and barriers of what’s within—heart, spirit, soul, whatever you call it— can’t be solved with code or questions on Stack Overflow (though I would love to see someone try!). 

From @jackbutcher on Twitter again:

Just saw this tweet from @jackbutcher, and made me wonder a lot about my #decodingcoding journey. 

What’s this “nocode” thing about?

Discipline succeeds short-term. Diligence succeeds long-term. ~ @via_benjamin

Wow, just as I had given up on Strapi, the solution appears. All that was needed was just setting the Heroku config to production. 

After the 3-4 days trying to fix a deployment issue with Strapi, I finally decided to drop it. It’s too new (so lack support and resources), not quite stable enough yet (amazing how difficult it is to deploy to Heroku - search “strapi heroku deploy” in Stack Overflow, you’ll see), and I’m just not a competent enough coder yet to wrangle with new shiny tech at the frontiers. 

@dvassallo on Twitter was talking about low hanging fruits as a means to create a portfolio of many small bets. So spot on to how my month of Opportune October is turning out. 

I’d been hitting a wall on my coding journey, and it isn’t a bug that’s causing it, but choice overload when it comes to tech stack.

If you could choose, what kind of a mind, body and soul would you like to have?

This is how I like to start MVPs and businesses around it these days – by taking a no-biz approach. (You first heard that here) 

Straight from James Clear’s newsletter: 

I was listening to Remotely Interesting today, a podcast by Netlify, and they were talking about how to level up as developers, and learning by copying came up as one of the key strategies. 

@jackbutcher had a great tweet yesterday about the principal-agent problem of life:

Using tech for good, or the civic tech scene, is something of an emerging thing here that I’m part of. And much of our COVID-19 responses had been using nocode tools, which makes perfect sense due to the speed of launch that’s possible with nocode, and the low technical bar that allows no coding skills to get started. That makes almost anyone a web developer. 

Daniel Vassallo @dvassallo had been quite a force on Twitter. He recently shared how over the past year he’s been doing what I had aspired to do during Opportune October – random daily schedule, only driven by what needs to be done, what he feels like doing, and what opportunities he seeing before him. 

In the spirit of Opportune October, I wanted to think-by-writing about this tweet from @naval:

Just a few days ago I helped out someone I just knew from a Carrd Facebook group with his new Carrd site. He wanted to add a dropdown menu component to his site but there isn’t one native to Carrd. I showed him an accordion dropdown demo I previously did on Carrd, using the HTML code embed element, and the collaboration just went swimmingly from there. At the end, he had a new responsive header nav bar menu, accordion dropdowns for his FAQs page, and a scroll-to-top floating button, all of which doesn’t come with Carrd. And he’s absolutely loving it and happy with how it turned out. It was real fun helping someone with a real use case, and seeing what he needed from a business website owner’s perspective. Custom components that’s standard in most websites now but missing in Carrd:

I realised my previous months goals were too many and complex. Even having just a few points for sustain, start and stop didn’t help. I struggled to recall what the main focus of the month was about, lest even tracking my efforts and all. Without a central theme, it’s hard to put will and discipline behind it. But yet even a central theme is made up of many smaller tasks to be done, so perhaps what was missing was thematically weaving them into a cohesive whole, for the month. And besides, many of the tasks I previously set will be done whether it’s part of the monthly goals or not, so that kind of defeats the purpose. I remembered that the whole point of these alliterative monthly goals is to try new things or new approaches to old things, so I’m reminding myself here.

September went by much faster than I realised. While not as emotionally intense and high as August, I did end up doing quite a bit when I scrolled through my logs on Makerlog. It’s one of those months where I did more than I realised, but didn’t give myself enough credit and encouragement for it. Thankfully I do monthly wrap-ups!

I’d been doing quite some tech research for this side project I did called Your Life In Months. I kind of left it on the shelf for a while, not sure what to do with it after the MVP is up. It’s a Ruby on Rails monolith, made in exactly a year ago in September 2019. That was my last burst of coding before I dropped off and rebounded back again 2 months ago. Interestingly I went with Rails because it seems easy enough, but I believe if I had seen Vue, Nuxt and what JAMstack could do, I might have started on them then instead of Rails.

When I started on my decoding coding journey, I had the impression that all I needed to do to get better at coding is to just code more. First, take an online course . Then do more tutorials. Make a small side project. Rise and repeat. Basically, just looking at code on a screen, or someone else’s code on a screen, and go from there. I did that for kind of the first 1-2 years, but my relationship with coding then kept going on and then off. I’ll be super enthusiastic for a couple of months doing courses and Youtube tutorials, and then got busy and it dropped off the radar. 

Somehow I’ve been having cravings for a good cookie recently. A cookie that’s chunky, not thin; chewy, not powdery; toasty and warm, not cold and flaccid; crispy on the outside, gooey on the inside. Something that looks ugly, lumpy, rustic and hand-made. And definitely keto-compliant. 

In asking the title question, I realised I didn’t have much of it throughout my career, even though every job aligned to my passions, gave me meaning, and was on issues that interest and motivate me. Even my most recent job in design and innovation—which I considered to be the closest to the perfect career I had so far—didn’t offer much moments where I felt like a kid in a candy store. I was good at what I did, I enjoyed the work, but candy store moments? Far and few in between, unfortunate to say.

This awe-inspiring snippet of wisdom came in the mail the other day, compliments of James Clear’s ever-excellent newsletter. The text is a little long, but as an important note to self, I’m pasting it whole here, and then I’ll talk about why it’s so good:

So after working really hard the past 2-3 weeks on learning and head-banging on my Rails API, I decided I needed to switch up and do something fun instead. Sometimes taking detours make all the difference, even though it sounds unproductive and not adding anything to the progress. 

That’s what I learned from my first 4-day hitting-head-against-wall experience of trying to debug code. 

Thank you @keni for reminding a bunch of us about this 100-day challenge we did last year, and that we have 100 days left of 2020.

It’s been two months of spending at least one hour coding every day. I’m pretty proud of this streak, to be honest, even more than my writing one here. Because coding daily is hard. Pretty darn hard. And because I didn’t have a plan or a learning structure on what I wanted to or needed to learn for coding, it’s hard to feel any certainty that I have what it takes to keep going. Today can be a good day, tomorrow bad. It’s emergent, and I’m improvising as I progress, changing course and doing stuff which will seem scattered and un-focused to a typical coding class educator. 

My phone died on me a few days ago. And the past week had been an interesting period of accidental digital detox. OK not 100% detox though, because I used an old phone in the interim. But because the phone was really old, I didn’t have access to or interest in downloading all my apps, so it felt like a significant dose of detox, anyhow.

I’d been thinking of setting up a patronage thing for my social impact work. Why social impact patronage?

What’s the possible (legal) consequences if I openly ‘disparage’ about a larger, incumbent competitor in my marketing?

OK I’m exaggerating somewhat, but it’s not far from the truth. Our smartphone these days have become cybernetic extensions of ourselves, our brains, and even our whole digital lives. 

Today I caved in and decided it’s time to create new ad formats for Keto List Singapore. “Caved in” because I was initially unsure if customers are willing to pay for more expensive ad formats. Or rather, I lacked confidence that people would even want to pay for ads, lest more expensive ads! But after having more than a handful ask me about it, I took it as a signal from the market. I didn’t think it will work, but as part of a marketing experiment, I decided to include 2 lines in my emails and messages asking new and existing ad buyers whether they would be interested to have different ad formats. The response seems quite positive, but with n not being a representative sample size in any rigorous way, of course. But my entrepreneur’s gut feel after these feedback – it’s worth a try.

Lately I’d been enjoying this little hack to steal more time and opportunities to work on my goals. It’s about stealing time where you didn’t think you had, by leveraging on mundane moments or activities that you don’t think much about optimising.

I WON! At least I feel like I won. I finally made an API-first app that’s pushed to production out in the real world. And it works! It’s a Rails todo list REST API as backend, and then a Vue app as frontend to fetch data from the API, via axios, basic auth and environment variables.

I saw this on the social feeds today, about this heuristic, this rule of thumb for your relationships, called “Two beers and a puppy”. The heuristic is simple, and a great way to assess how you feel about someone, anyone. 

“If it is not making you happier, or healthier, or calmer, or having better relationships, or wealthier, then what good is it? It’s useless. You can safely discard it.” @naval

Inspired by a tweet by @levelsio by the same title, here’s a list of things I wouldn’t build myself in 2020 and some suggestions worth building, and all the reasons why:

I have something of an annual, once-a-year passion for mooncakes. Though I don’t eat mooncakes anymore, but I don’t know why I feel so happy buying them! It’s a perfect blend of the things that I love when I buy any product – meaningful, craftsmanship, and emotive. 

Reading @patwalls’ blog post about how he had to choose between his two products resonated with me:

It’s so easy to get triggered these days on social media. Like virtual landmines, you’ll never know when (not if) you’ll step on one when you open Facebook or Twitter (especially Twitter). Triggers are probably also the main causes of ill-being and toxicity from our media consumption. So what can we do?

True story.

True story.

Because of my one hour of coding habit recently and my eventual goal of building my own SaaS, I’d been learning a lot of new programming tricks lately and picking up new tools too. Some of these tools got me really excited that I have to share them!

The latest question posed by James Clear in his newsletter.

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

I was chatting with a friend on social media about the upcoming economic recession, and how many white-collar, mature, middle managers—or PMETs as HR pros like to call them—are going to lose their jobs. Imagine losing your job in a recession when companies are tightening their belts, freezing hiring, and retrenching like bad breakups, and all the while at an apparent ‘disadvantage’ due to age, higher salary expectations, and being over-experienced. But there’s also some other challenges many will face:

August had been simply awesome! If July was promising, then August had definitely lived up to July’s promise, and more. If the trend continues, September will be schweeeet.

I had an Awesome August, I really did. The pandemic might not be over yet, but I think I found my stride amidst the safe distancing, slow consumption, and simple hermit-like existence.

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

Conventional startup wisdom about product-market fit posits it as a critical success factor for any business, that you need to create a product that the market wants, and solves a painpoint for customers that they will pay for. 

Hi I’m Jason, from Singapore. I recently started Sweet Jam Sites to help Wordpress site owners from going bald. 

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

I wanted to build on and layer upon what @melakovacs said in her recent post:

[Watch me write a detailed tutorial for building a nocode chatbot using Chatfuel and Airtable. At the end, I’ll share this most parts of this tutorial as a long-form post on maybe Medium or my blog, with a Gumroad payment link for a detailed walk-through complete with images and gifs. An info product in the making.]

Backstory

Backstory

Backstory

One month ago, on 21st July, I decided to start a new streak. One hour (at least) of code every day, in the mornings or at night. Rain or shine, busy or not. Code every single day, or bust.

Backstory

About two years ago, while on a digital nomad work-vacay in Ubud, Bali, I created a chatbot called Grant Hunt using nocode tools like Chatfuel and Sheet2site. It’s a chatbot that has some conditional logic built in, and helps any grant applicant in the social impact space find a grant for their idea. I remembered working on it all day at Ubud’s lovely cafes, drinking piccolo lattes made from their home-grown beans, then taking breaks in the evenings and weekends to take walks in rice fields or go swim in the beach. It was an awesome work-vacay, and many beautiful memories formed around that project. 

Maker Twitter delivers gold again today. I get so much inspiration and learning from Twitter; it surprises me and exceeds my expectations all the time, of what’s to expect from a platform showing ultra short-form content. It’s like poetry almost…all the good stuff condensed into a tiny 280-character tweet. 

Came across a fascinating read of an article today about GPT-3, the openAI that’s been all the talk of town. The article talked about how a college student set up a fake blog, gave it a fake persona called “Adolos”, used GPT-3 to generate content and blog posts, and posted it on Hacker News and various places just test if people can tell the difference between a AI and a human.

I’d been coming across some marketing channels that isn’t your typical and usual suspects like Facebook, blogs, etc. Here’s some that I recently read about and wish to try:

Here’s a simple formula for mastery and being exceptional at your craft, credits to James Clear:

I just found the answer to all social tensions and inconveniences. Stay with me. 

Today I went out for a work meeting for the first time, since COVID appeared. That’s slightly over five months of working from home, not having to head out in work attire, to work in some manner. And it’s such a weird experience. I feel like a stranger in my own country. This must be what a hermit feels like when he heads down to the town square for the annual festival. 

The second wave is already here. A bigger wave than the first, and more insidious, even subversive. It’s not a second wave of infections, but an economic one triggered by COVID-19. And this is likely to affect even more people and livelihoods.

I just saw this tweeted out by @tylertringas - content repurposing-as-a-service, where a service repurposes your video interviews into “podcasts, blog post, social assets, newsletter snippets, etc”. 

I love Window Swap. I wrote about swapping my window for a view of the pyramids a few days ago, but now I’m back again, because there’s so much more to it.

[Currently writing to a window swap in rainy, gloomy Detroit with steam rising out of buildings, chorus of the rain and traffic]

I just spent ten minutes watching the (video) view of someone else’s window on Window Swap. This window belongs to Abdulrahman, who live in Giza, Egypt, and his window is front seat view to the Great Pyramids. What a view! 

This fascinating few lines popped up in James Clear’s newsletter recently:

Maker Twitter is awesome. Here’s a tweet by @jdnoc that got me excited:

Coding is like cooking. 

It’s been 12 months of making monthly goals and reviews, since August last year. Massive credits goes to @craigpetterson, who’s very first Awesome August post started it all here on 200wad, and created quite a lot of excitement then. Since then, @knight, @keni were my constant buddies in it. 

OK, so July had been promising. So let’s build on that, ride the wave and try to peak back up again! It’s going to be an Awesome August! Here’s the stuff that I need to sustain, start and stop:

I had initially wanted July to be an outwardly and inwardly slow month. To encourage myself a little, self-care a bit more, and mostly to listen deeply within, to just rest and stop. 

Here’s a great heuristic for discovering what your true preferences and interests are, where your passion and enthusiasm is anchored in, credits to @sivers on Twitter: 

I got an idea. Since I’m learning to code, what if the mini-projects that I made along the way can become products in themselves? 

Twitter had been ablaze with demos of what GPT-3 can do. GPT-3 is a natural language machine learning system trained from 45TB of text data, which allows it to generate sorts of content, all based on just a few input words.

I’d never done something this intentionally for so long. Not in such an unbroken fashion, at least. But after 600 days of daily writing, some thoughts:

I remembered this peculiar reading hack that Naval Ravikant outlined in this Tim Ferris podcast:

It’s funny how everyone’s experience of Twitter is different. In fact, sometimes worlds apart. It really comes down to how one curates his follows and feed. Identity politics Twitter – bad. Maker Twitter – awesome. Everyday I learn new things from Maker Twitter, and by now, almost everything on my feed is that. It’s positive, supportive, and inspiring. 

There’s two types of keto practitioners – those who cook every single damn thing they put into their mouths, and those who can’t cook to save their lives. I belong to the latter camp. Instead of keto recipes, I needed a keto directory. That’s why I created Keto List Singapore. But even knowing where to eat is not enough – knowing what foods are keto-safe and which ones aren’t in restaurants and eateries, requires some background knowledge of the typical ingredients that are used in different dishes. 

“Progress requires unlearning.” ~ James Clear

After thinking through the marketing channels that’s best for me and my strengths, I decided to start off with search engine optimisation for my JAMstack site Sweet Jam Sites. 

I’d been taking online tutorial courses on Vue School, to learn the fundamentals of Vue.js and Nuxt. As I go through it, I realised there’s a few things I fell into doing along the way that helps with my learning. There’s a certain structure that helped me learned 10x better. This is as much a note to self as it is for others who might be trying to pick up coding via online classes.

A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today ~ Tony Robbins via @brandonwilson

Every once in a while, you get distracted by something random but super interesting and fun, and a whole day goes by.

I’d been taking online tutorial courses on Vue School, to learn the fundamentals of Vue.js and Nuxt. As I go through it, I realised there’s a few things I fell into doing along the way that helps with my learning. There’s a certain structure that helped me learned 10x better. This is as much a note to self as it is for others who might be trying to pick up coding via online classes.

Overheard this on the interwebs today. It’s so important a message for myself that I want to write something about it, kind of like a note to self.

These days it’s hard to stay motivated and focused. After all, it’s still Jiā Yóu July for me. Still trying to pick up bits and pieces of myself in the aftermath of a crisis. I tried learning new things like Vue, which helps. Learning new things always helps. I found myself being quite easily distracted and unable to focus on the important tasks at hand, and just falling into doing whatever I felt like doing.

@dvassallo tweeted something which nicely summed up my approach to self-employment as a maker:

? Trending now: Everyday office productivity tools that we use and love are being used as backend databases and/or content management for websites.

@andrewtaso shared this some time back, about how members of a substance abuse support group got given a silvery memento coin as a celebration of staying clean for one year.

I’m experimenting with a pivot for my JAMstack web design and build productized serviced called Sweet Jam Sites. Maybe instead of trying to offer a website with free hosting, I can leverage on the benefits of JAMstack—the speed and security—to Wordpress site owners who are frustrated with having to deal with a seemingly endless and futile, Sisyphean cycles of security updates and software bloat.

I’m experimenting with a pivot for my JAMstack web design and build productized serviced called Sweet Jam Sites. Maybe instead of trying to offer a website with free hosting, I can leverage on the benefits of JAMstack—the speed and security—to Wordpress site owners who are frustrated with having to deal with a seemingly endless and futile, Sisyphean cycles of security updates and software bloat.

I’d been researching about how I want to build a website builder, and have roughly broken it down to sub-projects and tasks that I can begin to understand. But since I have to learn new frontend frameworks like Vue or Nuxt, and also pick up advanced Rails like creating an API, I’m also trying to make it less overwhelming and learn my way in baby steps. I explored some online courses in Vue and Nuxt fundamentals, and was planning to take other courses for Rails too, when it hit me.

Building on what @keenencharles posted:

I was just thinking, with the growing popularity of Carrd right now especially among the nocode community, could it become the next Wordpress, but better?

?? Noob developer question: Looking for tutorial-style blog posts or articles on how to create a website builder from scratch (in the likes of Carrd, Squarespace, or even Sheet2site) - anyone came across any? 

It’s election season now in Singapore. Every 5 years, we get to watch the drama and theatre of politics play out in our little island. But this time, with COVID hanging in the background, it feels like a distraction. Like as if we didn’t have enough things to worry about. But systems being systems, they live by their own rules, and therefore, we have to vote. ?‍♂️

I wrote about my micro-habits system back in Sept last year. My previous micro-habits system were centred around the keystone habits that I’m building as part of my million dollar goal project:  

I wrote about my micro-habits system back in Sept last year. My previous micro-habits system were centred around the keystone habits that I’m building as part of my million dollar goal project:  

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

Stop worrying about how long it will take and get started. Time will pass either way.

In Mandarin, “加油” (pinyin: jiā yóu) taken literally means “add oil”. It means to work harder, to buck up. Usually it’s said in the context of encouraging someone, to fire them up, motivate them.

At the start of June, I had planned to seek new energy and organise myself for this post-COVID new normal. I didn’t set anything specific to achieve, but to have a forward plan of action at the end of the month.

A thought-provoking tweet from the great @naval: 

The wanderlust itch is returning. I can feel it. But with most borders still closed, one can only dream. To curb that itch today, I got to scrolling through old photos on Instagram of my travels. If I can’t be there in body, maybe in mind…for a bit. But it also got me thinking about post-covid travel. Without a vaccine, will it ever be safe to travel again, ever? 

There’s a local personal finance comic series called The Woke Salaryman that I enjoy reading. The artist recently drew a story about his father getting retrenched in the last economic recession as a way to talk about the pending recession from COVID, and one of his lines resonated deeply.

Here’s a formula to use when you’re thinking of starting a productized service:

You always hold the rights to your effort, but never to your results.
Results are entitled to no one. At best, they are on loan and must be renewed each day.
All you own is the right to try.

Today’s one of those days. 

Imagine a software development agency, but for nocode software. At $99/month, you get unlimited nocode small tasks, to build anything you or your organisation needs. A working prototype, a minimum viable product, or an internal dashboard or productivity tool. 

?? Noob developer question: Looking for tutorial-style blog posts or articles on how to create a website builder from scratch (in the likes of Carrd, Squarespace, or even Sheet2site) - anyone came across any? 

They are ubiquitous, household standards in tech, mostly held by incumbents, and barely changed in over a decade (which in internet age, it’s dog years).

?? Noob developer question: Looking for tutorial-style blog posts or articles on how to create a website builder from scratch (in the likes of Carrd, Squarespace, or even Sheet2site) - anyone came across any? 

The average life expectancy of a Singaporean is 82-ish. I turned 41 yesterday. So this makes it my expected half way mark in life.

Imagine a software development agency, but for nocode software. At $99/month, you get unlimited nocode small tasks, to build anything you or your organisation needs. A working prototype, a minimum viable product, or an internal dashboard or productivity tool. 

Alright, honest question. Looking back, I think my struggles with getting success for my products is that I enjoy only the creating aspect of making products. I love the rush of making new shiny things – who doesn’t?! Being able to translate a thought, a brain fart, an idea, into something tangible, something that people can poke around and play with, something that might actually be useful to people’s lives or even the world. Isn’t that crazy? That you, one mere person, actually can have enough leverage to have some measure of influence on the lives and work of others. 

I’d been learning programming since last September. There’s been some progress. A Udemy course in web development to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, mySQL, Bootstrap. Then I did another series of tutorials to learn Rails. Then I made a mistake which I now see as a mistake – instead of doubling down on all the coding skills learned, I got distracted and went back to using nocode tools to make products. 

My country’s Government Technology Agency (Govtech) had been making lots of interesting and useful digital products recently, and I can’t help but notice someone inside might be referencing the Silicon Valley’s (the tech hub not the HBO comedy) startups and products to create public sector equivalents.

Finally, after almost 3 months, the government announced Phase 2 of post “Circuit Breaker” lockdown to begin on 19 June, this Friday.

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” - David Perrell

Hard to imagine, that you are here for 100 days already. It’s still surreal that you are here, with us. 

Productized services guru Robin Vander Hayden @Vinrob tweeted this out yesterday:

Saw this tweet from a @david_perell bot:

I’ve been using Stackbit for a few months now, and had created around 10-20 sites using it (I lost count). I even started a productized service around this offering, because it was exciting enough when I first tried it! But few months on, flaws begin to emerge. So here’s a sum up of the pros and cons:

I might have mentioned this before here on 200wad, but for learning, for self-reinforcement and reminder, and for my own sake, I want to write this down as a way to concretize a new way of thinking, a shift in mindset and narrative.

From the Twitterverse today, from @JamesClear:

So after asking what’s the biggest small thing I can do, I did it. Finally. I cleared my desk. All the clutter; receipts from weeks ago; bills paid but left lying there; books I no longer read; outdated sticky notes left flapping in the wind; things I don’t need on my desk; all cleared.

Saw on Twitter that the “nocode” key word is finally taking off on Google Trends. This is to be expected. But what’s fascinating and interesting is under related queries, “github nocode” is the top breakout query.

Great question offered in James Clear’s recent newsletter, as always. Just in line with my musings about radical simplicity and washing my bowl, and finding a way to restart in June. 

A friend suggested that I take some time to appreciate myself for what I had already done since the two-month lockdown. It’s time to cut myself some slack and embody this self appreciation today, before moving on to the future. It probably seems like a humblebrag—”my lockdown productivity report card”—but I don’t care much at this point. If I have to humblebrag a bit to perk myself up a little, I’ll take it.  

How does one eat an elephant? How do you even start, even if the right answer is “one bite at a time”?

Yeah, it’s my month. Birthday month. I’m turning 41. So what goals does one plan to do on one’s birthday month?

Two months ago I made Dabao Dash. It’s a community board matching freelance, independent delivery folks with hawkers & small-medium F&B shops affected by COVID-19. It was a product made for the lockdown. With our lockdown easing off tomorrow, it’s also time to relook at its future.

For the month of May, I decided to go for goals that focused on money:

“Never waste a good crisis.” I once heard. And looks like COVID-19 could just be the nudge for getting late adopters of technology on their digitalization journey. Because despite hearing how the pandemic is killing off many businesses and jobs, there’s also job creation due to the virus. 

What a beautiful question from James Clear in his latest newsletter. His weekly emails are the only newsletter that has 100% open and read rate for me, and it continues to be a source of inspiration for writing here on 200wad. 

Carousell is a local bulletin board/marketplace, much like Craigslist (but less seedy haha). I’d been trying my luck with posting gigs and services there as a marketing experiment in local markets. I tend to market to an international audience, but with Covid and all the local focus, I got drawn to Carousell and wanted to learn and explore more. And very much like previous posts about unbundling Craigslist, this is a little entrepreneur brainstorm in unbundling Carousell. 

A bit of a cold marketing hack I stumbled upon recently: marketplaces where your target customers are selling are also places where they can buy. I always presumed that sellers in a marketplace are there only to sell, and consumers only to buy. But sellers are also buyers outside of their selling jobs. They need to consume stuff too.  And a marketplace, in it’s most traditional form, is a place where people gather, sell some, buy some. There’s no strict separation.

I saw this on the Twitterverse the other day, a tweet by @drose007 who was talking about his time in Amazon and something that Jeff Bezos said about Amazon’s competitors, in particular, eBay:

For some strange reasons, I’d taken an interest in the local F&B scene in Singapore during our lockdown period. Perhaps it’s boredom, maybe it’s the horror of possibly seeing my favourite hawkers and F&Bs shut down. I even went on to create a bulletin board to match F&Bs with delivery drivers, so that they have a fighting chance at transitioning to a delivery-only business model. In fact, even after our official lockdown ceases, dine-in is still not allowed, for god knows how much longer. F&Bs really need to hunker down and evolve fast, if not it’s hasta a vista baby.

I emailed Andrey, founder of Sheet2site, the other day: 

What’s the best parts about working from home, now that we all have to? 

I’d been meaning to do something to help other self-employed or freelance creatives affected by lockdown measures, but wasn’t sure how my skills can help. But seeing how many others are taking time to learn new skills, study online courses and refreshing their portfolios, I realised I can help by building portfolio sites for creatives who don’t already have one and need one. 

So these days I’m in a bit of a conundrum. 

Twitter was ablaze with discussion about Joe Rogan’s latest move to give Spotify exclusive to his podcasts. Understandably so, because his following is massive. But I’d always wondered about this followers. Who are they? What interests bind them together? Because Joe Rogan being Joe Rogan, his podcasts are the antithesis of the conventional indie maker wisdom of targeting niche groups. Because he don’t do niche in his podcasts. He follows his curiosity, wherever it might lead. Yes, he’s known for some things, like MMA, standup comic. But the topics he cover in his podcasts are anything but specific. I don’t usually listen in when he talks about MMA. My top favourites had been about him talking about tech (most notably with Elon Musk), nutrition, and get this: aliens, UFOs, ancient civilisations and ayahuasca rituals. 

Saw this tweet today that stretched my horizons further:

If you’re an indie hacker and making products for other indie hackers is your game, then the Indie Hackers groups is definitely something to get product ideas from. To date, there’s 42 groups:

That’s the advice you hear often in the indie maker and software world. Never build your house on someone else’s land. Never build your business on someone else’s platform. Yes, while there’s opportunity to be leveraged from using platforms like say Facebook to build your audience, or a business, depending entirely on it makes your business vulnerable.

I saw this on Twitter, and even though I had done a variation of it before, @dvassallo’s breakdown of a $100k target in his tweet managed to make it even more tangible and concrete:

This is a classic about using the Pareto Principle on your work, from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits and my favourite email newsletter on the internet:

Weird question, I know. It’s almost oxymoronic to put “free” and “making a living” together in one sentence.

What’s the best parts about working from home, now that we all have to? 

@dvassallo’s tweet was spot on in summing up my indie maker journey so far

There’s been a spate of newspaper articles here in Singapore, how some companies are rebuilding the manufacturing needed to make our own surgical masks. Even the gaming laptop company Razer—whose CEO is Singaporean—is in on it, allegedly setting up one plant within 24 days, with a production capacity of 5 million masks per month. Spotlight was also on another government-linked company which had to ship their machinery back from Taiwan to make the masks locally, after an embargo on mask exports was introduced in Taiwan.

In the recent email newsletter by James Clear, he ended off with this question:

So many changes are going on right now in the economy. I wonder if we will ever go back to how we used to work anymore. Almost overnight, some skills and jobs become obsolete or close down, and new ones take their place. That got me thinking: How do I better prepare myself to the inevitable changes to the economy, society and life in general? How does one be pandemic-proof?

Saw this on James Clear’s newsletter today:

So many changes are going on right now in the economy. I wonder if we will ever go back to how we used to work anymore. Almost overnight, some skills and jobs become obsolete or close down, and new ones take their place. That got me thinking: How do I better prepare myself to the inevitable changes to the economy, society and life in general? How does one be pandemic-proof?

Sometime in late March, I made an offer to anyone with a COVID-related cause, that I will build them a website for their idea, for free. Call it “corporate social responsibility”, or socially conscious business, I rolled this out via Sweet Jam Sites, my web design-and-build productized service.

Everyone has OB markers. Things that you’ll never do, lines you’ll never cross, people or causes you’ll rather die than to support, places you wouldn’t even get near within a mile. Perhaps these OB markers are based on your moral values and perspective on ethics. Maybe it’s from  personal experience or past trauma. Or it’s even something you were simply brought up with and never questioned nor saw the need to question.

So I made a thing again, called VisualAid.sg, this time with my fantabulous co-conspirator Shaina Tan and a bunch of designers, illustrators and translators in Singapore to create illustrated translations to help healthcare workers communicate better with migrant workers affected by COVID-19. 

Something I saw recently from the Twitter webs, regarding luck:

I think I had fun in April. Maybe too much fun. 

So many changes are going on right now in the economy. I wonder if we will ever go back to how we used to work anymore. Almost overnight, some skills and jobs become obsolete or close down, and new ones take their place. That got me thinking: How do I better prepare myself to the inevitable changes to the economy, society and life in general? How does one be pandemic-proof?

For April, I decided to go with the flow of where my attention seems to be drawnto most - COVID-19, and to address it directly by making products with altruistic abandon. It feels cringe-y every time I say that word “altruism”, but it pairs well with April, so…

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Crisis doesn’t change people; it reveals them. ~ Eric Walters

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

I wrote a seed fund proposal today for Dabao Dash, one of my products for Altruistic April. And to think the month have not even ended yet, and I’m pushing this further. $20,000 seed funding from our local Design Business Chamber! First time I’m trying out getting some sort of funding for my product, so it’s been fun experience. Since I wrote all that out, I thought I’ll log it here for memory’s sake: 

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Hot take: Writing is an indulgence in times of COVID-19.

There’s this neat graphic that’s being forwarded around in social media feeds. The key question it asks is, “Who do I want to be during COVID-19?” And in answer to that question, it posit that there are four ways of being, or “zones”, during this pandemic:

New normal, new skills to master.

As always, James Clear’s (author of Atomic Habits) newsletter delivers on wisdom. In his latest one, he talked about balance. This was a theme that was a big part of my introspection last year, and he shared it in a way that helped me right some incongruence:

What can businesses do to serve the needs arising from major shifts in lifestyle due to COVID19? Not profiteering of course, but providing supply where there’s genuine increased demand. 

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

There’s a scene in Iron Man 3 where Tony Stark was having a panic attack from the work as a superhero, and he called Harley, the kid who sheltered him while he was hiding from his enemies. Harley goes console Stark, and said, “You’re a mechanic, right? Why don’t you build something?”

They say you should be careful what you wish for. It happened to me this month. But it was probably also a case of supply meeting demand: a hungry demand for new ways of coping with COVID-19, and my April projects and ideas being supply.

A timely reminder by Facebook. A post from years ago, but all the more relevant now.

How does a good home-body life look like? How might staying home all the time be fulfilling, fun and healthy?

I think we’re all going through grief in a way. Grief that the old life might never come back. If we follow the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—I think I’m probably in the depression part. Ok that clinical depression. But feeling low. Like Monday blues forever kind of low.

I think we’re all going through grief in a way. Grief that the old life might never come back. If we follow the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—I think I’m probably in the depression part. Ok that clinical depression. But feeling low. Like Monday blues forever kind of low.

I realised today that the decisions I’d been making for the past weeks had been centred around waiting, and the expectation that normalcy will return. Eventually.

So I made a thing again, for COVID-19. It’s called Dabao Dash. And it’s another listing site. Another! But no shame about it, if it helps serve a gap in Singapore right now. 

We’re just a one or two months into this pandemic, and already the makers are out in full force. What caught my interest recently were the analog and hardware products that’s been blooming up. Urban survival gear fit for a pandemic.

As Singapore heads into our most serious ‘circuit breaker’ (our fancy PR name for “lockdown”) yet tomorrow due to COVID-19, staying home and eating in will be the norm, at least for the next 4 weeks. How might we stay safe at home, yet make it more pleasant while also staying in ketosis? Being able to get our keto supplies right to my door will go some way in easing any concerns I think.

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

Since I decided to make things with altruistic abandon for April—anything COVID-19-related—I’d been observing needs and trends, and brainstorming ideas to plug those gaps. Some ideas so far:

March was a disaster, but rightly so. No one could have expected how bad the pandemic could get. But no guilt either, by virtue of force majeure. I do want to circle back to learning about investing sometime in the future. But till then, will keep in view. But all the upheavals in the past month made me apprehensive about planning for April, because who can make plans in times of great uncertainty? Trying to force-fit business as usual—be it via lifestyle routine at home, or doing the same work as I usually did—just didn’t feel right.   

I wanted to kickstart my investing and money growth habits this month, but for the first time, I failed dismally.

Today we clapped. 

Saw this today in the Twitter-verse:

I made a new thing today, again. After making Tools For COVID19 using sheet2site the other day, I thought about what else I can do to help, but wasn’t sure how my skills can come in useful. Call it boredom, or call it leveraging on inspiration or the need of the times. The pandemic situation seems to be completely occupying my mindspace, so rather than let it get me down, maybe I can transmute the energy to create things that might come in useful. There’s many things I can’t control now, but I can control how I want to respond from the energy that’s there.

Words matter. Our choice of words matter. The words we use can shape our perspective of a situation more than we realise. I wonder: what if we chose different words—more uplifting, optimistic words—to use when describing our lived experiences under COVID19? How might we reframe things, so as to bring about mindset shifts that will tide us through these hard times? 

Something in @JamesClear’s email newsletter today struck a chord:

So I made a thing today, to help small local businesses survive COVID19.

Here’s an interesting counterpoint to the whole consistency versus intensity debate: 

When despair for the world grows in me

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

What can businesses do to serve the needs arising from major shifts in lifestyle due to COVID19? Not profiteering of course, but providing supply where there’s genuine increased demand. 

A popular nocode ‘tech stack’ now is the WAMZstack - Webflow, Airtable, Memberstack, Zapier. With this starter stack, you can create the 4 common features that any SaaS needs:

COVID19 descended on Singapore since early Feb. It’s been more than a month since, and over time, I found myself adopting new and different hygiene habits and personal sanitary hacks to minimise exposure to the virus. I thought I’ll compile a list here to share for common good, beyond the usual “wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid crowds” advice. 

Lots had been written about Singapore’s response to the pandemic, but what I’m more heartened to see are the ground-up, community-driven initiatives sprouting up to cover the gaps that the government and public institutions don’t have bandwidth to cover, especially in areas of psychological and social resilience.

Alright guys, if you’re still here after 12 long chapter reviews, this is the end, my friend. The last one.

Alright this chapter is straight out of some new age yoga , everything is vibrations sort of philosophy. Ignore, keep calm and carry on if you feel sick of stuff like that. Otherwise, it fits in the author’s entire framework of thought leading to action leading riches. Definitely fits into his weird science, especially for his era. 

Our modern productivity techniques and methods for success are almost completely biased towards the use of the intellect, the rational mind. Plan this, make these goals, calculate that. 

OK this is the long-awaited chapter where it gets really weird. But I thought I should share this chapter anyway since I talked about how unorthodox the book was. This chapter defines it. It’s also the longest chapter ever (pun intended…why am I not surprised?).

I heard about Master Minds a lot, but initial impressions just bring to mind boys’ clubs and the Illuminati. So perhaps its reputation precedes itself, in a less wholesome way. But I can imagine how a group of close friends—in a spirit of brotherhood/sisterhood—can actively support and push each other towards their own goals.

Everyone knows perseverance is important to success. But I’d seen few expound well on why and how it does. That’s why it’s pretty amazing to read this chapter, despite the boring topic. I mean, what’s to get excited about persistence? It’s no longer a sexy character trait to have, unlike say, creativity. But there seems to be a pattern in the chapters in this book. It persistently underwhelms by chapter title but impresses with the contents.

(It’s my 500th post today! ? Woohoo! #celebratetinywins)

Boring chapter title, but a few things worth noting:

This chapter of Think And Grow Rich doesn’t sound like much until you actually read it. Everyone knows imagination is important for innovation, which in turn brings much riches when done right. 

At first glance, specialized knowledge as a road to riches is obvious enough. That’s why we have this thing called intellectual property. But I like how the book dispels the myth that having that knowledge is all. But it’s not, like how university professors have specialized knowledge but not rich. It completely bypasses the vain societal high water mark that being an intellectual/expert is a successful person. On the road to riches, knowing how to organize and use specialized knowledge is more critical. 

This is the chapter with a practical habit forming/goal visualisation hack: writing down your goal statement and repeating it everyday to “auto-suggest” to your subconscious to create the reality distortion needed to achieve your goals. Interesting, it explains the dynamics of the psychology behind it – how and why repeating a sentence daily will help you achieve your goal. Thanks to this chapter, I created my goal statement (latest iteration):

Any desire that you have that you emotionalized, coupled with faith, will lend it self to be actualised. This was the 1930s version of “fake it till you make it”. Understanding the underlying psychology behind visualization and applying it with success in the field of sports and work didn’t arrive till much later, say the 80s/90s? But this book is historical by comparison. 

This book is old school. First published in the 1930s! But yet, there’s something unorthodox and new age-y about it that feels very 21st Century. I can’t quite put a finger to how strange the ideas are for its time, because the book reads more like something I would find in the self-help or new age section of book stores these days. It starts off conventional enough, talking about desire for achievement, faith that it will happen, imagination, specialized knowledge and organised planning. All the norm for any business/personal success/self-help book. But somewhere near the end he goes weirdo overload and talks about sex transmutation (lol whaaaat?!), and the sixth sense.

What’s up with this thing in life about getting what you want in indirect ways?

What’s up with this thing in life about getting what you want in indirect ways?

I always love a good Tony Robbins quote. @brandonwilson shared one the other day which caught my eye:

I’d been putting this off but I think March is a good time for it. To finally learn how to invest. Why now, or at all? A few things:

For Feb, I decided to learn how to have more fun. Yes, play. What a loser goal, that I even need to set goals to have fun. But for a workaholic like me who had effectively forgotten how to play, it’s like taking baby steps all over again.

Since opening up Keto List Singapore to ads, I’d been having coffee with ad buyers—keto bakers and sellers—just to chat and understand their business and business needs. So far, there’s been more than a handful interested in advertising, and already four had paid for ads, some for a whole six-months block. I’m flabbergasted. That was not the response I was expecting for a site that’s just been around for four months, with 1000+ page views per month. As much as I’m still not believing this is real, it seems like something stuck…and everyday I’m just holding my breath out for when this lucky streak will end. 

It’s been fascinating to watch the nocode trend/movement play out on Twitter. I’d seldom caught on to a movement this early, so it’s been super educational and a curious study of how a new movement takes shape, takes hold in people’s minds, and then fight between themselves to be the dominant narratives. And yes, the culture wars. There’s a few culture wars in the #nocode circles that’s interesting to observe, mostly down to polarized thinking (when in actual fact, there’s room for everyone to live comfortably side by side):

Today I came across a quote on IG, by @elizabeth_gilbert_writer, who wrote the famous Eat Pray Love book. 

What’s a micro-SaaS? I talked about it in my post yesterday, but didn’t elaborate much. Here’s one trend-setting tweet in 2017 by @levelsio:

Today I drew a diagram. I was doing a bit of product retrospective and planning, and to make sense of my different products, I charted them out. Call it my product diversification portfolio strategy. It’s similar to the concept of a diverse investment portfolio, where you have diverse investments to spread out risk, to not put all your eggs in one basket. I use “products” here generally to mean service products and software products.

As usual, @naval delivers his trademark bite-sized tweets of wisdom. His recent podcast and tweet was about the relationship between happiness and efficiency.

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

Chanced on this today via @nepentheez on my social feeds:

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

Just read “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Berber. It’s a great book for anyone who’s starting up a business, and how the reasons that got us into a business might not be the reasons that will propel the business forward. 

I was listening to an Indie Hackers podcast today – an interview with Katie Keith of Barn2 Media, on how she and her husband turned small ideas into a $35k/month business.

[Continuing my learning in marketing and monetization since Juicy January, here’s some more marketing experiments and learning points:]

Reading this article from NY Times got me thinking about all the cognitive biases we might be bringing into this coronavirus situation, and how that shapes how to misjudge the risks. We react reflexively instead of responding rationally due to cognitive biases like:

It’s a play on the phrase “Done is better than perfect.”

My previous two posts of unbundling Craigslist and Excel ended with me wondering:

So I went down the internet rabbit hole with my previous post about unbundling Craigslist and applying that to local classifieds. And go deep enough, you start to get drawn into other threads, like this new one: unbundling Excel.

I’m a big fan of Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans theory. The premise behind 1000 true fans is that the internet will allow indie creators to make a comfortable living with an annual income of $100k if 1000 true fans paid $100 per month for content, music, product or a SaaS. But he wrote that 2008, 11 years ago. In tech, that’s dog years. The original iPhone was launched in 2007, just a year before his post. Much had changed since.

Classifieds. Do you know what that is? I can almost imagine someone younger, who never read the newspapers (yes, the physical paper one) to be completely clueless about it. 

@keni said: 

I had some concerns about the pandemic sweeping through the world right now, so I went down the internet rabbit hole to read and understand the science and the facts. Just so you don’t have to. Having more information and knowledge helps reduce panic.

I’d always said this and I’d always made it a point to mention it here whenever someone asks about how to keep a daily writing habit going.

I’d always heard about the toxic side of Twitter. It’s like scary stories you hear of a faraway land that you had never been to. I’d been using Twitter for years, but somehow, perhaps due to the topics I follow and the people, 99% of the time, it’s Tolerant Twitter. People are mostly well-mannered and civil. Disagreements yes, heated arguments, for sure. But I had not yet experienced irrational internet mobs bullying someone.

Today I just got my first customer testimonial for Sweet Jam Sites. Here’s what he said:

@rasmusrygh wrote something which resonated the other day, about being in the transition between analysis and action; between formulating your next business idea, and acting on uncertainty anyway:

Gratitude always starts with celebrating the little wins in life. I know that. But it always feels forced to me. Even fake.

Lately I’d been musing—agonizing—over the the practice of surrender in the context of habit formation. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

When we were kids, play came naturally. That’s all we did, all day. No agenda. No plans. No purpose. Just play. We didn’t need to be told to have fun. Play was all of our waking hours. It was the vehicle in which we engaged with all of life; the lens through which we saw the world we were just born into. Play was a keystone habit we didn’t need to inculcate. Play was everything. 

For the month of January—dubbed Juicy January—I had set out to experiment and learn more about marketing and monetization:

There’s an interesting trend in food and beverage industry these days, where they’re borrowing ideas from the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. 

It was a seemingly simple and innocent question. Yet, one that I realised—to my horror—that I don’t have an answer to.

It’s hunting season again for me. Out on a hunt to my next product idea. For my past two products, I went with the conventional approach of identifying a really specific niche that I am familiar with and a part of, and then making a product addressing the needs of that particular group. Keto List Singapore was for locals on a keto diet. Sweet Jam Sites was for productized services and freelancers. I tried the conventional approach, it works somewhat, and there’s still lots to do.

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

I recently learned these two words from a friend who’s into biohacking. He related his own experience of doing fasting, and how he went from having no boundaries between work and life, to now having no ‘choice’ but be dictated by what his body needs for optimal health. 

It’s the first day of the Lunar New Year today. For the ethnic Chinese, today is our first day of the year. So happy new year guys!

Planners didn’t quite work out for @brandonwilson. Just like him, I have a huge stack of planners and notebooks meant for scheduling and planning life. Most are gifts, a few I bought myself. But all had been sitting quietly on the shelf for years. I even keep year planners that had ‘expired’, so that one day when I can use it as a random scrapbook or notebook. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

@joncarllewis wrote something which got me diving deeper into my own musings the past few weeks since the new year started. He talked about how journaling daily can be used as a tool for growth, as accumulating data over the years to find solutions to problems now.

Facebook reminded me today of something I posted years ago: 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

I recently started reading Dollars And Sense: How we misthink money and how to spend smarter, by Dan Ariely.

I recently started reading Dollars And Sense: How we misthink money and how to spend smarter, by Dan Ariely. 

I just read Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth, by T.Harv Eker. With a lot of wealth books, it tends to hover around mindsets. But this book has a good balance of both. I found the practical tips helpful in helping me think about what keystone money habits I need to have.

I first asked my #milliondollarquestion back in Jun 2019. Since then, I had explored this audacious dream over more than 20 posts, with the last one in Nov 2019. In particular, regarding my keystone habits, I asked:

I just read Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth, by T.Harv Eker. With a lot of wealth books, it tends to hover around mindsets. But this book has a good balance of both. I found the practical tips helpful in helping me think about what keystone money habits I need to have.

I just read Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth, by T.Harv Eker. With a lot of wealth books, it tends to hover around mindsets. But this book has a good balance of both. I found the practical tips helpful in helping me think about what keystone money habits I need to have.

I’d been reading Dave Asprey’s book Head Strong. It’s all about biohacking the brain for peak performance, and after reading it, I’m hooked. I’m pretty new to the whole biohacking game, and if I do any of it, it’s mostly related to my productivity habits. But he takes his hacks to a whole new level, in areas of life I never imagined as important to mental productivity before. 

I’d been reading Dave Asprey’s book Head Strong. It’s all about biohacking the brain for peak performance, and after reading it, I’m hooked. I’m pretty new to the whole biohacking game, and if I do any of it, it’s mostly related to my productivity habits. But he takes his hacks to a whole new level, in areas of life I never imagined as important to mental productivity before. 

I’d been reading Dave Asprey’s book Head Strong. It’s all about biohacking the brain for peak performance, and after reading it, I’m hooked. I’m pretty new to the whole biohacking game, and if I do any of it, it’s mostly related to my productivity habits. But he takes his hacks to a whole new level, in areas of life I never imagined as important to mental productivity before. 

For the month of January—dubbed Juicy January—I set out to experiment and learn more about marketing and monetization:

I’d been reading Dave Asprey’s book Head Strong. It’s all about biohacking the brain for peak performance, and after reading it, I’m hooked. I’m pretty new to the whole biohacking game, and if I do any of it, it’s mostly related to my productivity habits. But he takes his hacks to a whole new level, in areas of life I never imagined as important to mental productivity before. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

I was hungry for some ideas on how to create a money keystone habit, so I picked up Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T.Harv Eker. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

I first asked my #milliondollarquestion back in Jun 2019. Since then, I had explored this audacious dream over more than 20 posts, with the last one in Nov 2019. In particular, regarding my keystone habits, I asked:

I always enjoyed writings coming out from the Basecamp folks, especially Jason Fried and DHH. Recently Jason talked about how he doesn’t have goals. As a goal-setting junkie, I was intrigued. Can anyone with his level of success not plan goals at all? This is what he said:

Back again to James Clear’s latest mailer:

As usual, James Clear’s newsletter delivers gold. I don’t read 99% of the newsletters that I sign up for, even though I like the idea of being informed and having that choice. Some kind of digital FOMO perhaps, but that’s the privilege of the digital. It doesn’t take up space to keep getting those emails. But I read every single newsletter by James Clear. It really does live up to its own hype of being “The most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web.”

Since 2016, I had been using the 8 forms of capital framework by Ethan Roland & Gregory Landua, to think ahead for what I would like to achieve for the year. I did one last year which I shared on 200wad. For the uninitiated, the 8 forms are: 

It’s 2020! A new year, new decade. And also January - time for monthly goals.

My goal for December was to go deep, into my metaphorical cave to reflect on how 2019 had been for me: 

Last year, I did a whole series of posts reviewing my maker journey of launching products every month (I made it to 8 products). That was my very first year as an indie maker, albeit part-time.  This year again, it was still part-time in the sense that I only started on it in June. But since, I’d been plugging away fulltime on it. I’d just recently done a review of my journey learning to code, so I won’t rehash that. I want to just reflect on the products instead.

2019 had been a year of revival for me when it comes to reading. More accurately, most of the books were read in later half of the year, when I started on my indie maker journey, and needed fresh inspiration and ideas to nudge me forward. 

@JamesClear tweeted this today:

It’s been more than a year since I started writing daily here on 200wad. And somehow, today I just got to a bit of daydreaming about what my dream writing platform would look like. What features would it have, and how would it help me with my writing purpose? 

How does one even review a whole decade? This is the first time I’m doing this in a more serious way, but it feels necessary. After all, this year is also the year I turned 40. It does feel significant in a way. 

Back in December last year, I wrote this post about asking what might be the conditions for cultivating joy and happiness, for me. My latest version (v1.2) then, looked like this:

I did this exercise last year right around the same time. It’s a really easy and revealing review exercise to do, thanks to Tim Ferriss who first coined and shared it on his blog. To recap, here’s how it’s done:

@basilesamel’s post about tracking data and time for personal growth got me thinking about my own experience. Everyone’s context differs, so ymmv.

Just a tiny reframing, yet all the difference. It’s the end of the year, and a new year and decade coming. I’d been think back and planning ahead, and chanced on this slightly different way of framing goals and resolutions:

It always starts with a few words. But these few words had been hard, and a long time coming. It’s hard to say goodbye. As I’m writing this, tears flow. ?

So I’d been travelling a bit in Ubud, Bali. Spent 10 days here. I was initially a little apprehensive about finding keto-compliant foods, as I’m not all too familiar with Indonesian cooking. And Ubud is known for lots of healthy, vegan restaurants, so I wasn’t sure if there’s any keto there.

@keni asked me in her post: 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

You know that indie maker bit of wisdom about making products for yourself, which you yourself would want to use? I just came to a tiny epiphany today, about getting paying users (not just users in general, paying and non-paying): 

I always looked forward to my year-end retreats here in Ubud, Bali. It’s like you hold your breath for the whole year, dive as deep and long as you can, and then come up for air in December. I can literally breathe better when I imagine myself taking off from the tarmac towards the famed Islands of the Gods. I really needed it, and wanted it. It’s no wonder then that I like creating a countdown timer for it every year. Something to look forward to, and the anticipation from watching the days go down brings me a sigh of relief. 

Continuing from the theme of “Things I couldn’t foresee myself doing before, but do so now”, learning how to do programming was the next thing. Or this could be titled: How to learn coding. Or my journey of decoding coding.

I always looked forward to my year-end retreats here in Ubud, Bali. It’s like you hold your breath for the whole year, dive as deep and long as you can, and then come up for air in December. I can literally breathe better when I imagine myself taking off from the tarmac towards the famed Islands of the Gods. I really needed it, and wanted it. It’s no wonder then that I like creating a countdown timer for it every year. Something to look forward to, and the anticipation from watching the days go down brings me a sigh of relief. 

I send messages to myself in my Telegram app, for all sorts of things: useful links I want to get back to, text that I want to copy from my phone to my laptop, and sometimes, awesome quotes and ideas I read from somewhere and want to archive. I was scrolling through it as part of recollecting and reflecting on my year in 2019, and saw this short line that I wrote 2 years ago, in July 2017:

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

It’s full moon tonight. 

It’s so quiet. Too quiet. 

Last month I read The Magic of Thinking Big, by David Schwartz. It’s a motivational book first printed in 1959. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

What if I cast aside all plans and deadlines into the wind, and just followed my energy instead?

Mixed feelings

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

@craigpetterson and I are on a roll with this continuing thread of posts. He mentioned something intriguing about advice:

Continuing the thread on the streak, I’d been reflecting on my own personal experience and learnings, especially around a comment that’s oft-repeated here on 200was, about being too attached to the streak, leading to not-so-pleasant feelings of perhaps guilt, disinterest or frustration.

A bunch of us here on 200wad had been doing monthly goal setting and reviews since August. So it’s been 5 months! I love our monthly goals circle. You get inspired by the interesting goals that others are making, get nudged along if you feel unmotivated, and celebrate small wins at the end of each month with a wrap-up. Working on oneself, improving and progressing, can often feel like a journey without end (till of course, death), so it’s great to break it up into one-month milestones and pit-stops. Pulse and pause. It feels more manageable and I love how I’m getting towards a better me one month at a time…

It’s monthly goals time. I’m going to keep it simple for December. It is, after all, the end of the year. And the decade. What better opportunity to just simply…retreat deep into reflection and restoration. Getting to the required depth to find the real treasures. That’s why - Deep December.

Another month flew by! As the year and the decade (!) closes in, there seems to be a growing unease and urgency to get stuff completed. Well, at least for me. So, quick wrap-up first:

I used to ignore Black Friday, brushing it off as another marketing, consumerist gimmick to get people to buy stuff they don’t need to impress people they don’t know. When I needed stuff, I just bought them, without discount. But that was when I was younger, more self-righteous and had an overly-idealistic and poor view of money. But over the past 1-2 years, I had done some work on re-evaluating my relationship with money and consumption, and I’d say, had arrived at a more balanced view. 

I used to ignore Black Friday, brushing it off as another marketing, consumerist gimmick to get people to buy stuff they don’t need to impress people they don’t know. When I needed stuff, I just bought them, without discount. But that was when I was younger, more self-righteous and had an overly-idealistic and poor view of money. But over the past 1-2 years, I had done some work on re-evaluating my relationship with money and consumption, and I’d say, had arrived at a more balanced view. 

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about 200wad, but prompted by @craigpetterson and @basilesamel in this post, it got me thinking about my experience using the streak mechanism after almost a year:

So the first 200wad competition is now over and I had the pleasure to be one of the judges for it. I shared my votes and comments with @basilesamel, but thought I could share this here anyway. Maybe it might be useful for the authors? I don’t know, I can only assume that as someone who writes daily myself, hearing feedback is always interesting. 

He probably mentioned this before, but there seems to be a pattern going on for all Elon Musk’s companies and products, and I’d venture a wild theory here - they are all built to get us to Mars and live there. Think about it:

So Elon Musk just launched Tesla’s newest product - the Cybertruck, to great fanfare and ‘fiasco’. But I’m not here to talk about how his net worth plunged or the ‘failed’ demo. I want to talk about the crazy, bad-ass of a truck, its design boldness, and its implications.

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

In @craigpetterson’s recent post, he talked about how: 

I just went to Bali with my wife for a short couple get-away. This time, we stayed at an Airbnb shophouse apartment right smack in town, in Ubud central. And boy did we discover a diamond in the rough. 

@abrahamKim mentioned something interesting about New Year resolutions. He read “resolution” as something to resolve, to close for the year, instead of being resolute to achieve a goal set out for the new year.

I just read Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination, by Hugh MacLeod. It’s 80% book, 20% comic kind of book, with a comedic voice. A classic in a way, with first print being 2011 in a time when blogging was still considered ‘in’. So some of the tips feels kind of dated, but the deeper mindsets, metaphors and values still apply today. At least for myself. But most importantly, the title caught my eye. Of course I want to have a evil plan. These days everybody wants to change the world for better. I’d rather have an evil plan for world domination and have fun along the way. He also endorses and embraces the bootstrapped, stay-small, #smalltech/microstartup/micro-SaaS ethos of running a business, made famous by the folks at Basecamp, and also the book Company of One.   

Transport analogies run deep in MJ DeMarco’s book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime. He talked about the types of lanes (“Sidewalk”, “Slowlane” and “Fastlane”) you can take towards wealth, and also the vehicle to wealth (personal development in mindsets, habits, learning). Next he moves on to the different roads to wealth, how it needs to follow 5 “commandments” of need, entry, control, scale, time.

The roads to wealth analogies (“Sidewalk”, “Slowlane” and “Fastlane”) frames the title of MJ DeMarco’s book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime. But now, he moves on to your vehicle to wealth: you. Some good pointers on the mindsets, perspectives and self-development you need in order to get on the fastlane to wealth.

MJ DeMarco, in his book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime, talks about 5 types of businesses that one can do to accelerate wealth in the “Fastlane”. I like it because I have a bias towards software businesses and he recommends it as one of the fastlanes to wealth, but it’s not the only one. He includes also some pretty ‘old/conventional’ ones, like real estate. The key to these 5 businesses that can generate wealth fast is the scale and magnitude, and a certain level of passivity.

After busting the 2 big myths to wealth acceleration in his book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime, MJ DeMarco goes on to share the mindsets and perspectives one needs to have in order to get on the “Fastlane” to wealth.

The second big myth that was busted in the book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco, was about how we had all been convinced that living in mediocrity will eventually lead us to being rich (but too old or ill to enjoy it).

The second big myth that was busted in the book The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco, was about how we had all been convinced that living in mediocrity will eventually lead us to being rich (but too old or ill to enjoy it).

Since starting on my ‘absurb’ goal of wanting to earn a million dollars, I started to gravitate towards being more financially astute and ways that I can get there within a few years (not lifetime). I’m going through a kind of motivational classics phase this time round, and after The Magic of Thinking Big, I chanced on The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco. 

I’d just read the motivational classic The Magic of Thinking Big, by David Schwartz. 

I got a fire to make. Someone gave me that job when I was born. I don’t know who, but that job was mine alone. For life.

I saw this lovely quote in one of @nelecluver’s post:

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

From forest-bathing to…well, real bathing. In the sea.

I remember hearing Naval Ravikant say on podcast how we should set an aspirational hourly rate on our time, even if it’s not for work. So that if going to the store to exchange a broken product saves you less than your aspirational hourly rate, you shouldn’t bother doing it. Give that product away. Or discard it.

Two months into the keto diet right now. @knight asked me about the tools and resources I use for keto, so here goes:

The real price of life is not money, not material possessions. But time. 

From “Play October”, I got pretty excited trying out new JAMstack tools recently, and that really ignited a learning fervour to want to dive in more into JAMstack, and building out more random sites from it - perhaps some for learning (like making a new blog and importing content from my old Wordpress blog), some for money (using JAMstack to create niche sites for other niche businesses). So, GatsbyJS, Netlify, Stackbit - I’m coming for you! More Javascript and APIs this month! So, more code with JAMstack!

Another eventful month went by. At the start, I wanted a “Play October”, where I’m going to run a learning experiment to learn how to inject joy and play into my daily work. I just want to enjoy every f**king work day, because I’m so bad at it and don’t want to reach my destination without enjoying the journey. So I set out experiments to learn about injecting joy and play into my work. Instead of setting a definitive outcome or output, what if I set open-ended, exploratory questions that guide my way towards learning about it?

Thanks to a tweet by @basilesamel, I got introduced to the world of JAMstack. I had heard crazy loads about GatsbyJS and Netlify previously from other makers, but even after checking out their websites, I could not yet grasp the significance behind these new web technologies. Only after being introduced to the larger context and trend behind JAMstack and falling down the Google rabbit hole reading up more articles about it, did it all make sense.

@fyodor shared an interesting book recommendation which I want to read now, a book called Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling. It’s a guide for software developers to launching their startup. Something about the three reasons he shared for wanting to start up resonated with me. It was simple and clear. That was refreshing to read.

Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions. 

I was reading a birthing book the other day with my wife, and it quoted this line from the Tao-Te Ching: 

So I made a product last week, called Keto List Singapore. It’s a curated local directory site for people on the keto diet in Singapore, listing out all the local bakeries, restaurants, cafes, supermarkets and online retailers selling keto-friendly products.

So I made a product last week. In fact, it just took 2 full days of work. Doing that just made me feel more discouraged with learning coding. 

I really liked this tweet from Tiago Forte: 

“Solvitur ambulando.” In Latin, this loosely translates as “It is solved by walking.” 

Saw an interesting tweet trending today: “Things I didn’t know a year ago”. The context was, sometimes when we hunker down deep into work to achieve our goals, we can develop tunnel vision, get too hard on ourselves, and lose perspective on how far we had come and grown on our journey. The process matters too. The trail we blazed is worth celebrating and being grateful for. To do that, we write down the new insights, skills, lessons we learned that we didn’t one year ago on the exact day. So here goes:

“Why should goals have to be attainable and realistic?” asks Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of MindValley. I remembered thinking about the problem with goals a few weeks back when October started, and reading his Facebook post about S.M.A.R.T. goals resonated in that same thread.

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

Throwback to a post when @hiro talked about how important it is to create more output from your learning than simply just taking in input, because just input alone is faux learning.

I was quite enamoured by the childhood vision that @basilesamel painted. He wanted to work in a space like a mad scientist’s lab, full of gear and equipment. A lab of someone eccentric yet wise. 

I chanced upon an intriguing article today, about the 7 types of rest. According to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, author of Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Renew Your Sanity, humans need these 7 different types of rest:

I loved the new twist that @keni just brought to that old quote “Time is money”:

I was listening to the Rework podcast by the folks at Basecamp, and something that @DHH (co-founder of Basecamp, and creator of Ruby on Rails) said made me sit up.

@seunoyebode mentioned about how children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. I thought I can share a bit of how it looks like from a local born and bred Singaporean… I like how our education ministry is making moves towards less exams-focused system. It’s applaudable. But I thought the headline was kind of misleading…

Counter-intuitive things I learned about nutrition and wellness while on intermittent fasting and keto diet, based on personal experience and all the reading up I had to do:

A recent entry in the book The Artist’s Way Every Day (by Julia Cameron), talked about those moments of self-doubt when we are almost finished with our project, and just before launch, that self-critical voice ambushes you and does that thing it always does: 

@basilesamel wrote something interesting about how over-ritualizing his work held him back:

A most empowering phrase to soothe those hard-driving reflexes, especially for all you over-achievers out here. It worked for me, at least.

@keni asked a most interesting question: between health, wealth and happiness, which would you choose?

I’m doing a “Play October” challenge this month, to run learning experiments on how to inject more play and joy into my work. I got lots of goals set up that I want to achieve, but tunnel vision is making my journey getting there much too serious and stressful than I would like. So in order to enjoy the ride as much as the foreseen destination, I have to seriously figure out how to have more joy in my work, in the daily processes and tasks, even if I recognise that there are unpleasant tasks that need to be done from time to time. I want to enjoy every f**king working day.

Recently read this in James Clear’s email newsletter:

I really liked this metaphor for coding that @keenencharles recently wrote about, regarding eating your coding ‘vegetables’:

I subscribe to hundreds of email newsletters that I don’t read, even though I still want to receive them in my inbox. Call it a kind of digital FOMO. But recently, one of these newsletters had caught my attention, and I’m actually beginning to look forward to getting it. It’s the email newsletter by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. The interesting thing is that his newsletter isn’t just about habits - it’s whatever he is. This few lines caught my eye:

I finished another book about antifragility - The Anti-Fragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice, by Sinan Si Alhir. Looks like I can’t get enough of it! I’m really enamoured by how broadly applicable this idea is - in work, career, life, happiness, health. The potential seems quite limitless at this point, because most of what we encounter in life are complex systems, after all. So I’m keen to learn as much as possible about this, and try to apply them later on.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I really enjoyed reading @basilesamel’s post about going offline intentionally to help with productivity, mental well-being, higher order musing and finding balance. There’s a dreamy quality to it, and I love it.

TL;DR - For “Play October”, I’m going to run a learning experiment to learn how to inject joy and play into my daily work.

Looking back, I think I started September with goals more ambitious than I realised. “Singular September” meant a singular focus, on getting 1 product launched, 1 customer and 1% weekly improvement in my keystone habits. How it panned out:

Finally, kintsugi!⚱️

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

Today marks 100 days before the end of 2019. @haideralmosawi wrote about it a few days ago, and I was sufficiently enamoured by the nifty marketing tagline of #100daychallenge to want to try.

@juliasaxena wrote about intermittent fasting last month. Reading her post and another detailed and convincing one by James Clear (author of Atomic Habits), made me swing over and finally give it a go.

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work. 

I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and completed writing down the book notes. It was a thick tome, and one with lots of refreshing ideas that needs careful illustration and examples to understand. It’s been a long time since I took my time to slowly devour every word, ruminate on every concept, reflect on how my thinking was previously limited. It took me 2 weeks of 1-2h readings per day to complete, but it’s definitely worth that mammoth task. If you don’t have the time, I’d recommend just reading the Prologue - it’s a condensed version of all the key concepts in brief. 

What a great idea @haideralmosawi shared, about the 100-day challenge: 

One of the indie maker folks on Twitter whom I look up to - @yongfook - wrote an article about making products as a solo developer/entrepreneur. I loved it and thought they were super useful tips for anyone solo starting out on your product. Paraphrasing them here and adding my own thoughts and applications to it:

I’m reading Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and this line about happiness really caught my eye. I paraphrased it below:

Early this year in January, I started out on my #decodingcoding journey to learn programming from ground zero. I made a list of coding project ideas then, more out of imagination than any tangible sense whether I can really make them:

I’d been having fitful sleep of late. The kind that dreams too hard, tosses too much, and never quite restful enough. Probably partly due to the keto diet, which I’m still easing into. I long for that kind of sleep that’s so deep and restful, you wake up feeling fresh and vibrant, energized and eager to start the day. When was the last time I had that? It’s been so long since that I had forgotten when. But it’s not just about the keto diet. I had the same issues even before the diet change. There’s something more……something that’s missing.

I devoured Naval Ravikant’s podcasts recently and learned so much from it. One thing that caught my attention, was about business models. He talked about how choice of business model can be good leverage:

My one obsession at this time of the year, during mid-autumn: traditional hand-made mooncakes [photos here]. These artisanal treats are so hard to find these days, especially after my previous traditional favourite 大中国饼家 stopped making them by hand and went to over to the dark side of industrialization, making dry, soulless, factory things that they think their old time customers won’t be able to tell. Nope.  

I saw this quote on my social feeds today, and I went “Hell yeah ?”.

@basilesamel wrote about his micro-habits program, which inspired me to share mine too. I previously shared about some of the keystone habits that I’m building as part of my million dollar goal project, centred around:

Oh my god. This entry about being too damn adult and getting in our own way in The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living is so uncannily timely (emphasis my own): 

I feel like I was dragged by my hands tied to a long rope on a car and dragged through mud and dirt while the car drove at 100 miles per hour. This first week on the keto diet and intermittent fasting had been tough. I feel ragged and beaten down, though I managed to stick through the strict requirements. 

I’m nervous and scared. I’d been carrying a bag load of fear around on my chest for a few weeks now. It’s many things - transiting to a new season of life, audacious goals, ambitious new habits to make, learning completely new skills like coding, major changes coming up for family.

My next milestone on my #decodingcoding journey - Ruby on Rails. Earlier in Jan this year, I made a promise to myself that I’ll really learn how to code this year. I asked:

A few of us here on 200wad had recently started doing monthly goal-setting and reviews. Thanks to @craigpetterson who started the Awesome August idea! It was great fun doing it with the group, and nice to have a discussion around our individual goals. We’re all in our September goals now, adding our own unique twist by using different adjectives to the word “September” - Super; Singular; Social; Spectacular September. I love it.

@seunoyebode posted a good answer to a question that @keni asked in one of my posts. Thought I’ll add on to it:

Why I wrote then, back in Dec 2018 when 200wad started:

@rosieodsey recently shared her on-off relationship with reading and with books, which made me chuckle because it’s so true for me too. I often read a book, drop off, come back to it, read some more, write some notes, drop off, absolve to finishing it, but almost……ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Some plans for September - “Singular September”, because there’s a recurring theme of the number ONE. Also denotes singular focus on just getting stuff out the gate and into the world.

Inspired by @craigpetterson, here’s my Awesome August wrap-up: 

It’s been a while since I had steak. Years probably. Not sure why I ever stopped…I guess because I loved chicken better? And steak had always felt a little too…heavy. But today I finally broke the mis-steak (haha pun intended). I like my steak medium well - cooked surface and slightly crispy, charred ends and bits, with the middle still slightly pink. 

I just read Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s been super mindblowing and intellectual read, and there’s so much to unpack. I can now see how antifragility is akin to the foundational ‘physics’ of complex systems phenomena, from why startups can win large incumbents, to why catastrophes are increasing, or even why it’s important to tinker and iterate as makers. It’s a bit like a modern Tao Te Ching, or at least part of it. 

@seunoyebode recently talked about homeschooling as a sleeping billion dollar industry, and I couldn’t agree more. He talked about how schools are not returning on investments and are getting way too expensive, especially university - indeed, a degree is still the high watermark for a “good education”, isn’t it? Also, convergence of other career pathways like remote work, ease of entrepreneurship might be redefining how education helps/hinders that. Cue the well-known narrative of the tech billionaire who dropped out of college.

I just came across a beautiful entry about surrender in The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living:

@haideralmosawi wrote about how being weird is good for startups: 

I went on a work trip last week. It was intense and exhausting, and didn’t have the best conditions for maintaining my health habits, which resulted in my chronic medical condition recurring again. I thought I had left all that behind since a year ago, but now it’s back. They say you can choose between asking why things happen to you versus what things are teaching you. I was crestfallen initially, but now I see what this recurrence is trying to teach me. 

Interesting observation: Makers are abstracting out individual features of the Chrome browser console and enhancing them into better, stand-alone productivity apps for designers and developers. Here’s examples I saw:

Phuntsholing felt like one of those cowboy towns in the Wild West. Not the lawlessness, but the electric vibe of a place that’s at the borderlands; a city far from the capital and seemingly less concerned about formalities; a town with thriving trade and commerce like one of those cattle trading posts in a desert - full of activity and life, but so far from everything else.

Sometimes, a little switch in perspective is all you need to go from “Yes, I want this.” to “HELL YEAH, LET’S FUCKING GO!” This literally happened when I was thinking and planning for my goal of making a million dollars. 

What might be the habit system of someone who makes a million dollars? What keystone habits would this person have? 

I was really inspired after reading It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. As I go into a new season of work as an indie maker/entrepreneur, I want to apply the tips and principles I noted down from the book…that it doesn’t have to be crazy at work; that I can choose calm, not crazy. That involves saying “no”, A LOT. “No” to things that people usually say “YES!” to. 

I recently read The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work The Way You Like. Have The Life You Want. by Elaine Pofeldt.

Flipping to a random page on The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living, this bunch of beautiful words dropped on my lap:

I’m a big fan of creative visualisation, especially for life goals, self-growth and career. Recently, @arthurkendall shared this exercise called Segment Intending which is a way to visualise your day, and to bring possible surprising results on your happiness and how your day turns out. Here’s how he does it:

@davidneuman asked this powerful question in his post today: 

They say practising gratitude is one good way to increase one’s happiness. I get it. You are grateful for the things you have today, and you don’t postpone your happiness for what you don’t have yet. That leads to contentment and satisfaction. But I always wondered if gratitude is some devious ploy to get people to stay in their lot, and discourage them to not be ambitious and overreach. In short, gratitude seems to pair with scarcity, to entrench the poor in their poverty. Really? 

Yesterday on The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living, this bunch of beautiful words dropped on my lap:

I got hacked last week, for the first time ever.

As I start off on my way towards my million dollar goal, I often wonder - is it moral to accumulate a million dollars? 

In his book Rework, Jason Fried mentions how writing is making a comeback. People prefer to email and text instead of calling, not just for work but even in our personal lives. We engage on social issues on Twitter, Facebook and other forums, using text. Even on photo-centric platforms like Instagram, the engagement is primarily around text. Suddenly we’re all writing a lot more than we did a few decades ago. Everything involves writing. I also love how he used writing as the differentiating factor when choosing between hiring 2 equally good candidates. That was quite an insight for me:

As I start off on my way towards my million dollar goal, I often wonder - is it moral to accumulate a million dollars? 

Today on The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living, this bunch of beautiful words dropped on my lap:

Julia Cameron, author for The Artist’s Way and the original muse for this writing habit idea called the morning pages. Three pages of free flow writing, every single day. Write anything, everything. We can probably trace the inspiration lineage of the earlier daily writing habits platforms (like 750words) to her morning pages idea. In many ways - directly or indirectly - 200wad and why we’re all here can be traced back to this little writing movement she started in the 90s. So we can say Julia Cameron is the grand mummy here.

There’s something different about knowing the estimated date of my death. We all know our current age and our average lifespans. We can do the math. But to see the actual date……hits you harder in the gut.

I just read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport.

No, seriously. How did we all come to that narrative, that books are meant to be finished? And if we don’t, then comes the guilt, the self-flagellation, the sense of failure. Because of that defeatism around not finishing books, I started to not want to read books at all, unless I knew beforehand I can and want to finish it. On the other hand, it’s so easy to ‘finish’ reading a social media post, and to have a false sense of productivity after reading a handful. The dopamine hit after hit, from ‘finishing’ post after post on Facebook, is so addictive. 

Just as a thought experiment: What if we applied the habit hacks in the book Atomic Habits to 200wad and the habit of daily writing?

I just read Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear.

I just read Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear.

Listening to Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferris Show podcast, I couldn’t help but wonder what would be my own response to the question of what should be taught in school today, instead of what’s currently being taught.

At the end of June, my tank was dry and I decided to go a month without appointments: 

I just read Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. 

@basilesamel shared a good idea about curating and funnelling 200wad posts onto his personal blog and Twitter account. I’d been thinking the same too, but never once thought about how Twitter can be part of it, nor ever thought of framing it all as a funnel. So thanks, Baz! 

I saw this quote on my social media feeds. Made me sit up:

@hiro wrote about the power of 1% growth:

@brandonwilson wrote about finding three hobbies you love:

How does goal setting look like on the Olympic level? Do world champion athletes do things differently? I’d been reading Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss, and the chapter with Olympic medalist snowboarder Shaun White made me sit up: 

I wrote a series of four posts (1, 2, 3, 4) of book notes on How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. It was such an enjoyable, exciting and enriching read that I now want to try to synthesize and pare it down into a practical method checklist of to-dos that I can use in applying the science of luck to various aspects of my life.

I just read The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit, by Marina Krakovsky. It’s an interesting book about how in our increasingly specialized and diversified economy, most of us are now middlemen, even if we generally hate dealing through middlemen. It then goes on to break down the different types of middlemen, their roles, and the value they bring. I thought this was useful for my work going forward, since I do foresee myself making products that might have to deal with 2-sided markets, or 2 different sets of customers, e.g. businesses/suppliers and consumers.

Have you ever witnessed how a place close to your heart deteriorate slowly over the years into something you feel disappointed to come back to?

I just read How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. It’s a really awesome book into why some people are more lucky than others, and how we can leverage on things we can do in order to be luckier. In other words, luck is (party) a SKILL that you can hone. The science of luck will be an interesting trend to watch, much like how the concept of antifragile trends, because both have their roots in complexity, systems-thinking, and chaos.  

I just read How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. It’s a really awesome book into why some people are more lucky than others, and how we can leverage on things we can do in order to be luckier. In other words, luck is (partly) a SKILL that you can hone. The science of luck will be an interesting trend to watch, much like how the concept of antifragile trends, because both have their roots in complexity, systems-thinking, and chaos.

I just read How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. It’s a really awesome book into why some people are more lucky than others, and how we can leverage on things we can do in order to be luckier. In other words, luck is (partly) a SKILL that you can hone. The science of luck will be an interesting trend to watch, much like how the concept of antifragile trends, because both have their roots in complexity, systems-thinking, and chaos.  

I just read How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life, by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh. It’s a really awesome book into why some people are more lucky than others, and how we can leverage on things we can do in order to be luckier. In other words, luck is (party) a SKILL that you can hone. The science of luck will be an interesting trend to watch, much like how the concept of antifragile trends, because both have their roots in complexity, systems-thinking, and chaos.  

@keenencharles talked about how “change is fundamental to growth”, and how it’s good but scary. It’s such a coincidence, because I just watched a TED talk by Natalie Fratto about the adaptability quotient, and how to measure and improve it.

I had always thought of life as a journey. It seems that I need to challenge that paradigm, after listening to Alan Watts:

@twizzle shared this quote by Neil Gaiman, that made me went “a-ha!” and *face-palm all at the same time: 

@seunoyebode mentioned about keeping up a regular practice of generating ideas for possible products to create (as part of being an entrepreneur), and we got talking about our own practices.

“Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend, the more you have.” - Chase Jarvis

How does one become limitless? That question was inspired by @keni ‘s post: 

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” - Confucius via @naval.

I took notes while reading It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. If you feel that there’s something not quite right with the gruelling work ethic that everyone is now expected to put in, how everyday is fighting fires, and just plain crazy, then this is a worthwhile read. Not just for startup or tech folks, but a critique of how we work in general, whether corporate/startup, private/public/people. 

I took notes while reading The Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business, by Paul Jarvis. Sharing them here as reference for myself, and for anyone who might find it useful. 

I was listening to Tim Ferris’ podcast with Naval Ravikant, and something about making and breaking habits that Naval said really struck a cord.

It’s a season of renewal and change. After finishing work for the year, I definitely feel that I’m eager for change, to start on what I’d been excited about for some time already. 

@abrahamKim did an interesting exercise based on my calculations of how many customers do I need to make a million dollars: 

We’re often told that we have to adapt and adjust to an ever-changing world. Change is the only constant. Self growth and evolution is key to survival. The law of the jungle is the fittest and strongest survive.

@seunoyebode wrote something about how many customers he needs for his SaaS app idea in order to earn X amount, which I happened to also be brainstorming about recently. The question is: how do I make a million dollars in 12 months from a monthly subscription-based SaaS product? I wrote parts (1) - the why, and (2) - the what, previously, so this is a continuation.

Lately, I’d been intentionally creating physical inconveniences for myself just so to be healthier. Health had been a recurring theme for me for the past few years. I had some health scares, and just feel an overall, nagging lack of well-being. Turning 40 this year also motivated me to do more to upkeep my health.

@abrahamKim made a comment about writing inspiration that gave me lots of food for thought:

@knight does quarterly reviews of his annual goals, which I think is an awesome idea. I do one big review at the end of the year, but now he’s making me think I should do this more often.

@basilesamel recently wrote about applying a weight lifting workout concept of progressive overload to writing, which I thought was brilliant: 

@keni mentioned in her post the “the #1 most common regret is not having the courage to live a life true to self and not the life others expect.” I came across articles exploring that topic before, and more recently, chanced upon this line:

When I have that foreboding feeling that my creativity tank is running empty, when I feel like I’d burned both ends of the candle too often too long, I go swim in the sea. Though the swim itself can be somewhat physically tiring, the waters nourish my dried up soul. It’s an almost spiritual thing, and heading to my favourite beach like a pilgrimage. 

There was an interesting thread between me, @mikebyrnes and @Rawhead two days ago, about what our writing voice sounds like.

@philh said in his post “I feel the need of completely cutting off myself from the grid.” and that resonated. I just finished some big work projects and feel like I’m in pre-burnout stage from work, or a “brownout”. I need a break. Though it is unlikely that I can go completely off the grid- no internet, no electricity, no contact - for the time being due to other commitments, I wonder if there are other ways I can still have some semblance of being ‘off the grid’ while still being in the city.

Change it, accept it or leave it.

A side conversation in the comments thread that I had with @basilesamel keeps coming back. This was in one of my previous posts about streak burnout and wellbeing, and we were talking about intentionally breaking your streak as part of growth: 

So, it’s my 200th post on 200wad here. A significant milestone? Not so sure anymore. Back when I was at 100, I was excited to reach 200. But now, at this point, it feels like a small check point in a lifetime of writing. Yes, a lifetime. If this 200-day journey had taught me anything, it was that I enjoy writing and benefit tremendously from daily writing. I have a feeling I’ll continue to write daily, if not frequently, for life. 

I chanced upon this story on the Indie Hackers forum, about how a guy stumbled upon this opportunity to sell this very special variety of onions to a very niche crowd of fans. His name is Peter Askew, and he would sometimes buy interesting domain names to build businesses off them. What started out as a random bid for the domain of VidaliaOnions.com became a nagging idea that keep coming back to him. Eventually, he reached out to a farmer, got a deal going, started small, then saw demand for online orders for the onions sky-rocket. And the rest is, as they say, history.

What would your cabin in the woods look like? Imagine. 

Inspired by @basilesamel ‘s post, here’s my own note to self of the places I had been to. Not necessarily having lived there for one month, just cities and countries I traveled to before. 

@basilesamel said “I came to the conclusion “know thyself” is both the way to live and the meaning of life. The how and the why.” This is so true, so well said. I really like that the most important things in life, or life itself, have this weird, ironic, counter-intuitive dynamic to it.

@keni asked an interesting question the other day, about how to better keep the ego in check. I said mindfulness and meditation. I’m no expert as I’m still a student of mindfulness. But here’s what I learned so far: 

I wrote about how I’m done with work for the year, and @keni asked: 

Or at least I feel like it. I’d been so busy with consultancy projects right off the bat in the new year. Feels like I’m only catching my breath now.

This may sound a bit morbid, but I got thinking about this question after reading a really beautiful obituary in the papers today. What would my own obituary read like? What would I want it to read like? I don’t know the deceased in this case, but here’s his obituary:

@vickenstein talked about how we’re no longer allowing for much serendipity in our lives these days. It’s sooo true, and such a nice reminder. In our rush to be every more efficient and optimised, we forget that getting lost and allowing for serendipity actually gives more outsized joy in our lives than shaving off a few minutes.

My short discussion with @knight made me wonder if anyone here in the 200wad community is feeling burned out due to having to write everyday to keep the streak. Are you?

@seunoyebode just shared this article about Jeff Bezos, where he said “the true secret to business success is to focus on the things that won’t change, not the things that will.”

The common narrative is that we write everyday because we have a goal. Improve our writing. Build up content for professional growth. Writing for fun. But as @jacklyons shared in his post, he’s on a 61-day streak and still he doesn’t know for sure why. I wonder if there’s perhaps another way - writing not due to a goal, but to draw out and discover a new goal everyday.

All the various posts on 200wad about the streak had been an interesting read. It’s a fascinating lens on the depths of human motivation, and the various techniques on what makes a habit stick.

I talked about the “why” yesterday, behind asking “How do I make a million dollars?” It isn’t just about money. It’s about a writing/thinking experiment to dream bigger. Much much bigger. In fact, to call it an experiment is undercutting it. This is a how-to question, to be carried out later after there’s a plan. More like a planning exercise. A crazy one at that!  

Do you know that writing experiment “What would I do if I had a million dollars?” What if you flipped it on its head and asked instead “How do I make a million dollars?”

I recently chanced upon this book The Beautiful No: And Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation. The title really caught my eye, even though I had not read it yet. Just the title alone, made me wonder.

I love collecting beautiful questions. It’s a bit of a hobby, like picking sea shells by the beach. It’s less about the shell and more about the act of being at the beach and picking. And occasionally I chance upon a shiny one that came at the right time, right place. They always say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. In this case, questions, words, thoughts put out by others, by no intention of their’s, become a shiny, insightful provocation to the boiling ocean of thoughts in my head. 

I like @keenencharles recent post about cynicism. It made me sit up and reflect:

Continuing from yesterday’s crossover post, today it’s superheroes meet business world. A lame attempt at writing fiction: 

I loved @twizzle ‘s post Demoning yesterday. He talked about how being a demon isn’t easy, there’s lots of paperwork, bureaucracy, and key performance indicators (oh yes, they had KPIs even in hell!). It’s hilarious as hell! 

It’s raining. Finally. What a relief, after weeks of boiling hot and sticky weather. I was early for my next meeting, so I got myself a cup of local coffee at a local coffee shop, colloquially called a kopi tiam (literally coffee shop in local dialect). It’s that kind of cheap brew that gives you a strong kick with a sharp aftertaste, but require much sugar and sweet milk to be palatable. In the past, people used to roast these cheap beans themselves in the back alleys of their shops, adding sugar to caramelise it as it roasted. Poor man’s coffee is now a national institution, a staple of every middle class Singaporean. The copious amounts of sugar and milk had recently made me reconsider my daily affair with it. But I grew up on these beans, and I still enjoy them from time to time. Especially today. It’s a perfect intermission, between appointments, set within a perfect theatre of life that is the Singapore heartlands. Sitting here at the local establishment, watching the rain fall, watching people coming and going, ears plugged into music aptly titled “Rain”, it was bliss of the mundane, the ordinary. The elderly man at the next table waved at the staff, asking her to dry the plastic chairs. He sat down, staring out in space, waiting, like the rest of us, for the rain to abate. At the table in front of me, a middle-aged lady, hair drenched, just sat there, playing Candy Crush to pass time. Further out, an old lady came to someone at a table, thanked and returned him his umbrella, and walked off with her own. Presumably, she borrowed it from him, got home, got her own umbrella and came back to return his, so that he won’t get wet in the rain. A brief moment of that elusive kampung spirit, that spirit of helping one another, looking out and caring for one another. A beautiful moment of humanity, as rain falls. I’d been too busy. I live for moments like this, but had been too busy to even have the opportunity. A stark reminder for me, now that my projects are winding down, that I too need to wind down, stop, chill and watch life happen as the rain fall, in slow motion.

Every community has sacred cows. OB markers on what’s acceptable and not. Guidelines and do’s and don’ts. Norms that prefer not to be broken. One example might be the rules around the streak.

Reading this post by @juliasaxena made me remember this line I read somewhere before: 

It’s been slightly over a month since I returned from my last epic trip in Japan. And already I’m itching to go somewhere…again. The wanderlust is real.

Galileo was suspected of heresy and condemned to house arrest due to his views of a heliocentric universe, that the Earth revolved around the Sun, contrary to then religious views that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

One day, it will happen. Not today. Likely not tomorrow. But one day in the future, for sure. An over-nighter on a plane. An epic day where you just collapsed into bed out of exhaustion. Or just watching too much TV and plain forgetting. One day, I will lose my streak.

What do you do when you lose faith in humanity? 

Touching toes and brushing past each other in this life. 
Swimming seas and chasing sticks together in the afterlife.

The 10-minute, 200-word post. No pre-determined topic. No prompters. Just a stream-of-consciousness piece. Here goes. 

I’d been writing posts like 200 spaces, where we add a space in between every letter to bulk up the word count. And recently, using lorem ipsum as filler to make a post. A streak trick? That’s looks like cheating!

When is feedback/criticism not needed for artistic growth? Or any sort of personal growth for that matter?

Dear body,

@svenka said about his aspirations writing here on 200wad: “one thing I would really like to be able to improve on, is my ability to not care about what people might think of what I produce.”

Bacon ipsum dolor amet picanha ham hock eiusmod sirloin, bacon cillum culpa consectetur dolore drumstick exercitation ham ut flank pig. Jerky ut tenderloin salami flank capicola nisi. Adipisicing laborum sunt, sausage aute rump tri-tip frankfurter eu turducken fugiat qui. Bresaola cupidatat aliquip cupim. Shoulder fatback consectetur sunt, shankle turducken cow porchetta incididunt ball tip rump tongue tempor spare ribs.

I was checking out the new Profile page layout and clicked on the Following tab. Realised I was following some folks who had stopped writing, and decided to do some spring cleaning of my follow list. I like doing this on my social feeds from time to time, not just on 200wad, but also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

I just wrote my 200th post today! What a ride! Not the 200th day streak though. That’s still some ways off. But my 200th post on 200wad - 200 on 200 - a nice ring to it, right?! Nothing else I want to say here, other than a brief celebratory post here for my 200th.

“So your 30s is basically cleaning up after your irresponsible health, financial, spiritual, emotional, and mental decisions of your 20s?” - @mrmedina

Love the 3 decisions! Simple to understand and to put into practice. What I’m interpreting:

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Any virtue pursued single-mindedly to the extreme will always end up being a vice.

I initially wanted to ask how does one be a traveller in your own country, but realised for many, it is possible to travel in one’s country due to sheer size of the country. But I come from Singapore, which is a small city state in South East Asia. So no such luck when it comes to having a real sense of travel here.

Try your best. Give your all. Break past your limits. You’ll win, anyhow.

F a t h e r    a n g e r s ,  

The Buddha is as the Buddha does. He was born, he got enlightened, he taught, he died. But he never left, really. Where did he go?

I’d been noticing this effect writing had on me. If I write about something, it is purging and releasing, whether good or bad. Write about something good, it fades away faster. Write about something bad, it purges from your system sooner.

Everywhere you go, people are telling you where you should be heading. Work hard! Hustle. Be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be an engineer. Or better yet, start a startup. Be a billionaire. 

O n    t i p s    o f    g r a s s e s 

Expanding on the random space-time theme of my post yesterday We’re all time travellers, perhaps we are all already living in a multiverse. In our own minds. 

@lucjah just asked a really good question that no one had ever asked me before, about my meditation origin story. 

@daniellucas is someone I’d been reading here on 200wad, and his writings often prompt me to sit up and think. Maybe it’s because I enjoy reading musings and reflections on life…maybe it’s his writing style. It’s beautifully descriptive in the way that I’d been enjoying writing. So his recent one about “Subjective time”, left an impression for sure.

Something @brandonwilson mentioned in the comments of this post piqued my interest. 

I    s e a r c h,    I    d i g ,    I     c a l l 

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

Really enjoyed @brianball’s Lego analogy of learning programming, about starting small, block by block, to learn how things work before trying to bundle things together. In many ways, that’s how I started out recently. But I’m realising that maybe that has to be turned upside down now.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

This post was inspired by a thread that @santhoshguru started from weeks back. It was about imagining what how your writing will look like after writing everyday for 5 years. I enjoyed the thread, but felt that I wanted to use this writing device to explore this theme about the future in a broader sense, regarding life in general. 

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:

I’d been meditating for slightly over 10 years now. But it’s not often I write about it. Not because there wasn’t anything to write about, but because what I see and experience when sitting are hard to put into words. Only imagery, metaphors, visualisations and poetry work in this space. And so here it is:

I’d been meditating for slightly over 10 years now. But it’s not often I write about it. Not because there wasn’t anything to write about, but because what I see and experience when sitting are hard to put into words. Only imagery, metaphors, visualisations and poetry work in this space. And so here it is:

I’d been meditating for slightly over 10 years now. But it’s not often I write about it. Not because there wasn’t anything to write about, but because what I see and experience when sitting are hard to put into words. Only imagery, metaphors, visualisations and poetry work in this space. And so here it is:

There was this one time I did ice cream meditation for a few weeks, in order to learn about why I eat so much of it. What I did was to just apply mindfulness when eating it. Just be aware of every spoonful, how my body and mind reacts to it, before, during, after. I realised it’s not so much about the taste of the ice cream that made me consume so much, though I generally do enjoy sweet diary products.

Where is your secret place? 

Today for working meditation, we were tasked to harvest cherry tomatoes at Happy Farm, the organic farm that is a bold experiment by the Plum Village monastery and an astoundingly successful one so far. Harvesting tomatoes is the best part of working meditation on the farm, really. More pleasant than weeding and the other dirty, sweaty work we sometimes have to do. It feels like I’m walking down the supermarket aisle picking up food, except that this is the real deal. The original ‘supermarket’ created by Nature. 

I had a backache. It ached real bad. I really wanted the backache to go away. Doing this and that, stretching the muscles left and right, I tried to make it go away. 

L i k e    p l a n t s    g r o w i n g    t o w a r d s    s u n l i g h t ,    o u r   
q u e s t i o n s    a r e    o u r    L i g h t .    W e    g r o w    t o w a r d s    t h e   
d i r e c t i o n     o f    o u r    q u e s t i o n s .    I t ‘ s    n o t    o u r    d a r k n e s s    w h i c h    s c a r e s    u s ;    i t ‘ s    o u r    l i g h t .    S e t    y o u r    l i f e    o n   
f i r e .    S e e k    t h o s e    w h o    f a n    y o u r    f l a m e s .    O n l y    t a m e    b i r d s    h a v e    a    l o n g i n g .    T h e    w i l d    o n e s    f l y .  

The mournful lament of the reed flute.

@santhoshguru asked a few of us (the 200wad mafia he said! haha) these questions:

I just watched At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about the life of the master painter Vincent Van Gogh. It’s a beautifully intimate art film, shot in a way to bring the audience to experience Van Gogh’s life through his eyes. I love the story of his journey, and the dialogue. So much of what the character says about painting can be applied or interpreted in the light of writing, and also generally, living a creative life.

I just watched At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about the life of the master painter Vincent Van Gogh. It’s a beautifully intimate art film, shot in a way to bring the audience to experience Van Gogh’s life through his eyes. I love the story of his journey, and the dialogue. So much of what the character says about painting can be applied or interpreted in the light of writing, and also generally, living a creative life.

I just watched At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about the life of the master painter Vincent Van Gogh. It’s a beautifully intimate art film, shot in a way to bring the audience to experience Van Gogh’s life through his eyes. I love the story of his journey, and the dialogue. So much of what the character says about painting can be applied or interpreted in the light of writing, and also generally, living a creative life.

I just watched At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about the life of the master painter Vincent Van Gogh. It’s a beautifully intimate art film, shot in a way to bring the audience to experience Van Gogh’s life through his eyes. I love the story of his journey, and the dialogue. So much of what the character says about painting can be applied or interpreted in the light of writing, and also generally, living a creative life.

After lunch it was really cosy to snuggle up on the couch in the Stone Building, to read and just enjoy the presence of friends quietly. People walked past and commented that it was nice here. After all the rain and getting wet, it was lovely to just be dry and warm, with my feet propped up, reading quietly and peacefully.

Yesterday, Brother Phap Tien made a comment that I should smile more, that I practice freshness. It really struck home. I made a comment about how my friends always tell me to smile more.

Japan starts a new era of Reiwa – “beautiful harmony” – today. Reiwa was inspired from an 8th Century poem of admiring plum blossoms in the spring. How fitting, that this new age started in spring too. 

How can such perfect weather ever exist? It’s simply not fair.

Strangely, my transformative travel experiences tend to happen near rivers. It’s something of a pattern I observed again and again. There’s something about flowing water, and being able to live near it, walk alongside it, sit with it, and just watch the water stream and fold and bubble over itself. 

Early mornings walking to class. The sun’s not up yet, and blue light filled the streets. Everyone is still asleep, not even the office workers are up. Yet, some afar, you know that the local boulangerie is already open, as the lovely, comforting smell of fresh oven-baked bread wafts down the street. It stirs my senses awake. I was still groggy and half-asleep for having to wake so early, but this smells never fails to perk me up. I purposely walk slower, down to an elderly pace, just so to extend this sensory feast a little longer. Orange light streaming out from the bakery, and you can see some early birds already shopping for their daily breakfast baguette. Croissants, chocolate danishes and long loaves of baguettes, all warm and ready.

Since first posting about my wandergrief, I’d spent almost 2 weeks here making sense of it, by recollecting my past transformative trips in India, Bhutan, France, and Scandinavia. I was trying to learn from what made these trips transformative and how I recovered from it, hoping that it will help in some way for my current wandergrief after spending an absolutely soul-changing 3 weeks in Kyoto. Some things I learned through this writing experiment:

4am. Groggy, but inspired, I wake. I don’t really know where the Mahabodhi Temple is, but I’ll just walk and figure it out. It’s still dark outside, and everyone’s still asleep, not even the pilgrims.

Work went from 0 to 100 quickly this week, and when the mind is distracted by other urgencies, the wandergrief from my recent 3-week trip to Kyoto fades fast. But since I started on this exploration on wandergrief, I want to finish it. There’s just a few more memories to plough through, to learn, re-learn and see with fresh eyes what I can do with this gift of wandergrief.

Old sun, ancient trees

Old sun, ancient trees

Yes, I was in Tibet in Toulouse. What a strange confluence of factors that brought me here. I just spent a year working solo in London. This was in 2007. Between a work permit and a plane ticket home, I chose the plane ticket. I think I’m done with what I want to do in London. Home calls. That season of life is over, and a new one beckons. I want to return home and give back to it. To Singapore.

Living near a river had always been something that’s close to heart. The Kamo river (鴨川) was close to my apartment, and it became a daily treat. It was often the first thing I saw walking out from my hood, and the last thing coming back. It was my jogging route every other day. It’s a north-south cycling highway to get to and from the city core, so it was my cycling circuit too. When the sun is out and wind not as chilling, I join everyone out on the banks, having picnics, reading, hanging. Ducks and cranes often flocked to its waters, allowing us all to have just that little bit of nature, right within the city.

I cannot finish my meditation on wandergrief without looking back at my travels in India. This time, I’m go further back in time, to mid-2009. I was there on a pilgrimage, to see the holy sites of Buddhism and learn more about this new religion and practice that I had just discovered not too long ago. To follow in the footsteps of Buddha, so to speak. And wow, what a transformative experience it was. I returned home, irrevocably changed. So, this again shows that Kyoto was not the first time I’d been down this road of wandergrief.

I think I’m almost done with exploring wandergrief. There’s a few more memories to rummage through, but as work starts to pile up, and routines start to normalise life, the wandergrief starts to fade away. Slowly but surely. Routine can be an anchor for life, a grounding to life itself, when it’s not the boring, mundane thing we usually complain about. This time, I’m looking back at Iceland, in October 2014. This was not the first time I’d been down this road of wandergrief.

In trying to understand wandergrief from my past experiences, I’m already slowly but surely leaving behind my present one. It feels right. So I will keep going. This was not the first time I’d been down this road.

I’m still ruminating on the theme of wandergrief, looking back, sieving through, rummaging among my memories of past travels where I felt wandergrief. This was not the first time I’d been down this road.

Further exploring the theme of wandergrief here, this time from Bhutan. I’m now looking back, sieving through, rummaging among my memories of past travels where I felt wandergrief. This was not the first time I’d been down this road. 

Lessons on wandergrief from Plum Village in Bordeaux, France. Since I’m still trying to make sense of my wandergrief after 3 weeks in Kyoto, I’m now looking back, sieving through, rummaging among my memories. This was not the first time I’d been down this road. What lessons from the past can I take comfort in? What hangover cures might there be?

As I try to make sense of my wandergrief after 3 weeks in Kyoto, I look back, sieve through, rummage among my memories. This was not the first time I’d been down this road. What lessons from the past can I take comfort in? What hangover cures might there be?

There’s got to be a word to describe the feeling of disorientation, overall sadness, reverse culture shock one feels after coming back from a particularly transformative travel experience.

I really love the Kyoto neighbourhood where I lived in for 3 weeks. It’s the area of Demachi. It’s a super normal hood, to be honest. No temples, no traditional machiya houses, no major iconic attractions. But I’m realising that this trip was a a strange one for me, by normal tourist standards. I deeply enjoyed living here (as a local would), not traveling here (as a tourist would). So, for future reminiscence’s sake, I’m logging down all the places I enjoyed here.

Facebook recently reminded me that I did a photography and prose project back in 2011. Everyday, an image and some words. It’s called “I <3” (“I LOVE”). I stopped at Day 200, for reasons I don’t recall. Reading back, I can’t imagine how I wrote some of the proses. 

I’d been feeling disinterested to post photos of my trip in Kyoto. It’s strange. Usually, I love to post in realtime, or at least during the trip. But not so this trip. Increasingly, for all my recent trips too.

When I was bored of seeing the tourist sights in Kyoto, I thought I broke my wanderlust. You see, when I just arrived, I made a looong list of stuff I want to do. Yes, a long list of thirty things, here: 

Dawn in the Mountain Spring Lodge. Blue light, slowly glowing through the curtains. It’s so quiet in this hood. I can hear the rain falling gently on the roof. A lullabying rhythm, a gentle start to the morning. I tuck deeper beneath the warm, comfortable blanket. Just one more minute…

At first when they came, there were no loud announcements, no rallying cries. Quietly, one by one, they sprouted. No concerted efforts, just tiny sightings here and there, breadcrumbs left sprinkled along the river, hinting to a spring defrosting, arriving.

After writing for this long, I stumbled onto something of an observation. My motivation to write reflects what’s happening in my life. If I’m feeling unmotivated, in a slump or stalemate with my writing, it probably means I’m not very inspired by life at the moment, or feeling indifference, or fatigue. But when I get out to seek some inspiration/novelty, feel excited about life again, or travel, then I start to have stuff to write again. 

It’s strange, but I’d only started observing this recently. When I write about my experience of something before it’s over, it changes how I experience the event as it continues to unfold. Sometimes, it changes in a good way, sometimes not so good. So maybe it’s good to write about things after the fact, not during.

Someday, sometime in the future, I will stop writing here in this platform. Nothing lasts forever. Life circumstances change. Priorities evolve. Seasons end. 

Between strolling down a beautiful tourist path alongside a canal lined with Japanese cherry blossom trees in full bloom, and cycling through the local neighbourhood to get groceries - which is a better travel experience? 

Hara hachi bu (腹八分目), is a Japanese phrase that instructs people to eat until they are 80 percent full. It’s no wonder the Japanese are all so slim! And it’s also only in Japan where you can find food sizes/portions that are smaller than the usual. It’s obvious especially at global brand names like McDonald’s and Starbucks. The Starbucks here carry a frappacino size that’s smaller than the “Tall” size, called “Short”, like a kid’s size version. It looks so cute seeing people hold it. And I love it. Sometimes I just want a taste of coffee, but yet finishing a Tall frap feels too much. I also found Snickers that’s like half the size of the usual “Fun-size” (which is already like one third of the usual Snickers). It’s so small, you can pop the whole thing into your mouth in one go, like one of those bon bon candy wrapped in paper. 

Recently I’d been really enjoying coffee-tasting. It all started during my month-long stay in Ubud, Bali, where I frequented this cafe called Seniman. They roasted their own coffee, and is probably the best third wave coffee place in Ubud. I wasn’t much into coffee then, until I got used to and started expecting great quality coffee every other day. Now, in Kyoto, I’d been frequenting a cafe called Light Up Coffee Kyoto. They serve great single origin espresso-based coffee and drip coffee, and every cup comes with a tasting card to share where they sourced their beans, how it was roasted, and what tastes to look out for. I love it.

I’d recently taken to doing runs even while I’m traveling. I run 3 times a week back home, and it’s gotten to a point where it’s starting to feel like a hygiene kind of habit - where, like brushing your teeth every morning, if you don’t do it, you feel ill at ease and uncomfortable for the rest of the day. I run mostly for health reasons. If I run, I feel better, have more energy, have less bodily aches, and feel more productive and better sense of well-being. Back home, I run the same old tired routes and it’s just boring - I just do it because I have to. But running while traveling is different. I actually look forward to it and enjoy the experience. It’s like a form of travel experience in itself.

What’s the few places on earth that you feel at home in? It doesn’t have to be your country of birth/origin, but somewhere else where you might have traveled to or stayed for some time. 

Dawn

After 115 days, it had finally come to this. I’m quitting writing 200 words a day.

The Japanese have a term called komorebi (木漏れ日 / こもれび). There’s no English word equivalent for it, but it’s short for sunlight filtering through the leaves and branches of a tree. Or “dappled sunlight”, “god rays”.

Pitter patter

Sliding open that door, you enter a sauna of delicious aromas. It’s a tight space after all, just like a real sauna. The smells, as if growing hands, waft directly to your nose and pulls you in to sit on the counter right next to the stoves where the chef makes his magic. You’ll want to be there to see it all, take it all in, to see your bowl of thick, soupy loveliness emerge from genesis to a fully formed meal on its own. Yes, when in Japan, I find I don’t need anything else for food. This is a complete and satiating meal in its own right. 

I’m in Kyoto for 3 weeks, to learn kintsugi - the traditional Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery with gold. Took my first lesson today - it was a half-day, beginner-friendly introductory class. I had to scrap, clean, glue, polish the broken pieces of pottery using tools that required almost surgical precision. It brought a level of intricacy that I relished. And it’s been so long since doing something with my hands had enraptured my attention so deliciously. 

I wanted to say slow travel as per the larger Slow Movement, but it’s not exactly about the pace per se. It’s more about not having a strict itinerary, not trying to achieve things (like check off tourist sights) while travelling, not seeing your vacation as a project to be completed.

I’m in Kyoto for 3 weeks. This was a trip that’s a year late. Looking back, I remembered writing this in my journal last year:

Wind, teach me not the secrets of Nature, but show me how to fly like you do. Teach me to soar the southern skies and find my guiding star. Let me cover lands in time no mortal can surpass, and allow me to see wonders no eyes ever awed upon! I wish to fly, Wind.

There is only silence.

Glowing amber, deep and rich.

Wake up. Wake up……

Wake up. Wake up……

Wake up. Wake up……

Start.

Have you ever slept that kind of deep sleep that you wake up feeling refreshed yet relaxed? This kind of sleep had increasingly been elusive to me, as I get older. Mostly, my sleep is a mix of restless dreams, tossing and turning, dreaming about going to the toilet to pee, actually waking up to pee occasionally, and only sporadic moments of deep sleep. And it’s been a long time since I woke up feeling refreshed, relaxed, excited for the start of the day.. 

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ??‍♂️

Today marks the day I’d been writing here for one hundred days. One. Hundred. But as many of you guys might know, I’d also been in a long writing slump a third of that time, of not knowing what to write. It slowly crept up on me a month ago, around Day 60 or so. But I credit my 100-day streak to my slump, not in spite of it. 

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?               

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m cheating again today. Doing some more research to get inspiration on writing worldbuilding topics. Check out some of these awesome questions about worldbuilding:

I’d been musing about worldbuilding. It’s something that I’d never tried writing and probably suck at, but yet that’s how my inner child thinks and dreams. I wonder if writing 200 words of worldbuilding makes sense. How does one build worlds in 200 words or less? It’s hard not to compare when I think of worldbuilding - Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Universe - and immediately I cower standing next to these giants. Most of all, it’s easy to just stick to what I’m good at writing, and to avoid what makes me feel uncomfortable and apprehensive. 

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ??‍♂️

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?

I’m writing 200 words based on a emoji, daily. Today’s emoji ? also happens to be the topic of the week! Yaaay! Two birds one stone. Or should we say, 2 toppings one pizza.

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today’s emoji is ?:

I still don’t know what to write, so I’m randomly choosing an emoji a day and writing 200 words about it. Another one of my writing slump cheats. Today it is ☕️. Here goes:

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe something with the colour “violet”. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “violet” in your explanation. [I’m doing this for all 7 colours of the rainbow as a writing slump cheat. Read my indigo, green, yellow, orange, blue, red post.]

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe something with the colour “indigo”. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “indigo” in your explanation. [I’m doing this for all 7 colours of the rainbow as a writing slump cheat. Read my green, yellow, orange, blue, red post.]

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe the colour “green”. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “green” in your explanation. [I’m doing this for all 7 colours of the rainbow as a writing slump cheat. Read my yellow, orange, blue, red post.]

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe the colour “yellow”. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “yellow” in your explanation. [I’m doing this for all 7 colours of the rainbow as a writing slump cheat. Read my orange, blue, red post.]

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe the colour “orange”. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “orange” in your explanation. [I’m doing this for all 7 colours of the rainbow as a writing slump cheat. Read my blue and red post.]

I really enjoyed writing my previous post, of trying to describe the colour “blue” without using the word “blue”. So I thought, why not I do the same with all the 7 colours of the rainbow? That would settle my 200wad posts for the next 6 days at least. What a great slump cheat - it gives multiple times over itself! 

So I’m still in a writing slump. Still don’t know what to write! Let’s play games instead!

You are talking to a blind man who asks you to describe the colour of the sky. Write down what you would tell this man without once using the word “blue” in your explanation.

When was the last time you did something for the first time? “My draft” as a post title is probably the best indicator here in 200wad that this is your very first post. Everyday I read the many “My draft” posts on the main feed, and I always wonder - what made you sign up for this? What’s that feeling like to want to try something new for the first time? It’s been 80 days running here for me. Just a short 2.5 months, but felt so long since that very first fateful post. I don’t remember how writing and posting that first post felt like anymore. I just remember I was in Bali on a personal retreat. I was nomading. I had lots of new experiences and I had loads to share and write about. I felt free. I felt alive. That was probably the last time I did something for the first time. And now, after 80 days, as things start to feel ‘normal’, how do you continue to write as if it’s your first “My draft”? How does one write everyday with the freshness of an eager beginner; the curiosity of a bright-eyed baby; the excitement of a teenage first kiss?

Complete the sentence: “I write because ____“__. I wrote some of my own, some from the posts others wrote. Tell us why you write in the comments below. Let’s hit 200 reasons together!

This slump cheat is called Writing Scrabble. Just like how you collect letters to form words in the game Scrabble, you select a bunch of 10-20 words randomly from the dictionary, and try to make something up using some or all of those words.

Characters as pixels, words as graphics. Challenge accepted, @lucjah! 

1. 200wad - first things first! Without which I wouldn’t be writing so much
2. Macbook - the ultimate work machine 
3. Internet - the Pandora’s Box of all things good (and bad)…thankfully love it more than hate it (yet)
4. iPhone 7 - closest thing to having Cortana in my Spartan armour. Most important personal item ever.
5. Air-conditioning - no work is possible without it in such a hot tropical climate
6. Warm climate - I’m definitely a summer person
7. Clean air - many major cities have poor air quality, smog and haze. None here, thankfully
8. Zero power outage - really! With a flick of the switch, you have all the comforts of modernity available to you. Grateful.
9. Clean drinkable water off the tap - many walk miles for water. To have it out of the tap is almost magic.
10. Roof over my head - a lovely comfortable home is bliss at the end of the day.
11. Leisure time - many people around the world have no leisure time, because every waking moment is for survival. I’m lucky and grateful for this.
12. Full stomach - I just had dinner, something not everyone can have on a daily basis
13. Ice cream - my first love was ice cream!
14. Good health - I’m writing this with no pain in body and no major ailment. It wasn’t always so for me, so this is contentedness.
15. Wealth - I’m not rich by local standards but I have enough. And enough is hard to come by already.
16. My family - the bedrock by which I persist and persevere in this world
17. My wife - soulmate, friend, partner in crime in this life and next
18. A job - I’m lucky to get paid well to do public good, in my consulting work with government
19. Sleep - I get to sleep relatively soundly through the night, without fear for my safety nor disturbances
20. Comfortable bed - we spend so much of our lives in bed…does it make sense to spend that much time in an uncomfortable one? 

I still don’t know what to write today. So I picked the first book that caught my eye on my bookshelf, and picked a random page number (108th - an auspicious number!), and selected a sentence from that page as the first sentence for my 200 words of the day. Continue from that sentence in any way you want, any genre you wish, be it fiction or factual. 

It was just a normal Sunday. I went to IKEA because I craved meatballs. But just as I stepped into IKEA, a frail-looking elderly lady tugged on my hand. She looked strange, dressed in black from head to toe. I thought I smelled ash on her. 

Through my writing slump I’m discovering a new way to write. And now I’m inspired to wreck my 200wad posts.

Slump week still ongoing. But I feel like it’s getting more fun despite the slump because I have to get really creative and inventive now to ‘game’ it and still fulfil my 200 words a day. 

So I’d been whining publicly about my writing slump here. I still feel dry and unstimulated to write. I think at it’s core, it’s really boredom. I commented to @christopherdeuda yesterday that it’s a feeling, of general uninspired-ness. Sure sounds like a definition of boredom to me. 

I think since I recognise and accept that I am in a writing slump, I am not going to fight it and just go with it. But how does one keep writing everyday despite a slump? By cheating. 

The best trick to do when you’re stuck and unsure what to write for the day, is to write about why you’re stuck, how you’re feeling about it, and what you can try to do.

This question formed slowly over a dinner conversation with a friend. I was asked what are indie makers are. And at first I said things like, “Oh it’s like indie bands, but for making products.” The idea is there but not quite there yet. Then after using a lot of words to explain what indie makers are, I said something about it being counter movement to startups. That stuck. 

It’s been 66 days since I started writing everyday. And I’m losing steam to continue.

How to practice mindfulness while making (as an indie maker).

To my younger self,

I’m currently doing a design research project around digital inclusion, so I’m using 200wad to capture my personal thoughts and reflections about inclusion as the project progresses. Thoughts and comments my own. 

Do some weekly topics work better than others? Some ruminations after 4 topics so far…

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Writing here on 200wad works, because it became clear when 200wad went down for a while yesterday. You don’t miss what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

I was scrolling through my notes app the other day and chanced upon this list of all the one-off, part-time gigs I ever done in my life, from when I was a kid till present as a working adult. Looking back, there’s some fun ones and some pretty strange ones! What was I thinking then?!

I’d been taking a web development course on Udemy and this week I finally started on learning server-side programming. Front-end development had been relatively easier for me to pick up because over the years of setting up Wordpress websites, one invariably comes across HTML, CSS and some Javascript. I realised there had been a lot of accidental immersion and learning in that aspect. But, back-end is completely foreign to me and now it’s feeling really hard.

Every bit of the (human) world that we humans built exists because of imperfections that we wanted to correct. If everything was perfect, where would the motivation to create arise? If everything is perfect, nothing would need improving, hence nothing gets created.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It’s also a beautiful, poetic analogy for how we can see our imperfections.

Nothing like making stuff with your hands that shows up all your imperfections. But sometimes, that’s the beautiful thing, as the traditional Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi would have it.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read the book here as it’s written, 200 words at a time.

Background: As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook Public Design FAQs in public, on the 200wad platform. It’s a complete field guide to the best practices, strategies, tactics, tips and hacks to using human-centred design approaches in the public sector. Read part 1 and 2. 

What’s the ebook called?

As an experiment, I’m writing my ebook in public, on 200wad. Write it with me, watch me try, see me falter.

A #10YearChallenge for writing. A short story from 10 years ago. Read part 1 and 2 here.

Coding is unforgiving af. It’s like failing a writing exam because you had ONE spelling error.

A #10YearChallenge for writing. A short story from 10 years ago. Read part 1 here.

So we heard a lot about what toxic masculinity is, thanks to that Gillette ad. That Youtube video actually managed to get more dislikes than likes - ~820k dislikes vs ~410k likes at point of writing. Personally, I quite liked the video. It didn’t give me the impression that all masculinity is bad. Yes, it shown some examples of bad male behaviour, but it also role-modeled some good behaviour. Behaviour that’s worth diving into a little more. What’s the moral opposite of toxic masculinity like? 

A #10YearChallenge for writing. A short story from 10 years ago.

I was having dinner with a friend last night and my Day 7 post sparked a little discussion, about a dilemma between enjoying the world today, or working hard to improve it. In the post I talked about how I seem to be tilting towards enjoying life and the world more and more, instead of being anxious about not working, about not making a difference.

Just wanted to write down a pivotal personal moment since starting to learn how to code the past 2 weeks. A moment when coding no longer felt scary.

So I watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix. For those who had yet to watch it, the show format is like Cesar Milan’s Dog Whisperer (where he goes around helping dog owners with their dog problems), but for home clutter. Marie Kondo is a renowned tidying expert helping people clear out clutter in their home, and each episode focuses on the human stories behind people’s homes and their stuff. 

The user experience of coding is broken. As a designer trying to learn coding, I’m surprised by how the UX of the coding activity itself is not built to set us up for success. 

Idea for startups: Take one painful, labourious, repetitive task on Photoshop/Indesign/Sketch/Final Cut Pro/any editing software for that matter, and make that into a product.

In my previous posts, I wrote about writers’ vs readers’ needs on the 200wad platform, and mapped out the features to each of the needs. Today, I thought it’ll be interesting to brainstorm some ideas and map them to the user needs it addresses:

Lately, I’d been feeling the need to be more active and move more, for health. But with work, it’s so hard. And not moving is killing us all. What gives?

In my previous post, I wrote about writers’ vs readers’ needs on 200wad platform, and made lists of each user group’s needs. Today, I thought it’ll be interesting to map out how each of the current features addresses the user needs. I’ll focus on writers’ needs as that seems to be the priority at least for now: 

It’s been fun and exciting witnessing the journey of 200wad, and I’m hoping to contribute to its growth by sharing some ideas. Putting on my hat as a UX/service/strategic designer, I see some potential opportunities for design. 

I’d been using 200wad for 1 month now and had never written so much within such a short period. Here’s my quick pros vs cons review of 200wad, as a user:

It’s been one month into #200wad for me. And it’s definitely been difficult maintaining this habit! There were more than a couple of occasions when I sit down and stare at the screen, clueless about what to write. I found some ways out of the writer’s block, so thought I’ll share what worked for me. YMMV, so would love to hear what works for you too! 

One of my all-time favourite travel moments is when a sudden downpour catches you off guard and strands you in a random place you didn’t expect to hang around too long at. Chance forces you to come to a standstill, and fate brings you to that place, to savour in stillness. 

I learn best by doing, and learning coding via projects and making products is probably the best way to learn coding, for me. YMMV of course.

Warning: Potentially contentious topic. I’m now trying to decide what programming language to learn, and how to do learn it. Go with plain vanilla HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL? Or go with tried and tested Ruby on Rails? Or try something new and shiny like MEAN? 

So I made a promise to myself that I’ll really learn how to code this year. Looking back at my journals, I had been making this resolution for the past 2 years, but it all but fizzled out after some weeks. Last January, I tried going through the tutorials on W3 School, but lost steam after hand-coding two HTML sites. I signed up for a free online course on Python with a local university, but the lecturer was a conceited, disrespectful a**hole, and the course format boring beyond belief. After that, I stopped learning coding altogether for the rest of 2018.

Every year for 3 years now, I’ll set targets that I wish to achieve for the year, using a holistic framework called 8 forms of capital. 

This is a response to @basilesamel’s post about his thought experiment: What if I’m given $1million now? How would that change your life (or not)?

Sometimes we blame ourselves for things even when it’s clearly not our fault, because it helps us feel less vulnerable. Our fault = in control. But we don’t have to do that.

I chanced upon some interesting Whatsapp chat groups for bidding and buying stuff while in Bali.

Inspired by @flowen’s post about the Past Year Review (PYR) method by Tim Ferris, here’s my attempt at it.

Part 7 and final part of a raw report card on my maker journey so far. Some actionable learning points from making and launching minimum viable products every month. 2018 was a maker year for me. My very first year as an indie maker. In Feb, I made a commitment to launch a minimum viable product a month (#1mvp1month). Read Part 1 (list of products made), Part 2 (metrics), Part 3 (what went well), Part 4 (what went to hell), Part 5 (technical learnings), Part 6 (personal learnings).

Some thoughts after being a digital nomad in Ubud, Bali for one month. Is it all it’s hyped out to be? Read why it’s awesome here, and why its less awesome than I thought here.

Some thoughts after being a digital nomad in Ubud, Bali for one month. Is it all it’s hyped out to be? Read why it’s awesome here.

Some thoughts after being a digital nomad in Ubud, Bali for one month. Is it all it’s hyped out to be?

There’s a popular theory that as a maker you need to launch many products in order to get one that’s successful. That’s counter to what many developers/makers like to do, which is to dedicate months and years to crafting a perfect product, only to see it not take off after launching.

Day 16 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 15 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 14 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 13 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 12 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 11 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 10 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 9 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 8 of the #200wad challenge.

Day 7 of the #200wad challenge. 

Day 6 of the #200wad challenge. Listening to life.

Day 5 of the #200wad challenge. What might be the conditions for cultivating joy and happiness?

Day 4 of the #200wad challenge. What questions am I asking in life, family and work for 2019?

Day 3 of the #200wad challenge. Looking back at 2018.

Day 2 of the #200wad challenge. The always changing list of what I want to write more about.

First post on @200wordsaday! Day 1 of the #200wad challenge.