I'm at a cabin for a week, to think

Well, my "think week" has officially begun. We got here about an hour and a half ago, and it's been a whirlwind of getting set up and settling in since then. Everything is so much more complicated with a baby involved! Bringing his swing, play mat, clothes, changing station, etc. added a...
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Start small

I've written before about making small bets, but I want to dive into that a little more today. Many of my business ideas so far have been really big. They've been things that I could easily picture scaling to my ultimate goal of total passive income without changing or pivoting at all. I thought...
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Is it better to write publicly or to write privately?

I've been writing a lot publicly, which has led to a lot less writing in private. I feel that my thinking has become limited in scope as a result. Writing privately, my thoughts meander. I don't put effort into writing concisely, or spend time forming each sentence into a coherent point. I don't feel...
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You become what you study

Robert Kiyosaki has a great point in Rich Dad, Poor Dad: "you become what you study." If I spend too much time thinking about money, I'll be left with money as my sole interest. I think it's really important to balance out my study of real estate and investment with study of other things that...
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Making money versus building wealth?

I'll keep this post short, because I'm still reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and it's late. One more critical realization I've had is the difference between making money and building wealth. Making money usually happens when you work hourly, and you stop getting money when you stop working. Building wealth happens when you invest the money...
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Qualitative income increases versus quantitative income increases

I'm reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad right now. It's one of the most frequently recommended books by successful real estate investors that I've seen, so I thought it'd be worth a shot. Very insightful book. I'm only forty seven pages in right now, but it's already prompted an interesting realization. It's about how I...
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How to display a calendar in the Linux terminal

I read recently in a discussion on IDEs over on Hacker News that rather than using a particular piece of software, one engineer considered the entire Unix system as his IDE. This idea totally blew my mind. Since then I've installed Linux and started using it as my daily driver, gotten set up with...
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I'm going to fix my sleep schedule in two weeks

Having a solid sleep schedule has proven to be the most important thing I can possibly do for my productivity. If I'm getting up early, at the same time every day, I get lots of work done. I'll wake up, make my coffee, get my morning prayers and spiritual reading in, have a workout,...
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De-risking real estate

Perhaps my most important learning of 2020 was "make small bets". The idea of making many small bets totally transformed the way I think about business ideas. As Seth pointed out in his blog post from January 1st, 2021: > ...consider a portfolio of projects. Some of them have a very high likelihood of working...
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Everybody puts in the effort

It's tempting to think that success must be effortless, because I am constantly exposed to success stories, but rarely hear about the effort that goes into them. This is due to the combination of human nature and social media. We like to talk about our successes, and don't like to talk about our failures....
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Reason versus intuition

I had a very interesting discussion with my brother earlier today about reason versus intuition – when each can be used when evaluating a business decision, and how useful they are. His position is that reason is very useful, but that it's dangerous to succumb to the allure of believing that reason can be...
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The paradox of chasing money

The only way to get money is to try to get money. But the act of trying to get money can lead me to doing things that I don't enjoy, am not good at, and so can't make money doing because I'm not good at them... even though that's the primary reason I'm...
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