<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"><channel><title><![CDATA[Elliot Bonneville]]></title><description><![CDATA[Dev career advice, design systems, indie hacking, and intentional living.]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/</link><image><url>https://elliotbonneville.com/favicon.png</url><title>Elliot Bonneville</title><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/</link></image><generator>Ghost 2.9</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 16 Jan 2022 21:32:04 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://elliotbonneville.com/rss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><ttl>60</ttl><item><title><![CDATA[Why I stopped posting daily]]></title><description><![CDATA[My last post is from January 22, 2021. From one day to the next, I went from
posting every day like clockwork to total radio silence. Over the past year, I
spent a while wondering why I stopped. Well (obviously), I'm writing again – and
I think I know what happened.

At the beginning of 2021, I was posting every day, and I had two goals. One, I
wanted to get better at thinking, and two, I wanted to build an audience at the
same time. Since then, I've since changed my mind about a couple of key t]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/why-i-stopped-posting-daily/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dd6249cd6c003b4984af</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 14 Jan 2022 21:40:16 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My last post is from January 22, 2021. From one day to the next, I went from posting every day like clockwork to total radio silence. Over the past year, I spent a while wondering why I stopped. Well (obviously), I'm writing again – and I think I know what happened.</p><p>At the beginning of 2021, I was posting every day, and I had two goals. One, I wanted to get better at thinking, and two, I wanted to build an audience at the same time. Since then, I've since changed my mind about a couple of key things.</p><p>After I had written every day for a while, I ran out of stuff to talk about. On a subconscious level, I began to see that I had written most of the stuff that I'd been ruminating on for a while, and all I was left with to talk about were the daily, surface-level thoughts</p><p>I started experiencing serious cognitive dissonance between the effort I was putting in and the perceived value I was receiving. I wasn't thinking new things when all my time was spent writing up the things I'd already thought. I gradually began feeling that the things I writing were a waste of time for anybody else to read.</p><p>Eventually, I realized that the two goals I had were in conflict with one another: <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/im-going-to-cut-every-post-in-half/">nobody wants to read your sh*t</a>, as Steven Pressfield puts it. Writing for myself and writing to build an audience were diametrically opposed ideas. The one requires a constant flow of low-quality, low-information-density content that is valuable only to you, and the other more sporadic, high-quality and high-value writing that is mainly valuable to others.</p><p>As these two realizations slowly dawned on me, I toughed it out and kept going. I'm ashamed to admit to posting a lot of largely meaningless fluff in an attempt to keep my streak. Not long after that had become my sole reason for writing, my willpower ran out. I didn't write about stopping writing (because nobody was reading my posts anyway), nor did I miss more than one or two days before I stopped cold. I quietly came to the conclusion it was no longer worth doing, and stepped away.</p><p>With all that said, I started writing again purely because I <em>wanted to.</em> I want to share the things I'm learning with others, and I want to build an audience and get feedback on what I think. Moving forward, I'll be talking about the things that I find are worth sharing, things that I won't cringe at the thought of asking others to spend their time reading.</p><p>What kinds of things?</p><p>Well, this is an entrepreneurial software engineer's blog. I feel like writing about engineering from time to time. I'm going to. Same is true of real estate, of building a SaaS application, and – as of recently – of studying to get hired at a FAANG (the rigors of FAANG entry, even for experienced engineers, is a blog post for another day).</p><p>Oh, and the bonus reason I stopped writing is because I discovered we were expecting Kid #2 shortly after Kid #1 turned five months old, and life devolved into absolute and total chaos for a while. I'm sure that had something to do with it too.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Asking for advice]]></title><description><![CDATA[Had a great conversation with my wife today about advice.

I've been calling up a ton of real estate investors that I've been referred to
via friends and family, or other contacts that I've made. I've learned a lot and
had some great conversations, but I've also had a few conversations that were of
a more negative tone.

One conversation in particular resulted in me feeling pretty down today, even
though I didn't learn anything that would cause me to seriously reconsider my
strategy.

Beyond the]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/asking-for-advice/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498480</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2021 04:36:38 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Had a great conversation with my wife today about advice.</p><p>I've been calling up a ton of real estate investors that I've been referred to via friends and family, or other contacts that I've made. I've learned a lot and had some great conversations, but I've also had a few conversations that were of a more negative tone.</p><p>One conversation in particular resulted in me feeling pretty down today, even though I didn't learn anything that would cause me to seriously reconsider my strategy.</p><p>Beyond the facts that I've been learning from these conversations, another thing that I am taking in is the tone of the conversations. If the conversation takes a negative turn, that's enough to significantly affect my mindset for the rest of the day.</p><p>My wife pointed out that it's very important to consider where the advice that I'm receiving is coming from. I should only ask for advice from people who are where I want to be or have experience in that area.</p><p>If they aren't where I want to go, then they probably don't know what the path to get there looks like. They might not think it's possible, or might act negative about it in order to improve their own status by sounding confident (people love to say negative things even if they're not totally sure it's true; it's a low-risk status-boosting signal exemplified by the caustic environments on forums like Reddit and, occasionally, Hacker News [this very comment may or may not fit in that category]).</p><p>It's also difficult to have a good phone conversation with somebody that I'm talking with for the first time. There are nerves involved and both parties are feeling each other out and trying to get a sense for the person on the other end of the line – their status, intelligence, ability, value as a contact, etc.</p><p>This sort of "meta conversation" that always happens on first phone calls and initial meetings detracts from the actual body of the conversation.</p><p>One way to get around this seems to be for me to be even more authentic and less worried about presenting myself as being more than I am (despite the fake it till you make it mindset that is popular these days).</p><p>A lot of people also have a negative mindset, or "will to fail" as <em>Think and Grow Rich</em> refers to it. This emotion carries through their conversations, and it's that kind of emotion that really put me down today.</p><p>Anyway, most important is the kind of person that I am seeking advice from. I think I'm going to back off from talking to every kind of investor I can reach and focus on talking to people who have walked the path that I want to go: who started out and focused on acquiring distressed apartment buildings and now have a portfolio of at least 100+ units right now.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Perseverance]]></title><description><![CDATA[A friend and I had an interesting discussion about perseverance today.

Perseverance: persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in
achieving success.

He pointed out that having perseverance in small matters is what allows us to
have perseverance in larger ones.

How we act in small matters is how we act in large matters.

If we begin giving up in small things, how long is it before we begin giving up
in larger things? And conversely, if we start persisting through smaller
diffi]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/perseverance/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847f</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2021 04:56:29 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A friend and I had an interesting discussion about perseverance today.</p><p><strong>Perseverance: </strong><em>persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.</em></p><p>He pointed out that having perseverance in small matters is what allows us to have perseverance in larger ones.</p><p>How we act in small matters is how we act in large matters.</p><p>If we begin giving up in small things, how long is it before we begin giving up in larger things? And conversely, if we start persisting through smaller difficulties, how long will that take to change the trajectory of our entire lives?</p><p>After all, there is a gap following every decision: the point between the initial excitement that drove that decision and the point where the action(s) the decision entails produce results.</p><p>This gap is why many people that begin a new journey give up before they reach their destination. The initial excitement has been spent and the success hasn't come down the pipeline.</p><p>But the bridge across the gap is named Perseverance.</p><p>Perseverance is why I'm posting again today, despite being exhausted and not having really taken the time to think through what I want to say or really taking that all-important time to reflect on the day today. Despite having not posted yesterday (yes, it was bound to happen eventually...). Despite view count on this blog having dropped down to nearly zero per day.</p><p>The key thing is to keep persisting, even when it doesn't seem worth it. Because our brains are really good at getting us to stop putting in the effort, especially at times when it's most needed (c.f. the end of <em>The Truman Show).</em></p><p>Of course, sometimes it really isn't worth it. There is a fine balancing act between pursuing the things that are worth it and avoiding the things that aren't.</p><p>Looking at the bigger picture helps us to perform this balancing act: if I'm the kind of person that typically gives up on things before they have come to fruition, I may need to spend more time building perseverance. Conversely, if I rarely quit things, even after I have reached a point of diminishing returns, perhaps I need to learn to quit more often.</p><p>We all exist on a spectrum of perseverance, and we should strive to reach a happy medium between too much perseverance, which is called being stubborn, and too little, which is called being lazy.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Why I write every day]]></title><description><![CDATA[Why do I write every day, even when I have nothing to say?

It's nearly midnight tonight, and I just spent three hours driving back to
Providence from Maine, after the end of our vacation, and here I am sitting at
my desk writing.

I haven't had any time to think today, so I don't have any brilliant insights to
share (or perhaps I am merely more conscious of that fact just now than I
normally am).

Nonetheless, I'm writing.

In part, I'm writing because writing every day is a standard I've set f]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/why-i-write-every-day/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847e</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2021 04:41:34 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Why do I write every day, even when I have nothing to say?</p><p>It's nearly midnight tonight, and I just spent three hours driving back to Providence from Maine, after the end of our vacation, and here I am sitting at my desk writing.</p><p>I haven't had any time to think today, so I don't have any brilliant insights to share (or perhaps I am merely more conscious of that fact just now than I normally am).</p><p>Nonetheless, I'm writing.</p><p>In part, I'm writing because writing every day is a standard I've set for myself. I'm not writing in order to always share useful, actionable information.</p><p>Go read other writers who post but rarely if you want to find useful information, not here.</p><p>Here, all you will find are the humble daily thoughts of a man trying to make his way in the world starting from scratch (though I will admit that "scratch" means one thing to an American and quite another for most other inhabitants of the world).</p><p>I write every day in order to write every day. If I miss a day of writing, why should I write tomorrow? Or the day after that? Or the day on which I do truly have a valuable thought that I would otherwise lose if I didn't set it down?</p><p>I'm writing even when I have nothing to say, because if I don't write every day, I won't write any day. It's how I am.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[From my phone]]></title><description><![CDATA[I'm writing this post from my phone. That's the reason I chose Ghost as a
content platform: no excuses.]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/from-my-phone/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847d</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 18 Jan 2021 04:14:35 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I'm writing this post from my phone. That's the reason I chose Ghost as a content platform: no excuses.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Rubiks cubes]]></title><description><![CDATA[My cousin learned to solve Rubiks cubes recently. While we were hanging out,
somebody else picked up the cube started fiddling around with it.

They solved one side and were proud of figuring that out, but my cousin pointed
out that solving just one side wasn't enough to solve the whole thing.

> "It's not just about solving one side, it's about using systems and algorithms."
Naively solving one side of a Rubiks cube can leave you stranded, without a way
forward.

Instead, establishing and follo]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/rubiks-cubes/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847c</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 17 Jan 2021 03:54:06 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My cousin learned to solve Rubiks cubes recently. While we were hanging out, somebody else picked up the cube started fiddling around with it.</p><p>They solved one side and were proud of figuring that out, but my cousin pointed out that solving just one side wasn't enough to solve the whole thing.</p><blockquote>"It's not just about solving one side, it's about using systems and algorithms."</blockquote><p>Naively solving one side of a Rubiks cube can leave you stranded, without a way forward.</p><p>Instead, establishing and following systems is critical for ultimate success.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I'm going to cut every post in half]]></title><description><![CDATA[I recently read a post by Steven Pressfield (author of The War of Art) called 
The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned
[https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned/]
.

The main takeaway? Nobody wants to read your sh*t.

So, starting with this post, I'm going to edit all my posts down to half length
(yes, half) after I finish writing them.

I expect this to achieve three things.

 1. My writing will deliver more value in re]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/im-going-to-cut-every-post-in-half/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847b</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 16 Jan 2021 03:41:47 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I recently read a post by Steven Pressfield (author of <em>The War of Art</em>) called <em><a href="https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned/">The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned</a></em>.</p><p>The main takeaway? <strong>Nobody wants to read your sh*t.</strong></p><p>So, starting with this post, I'm going to edit all my posts down to half length (yes, half) after I finish writing them.</p><p>I expect this to achieve three things.</p><ol><li>My writing will deliver more value in return for time spent reading it.</li><li>My first drafts will become more concise.</li><li>I'll think about my topics more in the process of deciding what to cut.</li></ol><p>I stated earlier in this blog that the point of this blog is to learn to think better. And that's still true. But if I'm going to spend so much time writing, I might as well try to get better at that too!</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[How to get stuff done]]></title><description><![CDATA[> A journey of 10,000 steps begins with 9,999 steps.
I named my car Success several years ago. That way, I nearly always have the
keys to success in my pocket.

On a more serious note, we all have goals, individually and shared. For a while,
I had no idea how to accomplish mine, but I've recently learned that there are a
few tools we can pack to make our journey towards success more likely to
succeed.

I wrote about them several times over the past week, but I figured I'd jam them
all into one p]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/how-to-get-stuff-done/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49847a</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:49:01 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote>A journey of 10,000 steps begins with 9,999 steps.</blockquote><p>I named my car <em>Success</em> several years ago. That way, I nearly always have the keys to success in my pocket.</p><p>On a more serious note, we all have goals, individually and shared. For a while, I had no idea how to accomplish mine, but I've recently learned that there are a few tools we can pack to make our journey towards success more likely to succeed.</p><p>I wrote about them several times over the past week, but I figured I'd jam them all into one post and throw in some quotes and saccharine, empty proverbs for good measure and future reference. Also for <a href="https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_171#:~:text=Generative%20learning%20is%20a%20theory,493).">generative learning</a>.</p><h2 id="writing-your-goals-down">Writing your goals down</h2><p>You know what they say... writing goals down makes you 40% more likely to achieve them. Or something.</p><p>Maybe it's just that the people that bother to write their goals down are the ones serious enough to do something else about them too, and it's just correlation – not causation.</p><p>Either way, there's just one way to be certain you're the kind of person that's likely to achieve their goals: write 'em down.</p><h2 id="build-systems-and-standards">Build systems and standards</h2><blockquote>“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” – Archilochus</blockquote><p>Setting a goal is not enough to accomplish it: rather, it is merely the determination of a destination.</p><p>The next step we must take is to figure out the path the journey to that destination must take us on. This path is made up of our systems and our standards.</p><p>A standard is something we must consistently do in order to achieve our goal. The system is the means we use to accomplish that standard.</p><p>Without them, we won't take a single step in the right direction, and it's all just wishful thinking. So we need to build them and adhere to them.</p><p>But how do we figure out what these systems and standards are? Simple: we use...</p><h2 id="reverse-engineering-and-inversion">Reverse engineering and inversion</h2><blockquote>"Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant." – David Perell</blockquote><p>Reverse engineering goals into plans is a form of inversion operating at a macro level. It's where you start with the end point and work the steps out backwards until you arrive at the present moment, coming up with standards and systems to support those standards by asking what will prevent you from achieving our goals until you've come up with every blocker and a means around it.</p><p>I picked this up from David Perell in his post <em><a href="https://perell.com/essay/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life/">50 Ideas That Changed My Life</a></em>.</p><p>Okay, great. We know what we have to do. But is that enough?</p><p>No, of course not. How can we know where we are on our journey if we have no clue where we were yesterday or where we're going to be tomorrow?</p><h2 id="tracking">Tracking</h2><blockquote>"You can't manage what you can't measure." – Peter Drucker</blockquote><p>Tracking is how it's possible to know whether or not you're, well, on track to achieve your goals.</p><p>The simplest, most effective tracking system is a simple spreadsheet: seven columns, one for each day of the week, and a row for each goal.</p><p>As you go through the week, mark each day in your spreadsheet when you meet your standard for that day.</p><p>At the end of the week, count how many points you got out of the maximum possible. Divide the actual score by the potential score, and this is your success percentage.</p><p>Your entire goal in life is to raise this score. Success is when that score is at 100% all the time.</p><p>If you want to succeed, you must get deadly serious about meeting 100% every single week. Unless you're at 100%, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Only dead fish go with the flow.</p><p>That's assuming you track everything, of course – if you don't, you can be almost certain you won't improve.</p><p>Bonus tip: improving is as much about removing unrealistic goals as it is about meeting realistic ones.</p><h2 id="momentum">Momentum</h2><blockquote>"An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." – Sir Isaac Newton</blockquote><p>Sometimes success is simply a matter of building momentum. This is what the vast majority of goal achieving and habit building consists of: slowly picking up the plates from where they got knocked down by the last thing life throws at you.</p><p>But true excellence comes when we are able to keep the plates spinning long enough, to keep building momentum, because then compound interest comes into play.</p><blockquote>“<em>Compound interest</em> is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.” – Albert Einstein</blockquote><p>The best way to become successful is to preserve your momentum at all costs.</p><h2 id="realize-that-the-journey-is-all-there-is">Realize that the journey is all there is</h2><p>With all that said, there is no true destination when it comes to achieving our goals, <em>even when it seems like there is</em>.</p><p>The moment we reach the end of one journey, we discover a new destination and must begin again. </p><p>It's important to realize that, because if we don't we risk becoming like the many men and women, who, upon having reached their goals, realize that what they have striven for does not satisfy them, and all they have sacrificed to reach that point seems to be more desirable than what they have attained.</p><p>So it really is important to enjoy the journey along the way. To stop and smell the roses. To be satisfied with where we are, where we're going, and what we're doing right now.</p><p>In every moment that we do not try to improve, we have lost. In every moment that we do try to improve, we have won.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Quick post]]></title><description><![CDATA[Just a quick post for today – it's getting rather late in the day.

Unfortunately, I'm not too sure what to write about still, because it's been a
busy day of goal setting and visualization and that all doesn't leave an awful
lot of room for thinking about what post I could write.

So by this point I'm a little empty of ideas. I think it's also interesting to
note that I didn't find much time to sit and think, or engage in reading about
where I want to end up, so I don't have a lot of new though]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/quick-post/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498479</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:12:06 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Just a quick post for today – it's getting rather late in the day.</p><p>Unfortunately, I'm not too sure what to write about still, because it's been a busy day of goal setting and visualization and that all doesn't leave an awful lot of room for thinking about what post I could write.</p><p>So by this point I'm a little empty of ideas. I think it's also interesting to note that I didn't find much time to sit and think, or engage in reading about where I want to end up, so I don't have a lot of new thoughts at the end of the day.</p><p>I think one thing I need to make sure I get is time every day to just sit and think and read. I've been writing my posts in the evening every day after the bulk of the day has passed, but I'm moving towards writing earlier in the day.</p><p>This is probably just part of the pain of adjusting my schedule – being in between having cut time from doing things at the end of the day, while not yet carving out that time at the beginning of the day.</p><p>One thing that does come to mind as I sit here writing, though, is intentionality. </p><p>I've written about it before and I'll write about it again, but the power of intentionality is definitely showing up over and over again in my sphere of consciousness.</p><p>That is, before I do something, considering why I might or might not succeed, then comparing the results with my prediction after the fact. It seems like this is the only true way to get better at things, because the alternative is mindlessly moving forward.</p><p>It's the difference between 10,000 hours and 10,000 reps that gets talked about online sometimes: mindless repetition does not a master make.</p><p>The most recent time I heard about it was in Bigger Pockets podcast 432 (released January 7th, 2021) where they talked about four qualities or traits that the hundreds of millionaires they've interviewed all share: decisiveness, momentum, tracking, and mastery.</p><p>Decisiveness is being able to make decisions quickly; momentum is what comes from making a series of decisions quickly and taking action on them; tracking is how you know you have momentum – and how you improve on things, and mastery is the result of being very intentional with those many decisions made close together.</p><p>The net product of these four traits is getting very good at what you're applying them to, and when that thing is making money, you end up a millionaire.</p><p>This is a long and rambling post; as Mark Twain said...:</p><blockquote>“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”</blockquote><p>P.S. This post is 473 words long (less this message), and I wrote it in nine minutes.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Kindling]]></title><description><![CDATA[There's a wood stove in the cabin we're staying in right now and we've had a
couple of fires going a day.

I say a couple, because I keep letting the fire we light in the morning die out
by not feeding it more big logs once it's burnt through the first few that I
started with.

When that happens, I'll usually wait until it's night and then light another one
at night to keep the place warm and cozy.

The trick with starting a fire is, you have to start small. You can't just light
a big log on fir]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/kindling/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498478</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2021 01:43:53 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There's a wood stove in the cabin we're staying in right now and we've had a couple of fires going a day.</p><p>I say a couple, because I keep letting the fire we light in the morning die out by not feeding it more big logs once it's burnt through the first few that I started with.</p><p>When that happens, I'll usually wait until it's night and then light another one at night to keep the place warm and cozy.</p><p>The trick with starting a fire is, you have to start small. You can't just light a big log on fire with the starter blocks. It's too big to catch by itself, and when I try the starter block flames up big at first, but then burns out. It doesn't last long enough to catch the bigger logs on fire by itself.</p><p>So what I have to do is go outside and take the hatchet and split up one of the bigger logs into smaller pieces.</p><p>It's cold out there, and there's a lot of leaning over and effort involved, because the wood they provided out here is hard to split and the hatchet is pretty small.</p><p>But if I put in that effort consistently at first, then baby the fire while it's getting started, eventually it'll get big enough and hot enough from the smaller pieces that I can start adding larger logs.</p><p>After that, I can leave it alone and not really worry about it too much, and it'll keep me warm and cozy for a while without any input or effort.</p><p>The trick is all in starting small and letting the fire build up slowly. Only once it gets going can I sit back and relax and let it take care of me.</p><p>From what I've seen, this is all true of businesses, too.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The alchemy of achievement]]></title><description><![CDATA[In my last post, I wrote about how standards and habits are important, not just
goals. But how do you transmute goals into achievable habits and standards to be
met?

There are two tools which make up this alchemy of achievement: reverse
engineering and inversion.

Reverse engineering lets us derive simple, actionable, low-level goals from our
high-level abstract goals (which are in turn more or less accurate
representations of our even higher-level abstract desires).

It's the process of lookin]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/the-alchemy-of-achievement/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498477</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 12 Jan 2021 21:10:36 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In my last post, I wrote about how standards and habits are important, not just goals. But how do you transmute goals into achievable habits and standards to be met?</p><p>There are two tools which make up this alchemy of achievement: reverse engineering and inversion.</p><p>Reverse engineering lets us derive simple, actionable, low-level goals from our high-level abstract goals (which are in turn more or less accurate representations of our even higher-level abstract desires).</p><p>It's the process of looking at our end state and figuring out what must be done and where we must move from to get there by asking the question "what must occur before this can happen?" It's looking at step Z and figuring out what step Y is, rather than trying to guess what step A must be.</p><p>But reverse engineering is difficult to do well in a vacuum. It's one thing to say "I want financial independence," and another to figure out what the action to take that leads to it is.</p><p>That's where <em>inversion</em> comes in. Inversion is the process of asking questions about how to reach the goal, where the goal, the question, or something about the context is entirely flipped.</p><p>Instead of asking "how can I succeed?" inversion suggests that we ask "how can I not fail?"</p><p>It's much easier to answer that question than it is to come with a strategy for succeeding.</p><p>By way of a practical example, my wife and I were talking about bedtimes and getting up earlier today, because we both agreed that I get my best work done in the mornings, and so I need more of them.</p><p>The conversation went like this:</p><hr><p><strong>My wife: </strong>"How can we get up earlier?"</p><p><strong>Me: </strong>"I don't know. What's preventing us from getting up earlier?"</p><p><strong>Her: </strong>"Well... going to bed late, I suppose. We'd get up earlier if it wasn't so hard. And it's hard because we don't get enough sleep."</p><p><strong>Me:</strong> "Good point. So how can we go to bed earlier? We've been trying for a while and we're still not there. It's not just a matter of <em>trying </em>harder: we've been trying plenty."</p><p><strong>Her: </strong>"Hmm, not sure. Well... what's preventing us from going to bed earlier?"</p><p><strong>Me: </strong>"If we ate dinner earlier we wouldn't stay up as late, because we'll get our relaxing time and our dinner time in by earlier in the day."</p><p><strong>Her: </strong>"So it sounds like we should pick a time to be done with work by every day, so we can focus on dinner and recreation for the rest of the evening."</p><p><strong>Me: </strong>"You're right. Let's focus on finishing work by 4pm every day so we can work on dinner after that. And instead of trying to stay up as late as we can get away with, let's focus on going to bed as early as we can. That's a total paradigm shift for me – I've never thought like that before."</p><hr><p>And just like that, we had created a <em>standard</em>, a habit we could work on, from our goal: by reverse engineering from our desired end state of getting up earlier to the needed actions, using inversion.</p><p>By focusing on what could cause us to fail (having a late dinner, focusing on staying up as late as we can rather than going to bed as early as we can), we came up with a series of steps we could take to avoid falling into those traps.</p><p>Those steps can now become standards and systems, which are what truly lead to success.</p><p>It's a process of transforming something useless, yet concrete, like lead, into something useful and desirable, like gold: the alchemy of achievement.</p></hr></hr>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Try-hard]]></title><description><![CDATA[So many things came at me today I don't even know where to start.

I jumped in the river this morning for about half a second (though I did go all
the way under!) and it was great, despite the 15° F temp. I came up with every
excuse under the sun not to get out there and do it, but I eventually got it
over with, and I'm glad I did.

Also, I started and got about a third of the way through Millionaire Real Estate
Investor by Gary Keller, and was really inspired. Lots of great advice and
mindset i]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/try-hard/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498476</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 12 Jan 2021 04:10:42 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>So many things came at me today I don't even know where to start.</p><p>I jumped in the river this morning for about half a second (though I did go all the way under!) and it was great, despite the 15° F temp. I came up with every excuse under the sun not to get out there and do it, but I eventually got it over with, and I'm glad I did.</p><p>Also, I started and got about a third of the way through <em>Millionaire Real Estate Investor</em> by Gary Keller, and was really inspired. Lots of great advice and mindset in there so far.</p><p>I was suggested to start reading the book by my cousin, who's also into real estate investing. Incidentally, I had a long phone call slash interrogation with him today about what he's doing for real estate investing now, since he seems to be doing pretty well for himself and is on the track I'd like to be on, though a little further ahead.</p><p>But what really hit different was episode 433 of the <em>Bigger Pockets </em>podcast. They had on a guy named Ed Mylett. I'd never heard of him before, but he was a awesome speaker with some fantastic points. He's also started a bunch of different businesses and done really well for himself as a business founder, a performance coach, and a real estate investor.</p><p>I wanted to note down a few things from the podcast that stood out and were really inspiring and relevant.</p><h2 id="you-don-t-rise-to-your-goals-you-fall-to-your-standards-">You don't rise to your goals, you fall to your standards.</h2><p>It's easy to set goals. In fact, that's what I'm hoping to do this week. But his point, and it's a point I've heard elsewhere, is that you don't rise to the level of your goals: you fall to the level of your standards.</p><p>Or as the old quote goes...</p><blockquote><em>“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”</em></blockquote><p>One of the other things I'll work on this week is deciding on some new standards and habits to put into place. I don't want to just make goals and then wait for them to happen; I want to go get them.</p><h2 id="getting-serious-about-getting-what-you-want">Getting <em>serious</em> about getting what you want</h2><p>Beyond setting and adhering to standards, the overarching lesson that Ed shared on the podcast is about <em>identity</em> – it's a big touchstone of his talks, and something that a lot of performance and life coaches talk about a lot.</p><p>Anyway, he shared a story about his son, who was losing golf tournament after golf tournament – badly. Not only was his son losing consistently, he was coming in last every time<em>.</em></p><p>Eventually, his son becomes motivated to win by having his playing skills insulted. Ed and his son decide to win, and Ed helps him do this by applying his performance coaching (especially as it relates to <em>identity) </em>to his son – something he hadn't been doing up to that point with golfing.</p><p>After he and his son get serious about winning, not only do they go on to win that tournament... but the next sixteen. And then his son gets a full ride golf scholarship (I didn't even know those existed).</p><p>One of the key things they did was have his son put on a different shirt that he'd never worn before while golfing. They called it his "winning shirt," and he only put it on after he got serious.</p><p>That shirt and the accompanying mindset shift were enough to propel his son from last to first – literally. It represented a shift from just playing around to being serious about winning. Obviously, his son learned a lot from playing in a more relaxed way, but only started winning once he decided to really go fo rit.</p><p>I'm afraid I've butchered the story – but you can listen to it at the end of <em>Bigger Pockets</em> episode 433, and I'd highly suggest doing so.</p><p>The point is, his son underwent an identity shift the moment he decided to get serious about winning, and it had a powerful result.</p><p>I want to do the same thing.</p><p>I also have my own little anecdote that relates to this – playing pool with a friend of mine this past Saturday. While we played he was telling me about how it's important to make note of where you think the ball is going to go before it does, so that when you strike it you know how to improve in the future. </p><p>He smoked me that first game, but towards the end of it I started paying really close attention to where I thought the ball was going to go, and playing seriously – intentionally.</p><p>Playing seriously, and with intentionality, wasn't enough to carry that first game, but the next one around, I beat him for the first time ever. It was very satisfying, and I don't think I would have if not for playing intentionally, getting serious about winning, and trying very hard to.</p><p>This touches on something I've talked about in the past that Ed's story on the podcast today also touches on – intentionality. Being serious. Playing to win.</p><h2 id="accepting-yourself">Accepting yourself</h2><p>The thing about playing to win is that before you can get serious, you have to admit the possibility of losing, and losing because of your own fault.</p><p>One of the reasons I don't always play serious is that I'm afraid of losing. I'm not afraid of losing if I'm not trying, because that doesn't reflect on my abilities and aptitudes. If I don't care about something, it doesn't matter if I fail.</p><p>On the other hand, if I really care about something and I fail miserably at it while trying my best, then the loss is clearly on me.</p><p>It's my inadequacy, my failure, my not being good enough.</p><p>And that is really difficult to accept. That's why I often want to pretend that I'm not actually trying, which is what leads to me not actually trying.</p><p>Funny how that works, isn't it? You spend long enough pretending to do or be something, and eventually you become that thing – whether it's what you want or not.</p><p>I can only get serious about succeeding once I accept that I might lose, even when I give it my best shot. It's that fear of losing when I'm trying my best that keeps me motivated to learn and to try even harder.</p><p>There's something different that happens when you say "I tried really hard – I gave it my best shot – and I failed," compared to when you say "Eh, I wasn't really trying anyway."</p><p>You can only improve yourself once you accept that you're lacking, and to do that means accepting yourself, shortcomings and all.</p><p>After all, if you're "good enough" as it is, why would you try to get better?</p><h2 id="i-m-getting-serious">I'm getting serious</h2><p>This is one of my goals for 2021: to accept myself, including where I'm lacking, and genuinely get serious.</p><p>As of now, I'm getting serious about making a living from passive income. If I fail from here on out, it's because I wasn't good enough, or I did something stupid, or I was lazy, or I didn't know something. But I'm going to learn from my mistakes and become stronger from them.</p><p>I am trying my very hardest from now on.</p><p>P.S. Yes, that is scary to post publicly – and probably comes off a bit, well, try-hard... but what's so bad about that? Honestly, I'm more scared of never getting where I want to go.</p><p>P.P.S. It sure does seem like our society rewards people who <em>don't</em> try hard, so much that try-hard is actually an insult, rather than a compliment. I should probably be more careful about judging others for trying hard (though it's interesting to note that I rarely do so, despite my personal fear of judgement).</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I'm at a cabin for a week, to think]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 lot to our luggage, and he
definitely took top priority as soon as we got in the door. He needed to be seen
to, settled, fed, and kept from getting too bored while we were trying to
unpack, and only now has he]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/think-week/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498475</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 11 Jan 2021 02:53:04 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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. </p><p>Everything is so much more complicated with a baby involved! Bringing his swing, play mat, clothes, changing station, etc. added a lot to our luggage, and he definitely took top priority as soon as we got in the door. He needed to be seen to, settled, fed, and kept from getting too bored while we were trying to unpack, and only now has he settled down.</p><p>With that said, I was still able to get the Bluetooth surround sound set up and a fire in the fireplace, and some stew we made last week thawed for a (very) late dinner, and my wife was able to get a load of laundry in (which has proved to be a bit loud, unfortunately – but we shouldn't have to do much of it while we're here).</p><p>The cabin sits right on a river in Maine, and is gorgeous. We're super happy with it. We have everything we need, and everything seems quite functional (in stark contrast to some of the other airbnbs we've stayed in). There are some foodstuffs, spices and things leftover in the fridge and cabinets, and we brought a cooler full of food too. We're set for eating for a couple of days, but we'll have to venture out shopping before too long.</p><p>With that all said, I'm planning on going to bed early, then getting up bright and early tomorrow morning for a quick dip in the river – never mind that it's going to be 14° F! I'm just going to jump in then run back to the cabin for a hot shower. Just want to get the blood flowing for a week of thinking.</p><p>I've found that doing hard things helps me think more clearly. Whenever I take a cold shower in the morning, my thought processes are clarified for a little while, and I make decisions that I'm happier about long term.</p><p>This might be entirely due to placebo effect, but I'm not sure. I don't know who said it, but there's a good quote:</p><blockquote>Do hard things, and life will be easy. Do easy things, and life will be hard.</blockquote><p>Doing a hard thing like getting into freezing cold water does a couple of things, physiologically and mentally.</p><p>First, there's the adrenaline and dopamines that flood your system from the temperature shock. You just feel great physically (well, after you warm up again) – and you want to do it again.</p><p>Then there's also the satisfaction that comes from having done something challenging. Once so rewarded, my brain is primed to make additional difficult, yet also rewarding decisions.</p><p>After all, that's how habits work on a long-term scale: trigger, action, reward. Set up a trigger for an action, take that action, and then fulfill the reward center in the brain.</p><p>Don't quote me on this, but I'm willing to bet that reminding your brain how rewarding it is to do something hard on a shorter timescale like a few hours or less helps it see more clearly what lays on the other side of longer-term hard decisions.</p><p>I don't want to try to break it down too much, though. I'm not a neuroscientist or a psychologist. All I know is that if I do hard stuff, especially getting in cold water, I'm happier with the decisions I make afterward.</p><p>We'll, uh, see if I stick with it the whole week, though. I already jumped into the ocean yesterday, which is what inspired me to try going in the river this week.</p><p>Anyway, with that all said, I'm going to spend the week visualizing our goals for our twenty year, ten year, five year, and finally one year plans, a la <em>The ONE Thing</em> (of which I brought a hard copy with me, along with a pen and a highlighter).</p><p>I hope to emerge at the end of the week with a renewed sense of clarity and vision, a set of goals (both personal and for the family), and steps to take immediately to reach those goals.</p><p>Another deliverable for this week is a good budget that will help us reach those goals. We really fell off of the budgeting bandwagon when Quinn was born, and haven't had time to set it up again.</p><p>We're here until the 16th, so we'll spend a couple of days doing some self-authoring and writing down where we are presently (writing things down is a critical part of the curriculum), and where we hope to reach. Then we'll spend another day revisiting our long term goals and evaluating where we are in relation to them right now.</p><p>Finally, we'll spend a couple of days breaking down the difference between our current state and our long-term goals into steps we can take to reduce that difference, reverse-engineering things from our desired end state as suggested in <em>The ONE Thing</em>.</p><p>By the end of the week, I'll know exactly where I want to go in 2021, and what I have to do to get there, starting next week and month.</p><p>Looking forward to it.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Start small]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 it made
sense to avoid starting things that wouldn't get me to where I wanted to go.

Well, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I'm coming to the
conclusion that this approach is very naive]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/starting-small/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498474</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 09 Jan 2021 23:24:50 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I've written before about making small bets, but I want to dive into that a little more today.</p><p>Many of my business ideas so far have been really big.</p><p>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 it made sense to avoid starting things that wouldn't get me to where I wanted to go.</p><p>Well, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I'm coming to the conclusion that this approach is very naive. A more sophisticated approach is to start small (or perhaps a better word is <em>certain</em>), and scale up once I have something working.</p><p>The subject of this post was inspired by <a href="https://patwalls.com/your-business-idea-is-embarrassing-and-that-s-a-good-thing">a post from Pat Walls</a> of StarterStory.com titled "Your business idea is embarrassing, and that's a good thing."</p><p>In the article, he writes about why small business ideas are great by pointing out how many of the businesses that are big today started out as very small ideas, executed well, that achieved initial traction and then scaled from there.</p><blockquote>Everything grows from a simple idea.</blockquote><p>Something else I'm reading right now is <em>Rework</em>, on <a href="https://smallbets.circle.so/c/ama/favorite-books">Daniel Vassallo's advice</a>. It contains a couple of different sections (the book is uniquely organized into unrelated, concisely stated insights rather than long chapters) that are very relevant.</p><p>The first section is this:</p><blockquote>Learning from mistakes is overrated.<br><br>What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what <em>not</em> to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don't know what you <em>should</em> do next.</br></br></blockquote><p>If failure isn't valuable, then failing at something really big is much more expensive than I've been thinking. At least if you fail at something small, you haven't lost a big investment.</p><p>I've always justified these bigger ideas by saying that even if I don't succeed, at least I'll learn a lot from my failure that will inform my next idea.</p><p>This justification is backed up by the classic Silicon Valley startup-mentality quote "Fail fast", at least in my mind. An alternate interpretation of this quote might be "ship early and ship often, even at risk of failure," but it's not my primary reading.</p><p>My mindset here was first challenged by a chance encounter with a software salesman from out West who'd moved back to Boston to launch a startup in the construction and renovation space. He was interviewing me for a CTO role, and when I suggested "fail fast" as a good <em>modus operandi</em>, he got ticked and shot it down angrily.</p><p>"'Fail, fail, fail,' is wrong! It's 'win, win, win big'!"</p><p>I didn't have enough context to understand it at the time, but he was right.</p><p>The other quote from <em>Rework</em> is this:</p><blockquote>Planning is guessing.<br><br>Unless you're a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands.<br><br>...<br><br>Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can't actually control.<br><br>...<br><br>Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.<br><br>...<br><br>Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.</br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></blockquote><p>What does this idea that planning is bad have to do with "start small"?</p><p>Every big idea I've had has been backed up by a big plan to scale to exactly where I want to go. But I know so little about each idea here in the present that it's really all just guesswork based on a little research.</p><p>If I accept that I can't "plan" my way to massive success, that leaves me free for improvisation – in other words, for dealing with reality as it comes.</p><p>It also means I must necessarily start small.</p><p>With all that said, it doesn't mean that I should start with ideas that must always remain small. It wouldn't make sense for me to try to build out fully passive income from a business that won't scale (running a small cafe, for example).</p><p>It just means that I shouldn't try to build something too big from the very beginning, because those plans probably don't have much in common with reality, I'll get nothing from them if I fail, and even more, failure is very expensive.</p><p>That final thought reminds me of a relevant tweet from Daniel Vassallo (who's been really on point lately!):</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Failure is a very expensive way to learn.<br><br>Apart from the loss of time and money, it also wrecks your motivation.<br><br>You&#39;re better off having something small that&#39;s working, than a string of highly-ambitious failures.</br></br></br></br></p>&mdash; Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) <a href="https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1346719577187598336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/>
</figure><p>I think the only other caveat to this entire thread of thought is that while it's important to start small, it's also important to move on from a business if at any point you discover it's not going to lead you to where you want to be.</p><p>Starting small comes with the disadvantage that it's tempting to stay small. If that's still enough for you to achieve your dreams, great! But don't get trapped in a neverending sidequest while the main quest goes untouched.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Is it better to write publicly or to write privately?]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 that I'm wasting time when I explore side-topics of a particular subject,
and as a result I think more, and more broadly.

I pursue my curiosities more, but I also write poorly, because I don't fee]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/writing-privately-and-publicly/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498473</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 09 Jan 2021 05:28:53 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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.</p><p>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 that I'm wasting time when I explore side-topics of a particular subject, and as a result I think more, and more broadly.</p><p>I pursue my curiosities more, but I also write poorly, because I don't feel the pressure to perform. I don't shy away from loquacity, if that's the easiest way to capture my thought process, rather than trying to write as simply as possible.</p><p>I'm much more honest with myself. I am comfortable sharing things with my journal that I wouldn't share with the general public.</p><p>Conversely, when I write publicly, I practice my writing skills much more – at the expense of farther-ranging thought processes. I find myself clarifying things, stating them more precisely than I otherwise would if I were writing merely for myself.</p><p>I get better at transcribing my thoughts. I also capture more context and explain things more fully, knowing that my readers will not enjoy the same frame of mind that I do at the moment of writing (this applies even when my reader is future me).</p><p>With that all said, which is better, writing publicly or writing privately?</p><p>It's a rhetorical question that creates a false dichotomy. Each approach is useful when used at the appropriate time.</p><p>When I want to think something through carefully which is private or contains information that when shared presents only downsides, I do so in private. This includes the meandering thoughts that often produce good insights, yet are of limited value in their raw form.</p><p>When I want to practice my writing or capture a thought process fully which I think is probably useful or actionable insight in some way, then it's useful to share that publicly.</p><p>In summary, the one does not preclude the other: it's useful to write both publicly and privately. It's just important that I align my actions with my goals. As with all things, intentionality is key.</p><p>Takeaway: I need to keep writing in public, but start writing more in private so that my thinking expands further.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[You become what you study]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 I care about, lest I cease caring
about them.

After all, what's the point of being rich if all you can think about and care
about is money?

I'm just writing this post to remind myself of that.]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/you-become-what-you-study/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498472</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:52:18 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Robert Kiyosaki has a great point in <em>Rich Dad, Poor Dad</em>: "you become what you study."</p><p>If I spend too much time thinking about money, I'll be left with money as my sole interest.</p><p>I think it's really important to balance out my study of real estate and investment with study of other things that I care about, lest I cease caring about them.</p><p>After all, what's the point of being rich if all you can think about and care about is money?</p><p>I'm just writing this post to remind myself of that.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Making money versus building wealth?]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 you made from hourly labor,
and when you've built wealth you keep getting money even when you stop working.

How R. Buckminster Fuller defines wealth
The bigge]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/making-money-versus-building-wealth/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498471</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:03:16 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I'll keep this post short, because I'm still reading <em>Rich Dad, Poor Dad</em>, and it's late.</p><p>One more critical realization I've had is the difference between making money and building wealth.</p><p>Making money usually happens when you work hourly, and you stop getting money when you stop working.</p><p>Building wealth happens when you invest the money you made from hourly labor, and when you've built wealth you keep getting money even when you stop working.</p><h2 id="how-r-buckminster-fuller-defines-wealth">How R. Buckminster Fuller defines wealth</h2><p>The biggest brain-exploding moment I had today was reading about how R. Buckminster Fuller defines wealth:</p><blockquote>“Wealth is a measure of a person’s ability to survive so many days forward [without working].”</blockquote><p>To be honest, this concept nothing new – I'm familiar with the concept from the FIRE movement and Mr. Money Mustache. But it neatly codifies the vague mental image I've been holding in my mind of success.</p><p>I am successful – I am wealthy – when I can survive more days without working than I can survive until I die.</p><p>This is my goal. And as the FIRE movement says, I can do this in two ways: reducing my spending, and increasing my passive income, until my spending is lower than my passive income.</p><h2 id="passive-income-established-is-time-earned">Passive income established is time earned</h2><p>By looking at these two numbers, I can calculate exactly how much freedom I earn with every dollar of passive income I establish.</p><p>Assuming an annual burn rate of $100,000, every dollar I add in yearly passive income (personal annually recurring revenue – PARR?) will get me:</p><pre><code>annual_burn_rate = $100,000
monthly_burn_rate = $8,300
daily_burn_rate = $274
minute_burn_rate = $0.19

dollar_time_value = 5.26 minutes, 0.08hrs</code></pre><p>Therefore, every dollar I add in PARR generates just over five minutes of freedom per year. Multiplied by the 66 more years I'm expected to live, that single dollar turns into 5.5 hours of freedom total.</p><p>Of course, that dollar in PARR costs many dollars of non-recurring revenue, and that exact ratio depends on what the return of my investments is, which in turn depends on the type of investments I make.</p><p>Anyway, that's all for now. I'm back to reading <em>Rich Dad, Poor Dad</em>... and maybe getting some sleep. </p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Qualitative income increases versus quantitative income increases]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 should allocate my energy
and focus towards quantitative and qualitative rate increases.

What do I mean by "qualitative rate increases"?

Speaking strictly in terms of quality of life, ]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/should-i-stop-raising-my-rates/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498470</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2021 05:14:05 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I'm reading <em>Rich Dad, Poor Dad</em> 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.</p><p>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 should allocate my energy and focus towards quantitative and qualitative rate increases.</p><p>What do I mean by "qualitative rate increases"?</p><p>Speaking strictly in terms of quality of life, the return on investment that I get for spending energy to figure out how to raise my rate by say, $20/hr, is trivial to the kind of results I could get by investing that same energy in real estate or some other kind of passive income generating tool.</p><p>At the rate that I'm currently making, an linear increase in rate, even a significant one (say if I were to start making an extra $100/hr or even an extra $200/hr) will not result in a significantly increased quality of life for me.</p><p>I might be able to buy a more expensive car and spend slightly less time thinking about upgrading my monitor and sound system, but I think that's pretty much it. Other than that I'll still be working for other people and probably won't have <em>significantly</em> more freedom.</p><p>After all, that income will always be predicated on the notion of working on complex projects with other people, which necessitates a certain level of cooperation and communication which is at odds with the idea of the free kind of life I'd like to lead.</p><p>That's not an absolute given, of course, and there are always interesting one-off projects where that's not the case, but I think the lowest common denominator of projects I can expect to work on falls in that category.</p><p>That's not always a bad thing – I'm not saying I don't like working on complicated projects, because I fully realize that sometimes the best and biggest things we can do can only be done with others and in service of a greater whole.</p><p>But I think at heart I'm a creator. Michelangelo didn't design his <em>David</em> via collaboration, nor did Bach his <em>Well-Tempered Clavier </em>(though a well-informed argument could be made against the independent origin of his <em>Musical Offering</em>, of course). I'm certainly no artistic genius, but I desire that independence to pursue the things I am called to (by?).</p><p>To reach independence, I need to focus on pursuing not just a qualitative, linear increase in income but an entirely <em>quantitative</em> increase in income – where the <em>type</em> of income I am making changes. I'm talking about building passive income. I mean, it's the dream, right? But the question is, how much should I focus on it?</p><p>I think it may perhaps not make sense to focus on raising my rates for the time being. To do so seems shortsighted (though perhaps my future self might disagree with me).</p><p>Instead, I need to focus on building passive income, because that appears to be the only thing that will enable me to do what I want. Right now, that's going to be via real estate.</p><p>Of course, there's also the idea of decreasing risk to consider. If I call a rate freeze on myself and lose my momentum, it increases the risk of my other ventures; they must succeed in order to make that a wise decision.</p><p>With that all in mind, I am committing to spending <em>much less</em> energy overall on raising my rates for the time being. It's not worth the investment right now.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[How to display a calendar in the Linux terminal]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 i3 (which I've tried to use in the past and gave up on), revamped my
Vim config, and have really started to make use of all its different features a
lot more.

One particularly cool tool I just found t]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/how-to-display-a-calendar-in-the-linux-terminal/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846f</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2021 19:04:01 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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.</p><p>Since then I've installed Linux and started using it as my daily driver, gotten set up with i3 (which I've tried to use in the past and gave up on), revamped my Vim config, and have really started to make use of all its different features a lot more.</p><p>One particularly cool tool I just found through a bit of Googling is the <code>cal</code> command. It'll output the current calendar – useful for calculating dates and things.</p><p>It's simple:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/2021/01/termtosvg__igu15sf.svg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy"/></figure><p>I read up about it <a href="https://www.configserverfirewall.com/linux-tutorials/display-linux-calendar/">here</a>. (By the way, the above terminal animation is an SVG made using <code><a href="https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg">termtosvg</a></code>).</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I'm going to fix my sleep schedule in two weeks]]></title><description><![CDATA[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, shower, eat breakfast, and get to work – all before 7am.

If I get that routine in, it's nearly a guarantee that my day will be
productive. But I can't get that routine in unless I wake up on time – 5am.

Every minu]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/fixing-my-sleep-schedule/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846e</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2021 18:45:09 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Having a solid sleep schedule has proven to be the most important thing I can possibly do for my productivity.</p><p>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, shower, eat breakfast, and get to work – all before 7am.</p><p>If I get that routine in, it's nearly a guarantee that my day will be productive. But I can't get that routine in unless I wake up on time – 5am.</p><p>Every minute past 5am that I get up ruins my sleep schedule, my morning routine, and guarantees that my day will be less productive, or not productive at all.</p><p>It's a bit all or nothing with me. Either I'm getting up at 4:45 to 5am, or I'm out of bed somewhere between 9am and 11am. I almost never wake up between 7am and 9am. I'm not sure why that is, but I've come to respect that fact as incontrovertible.</p><h2 id="my-sleep-schedule-is-bad-right-now">My sleep schedule is bad right now</h2><p>Today, I didn't get out of bed until 10am. I didn't even eat breakfast until 11:45am between showering (and showering the baby), making the bed, cleaning up a little, and making food.</p><p>My current losing streak started when I decided to finish writing my book last November. It was about halfway through the month, and I had only a single chapter written, because I hadn't decided yet to really make a go of it. But over the next two weeks I wrote ~120 pages (25k words, give or take).</p><p>I wrote quickly, but it cost me my good schedule – I got into the habit of working late to get the thing done, and in fact I didn't go to bed on launch night until 3am.</p><p>I've come to view this phenomenon as "spending" whatever routine I've developed, and I think that's happens with crunch times: you spend whatever effort you've put into getting a good routine worked out all at once, pouring it all into meeting your deadline. And then after that, you're toast for a while.</p><p>For me, after a couple of weeks of recovery (from December 1st on), it was already starting to be the holidays and I knew that even if I did get my schedule sorted out it would probably fall off the rails again almost immediately.</p><p>Now that we're through the festivities and into "windup week" for my next <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/two-months-of-freedom/">two months of freedom</a>, I need to get my sleep schedule into shape so I can reconstitute my normal, productive routine.</p><h2 id="routines-have-momentum">Routines have momentum</h2><p>One thing I've noticed is that since getting married, my routines have more momentum to them. When it was just me, I could change my habits and routines on a dime. But when there are more people involved, it seems like it's more difficult to do that. There are other people who have their own habits and routines that they're settled into, and it's harder to make course corrections.</p><p>That's why I've decided that these "crunch time" deals are not so good for me any more, and I'm going to try to severely limit them. I can get a lot done in a short time frame, and I've always worked best under pressure, but the lack of productivity over the following weeks and months means that it'll only rarely be worth making that investment.</p><p>With that all said, I'm planning on fixing my sleep schedule over the next two weeks to get back on track to getting up at 5am.</p><h2 id="tools-i-ll-use-to-fix-my-schedule">Tools I'll use to fix my schedule</h2><p>The single most helpful tool I've found for getting on a good sleep schedule is putting my phone down away from my bed. This one simple change has helped me fix my sleep schedule more times than I can remember, and yet I always seem to forget it when I need it most.</p><p>Really, it doesn't matter how many alarms I set. If my phone is within reach, I'll always turn them off, either without waking up (and thus having no conscious memory of it), or if I do wake up then I end up going on my phone until I fall asleep again. That's what I did this morning at 8am, for example.</p><p>Instead, what I'm going to do is put my phone where I have to get out of bed to reach it. Once I've gotten out of bed, I'll have the momentum I need to keep moving through the rest of my morning and into a productive day.</p><p>I'm going to start tomorrow with that one simple change.</p><p>The other tool I use is also pretty common – just setting my alarm earlier and earlier every day.</p><p>I'm setting my alarm for 8am again tomorrow morning, and then the day after that I'll set it for 7:45am. On Friday it'll be 7:30am and so on, until I'm getting up at 5am. That should take aboooouuut two weeks (technically, twelve days, but I'm counting a couple of messup days in there as well).</p><p>Some people like to use a smaller interval, but a) I'm impatient and b) my uptime isn't consistent enough right now for a five minute interval to make a sigificant difference, I think.</p><p>With those two changes, I should be back on my routine by January 19th. If I'm not, I'll donate an extra $20 to charity via my church.</p><p>Here's to a good sleep schedule!</p><p>P.S. If my sleep schedule gets sorted out on time, I'm going to credit this writeup for having gotten me to commit to a date and two concrete actions that I'm going to take in order to fix it, and that will mean this blog is being super helpful and getting me to exactly where I need to go!</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[De-risking real estate]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 out, and each one of these outcomes is pleasant, if not game-changing.
Play often enough, though, and your persistent generosity will pay off.

And then, mix into that some of the moonsh]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/making-small-bets/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846d</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2021 21:01:49 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Perhaps my most important learning of 2020 was "make small bets".</p><p>The idea of making many small bets totally transformed the way I think about business ideas.</p><p>As Seth pointed out in his blog post from January 1st, 2021:</p><blockquote>...consider a portfolio of projects. Some of them have a very high likelihood of working out, and each one of these outcomes is pleasant, if not game-changing. Play often enough, though, and your persistent generosity will pay off.<br><br>And then, mix into that some of the moonshot projects that most people are afraid to take on. They’re afraid because they have equated “low chance of success” with “risky.” They’re not the same. Risky implies that failure will cost a lot. It won’t. You can thrive with this strategy because you have a portfolio, and because you realize that “unlikely” is not the same as “not worth trying.”</br></br></blockquote><p>How do ambitious moonshot projects succeed?</p><p>An ambitious moonshot project requires a smart person to succeed, and smart people don't play the lottery.</p><p>Instead, they ensure success by ensuring failure doesn't take them out of the game. </p><h2 id="small-is-subjective">"Small" is subjective</h2><p>Elon Musk bet his entire net worth that SpaceX and Tesla would take off. If he had been wrong, he would have had zero capital... but he wouldn't have been out of the game.</p><p>He had an audience, a following, a reputation, and that's worth a lot of money as well.</p><p>This bet wasn't risky. It had a low chance of success, but, as Seth points out, that's not the same as risky.</p><p>If he failed, he would still have all his knowledge, his drive, his reputation, his connections, and he would still have a shot at the next thing.</p><h2 id="how-can-i-turn-the-time-i-spend-on-real-estate-into-a-small-bet">How can I turn the time I spend on real estate into a small bet?</h2><p>With that in mind, my question becomes – if I am going to invest in real estate, how can I de-risk that investment and turn it into a small bet? I plan on spending a significant amount of time learning how the market works, and probably investing a lot of money personally as well.</p><p>In particular, the biggest opportunity cost is to spend two months focused on real estate. If I don't end up pursuing it, that is effectively worth ~$50k, as I discussed in <a href="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/two-months-of-freedom/">an earlier post</a>.</p><p>If I pursue another project during this same time period as well, I am cutting my total opportunity cost invested into real estate by effectively half. Instead of investing $50k of my time, I am suddenly investing $25k in real estate.</p><p>And let's say for kicks that I also start a third project. Now my risk exposure for my real estate investment is down to ~$17k, spread across three projects.</p><p>Now you might say, well, by splitting my focus across two or three things, I am halving or thirding my focus and energy. And that's true. Multitasking decreases effectivity.</p><p>But multitasking refers to trying to do multiple things simultaneously; not trying to do multiple things at different times of the day.</p><p>Despite that, though, there is probably a cost to working on multiple projects and spreading focus around. But there is probably also a point where you reach diminishing returns in terms of focus.</p><p>I wouldn't be able to manager ten projects at the same time effectively, but two? Three? Definitely would be able to do better. I would also hazard a guess that the curve of effectivity across projects is nonlinear, and drops off rapidly past a certain number of projects happening in parallel.</p><p>Parkinson's law comes to mind:</p><blockquote>Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.</blockquote><p>As does the old quote...</p><blockquote>If you want something done, give it to a busy person.</blockquote><p>Now, this is an awful lot of logic for something that comes naturally to some people – working on lots of things at once.</p><p>But I think it's important not to get discouraged by this: building a business isn't like a running race. We don't all start in the same place, but are gifted with different talents and dispositions that cause our success curves to appear differently.</p><h2 id="plan-of-action">Plan of action</h2><p>So for me, I'm going to be working on three different projects going forward, I think. The first is going to be real estate, obviously, at about 50% of my time. The second is <a href="https://refactoryourcareer.io">my book</a> at about 25% of my time, and the third is TBD, also at roughly 25% of my time.</p><p>This should de-risk my investment of time significantly. There are other actions I can take towards that goal, but we'll take a look at them as I learn more about real estate.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Everybody puts in the effort]]></title><description><![CDATA[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. Acting
successful improves our status, and improving our status improves our odds of
survival, so we're incentivized to do this constantly. Social media only
amplifies this tendency.

We are w]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/everybody-puts-in-the-effort/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846c</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 03 Jan 2021 23:25:08 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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.</p><p>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. Acting successful improves our status, and improving our status improves our odds of survival, so we're incentivized to do this constantly. Social media only amplifies this tendency.</p><p>We are what we repeatedly do, and we believe what we are repeatedly exposed to.</p><p>Because I'm constantly exposed to success stories via my social media habits, I keep thinking that I should encounter success effortlessly in the same way that I encounter success <em>stories </em>in my media feed effortlessly.</p><p>Even when somebody becomes an overnight success, the reality is that they<em> </em>spent years laying the groundwork to make that possible, whether they did so in the field they achieved that overnight success in, or in a field where the skills and knowledge apply obliquely.</p><p>Steve Jobs once famously said:</p><blockquote>“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”</blockquote><p>We always see how the dots connect in other peoples' success stories, and we never hear about how they spent years struggling to reach that point.</p><p>Nobody gets there without putting in the effort. It's okay if I'm not an instant success. It doesn't mean I'll never get there; it just means I need to keep trying.</p><p>It's tempting to try to connect the dots looking forward, but I have to resist that temptation. And one day, I'll look backward and see just how all the dots connected after all.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Reason versus intuition]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 applied to reach good decisions in
every case, because reality is far more complex than we are capable of grasping,
and often our logic is gravely flawed or missing critical information.

This]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/reason-vs-intuition/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846b</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 03 Jan 2021 06:02:19 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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.</p><p>His position is that reason is very useful, but that it's dangerous to succumb to the allure of believing that reason can be applied to reach good decisions in every case, because reality is far more complex than we are capable of grasping, and often our logic is gravely flawed or missing critical information.</p><p>This was in response to one of my earlier posts, where I mentioned that I'd like to build a mental model that maps closely to reality in order to make better business (and life) decisions.</p><p>His position is supported by this Tweet from Daniel Vassallo, which I've shared before:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">My only idea validation process:<br><br>1. Can I do it?<br>2. Is it likely to work?<br>3. Is it okay if it doesn&#39;t?<br>4. Will I enjoy it?<br><br>If it&#39;s a YES to all, it becomes a candidate. All answers are based on gut feel, since all data is mostly noise.</br></br></br></br></br></br></br></p>&mdash; Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) <a href="https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1343328804538699776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 27, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/>
</figure><p>It's also supported by a book called <em>Thinking, Fast And Slow</em>, I believe. The book's main point is that our statistical intuition is very bad. Humans just aren't built to appreciate and model the complexity of the real world in our minds.</p><p>It says that any data that we think we can integrate into our mental model of the world is likely not very useful, given the number of other variables that are missing. And that means any data which gives us confidence is actually probably misleading us and giving us false confidence.</p><p>That said, reason must clearly play a role in decision making – without it, we relinquish control of success entirely.</p><p>But perhaps it's something which we should recognize as a <em>signal </em>pointing to some possible truth, rather than the ultimate arbiter of all truth. And we should incorporate many signals into our decision making process.</p><p>My conclusion is that our intuition is not entirely accurate, nor is it entirely wrong. Our reason is not entirely accurate, nor is it entirely wrong. And the advice of other people, drawn from their experience, is not entirely accurate (their context isn't our context, after all, and never will be, and we can never know truly what the differences between their context and our context is, which means we can't account for it) but probably isn't entirely wrong.</p><p>The point I'm making here is that there are many different inputs we can choose to accept, and no one of them tells the full story. We should learn to integrate many sources of information that may be painting many different pictures into our decisions.</p><p>We are operating in a world of limited information, and we'll never be able to make totally sound, completely safe decisions.</p><p>This is why it's important to treat decisions probabilistically, assigning a percentage of success and a percentage of failure to each, and only making decisions in which the reward, adjusted for probability of success, positively offsets the failure, adjusted for probability of failure.</p><p>Seth Godin talks about making decisions probabilistically in his post "<a href="https://seths.blog/2021/01/a-simple-quadrant-for-choices/">A simple 2 x 2 for choices</a>":</p><blockquote>...consider a portfolio of projects. Some of them have a very high likelihood of working out, and each one of these outcomes is pleasant, if not game-changing. Play often enough, though, and your persistent generosity will pay off.<br><br>And then, mix into that some of the moonshot projects that most people are afraid to take on. They’re afraid because they have equated “low chance of success” with “risky.” They’re not the same. Risky implies that failure will cost a lot. It won’t. You can thrive with this strategy because you have a portfolio, and because you realize that “unlikely” is not the same as “not worth trying.”</br></br></blockquote><p>That we must think probabalistically, integrating many sources of information into our decision-making process, is a conclusion I've come to via reason.</p><p>This shows that not only can reason be useful in a direct, decision making-capacity, it's also (and possibly <em>more</em>) useful in a meta role: perhaps it should direct the <em>way</em> we make our decisions more than the actual decisions themselves.</p><p>And why all this focus on <em>decisions</em>, anyway? Well, if I can make sound decisions, I will eventually succeed in business, if I stick around long enough. And if I can't, I'll eventually fail, no matter how long I stick around.</p><p>On this note, one thing that bothers me is when I see people who are obviously producing poorer content than I am.<sup>[1]</sup></p><p>It's concerning, because from my perspective there are many issues with the content they're putting out, yet they're truly doing the best they can, according to their reason and abilities and context. </p><p>It makes me wonder how lacking my content (by which I mean writing, thinking, and decisions) is to somebody who knows more and has more experience than I do.</p><p>Yet there's nothing I can do to correct this except continue producing content, hoping that eventually it will improve enough that I'll begin to succeed.</p><p>It's true that I don't know where other people are in their own journeys, and also the ability to produce quality content is reliant on the ability to judge quality content, and the ability to judge quality content comes from <em>consuming</em> quality content. But how does one consume quality content without knowing what quality content <em>is</em>?</p><p>My only answer is that one must consume lots of content and then apply reason, logic, and intuition to that content to over time construct a mental model which assigns a percentage or degree of trust to the quality of each piece of content consumed.</p><p>One can then use the "Quality Content Model" so constructed as a measuring stick against which to judge the quality of one's own content.</p><p>The drawback here is that failing to consume a lot of content will result in a poor Quality Content Model, which will result in poor-quality content. So the only solution is to consume lots of content, and then produce lots of content of my own so as to improve its quality according to that arbitrary metric.</p><p>The interesting thing is that the construction of this Quality Content Model is a thing which almost completely falls into the domain of the intuition. We don't necessarily use reason to determine why we like something; it is occasionally applied after we realize it's great, in order to figure out what makes it great.</p><p>In a way, our intuition is a bit like a machine learning model; we have to feed it stimuli, and a lot of it, in order to produce a model against which to judge other content, and then we also have to train it to produce content which meets that standard.</p><p>So the first step is obtaining an understanding of the standard; the second is learning to produce content <em>to</em> that standard. And that's a whole other challenge.</p><p>Ira Glass puts it really well:</p><blockquote><em>Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.</em><br><br><em>All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.</em><br><br><em>But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.</em><br><br><em>Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.</em><br><br><em>And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.</em><br><br><em>I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.</em><br><br>– Ira Glass</br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></blockquote><p>While Ira Glass is talking about the creative pursuits in this quote, the beautiful thing is that this applies to business as well. Building a business is creative work, even if it might not seem like it.</p><p>Although it's not as aesthetic and compelling as a Robert Frost poem or a Vivaldi concerto, we are nonetheless <em>creating</em>, forming something into existence from the void of our imaginations via our wills.</p><p>And so we just have to keep trying.</p><p>I'll close with a great quote from <a href="https://justinjackson.ca/2020-review">Justin Jackson's 2020 year in review</a>:</p><blockquote><strong><a href="https://justinjackson.ca/surfing">Business is like surfing</a>.</strong> Surfing is mostly about being in the water, paddling, and waiting for the right wave. The same is true for entrepreneurs.</blockquote><p>Ultimately, whether or not we get super good at producing the content that fires the engines of business, as long as we continue to try, we're expanding our luck surface area, building compounding results, and we'll most likely succeed eventually.</p><p>That's what I must believe in order to motivate myself to continue, anyway. It's also the only thing that makes sense; how else could so many succeed, if it was so hopeless?</p><hr><p><sup>[1]</sup> It's a little bit of a fallacy to assume that I can linearly judge the quality of content – I can never know its true purpose or the context in which it was conceived, so I can't genuinely judge whether or not it is poorer than the content I can produce, although I can perhaps assign a degree of probability to whether or not it is </p></hr>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The paradox of chasing money]]></title><description><![CDATA[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 doing them.

How can I make money without trying too hard to make money?

This thought is prompted by a quote I recently read in a transcript of a
podcast
by Naval [https://nav.al/rich]. He's just been asked the best way to build
specialized, valu]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/the-paradox-of-chasing-money/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49846a</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 02 Jan 2021 04:07:20 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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 doing them.</p><p>How can I make money without trying too hard to make money?</p><p>This thought is prompted by a quote I recently read in <a href="https://nav.al/rich">a transcript of a podcast by Naval</a>. He's just been asked the best way to build specialized, valuable domain knowledge you can leverage to make money:</p><blockquote>...if you go around trying to build it a little too deliberately, if you become too goal-oriented on the money, then you won’t pick the right thing. You won’t actually pick the thing that you love to do, so you won’t go deep enough into it. – Naval Ravikant</blockquote><p>This quote is very scary, because in this paradigm, the only way to be successful seems to be to get lucky, and you can't get lucky through careful planning (though it is possible to increase your luck surface area, which is helpful).</p><p>How do I resolve this seeming paradox?</p><p>On one hand, I might adopt a mercenary mindset: I'll do anything to make money. This leads to people taking jobs that make them miserable, but pay well: personal injury lawyers, Wall Street quants, SEO specialists.</p><p>On the other hand, I could adopt the starving artist approach, and derive great personal fulfillment from my work, yet be unable to support my family. For me, that would be doing things like writing fantasy, composing music, studying philosophy and writing, and hacking with lower-level programming languages (maybe building videogames for hoots?).</p><p>Surely there must be some middle ground that might be arrived at not merely by chance but through an intentional, planned course of action in an area which is both of interest to me, yet also financially profitable.</p><p>In a paragraph previous to the one quoted above, Naval says this:</p><blockquote>I actually think the best way is just to follow your own obsession. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you can realize that, actually, this obsession I like and I’ll keep an eye out for the commercial aspects of it. – Naval Ravikant</blockquote><p>Right. Okay. Follow my obsession.</p><p>...</p><p>Naval has a very valid point. But the solution he offers is frustratingly vague. Kind of reminds me of this meme – "How to draw an owl":</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/2021/01/image.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="800" height="572" srcset="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2021/01/image.png 600w, https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/2021/01/image.png 800w" sizes="(min-width: 720px) 720px"/></figure><p>Step one: identify the problem – I am pursuing money too closely.<sup>[1]</sup></p><p>Step two: don't do that, but make a bunch of money anyway.</p><p>Alternative step two: just give up on making money and supporting myself? Nah, ain't gonna happen.</p><p>So, follow my obsession, and keep an eye out for things that I can monetize? It sounds like a lot of fun, and I'd appreciate nothing more than a permission slip from the Source of Indie Hacker Money to go off gallivanting down the halls of my obsessions, but I can't in good faith do that without some kind of <em>plan</em>, some kind of <em>timeline</em>, right?</p><p>Look, I think part of the problem here, and the reason that Naval is being so vague is that he is aware of the dangers of survivorship bias.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/2021/01/image-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="635" height="945" srcset="https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2021/01/image-1.png 600w, https://elliot-bonneville.ghost.io/content/images/2021/01/image-1.png 635w"><figcaption>https://xkcd.com/1827/</figcaption></img></figure><p>Perhaps this is why he refuses to give more specific anecdotal advice about his or somebody else's experience, correctly realizing that just because it worked for him doesn't mean it'll work for me, or Joe down the street.</p><p>But that doesn't help me in this situation.</p><p>And at the end of this post, I'm afraid I don't have a good answer, really, just another question for the <a href="https://roamresearch.com/#/app/elliots-questions/page/EtExx-eab">Question Bank</a>: </p><blockquote>How can I make money without trying too hard to make money?</blockquote><p>I will continue to edit this post, though, as I think and learn more about this problem.</p><p><sup>[1]</sup> I'm making an assumption that this is the reason I have not succeeded yet. But is the problem really that I'm pursuing money too closely? I don't have any proof that it is. This is one hypothesis among many about why I'm not doing as well as I'd like to be doing.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Keep 'em short and sweet]]></title><description><![CDATA[I already wrote about concision
[https://elliotbonneville.com/the-virtue-of-concision/] recently, but I've been
continuing to notice a strong temptation to write longer posts, as if the value
I get from writing these posts and the value you get from reading them is
directly proportional to word count and reading time.

I really need to internalize that the point of this blog (and good writing in
general) is not to write a lot: it's to practice thinking clearly and writing
clearly.

I don't win p]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/keep-em-short-and-sweet/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498464</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 02 Jan 2021 03:50:07 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I already wrote about <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/the-virtue-of-concision/">concision</a> recently, but I've been continuing to notice a strong temptation to write longer posts, as if the value I get from writing these posts and the value you get from reading them is directly proportional to word count and reading time.</p><p>I really need to internalize that the point of this blog (and good writing in general) is not to write a lot: it's to practice thinking clearly and writing clearly.</p><p>I don't win points for taking longer to say things, I lose them.</p><p>Shorter is better. Less is more. And I need to keep 'em short and sweet.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Two months of freedom]]></title><description><![CDATA[How will I spend them? I took two months off of contracting – January and
February. I have enough saved up that this won't be a major burden, and I'm
confident that I'll be able to find work when I return, if I don't end up going
back to work with my previous client.

Nevertheless, the operative word in that question really is spend.

Two months of opportunity cost is a very real expense: at a hypothetical
$150/hr, it comes out to $48,000 dollars.

That's a lot of money, so I want to make sure I]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/two-months-of-freedom/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498469</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 01 Jan 2021 06:03:20 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>How will I spend them? I took two months off of contracting – January and February. I have enough saved up that this won't be a major burden, and I'm confident that I'll be able to find work when I return, if I don't end up going back to work with my previous client.</p><p>Nevertheless, the operative word in that question really is <em>spend.</em></p><p>Two months of opportunity cost is a very real expense: at a hypothetical $150/hr, it comes out to $48,000 dollars.</p><p>That's a lot of money, so I want to make sure I approach maximizing the return on this investment in the smartest way possible. The best way I know how to do that is to use the framework I mentioned in my post <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/questions/">Questions</a>: question everything and write it all down.</p><p>As I mentioned in my last post, I'll be focusing primarily on real estate and on marketing my book.</p><p>The first step towards making some progress here is to set some goals. Accordingly, I'm going to spend four hours tomorrow doing nothing but visualizing my end state and writing down my goals for the next two months.</p><p>And there's more to do, too, but I'm off to bed for now.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[2020]]></title><description><![CDATA[I guess everybody is writing their 2020 in review posts, so I'll add to the
noise (and hopefully a little of the signal) with mine.

Here are some things that happened, roughly in chronological order:

 1.  Fasted on just water for three days (72 hours) for the first time
 2.  Read a bunch of great books, including 4-Hour Workweek, which was super
     inspiring, and The ONE Thing, which also gave me a lot of motivation
 3.  Started writing this blog (twice [https://elliotbonneville.com/about])
]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/2020/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498468</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:30:32 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I guess everybody is writing their 2020 in review posts, so I'll add to the noise (and hopefully a little of the signal) with mine.</p><p>Here are some things that happened, roughly in chronological order:</p><ol><li>Fasted on just water for three days (72 hours) for the first time</li><li>Read a bunch of great books, including <em>4-Hour Workweek</em>, which was super inspiring, and <em>The ONE Thing</em>, which also gave me a lot of motivation</li><li>Started writing this blog (<a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/about">twice</a>)</li><li>Launched and ran <a href="https://sevendaysaas.com/">Seven Day SaaS</a>, a software-building jam</li><li>Built <a href="https://docuspy.com">a full-stack PDF-sharing SaaS</a> with analytics, then stopped working on it before acquiring a single user</li><li>Started (and stopped – thanks, COVID) a <a href="https://www.meetup.com/React-RI/">React meetup</a>, and even got sponsered by a local recruiting firm</li><li>Learned to work with technical recruiters</li><li>Started writing daily, at first in private, and then in public (this blog)</li><li>Hit the front page of HN for the first time (and then three more times)</li><li><strong>My wife gave birth to our first child, a healthy baby boy!</strong> Boy, parenthood is <em>hard</em>. I had no idea.</li><li>Celebrated one year of being married to my best friend</li><li>Built a front end for a product idea, also for one person (https://usebicycle.com) that I stopped working on after realizing the market was too competitive</li><li>Started building a homeschooling platform, then stopped when I realized I didn't have the funds, nor did I wish to grow to that size</li><li>Wrote a <a href="https://refactoryourcareer.io">career advice for developers book</a> in November in two weeks and sold 16 copies – my first dollar made online in <em>years</em>!</li><li><a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/im-giving-up-on-building-a-saas/">Decided to stop working on SaaS products and focus on real estate</a></li></ol><h2 id="stats">Stats</h2><p>Total money made from side-projects in 2020: $400.</p><p>Total audience growth: 420.</p><p>Total audience: 697</p><p>Twitter following growth: ~300</p><h2 id="looking-back">Looking back</h2><p>Overall, I'm disappointed that none of my projects achieved my goals, but I can feel a definite improvement in probability of success of my projects over time.</p><p>At first, the ideas I started working on were super unrealistic – I can see that now. Now, though, I'm beginning to actually make money from my projects.</p><p>I feel that my mental model of reality is improving slowly, and I'm learning more and more about business. In a way, it's encouraging to look back and see how many mistakes I made in my previous projects.</p><p>I know that I can only be making less and less mistakes as time goes on (although I'm always paving the way for new ones as I enter unfamiliar territory, of course).</p><p>At the same time, while it's definitely been a very chaotic year, I can't say that I'm too pleased with my overall achievements. I don't want to go too hard on myself, but at the same time I feel that I spent more time playing videogames and reading fiction than I should have.</p><p>However, most of the time I spent "lazing around" was shortly after the birth of my son, so I can't really beat myself up too much about that. It's been a period of huge adjustments – this is my first year, at twenty four, that I've spent living independent of my parents, with my wife, in a state of lockdown thanks to a global pandemic, with a child, and furnishing the apartment we live on.</p><p>Overall, this year was more about life progress than it was about business progress, and I think 2021 is definitely shaping up to be much better business-wise. The personal adjustments are slowing down and the house is starting to get into order (we finally put up curtains last week! yay!) and I'm getting other legal to-dos in order too (my son finally has insurance! I am completely financially decoupled from my parents!).</p><h2 id="lessons-learned">Lessons learned</h2><p>There are three top contenders for "biggest learnings of the year".</p><h3 id="1-thinking-probabilistically-and-making-small-bets">1. Thinking probabilistically and making small bets</h3><p>This is the thing that blew my mind the most – thinking probabalistically and making small bets.</p><p>Our minds are extraordinary narrative-weaving machines, constantly seeking the deeper meaning of random every-day events. It's how we process life and formulate meaning from our gut intuition without being driven crazy by the scope of it all. The story our brain and emotions tell us is powerfully convincing.</p><p>It's also often wrong.</p><p>This year I've learned about thinking and planning in terms of risk and probability, a concept that I had no clue of until a few months ago. A good way of summarizing how to operate this way:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">My only idea validation process:<br><br>1. Can I do it?<br>2. Is it likely to work?<br>3. Is it okay if it doesn&#39;t?<br>4. Will I enjoy it?<br><br>If it&#39;s a YES to all, it becomes a candidate. All answers are based on gut feel, since all data is mostly noise.</br></br></br></br></br></br></br></p>&mdash; Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) <a href="https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1343328804538699776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 27, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/>
</figure><h3 id="2-reverse-engineering-goal-setting-and-visualization">2. Reverse-engineering goal-setting and visualization</h3><p>Another powerful concept that I picked up from <em>The ONE Thing</em> is that in order to achieve a goal, it's important to reverse engineer what needs to happen to do so from the end state, and visualize arriving there in great detail.</p><p>It's not enough to take random actions in the hopes that one day you'll end up where you want to be. Instead, you need to have a plan (even if it's a plan that changes frequently) that coherently leads you to your end state, step by step. And that plan needs to be kept up-to-date with your model of reality.</p><p>For that reason it's important to constantly be revisiting your goals. As I heard on the <em>Bigger Pockets</em> podcast (incidentally also where I was reminded of <em>The ONE Thing</em>, which was already sitting on my shelf), "It's not enough to just have goals. You need to be in a relationship with them."</p><h3 id="3-the-pareto-principle-and-signal-vs-noise">3. The Pareto Principle and signal vs. noise</h3><p>I learned about the Pareto principle (also called the 80/20) rule, and looking back I can see how it applies to my actions this year. I felt like I worked on a lot of stuff, really hard, for the past twelve months, and I thought I was pretty focused overall.</p><p>But looking back at the list of things that I did, I'm surprised by how little there is on the list – and also how much.</p><p>Between changing focus a lot and getting distracted by non-productive actions, I worked a lot and didn't get much done. I hope to focus more on "signal" actions in 2021 and not get distracted by busywork that doesn't move the needle on my goals.</p><h2 id="looking-forward">Looking forward</h2><p>With all that said, what's happening in 2021? I have some really exciting things in the works. My main goal is to reach ramen profitability by the end of the year – although I'll write more about that shortly as I think through my goals more carefully.</p><p>Today was the last day of my contract with Harry's. I'm taking two months – January and February – in order to devote time to thinking about and working on my sidebusinesses.</p><p>As of right now, the plan is to work one to two days a week on the book until it's wrapped up, and three to four days a week on doing some discovery around real estate.</p><p>On March 1st, I expect to begin contract work again. It's looking like Harry's will want me back, but it's a budget thing, so I won't know until the first week of January.</p><p>If they do take me back, I won't have to look for work again, which will be a load off my mind. If they don't take my back, I'll brush up my resume and start chatting with people on February 1st. We'll see what happens, but either way I'm going to be hyperfocused on my sideprojects for these two months.</p><p>I'm also doing a Bill Gates-style think week in January, spending a week at a cabin with limited entertainment options to visualize my five-year and one-year goals, then plan out how I want to arrive there.</p><p>Whatever happens, 2021 is going to be awesome! Overall, I'm feeling very optimistic and think I have a pretty good chance of reaching ramen profitability by the end of the year.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Why I know that La Cello's bucatini is suspended by the FDA for being 2.1mg short of iron per serving]]></title><description><![CDATA[Bucatini is a kind of pasta that's thicker than average and has a hole in the
middle. This stunning display of culinary-architectural brilliance allows it to
carry 200% of the pasta sauce load of your average spaghetti, making it popular
among enthusiasts.

Also, it's super hard to find in the United States right now. Apparently this is
because somebody has a beef with one of the primary importers / producers of
bucatini in the US, La Cello, and brought their product to the attention of the
FDA ]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/authenticity-and-humor/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498467</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2020 02:42:59 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Bucatini is a kind of pasta that's thicker than average and has a hole in the middle. This stunning display of culinary-architectural brilliance allows it to carry 200% of the pasta sauce load of your average spaghetti, making it popular among enthusiasts.	</p><p>Also, it's super hard to find in the United States right now. Apparently this is because somebody has a beef with one of the primary importers / producers of bucatini in the US, La Cello, and brought their product to the attention of the FDA for violating an iron content regulation.</p><p>Their bucatini contained 2.1 milligrams of iron too little to be considered a macaroni (yes, macaroni, that's what we food heathens in the United States call it). The horror! Think of the children!</p><p>I bring this to your attention because these facts are <em>shockingly</em> uninteresting and boring. If I had to memorize them in history class, I would have undoubtedly have gotten an F minus on the quiz.</p><p>And yet these facts are stuck in my head like white on rice, despite how profoundly little they matter to me.</p><p>The cool thing is, I can tell you why.</p><p>I can also tell you why this post has been sitting on the front page of Hacker News all day (a tech news site, need I remind you, not a food channel).</p><p>Hint: it's the same reason.</p><p>The top comment on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25566652">the Hacker News discussion for this post</a> explains it succinctly:</p><blockquote>The writing style is awesome, I literally laughed out loud. – sam_goody</blockquote><p>In short, the article's voice is hilarious.</p><p>It's witty, endearing, authentic, relatable – so much so that it had the power to make me remember something totally inconsequential simply because of how it was presented.</p><p>If you don't believe me, <a href="https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/12/2020-bucatini-shortage-investigation.html">see for yourself</a> – I'll bet you read to the very end of the article (or at least you would have, if I didn't put this disclaimer – now you probably won't just because I postulated that you might – at least, I wouldn't if I were you).</p><p>If you want something to be remembered, say it in a memorable way. Mostly, humor does the trick (unless you're writing an obituary).</p><p>My personal takeaway is that I should take less pains to normalize my writing. I should be more comfortable with exposing my internal monologue to the cold hard air of the judgemental world. I think it just might help me to become a better writer.</p><p>It's also worth noting that this article set the tone within the first few sentences:</p><blockquote>Things first began to feel off in March. While this sentiment applies to everything in the known and unknown universe, I mean it specifically in regard to America’s supply of dry, store-bought bucatini.</blockquote><p>There aren't any humor jump-scares going on here, no sir. The author makes it clear what kind of article you're about to... experience, from the very beginning. This makes it easy for the boring people possessing sticks of poor internal alignment to bail, leaving only the easily-amused and the <em>very</em> bored still reading.</p><p>Finally, as with all things, I think writing humor well is something that only comes with intentional practice. I'm deciding to give it a shot here in this blog, partly because writing can be super boring if I'm not amusing myself with wordplay, but mainly because I want to get better at writing compelling things.</p><p>So, um, sorry in advance.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Originality]]></title><description><![CDATA[I've been reading the blogs of a lot of people that have goals similar to mine.

They have all started to seem like an echo chamber, if an unconscious one.

Just a couple of days ago, I went through three different blogs that all
extolled the virtues of writing and how it promotes clarity of mind.

Although this is true, I was a little disgusted by the similarity of the
sentiment. This may not be very charitable, so I apologize – it's a strong
sentiment. But I have a strong desire for originalit]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/originality/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498466</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2020 04:27:43 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I've been reading the blogs of a lot of people that have goals similar to mine.</p><p>They have all started to seem like an echo chamber, if an unconscious one.</p><p>Just a couple of days ago, I went through three different blogs that all extolled the virtues of writing and how it promotes clarity of mind.</p><p>Although this is true, I was a little disgusted by the similarity of the sentiment. This may not be very charitable, so I apologize – it's a strong sentiment. But I have a strong desire for originality and for avoiding saying things that have been said before.</p><p>I'm not sure if this is a useful desire. I'm going to be examining if it is or it isn't throughout the rest of this essay.</p><p>My strongest suspicion is that it might be an ego thing. The purpose of these blogs is usually the same: to improve thinking. Given that my goal with this blog is also to improve my thinking, it feels hypocritical and irrational to criticize others for doing the same thing that I am. And more ironic than that, I started this blog also talking about writing can be useful!</p><p>These were blogs of people who are actively pursuing their goals. It seems like writing is a fad in the indie hacker community right now; I've been reading a lot of posts about it on Twitter, Hacker News, and elsewhere. If it's a useful tool, why shouldn't it be popular?</p><p>Yet I feel an urge to express thoughts more distinct than these interchangeable ones.</p><p>This desire might emerge from conflicting goals in my head. On one hand, I do want to clarify my thinking, and for that it's not problematic to draw the same conclusions that others have; it might even be an indicator that I'm on the right path.</p><p>My other goal, though I haven't mentioned it before, is to build an audience by writing. For that goal, it is indeed less useful to share content that others have already written about.</p><p>Perhaps it's the cognitive dissonance about what I should be doing caused by trying to pursue these two goals that is causing me to experience feelings of disgust towards these other blogs.</p><p>Or perhaps I simply am bothered by echo chambers and places where there is a lack of original thinking.</p><p>I want to produce new, original thinking – not rehash what has been said before by others. This ties into the reason I quit working on SaaS – most things have been built before, and there are few new interesting problems to solve that also meet the criteria for a successfully bootstrapped solopreneur product.</p><p>Saying "everything has been written before" and "everything has been built before" leaves out two critical considerations.</p><p>One, <a href="https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_171#:~:text=Generative%20learning%20is%20a%20theory,493).">generative learning</a>: "the process of constructing meaning through generating relationships and associations between stimuli and existing knowledge, beliefs, and experiences."</p><p>The other – improving on what has been done before. First mover advantage is actually a <em>disadvantage</em>, and there are many upsides to taking an existing piece of content and improving it.</p><p>It seems that the most likely cause of my distaste for seeing multiple people writing about similar concepts is born of ego, which would explain the irrationally emotional distaste that I chose to describe with the word "disgust" earlier in this article.</p><p>I'm not totally convinced that this is true, though – it's hard to gainsay my instincts when they fail to produce any arguments that can be reasoned through and debated.</p><p>Ultimately, I'm forced to conclude that I don't fully understand where my negative feelings are coming from. It'll just have to go in the pile with the many other things about my thinking that I don't fully understand right now.</p><p>Hopefully this blog will help me shrink the size of that pile. If so, it will have served its purpose, regardless of whether or not it belongs to an echo chamber.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Motivation comes from alignment]]></title><description><![CDATA[If I don't feel like doing something, it's often because what I'm working on is
not important, and I haven't realized it yet.

For a long time, I believed that I was uncommonly lazy and unmotivated. I've
since realized that often when I feel like this, the problem is that I've failed
to make sure that what I'm working on is aligned with my goals.

My brain doesn't want me to waste energy on things that aren't worth my time.

Usually, this happens when I learn something that changes my perception]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/motivation-comes-from-alignment/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498465</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:53:07 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>If I don't feel like doing something, it's often because what I'm working on is not important, and I haven't realized it yet.</p><p>For a long time, I believed that I was uncommonly lazy and unmotivated. I've since realized that often when I feel like this, the problem is that I've failed to make sure that what I'm working on is aligned with my goals.</p><p>My brain doesn't want me to waste energy on things that aren't worth my time.</p><p>Usually, this happens when I learn something that changes my perception of the return on investment from what I was working on, but haven't reevaluated my priorities to take into account the new information yet.</p><p>I used to be resistant to the idea that my motivation levels were tied directly to the importance and relevance of the work I was doing. I thought I needed to be forcing myself to work to do valuable work.</p><p>Now, I realize that whenever I feel lazy, it's a signal that I need to reevaluate what I'm working on.</p><p>If I believe what I'm working on is important, I'm motivated – even if it's difficult. If I don't, I'm lazy – even when it's easy.</p><p>Instead of having an antagonistic relationship with my laziness, I now view it as a barometer that helps me determine what to work on and when I need to take a step back and reevaluate.</p><p>Not only do I have a healthier perception of my work ethic, but I'm also able to cut my losses and stop working on unimportant things more quickly. I work with my gut, not against it.</p><p>Of course, work can occasionally be draining, and we sometimes have to do things we don't enjoy. But often, a simple check into how things are aligned can reveal the importance of a task and result in renewed energy and momentum. Progress is intoxicating.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The virtue of concision]]></title><description><![CDATA[Seth Godin's blog posts [https://seths.blog/] are short and authoritative.

There are no extra or needlessly long words, and his writing flows well.

He delivers high value per minute spent reading by communicating his insights
concisely. He is not in love with the sound of his own voice, and he does not
write for the sake of writing.

He respects his reader's time, and as a result his posts are more worth reading.

Of course, as the old saying goes, simplicity lies on the far side of
complexity]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/the-virtue-of-concision/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498463</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 26 Dec 2020 22:31:44 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="https://seths.blog/">Seth Godin's blog posts</a> are short and authoritative.</p><p>There are no extra or needlessly long words, and his writing flows well.</p><p>He delivers high value per minute spent reading by communicating his insights concisely. He is not in love with the sound of his own voice, and he does not write for the sake of writing.</p><p>He respects his reader's time, and as a result his posts are more worth reading.</p><p>Of course, as the old saying goes, simplicity lies on the far side of complexity.</p><p>It's easy to write a lot, and difficult to write just a little.</p><p>Concision is a virtue that must be cultivated with effort over time. It is a product of intentionality and clarity, both about <em>what</em> is being communicated and about <em>why </em>it is being communicated.</p><p>P.S. Seth isn't the only writer who talks about this – Rob FitzPatrick touts value per word in his book <em>Write Useful Books, </em>and Stephen King is known for his phrase "kill your darlings" (avoid conflict of interest between writing nice things and saying important things concisely).</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Questions]]></title><description><![CDATA[If I could ask the world every question I had and get answers immediately, my
path to success would be considerably smoother.

Alas, I do not have any such ability – but I still need that information.

In absence of instant answers, I often forget or fail to consider my most
important questions.

Since the world isn't going to go out of its way to teach me (and my Twitter
following isn't large enough yet), I need to store and organize all of my
questions so that I can focus on the right ones and]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/questions/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498462</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 26 Dec 2020 20:31:29 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>If I could ask the world every question I had and get answers immediately, my path to success would be considerably smoother.</p><p>Alas, I do not have any such ability – but I still need that information.</p><p>In absence of instant answers, I often forget or fail to consider my most important questions.</p><p>Since the world isn't going to go out of its way to teach me (and my Twitter following isn't large enough yet), I need to store and organize all of my questions so that I can focus on the right ones and answer them in time.</p><p>To do this, I'm trying an experiment.</p><p>I'm going to write down every single question that I have about financial independence, indie hacking, real estate, and personal development. The tricky ones, the ones you can't just Google. The unkept secrets of the business world.</p><p>I'll prioritize them by importance and write answers out as fully as possible as I find them. I'll do my best to include all relevant context with my questions, and interlink questions to one another wherever possible to build a sort of <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Zettelkasten</a>.</p><p>I plan on using a construction for my questions and for my organization similar to the one Thomas Aquinas used in his comprehensive summary of theology, the aptly named <em><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/">Summa Theologica</a>.</em></p><p>His approach is genius. Structuring information as questions, objections, and answers rather than bare unqualified statements leads to a method of thinking that is always seeking to understand matters from their root.</p><p>It will help me both organize the information in an intuitive way and identify the right questions to ask, and it should also help me identify the obvious, important questions that are oh so easy to miss.</p><p>The problem is, our brains optimize for conserving energy in the present, without counting the cost to the future – yet another broken remnant of our hunter-gatherer days.</p><p>We shy away from asking hard questions, when often those exact questions are the ones we most need to answer.</p><p>By asking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys">five whys</a>, seeking to build understandings from <a href="https://jamesclear.com/first-principles">first principles</a>, and trying to think outside the box, I will systematically identify the gaps in my thinking and identify critical insights that I might otherwise miss.</p><p>I'm going to do this all in public in order to help others, build an audience, and most importantly force myself to think critically for fear of saying stupid things.</p><p>I hope you find it useful! You can take a look <a href="https://roamresearch.com/#/app/elliots-questions/page/xsheJGiX8">here</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Digital Purple Cows]]></title><description><![CDATA[I just read Seth Godin's Purple Cow
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RI9S9M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1]
. It's about engineered virality, and it really got me thinking.

I decided to read this book after hearing about it in an article about a
programmer who applied the Purple Cow principle to quickly build a reputation
and start pulling in great work.[1]

The Purple Cow principle states that it's no longer enough for businesses to
rely on massive TV ad distribution to gain market]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/digital-purple-cows/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498461</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 25 Dec 2020 23:15:59 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I just read Seth Godin's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RI9S9M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1">Purple Cow</a>. It's about engineered virality, and it really got me thinking.</p><p>I decided to read this book after hearing about it in an article about a programmer who applied the Purple Cow principle to quickly build a reputation and start pulling in great work.<sup>[1]</sup></p><p>The Purple Cow principle states that it's no longer enough for businesses to rely on massive TV ad distribution to gain market share; consumers have become far too savvy and filter them out easily now.</p><p>Seth Godin published the book in 2002, so it's a little out of date, but with a little squinting it's easy to see how the same principle applies to online advertising as well, and even to the modern-day job hunt.</p><p>It's not enough to buy a bunch of FB ads as a small business, or send out hundreds of applications as a programmer. It might <em>work</em>, technically, but the return on investment from such techniques is seriously limited.</p><p>Instead, what Godin is suggesting is that businesses should be built up from the ground around something truly remarkable. They should be the "most-est" about something (quality, speed, originality, traditionality): different, interesting – commentable.</p><p>They should make people <em>want</em> to talk about them. </p><p>A Purple Cow business is the kind of business that when somebody shares it, <em>their</em> status increases as a result. They feel better about themselves or about the world. Viral content is content that is <em>fun </em>to share.</p><p>While my main focus is on building a side business right now, I also can't help but think about ways I can use this approach to improve the contracting work I'm using to scratch my programming itch and bankroll that work.</p><p>I'm excited to see how I can apply the Purple Cow method to my contracting. If I build a programming project that gets me noticed, I'll get better work – specifically, inbound leads.</p><p>Inbound work requests will help me stop working with recruiters without spend fifteen years to building a network. That would be a massive quality of life increase, not to mention pay jump.</p><p>So, it's clearly worth doing. Is it possible to <em>intentionally</em> build a viral project, though?</p><p>Seth Godin thinks so. That's the whole premise of <em>Purple Cow</em>, after all.</p><p>The question is, how can I engineer a project to go viral? If it was easy, everybody would do it. But not every front-end engineer goes viral, so what's the secret?</p><p>Part of it has to do with being <em>hungry</em>. Not every engineer is constantly seeking for pay raises and trying to think like a marketer in order to find more interesting, higher-paying work. But it seems like the ones who dare to do well for themselves.</p><p>I also have to consider my audience. What is remarkable to the group of people that I want to target? If I wanted to rank on Hacker News, I would think about one kind of content specifically; for Reddit, another. People who have ranked highly on these platforms know what I'm talking about.</p><p>Finally, what do I want to go viral <em>about</em>? It's not enough to simply attract attention if that attention doesn't highlight my skills in a positive manner. Instead, I should build something that will highlight my skills as an engineer, so that the people who come across it might be inclined to reach out to me for help.</p><p>If I can figure out how to go viral, I will grow both as an engineer and as a marketer, and I'll save plenty of time instead of spending months and years publishing to this blog or something in order to get more eyeballs.</p><p><sup>[1]</sup> I can't recall the article now, which is a shame. I'll edit to include it if/when I find it.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Teaching is about mind reading]]></title><description><![CDATA[It's not hard to teach – you just have to be a time-traveling mind reader...

Today, while reading through my Twitter feed, I came across this absolute gem of
a Tweet:

> Teaching is perhaps 100x harder than we expect. The common misconception is that
it’s about sharing your knowledge; it’s not. Rather, it’s about understanding
what’s in the student’s mind, modeling that in your mind, building a bridge from
the student’s mental state to yours.

— Kanjun Qiu (@kanjun) December 23, 2020
[https://t]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/teaching-is-about-mind-reading/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b498460</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:22:03 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It's not hard to teach – you just have to be a time-traveling mind reader...</p><p>Today, while reading through my Twitter feed, I came across this absolute gem of a Tweet:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Teaching is perhaps 100x harder than we expect. The common misconception is that it’s about sharing your knowledge; it’s not. Rather, it’s about understanding what’s in the student’s mind, modeling that in your mind, building a bridge from the student’s mental state to yours.</p>&mdash; Kanjun Qiu (@kanjun) <a href="https://twitter.com/kanjun/status/1341856663863664640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 23, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/>
</figure><p>This tracks very closely with my experience writing my book on how to make more money as a developer, <a href="https://refactoryourcareer.io">Refactor Your Career</a>.</p><p>Although I know my subject matter well, that alone wasn't sufficient for me to write a good book on the first try.</p><p>The problem is, I know precisely what's important to <em>me</em>, relative to my context and worldview and life story.</p><p>But what helps me and <strong>what I find to be important is not necessarily what other people need to know</strong>.</p><p>For example, I don't struggle much with imposter syndrome; others I've talked to while writing the book do. I realized the book needed to address imposter syndrome by taking the time to talk with members of my audience. It would have never have entered my mind otherwise.</p><p>Knowing your subject matter is critical for writing a successful book or teaching a successful course. But just as important – possibly more so – is knowing what your audience is thinking and where they are mentally. </p><p>While teaching the content of my book in person, I've been able to address questions as they come up. But when communicating to a reader statically, that's not enough. I need to know what they're going to think ahead of time so that I can address those thoughts and questions in advance.</p><p>Learning the mindset of and the context your audience is coming from is the hardest part of writing a good book. There are no shortcuts: the only way to do this is to spend a ton of time talking to your potential readers.</p><p>This is also why it's so critical that you have a well-defined audience in the first place. Without one, you have no idea what context your readers are operating in, and you can't address their questions, concerns, and thoughts directly.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Clear Thinking]]></title><description><![CDATA[Many of the people that I respect and that are doing well in the business world
have mastered the art of thinking clearly. Ex.:

Daniel Vassallo
Jordan O'Connor
Derek Sivers
Mike Lynch
Shawn Wang (swyx)
Seth Godin
Rohan Gilkes
David Perell
Rob FitzPatrick
Jack Butcher
Drew DeVault

In reading their writing, I have been struck time and again by how insightful
their observations are. Their mental models appear to map closely to the nature
of reality, or if not absolutely closely, then certainly mo]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/clear/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49845f</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 23 Dec 2020 05:24:31 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Many of the people that I respect and that are doing well in the business world have mastered the art of thinking clearly. Ex.:</p><p>Daniel Vassallo<br>Jordan O'Connor<br>Derek Sivers<br>Mike Lynch<br>Shawn Wang (swyx)<br>Seth Godin<br>Rohan Gilkes<br>David Perell<br>Rob FitzPatrick<br>Jack Butcher<br>Drew DeVault</br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></p><p>In reading their writing, I have been struck time and again by how insightful their observations are. Their mental models appear to map closely to the nature of reality, or if not absolutely <em>closely</em>, then certainly <em>more</em> closely than my mental model does.</p><p>It's obvious that this capacity for clear thinking is what has contributed in (at least) large part to their success. Action is required for success, of course, but it's critical to be working on the right things, and building up mental models for determining what those right things are is critical for succeeding.</p><p>The question is, how did they do it? Are they just naturally talented and brilliant, or is there something more? An intentional strategy that they all have employed?</p><p>It seems that intentionality itself is the strategy.</p><p>I blunder from action to action, from decision to decision, without ever stopping to question <em>why. </em>To wonder, question, pause and step back and just – think.</p><blockquote><em>The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. – </em>Amos Tversky</blockquote><p>I need to avoid getting caught up in analysis paralysis and winding up stuck, not making any progress in life or in the clarity of my thoughts.</p><p>The counterpart, or perhaps a necessary component, of clear thinking is consistent action. Action informs thought, and thought informs action; without both, I'm dead in the water.</p><p>Business is the art of understanding reality. To understand reality, I must come into contact with it, and I can only do that by doing things, sending out little probes into the fuzzy nature of reality.</p><p>To then understand what I've come into contact with; to synthesize it into a map; that takes time and thought, intentionally processing what I've discovered.</p><p>I need to make time to think, and I need to make time to act.</p><p>I often act when I should be thinking, and think when I should be acting. Identifying what to do at each moment is a skill that can only be developed through practice over time.</p><p>Finally, clear thinking is independent thinking. I must learn to think for myself, to reason through my dilemmas and to sharpen my intellect without recourse to the shortcut of cheap, contextless advice.</p><p>It's easy to resolve my immediate pain by fantasizing about the successful application of generic advice, but that doesn't solve <em>my</em> problems. Only solving my problems solves my problems.</p><p>Thinking clearly is the foundation of success. I must learn to think clearly.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I'm giving up on bootstrapping a SaaS]]></title><description><![CDATA[I thought for a long time that my path to financial independence was through
building a SaaS. I'd keep it a one-man shop, get it to around $10,000 a month
and let it grow slowly after achieving sufficient traction. I'd write incredibly
good documentation, have only a small amount of support requests to deal with,
and never get carried away by my success.

Once that was all set up, I'd get to spend my time doing what I loved – coding,
writing, playing music, spending time with my family – instead]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/im-giving-up-on-building-a-saas/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49845e</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2020 22:38:24 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I thought for a long time that my path to financial independence was through building a SaaS. I'd keep it a one-man shop, get it to around $10,000 a month and let it grow slowly after achieving sufficient traction. I'd write incredibly good documentation, have only a small amount of support requests to deal with, and never get carried away by my success.</p><p>Once that was all set up, I'd get to spend my time doing what I loved – coding, writing, playing music, spending time with my family – instead of slaving away at a corporate 9-5.</p><p>This idea came from the fact that like many people, I desire financial independence, and I'm a software developer. Since I can build software for other people, and since I enjoy doing it, surely I'd enjoy building software on my own behalf, right?</p><p>Wrong.</p><p>I did, of course, read about all the disillusioned software developers out there who came to the conclusion that running a SaaS isn't all that fun, because it's 80%-90% Business Stuff and they'd rather be coding. Those cynical, pessimistic naysayers [/s] never got me down, and I bravely and proudly ignored them, never imagining I might one day join their ranks.</p><p>I assumed that I could push through the "boring work" of market validation and idea generation and get to the cool parts – building the actual software – with ease. Or, if not at with ease, then at least through a lot of focused effort.</p><p>I thought I was more business-minded and results-focused than many software engineers, and that because of this I'd be able to focus on the critical business stuff at first and knock it out, spend a bunch of time building a cool product, and then launch to wild acclaim.</p><p>It turns out that assumption was bad.</p><p>I really love coding, and trying to build a business around my passion – where my passion has to take a back seat by necessity – has been grueling, disheartening, and frustrating.</p><p>Several years after conceiving of this idea, I still haven't made it happen. I tried, really hard, a bunch of times, and I learned a <em>lot</em> about how bootstrapped SaaS companies are built... but none of my projects ever took off.</p><h2 id="what-did-i-work-on">What did I work on?</h2><p>Here are a few of the more mature ideas I worked on:</p><ul><li><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170707000212/http://oxbowdomains.com/">Oxbow Domain Scraper</a>: Was getting way too many support requests and the purchase volume had nearly vanished. ROI for my time was negative, so I shut it down. In hindsight, I wish I'd spent more time marketing it before deciding to move on.<br><br>This piece of software made me thousands of dollars, more than any other product I've launched, but it never came close to reaching <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html">ramen profitability</a>.</br></br></li><li><a href="https://usebicycle.com">Bicycle</a>: Gave up because I came to the conclusion that I couldn't charge enough because of the price point the competitors could afford to offer similar software.<br><br>Turns out they were offering comparable products at a loss to drive traffic to their main services, and I didn't care to spend five years trying to break into a market where prices were already in a race to the bottom.</br></br></li><li>HomeschoolHub: A tool for people to build, share, and rate homeschool courses based on their fields of strength. As a homeschooler married to a homeschooler who plans on homeschooling, I thought I'd be able to pull this idea off, especially given the current climate.<br><br>As a consumer-oriented product for which I could charge very little (I found my audience is rather price-sensitive and decent solutions exist for most of this already), I came to the conclusion that I would have had to scale larger than my bootstrapping budget would allow for in order to reach profitability.</br></br></li><li><a href="https://hackertracker.io">HackerTracker</a>: Wasn't able to build traction; nobody seemed to be that interested in it. I left the site up, though, and if it ever blows up I'll build out the solution.</li></ul><p>Looking back, this doesn't seem like a long list.</p><p>Most of the effort over the past several years sits below the waterline, and went into coming up with ideas and invalidating them far before they ever reached the stage where I started building something (even if it was just a home page).</p><p>Here's a list of ideas that I've come up with that I could possibly tolerate working on and/or have looked into, that seem more viable than others:</p><ul><li>Wordpress theme</li><li>Invoicing software</li><li>Website interaction analytics e.g. Hotjar</li><li>Cloud image processing e.g. Blitline</li><li>SMS blasting</li><li>Payment management software</li><li>Resume generating software</li><li>Form building tool</li><li>Email popup collector e.g. OptinMonster</li><li>Ad design</li><li>Software license management</li><li>Serverside analytics</li><li>Note taking app (thought.app)</li><li>Mailing list software</li><li>Scheduling software for plumbers</li></ul><p>And a list of possible niches I could serve or build software within:</p><ul><li>Web design</li><li>Design Systems</li><li>Web developers</li><li>VR developers / enthusiasts</li><li>Email marketing</li><li>3D art</li><li>SEO</li><li>Blogging</li><li>Podcasting</li><li>Website agencies</li><li>Graphic design agencies</li><li>House construction / general contractors</li><li>Electricians</li><li>CPAs</li><li>Lawyers</li><li>Plumbers</li><li>Real estate</li></ul><p>Obviously, these aren't terrible ideas – there's lots of software in every one of these categories that is doing very well. As well, there are a ton of niches that I have no idea about where people are doing incredibly well (see <a href="https://secondbreakfast.co/patio11-s-law">Patio11's Law</a>).</p><p>So why didn't I just build one of those ideas or something serving one of those niches?</p><p>The simple answer: I couldn't force myself to build Yet Another SMS Meeting Reminder Tool (no shade-casting intended) or serverside analytics platform, despite trying to for years. I had zero motivation to code solutions to these already solved problems, and my willpower wasn't answering its phone.</p><p>I have yet to determine if this is because I'm lazy or because I'm smart, but the result is I never fully committed to building any of those things, instead focusing all of my effort on ideating and fantasizing about how awesome life was going to be.</p><p>I did have a few toy ideas that I started working on, like a note taking tool called <a href="https://twitter.com/elliotbnvl/status/1261762512736989185">Thought.app</a> – spent a couple of hundred dollars on the domain and everything. I knew from the beginning that the value per customer for it was quite low, likely less than it would cost to acquire them (in terms of personal energy or marketing dollars, both of which in a bootstrapper's case are interchangeable), but I was so excited about the idea that I started building it anyway.</p><p>Once it got to a mostly-done point, I lost interest and stopped working on it. I realized that Roam Research was way ahead of me anyway, and happily proving my point that you couldn't build a mass-market consumer-targeted tool like that as a one-man show.</p><h2 id="why-did-i-keep-giving-up-on-ideas-so-quickly">Why did I keep giving up on ideas so quickly?</h2><p>A common theme with many of my ideas here is that I gave up on them what feels like "early" to me in hindsight. Yet when I step through the logic for each one of those decisions, I come to an agreement with my past self that each time it was the right call.</p><p>Each time I delved into an idea I discovered drawbacks or realized a critical business concept (like product-market fit, marketing return-on-investment, etc.) that presented challenges I could surmount by picking another business idea.</p><p>My logic was, and is, like this: if there's another, easier way of getting to where I want to be (passive income, freedom to work on whatever I want to work on), why shouldn't I take it, even though I've invested some energy into my current path?</p><p>This logic led me to abandon many ideas in the past, probably for the best (I spent three years building a digital marketing business before realizing that I was completely unaligned with the target market, and I wish I'd quit sooner).</p><p>My biggest regret so far is how much time and energy I spent trying not to be a lame quitter, when that's exactly what needed to happen for me to move forward and learn more.</p><p>I didn't understand the difference between being a lame quitter (my internal monologue's words, not mine) and listening to your gut. I was too hung up on my insecurity around my ability to work hard to see that it wasn't me that was the problem, it was the fact that selling SEO was a ship that had long since sailed.</p><p>Ultimately, it's this logic that led me to conclude that I should <strong>not</strong> focus all my energy on building a SaaS right now. I love to code too much, and while I don't mind building a business (I enjoy marketing, sales, and focusing on business value), to do it while attempting to build something that I find super cool seems like a conflict of interest that is ultimately just going to make things way harder for me than they have to be.</p><p>Building something cool that also satisfies the constraints that a successful bootstrapped business imposes seems to me to be almost impossible. Either one of those is difficult enough as it is – combining them is a recipe for frustration.</p><p>So, my conclusion is that I'd rather keep my play and my work separate.</p><p>I'm giving up on building a SaaS, because I love to code too much.</p><h2 id="baremetrics-a-failure">Baremetrics: a failure?</h2><p>The straw that broke the camel's back, my trigger event for coming to this realization, was <a href="https://baremetrics.com/blog/i-sold-baremetrics">Josh Pigford selling Baremetrics</a> for 4 million dollars in November.</p><p>To many, this might seem a smashing success. To me, it was shockingly demotivating, and hit like a Mack truck to the gut.</p><p>I quote:</p><blockquote>We kicked off 2020 by hiring three new team members, and then COVID hit. March was rough for us, but then subsequent months were actually some of the best months of growth we’d ever had. However, this rollercoaster reminded me of all the things I <em>don’t</em> love about running a company.<br><br>The majority of my time working on Baremetrics has been spent as <a href="https://baremetrics.com/blog/maker-manager-founder">a “manager” and not a “maker”</a>. But at my core I’m a maker. I’m at my most fulfilled when I’m creating and am generally indifferent on growing or scaling things. Yet, as the CEO, I’m firmly in the role of a manager and do almost zero on the creative “making” side.<br><br>Baremetrics has been the <a href="https://joshpigford.com/projects">most successful project of mine</a> (at least financially) by a long shot, so I justified staying in the manager role because…why not? It was kind of fun seeing something succeed like this, especially after 15+ years building software!</br></br></br></br></blockquote><p>I'm terrified of this kind of "success", which when achieved takes the form of a ball and chain rather than more freedom.</p><p>Josh doesn't delve too deeply into it, so I can only imagine the emotional toll this process has taken on him. Trading seven incredibly draining and involved years spent founding a company – something I've only just begun to grasp the physical, emotional, and psychical cost of – for four million dollars, seems to me a poor bargain.</p><p>If it was just about the money, four million dollars is (comparatively) easily had working at a FAANG, and for much less white hair and sleepless nights.</p><p>Josh goes on:</p><blockquote>Sure, I could have dug deep and stuck it out another couple of years and figured out some new ways to grow it and maybe had a larger outcome, but did I really want to have spent 10 years of my life building a business analytics software company? No, not really.<br><br>There’s obviously nothing wrong with building a software company, but for me, on a personal level, that interest had run its course. I’m simply ready to do other things.</br></br></blockquote><p>Seeing him reflect in this way made me realize that I really didn't want to end up in the same place.</p><p>I've looked up to Baremetrics as a paragon of my goals for years. To see it sell for this little after the amount of work Josh put into it was very much a wakeup call. I don't want to sacrifice doing what I love for something I dislike for a long time, even in exchange for an extra million or two – which isn't even guaranteed.</p><p>Josh's is a story of rare success, which is what makes its somewhat limited scope so disheartening.</p><p>Granted, four million dollars is an absolutely lifechanging amount of money, and I'm sure Josh is quite happy with where it's left him, but perhaps he is made of different stuff than I am. I don't think I could conceive of running a company with a moderately sized team of people dependent on my decisions for seven years as ever being worth four million dollars.</p><p>Put another way: you couldn't pay me four million dollars to be a manager for seven years. And if that's what bootstrapping to success looks like, you can just go right ahead and count me out.</p><p>You could also argue that Josh's business is a product of his goals – that he didn't mind running a company with a team. Perhaps it was validating to him. I see it only as torture of a cruel and unusual nature.</p><p>To be fair, there are plenty of other bootstrappers out there who did equally well (or even better!) while also staying a one-man show, but I'm no longer convinced that this is commonly achievable enough to be worth setting my sights on – exclusively, anyway.</p><h2 id="what-s-next">What's next?</h2><p>With all that said, my dream of passive income remains, and in fact I feel its call even more strongly after having recently gotten married and having a baby.</p><p>The last couple of years have been crazy for all of us, but me personally even more so: I met my wife two and a half years ago, and since then it's been a whirlwind of dating, engagement, three-month European honeymoon, getting settled, having a son, and all of COVID. We couldn't be happier, but it's just been <em>crazy</em>.</p><p>Things are calming down now, and my focus is returning. I'm taking January and February off from work to focus on building a business. A business that has <em>nothing</em> to do with code. I'm not sure what it will be, but I'm exploring two ideas: promoting a book I wrote, and real estate.</p><p>First, I wrote <a href="https://refactoryourcareer.io">a book on making more money as a software developer</a>. Without much of a launch to speak of, I sold sixteen copies at $25 (50% off because it's beta release) within a few days, and it seems to be well-received so far.</p><p>I'm going to continue to promote the book by publishing great free content and doing joint venture launches with various mailing lists, with hopes of reaching ramen profitability within six months.</p><h2 id="i-m-going-into-real-estate">I'm going into real estate</h2><p>For my long-term strategy, I'm investigating real estate. I've identified a strategy that matches my goals of scaling well yet retaining personal freedom: buy commercial residential properties (apartment complexes) that are underleveraged, improve them, and then sell them or keep renting them out, retaining a good property management service to handle the busy work.</p><p>It seems simple, but I had two key realizations that together caused me to become interested.</p><p>First, I realized that this strategy satisfies my goal constraints when applied at scale. Although owning a couple of rental properties does not a passive income make, running a few dozen gets a lot closer to the dream.</p><p>Second, I could do this at scale by partnering with investors and asking only for a tiny percentage of their profit<em> </em>to start<em>. </em>Then, later on, as I build up experience and funds, I can start asking for larger cuts, or even begin investing entirely on my own.</p><p>I have no idea if this is a good idea or not – it's just what I've found with a little preliminary research. There's a ton to know about real estate, though, and the long and the short of is that regardless of which strategy I employ, I don't want to treat it like a small side-gig where I'm investing passively in one or two AirBnB properties.</p><p>I'm going to approach real estate with the same attitude that I first approached programming: as something that's both necessary for me to get where I want to go (in the case of programming, it was building a game; in the case of real estate, it's building passive income), and eminently interesting in its own right.</p><p>I'm going to do everything with an attitude of great curiosity – and entirely in public. I plan on sharing everything I learn and do, including all of my profits, expenses, decisions, and the logic that went into them.</p><p>More importantly, though, <strong>I'll approach real estate with a long-term attitude</strong>.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.</p>&mdash; Naval (@naval) <a href="https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103770518441989?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 31, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/>
</figure><p>Interestingly, real estate has <em>always</em> been my endgame: to invest whatever profits I make from building and selling one or more SaaS companies directly into real estate. I'm just starting a little sooner than I expected to. But I feel confident about committing to this for the long term, far more so than I've felt about any of my ideas thus far.</p><p>Of course, the other thing to bear in mind is that this approach relies completely on networking and building relationships with other people, which is a critical part of the reason that I'm going to be learning in public and talking about everything I do going forward.</p><p>By communicating about my goals, my desires, my plan, and being super authentic over time, I'll become more trustworthy and interesting, which will allow me to reach more people with whom to do business.</p><h2 id="also-i-m-going-to-keep-coding">Also, I'm going to keep coding</h2><p>As I said, real estate is a long, <em>long</em> term game. I have a ton to learn, and I don't expect to make any money for a while. To make ends meet, and also because I love it, I'm going to keep coding.</p><p>I'm going to code for fun, and I'm going to code for money.</p><p>Most importantly, I know that I'm not going to confuse my passion for my business again, and I feel free. I'm finally able to get back to what I've loved doing since well before people ever paid me for it.</p><p>I'm no longer subjecting myself to the demands of coding something that must be directly profitable. Instead, I can solve cool problems and work on things that, like all truly interesting work, are parts of a larger whole.</p><p>But that wouldn't give me any satisfaction if I didn't also feel like I was making progress towards my ultimate goals – which I do.</p><p>So yes, I'm giving up on bootstrapping a SaaS, but it's not a sad thing. I don't feel depressed or like a failure. Instead, I feel excited and energized.</p><p>And you know what? In a few months, or years, I might realize real estate is a terrible idea, and that bootstrapping a SaaS is the only way for me. But if I return to the realm of SaaS, I'll do so with greater focus and energy, knowing it's even more likely to be the only, or best, option open to me.</p><p>I don't think that will happen, but it's the train of logic that I'm using to help me justify this context switch once more: at worst, I gain renewed energy, focus, and confidence in bootstrapping, and at best I build my passive income real estate empire while having great fun building a business and coding, without ever conflating the two again.</p><p>Thanks for reading. If you're interested in following my journey, you can <a href="https://twitter.com/elliotbnvl">follow me on Twitter</a>, peep <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/rss">my RSS feed</a>, or subscribe to my email list below.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I'm going to post every day]]></title><description><![CDATA[I know in my last post, I said that I would only post when I had something
worthwhile to say.

I've been thinking about that, though, and I realized that at this stage in my
development[1], I have very little to say that is worth reading. Writing
improves thinking, and to think better I'll have to write better. And I can only
write better by practicing intentionally.

To become somebody who only writes when they have something valuable to say, I
first have to write a lot in order to learn how to]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/im-going-to-post-regularly/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49845d</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2020 19:05:52 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I know in my last post, I said that I would only post when I had something worthwhile to say.</p><p>I've been thinking about that, though, and I realized that at this stage in my development<sup>[1]</sup>, I have very little to say that is worth reading. Writing improves thinking, and to think better I'll have to write better. And I can only write better by practicing intentionally.</p><p>To become somebody who only writes when they have something valuable to say, I first have to write a lot in order to learn how to find valuable things to say.</p><p>Therefore I'm changing my <em>modus operandi</em> for this blog: I'm going to write a lot, with full understanding that my writing will probably suck and I don't have anything important to say.</p><p>Every day, I'll post something.</p><p>It can be one sentence or a paragraph or a whole essay. I'll work on my more important posts on the side, and email those out to my mailing list when I have them.</p><p><sup>[1]</sup> I consider "development" here to mean building an understanding of reality that will allow me to create a successful business. It's very difficult, maybe impossible, to build a successful business if you don't understand the reality of how and why people buy on some level. Luck makes it easier, but I'm not interested in waiting on the whims of Lady Luck.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[About]]></title><description><![CDATA[Writing clarifies thinking, and I need all the clear thinking I can get on my
journey to passive income. That's why I write about everything I'm thinking and
doing on this blog.

I'm a software engineer in Providence, RI. I've been working on front-end design
systems, design tools, and direct-to-consumer e-commerce sites for almost seven
years.

I'm studying and writing about:

 * Real estate investing
 * Audience-building and content promotion for a book I wrote
   [https://refactoryourcareer.i]]></description><link>https://elliotbonneville.com/about-2/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">Ghost__Post__61e1dc6349cd6c003b49845c</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Elliot D Bonneville]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 19 Dec 2020 01:42:29 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Writing clarifies thinking, and I need all the clear thinking I can get on my journey to passive income. That's why I write about everything I'm thinking and doing on this blog.</p><p>I'm a software engineer in Providence, RI. I've been working on front-end design systems, design tools, and direct-to-consumer e-commerce sites for almost seven years.</p><p>I'm studying and writing about:</p><ul><li>Real estate investing</li><li>Audience-building and content promotion for <a href="https://refactoryourcareer.io">a book I wrote</a></li><li>High-level strategy for achieving financial independence, including finance and investing strategies (I am not a financial advisor, yada yada)</li><li>Assorted code nerdery (for example, I recently set up i3 on Ubuntu and am blown away)</li><li>Genuinely intentional living</li></ul><p>My goal is to publish content frequently, but <em>not</em> on a schedule. I'm going to publish good, important updates, so that when I post something, it's because I have something worth saying.</p><p>You can sign up for emails below, and follow me <a href="https://twitter.com/elliotbnvl">on Twitter</a> and my <a href="https://elliotbonneville.com/rss">RSS feed</a>.</p><p>If you want to contact me, the best thing to do is <a href="elliot.bonneville@gmail.com">send me an email</a>. Alternatively, message me on Twitter or just cut to the chase and <a href="calendly.com/elliotbonneville/30min">set up a meeting</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded></item></channel></rss>