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Looking over last year, and a first incident for 2025.
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I was walking on the beach. Hadn't walked on a beach in a while. Was loving it. The sea breeze. The waveless sea surface in the morning. After a while, maybe out of boredom, I started placing goals. Rather, my mind started placing goals: "I'll walk up to that grove" or "I'll walk up to that dock and then make my way back". I quickly caught my brain doing this. What happend with me just enjoying the walk? Putting one step in front of the other. Marveling at the scenery. Why do I have to burden myself with goals? After all, goals are limiting! What if you could go way father than your mind's goals? And in business too. Goals as an end of it all, are detrimental. Goals as values is where it all should stand —— I enjoy helping clients daily I enjoy making a sale I enjoy people discovering BlogMaker These are value based goals which will get us way farther than limiting goals that makes us enjoy less the steps in between. At the end of my walk, I reached the dock my mind set as a goal. And that was good. But, since I was aware of this goal that "my own mind" was chasing, I made sure to enjoy my steps up to there. I looked at the fishermen. Stared at the never ending liquid horizon. Thought about how a beautiful grove along the way could have been way better if someone cleaned it up a bit. We can't escape our minds, but in the middle of it all, we can make sure we're enjoying the little steps that make it all valuable.
The desktop app that turns AI chaos into productivity superpowers. No more context switching. No more AI sprawl.
Highlights I look for ways to limit the number of half-complete tasks I’m juggling. I brainstorm ways to talk with more of my early readers. I have trouble accepting a design decision in the Gleam language. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Offer a lower-friction way for users to pre-order my book Result: Switched from Kickstarter pre-orders to Stripe payment links. Grade: A I ran the initial pre-sale through Kickstarter, so I decided to just stick with it for subsequent pre-orders. After a couple of months, I realized Kickstarter requires customers to create an account to buy the book, which adds a lot of friction and discourages people from buying.
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I recently returned a product to goHardDrive, a merchant that specializes in selling used hard drives. During the return process, I discovered that they were accidentally publishing details about thousands of their customers, including their full names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and order details. The leak When I requested a return from goHardDrive, they assigned me a return merchandise authorization (RMA) number ending in five numeric digits. I’m not publishing my actual RMA number, but you can imagine that it was a number like this: