crushing it

a one off essay that I fully expect to lose me 15 or so subscribers

Wake up ready to crush the day.

Log breakfast macros on a notion template I paid someone 10$ for.

If you win the morning, you win your day.

Drive to work in my Tesla listening to the Andrew Huberman podcast. He’s talking about Ashwagandha. It’s not as good as the episode about why we shouldn’t drink, but that’s okay. It’s still good.

He starts to talk about Athletics Greens and I chuckle, because I already have a subscription. It’s like an inside joke with me and him, it’s funny because he doesn’t need to tell me to buy it. I already did.

I’m fucking crushing it.

I go to work. I have a Patagonia vest on top of a white collared shirt. I’m wearing Allbirds.

I check Outlook. I have 13 emails. I check my calendar. I have a meeting at 12:30 and at 3:30. Cool.

I start clearing out my inbox.

I approve and circle back until it’s all done. I go to my notion productivity tracker and click the checkbox which says “finish emails.” My template I’m using automatically tracks the number of days where I finish tasks and tells me about it on this special dashboard. It helps me stay consistent. I believe in consistency a lot. Habits. Did you know that a habit takes 21 days to form? And that habits start with an emotional cue?

I have to make a pitch deck for a new feature. I work in B2B SaaS. It stands for Business-to-business Software as a Service. It helps people better track their businesses to be more productive.

One time I was at a party talking to a girl, and she said she didn’t know what B2B SaaS was. She said it sounded like a Swedish backpack company. I didn’t find it very funny but I laughed to be polite. If she didn’t know what B2B Saas was, she could have just looked it up or asked me. I told her I help businesses with their software.

I like my pitch deck a lot. It’s very “cohesive” as my mom would say. There’s a new feature which draws a little line on the screen whenever things are symmetrical. It saves me a lot of time. As a kid I would worry about keeping this symmetrical a lot. I would make paper airplanes and when the edges didn’t align, I would want to cry. I didn’t understand why the lines wouldn’t match up. It made me feel bad about myself.

I put the finishing touches on the deck and send it to my team lead on Outlook.

I’m crushing it.

I’m pretty happy about finishing the deck because I know my team lead wanted to advance us on the Gantt chart and finish the card on Kanban. Our team leads and project managers all use different version of this stuff called “Scrum.” I didn’t really get it when someone explained but I nodded because I wanted to get back to my other work.

I don’t have the Andrew Huberman podcast on. It’s because I finished it already. I have a Ryan Holiday podcast on. He’s talking about Marcus Aurelius. I really like it.

I do my meetings and mark the checkbox which says “Meetings.”

I’m crushing it.

My greens are athletic.
My habits are atomic.
My sleep is tracked.

And I am CRUSHING IT!

I hope you enjoyed that. What happened was I was thinking about writing a “logical proof” style expansion essay about this substack note of mine.

I usually write in a very concise and minimalist way.

In the beginning of when I started writing I usually wrote so I could clarify my own thoughts and see patterns in my emotions. I then saw certain patterns and thought they were compelling so I would write about them. I knew that people my age would not read stuff unless it was legible for their attention span, so I challenged myself to write stuff that could be understood within 3 seconds of reading. I would literally write essays and then make a “3 Second Rule” draft.

I was going to expand the note into a full essay but I realized, the note itself already perfectly fine.

I then started writing the above story on a lark. I usually hate work that exceedingly stretches out a simple nonfiction idea. But I’ve been reading Sam Kriss and saw that hey, maybe there is some value in meandering along a topic, letting it soak in and having some fun.

Halfway through writing, I get the idea, why don’t I have a super super long explanation for all the choices I made? This might be incredibly boring to you but this is my blog and you can click the x button if you don’t like it.

I’m stoned by the way.

I want to explain some of the references because I think a lot of them will be dated within 10 years. Which is a horrible thought to think that a lot of our writing is gonna require a very specific cultural context to understand, and that we might explain it to our kids but they will never really *get it*

My little sister will never “get” the summer of 2016, and my kids will never *get* how performatively healthy the Andrew Huberman podcast is. For example I think sleep tracking is kind of dumb, you can tell how well you slept just by feeling.

Log breakfast macros on a notion template I paid someone 10$ for.

Notion is an online hybrid productivity software. It’s highly customizable. Self improvement types who are more “trendy,” as opposed to productivity purists, like to use it to track their habits. Some people are so good at customizing the software that they can sell the “template” for a few bucks apiece.

Selling notion templates is one of those “side hustle” online businesses that online business “side hustle” guru

A side hustle is a second job which is somewhat informal, usually self employed, and complements your main income. For the middle class, it’s a kind of double edged sword. Many resent side hustles for being the cultures way of apologizing (not) for skyrocketing costs of living. Some people see side hustles as a way out of a bleak corporate existence.

Fun fact, the first time I had a corporate job, I was so depressed so early on it activated a sleeper tooth infection which had been in my tooth bones for 3 years after a skateboarding injury where I hit my face. I took amoxicillin for a week. I took some CBD gummies at one point for the pain and the combo made me breath manually. That is where your breathing isn’t automatic. I asked my dad if he knew what manual breathing was. He said yes. I then told him what it was and asked him if he knew what it was. He said oh no that’s awful (in Chinese tinted english). (This implies he didn’t know what it was). That’s the thing about my dad, he often is doing a performance. His version of saying “yeah yeah totally” to a conversation which bores you.

Some people see side hustles as a way out of a bleak corporate existence.

There is a class of side hustle where a person makes a youtube video explaining how to do a side hustle. I hope in the future that sentence sounds ridiculous.

Selling Notion templates, despite having a total market size of probably like three suckas per year, is sold by productivity gurus as something capable of making enough money to buy things like groceries. People make more money engagement farming and selling courses about selling Notion templates than actually selling Notion templates.

Okay now moving onto the thoughts and references behind line 3:

If you win the morning, you win your day.

On social media a hot topic is how if you wake up earlier and be productive early in the morning, it makes your whole day better. I’m making fun of it a lot but it’s true. It feels really good to wake up and get something done and I’m usually writing on this blog.

I’ve spent about 40 seconds this year worrying if I’m going to be a “meta influencer” of some kind. I don’t want to be a meta anything. I don’t want to be a nootropics guy who uses the Flow State from nootropics to write better performing tweets about nootropics.

Right now flow state is a trending topic too but it’s been trending for a while, and the term was coined in the 80s.

In general with flow state I think not enough people talk about how flow state is about finding your edge in terms of difficulty. I’m in a flow state right now.
In practical terms finding an edge of difficulty means re-arranging the problem to hit the goldilocks zone of being challenged right at the edge of what you are capable of.

Now for this line

“Drive to work in my Tesla listening to the Andrew Huberman podcast. He’s talking about Ashwagandha. It’s not as good as the episode about why we shouldn’t drink, but that’s okay. It’s still good.“

Tesla because this is like a SF tech bro archetype.

Andrew Huberman because he’s a popular and trendy health optimizer. Biohacking is softly divided between people who use it partially as a trend, who tend to listen to Andrew Huberman, and people who are autistically dedicated, who feel no need to signal cultural literacy, and instead go on webforums like the Ray Peat forum, which has lively debates on “I drank fabric dye to boost my metabolism” and “did the Holocaust actually happen.”

Btw I love the Ray Peat forum. A lot of the inspiration for my blog comes from there. There is a little bit of unhinged stuff on there but most of it is just technical discussions on metabolism.

Ashwaghanda was a supplement which got most popular in 2022ish and has been passively popular at a lower level since. It “blunts cortisol.”

I’m trying to make this character very earnest which is why he thinks so simply and undramatically. He’s well intentioned and not like the sociopath Patrick Bateman type.

Athletics greens is a supplement brand which blends together nootropics, greens, vitamins, and minerals in one drink.

In general if a supplement has more than one ingredient it’s taxing the fuck out of you.

(To “tax” is slang for charging someone and I’m pretty sure black people came up with it.)

There was a point in high school where I realized black people, despite being a minority of Americans, create a majority of the new words in day to day use.

In high school one of my best friends was gay. He used twitter a lot.

For about 4 months in 2018, black women on black twitter and gay men on stan twitter would type “sksksksksksks” when they found something funny. They would also say “And I oop” which is from a video of a black drag queen saying that in reaction to something.

A year later teenage girls started to say these things.

When I talk about these labels like “black” or “drag queen” or “gay” just know that I mean no disrespect. I don’t think they are offensive just wanted to make sure.

Stan twitter is twitter for music superfans. A stan is a fanatic fan and it comes from the song Stan by eminem.

Here’s a list of music popular with gay teenagers on Twitter in 2018:

Charli XCX, Marina and the Diamonds, Lana del Rey, Slayyyter, Lorde, Melanie Martinez.

I saw the meta pattern of how black culture got to whites (and asians).

Boys got the words from hip hop.

Girls got the words from gay men who got the words from black women.

Come up with a punchline and drop it in the comments. I’m not clever enough to make a joke that’s slightly racist in a funny way.

Earlier today I realized for better or worse it is never going to be where a parent has the same life as their kid and can offer them guidance. The world changes too fast for that to be a thing anymore.

“I go to work. I have a Patagonia vest on top of a white collared shirt. I’m wearing Allbirds.

I check Outlook. I have 13 emails. I check my calendar. I have a meeting at 12:30 and at 3:30. Cool.”

Grey patagonia vest with white collared shirt is tech and finance uniform. Allbirds is a tech company making wool shoes. They were part of the big “Direct to Consumer” push from roughly 2018 to 2022, with venture capital businesses trying to cut out middlemen, but they were middlemen themselves.

It was part of a larger economic trend of a lot of companies being funded and being valuable on paper because of ZIRP, a time where the interest rates on loans were at 0. (Zero interest rate phenomenon). Please correct me if my technical details are wrong on this.

Outlook is an email software. If you type in the title of an email you received in the search bar, it won’t come up. Microsoft has this bad habit of not making their software very user friendly. Unrelated, they just hired this woman named Asha Sharma to run Microsoft’s gaming division, which means Xbox is going to get worse and worse and maybe even get shut down entirely. (not cause she’s indian or a woman, it’s because her background indicates no experience in the industry. She seems to be a sort of “axe-woman,” a fall guy to blame when the higher ups tell her to pull the plug.

Allbirds’ shoes look terrible.

I approve and circle back until it’s all done.

“Circle back” is a term used in business lingo. “Approve” and “circle back” are being used as verbs to represent the person using those phrases in emails. That is why it is not “circle back when it is all done.”

I’m pretty proud of this sentence.

Habits. Did you know that a habit takes 21 days to form? And that habits start with an emotional cue?

This is referencing a commonly repeated pop psych fact, and then using a quote from Atomic Habits. Atomic Habits is a decent book but I’ve never met someone more successful than a productivity youtuber recommend it.

I’m pretty sure it’s based off of a framework developed by BJ Fogg and Nir Eyal, in the Stanford Persuasion Lab, where Instagram founder Kevin Systrom was a grad student. It’s just a regular looking house, I went there when I was 18.

When I was 18 I wanted to go to Vietnam to do digital nomad for a internship but my parents didn’t let me. So I went to SF for ten days instead. I used worldpackers.com and volunteered at a Bhakti center for free room and board. It turned out to be a religious yoga studio on an OK street in the city, and I slept on the floor in the back room with a monk. He was a shaved head german man with an indian name (dude was named Ananta) from new zealand who spoke english. He would wake up at 5am to meditate.

That’s how I ended up touring stanford.

That’s how a lot of things happened. I went to a religious gathering at a huge house owned by a car dealership owner with a bunch of tech people I never met.

I met a Mexican American lady monk who was really bubbly.

I took a picture of the road from the back of a car with people way older than me at the ride to the gathering and the flash was on and I was really embarrassed.

That same week I met a guy who told me about a party in a warehouse. I was considering going, painfully debating it, but I was exhausted and didn’t want to waste the next day. So I didn’t go.

I was talking to the guy who invited me and he was like Harrisburg has great architecture and I was like maybe when I’m your age I’ll appreciate it and he was like “how old are you” and I was like 18 and he was 36.

He felt bad about telling me about the party because it could be dangerous because there were drugs there. I saw he felt bad so I went to talk to him about it and in the course of the conversation I was like I was looking into changing my major he said why don’t you and I was like “I would need an extra semester or year” and he was like “why not do it if you care so much.” That conversation I was on the knife’s edge of not having. So my entire future was determined by a highly specific outcome of a conversation which almost didn’t happen on a trip which needed highly specific circumstances to happen. So in an alternate timeline, I wouldn’t be on here, I would be a psych major in grad school right now to be a therapist. (I majored in business switched to bioengineering but almost switched to psych)

It was one of my first encounters with a highly agentic silicon valley person.

Agency is a new term for initiative and determination. Some people are like “tech bros rediscover [xyz] thing” And then I loop back to this tweet:

That tweet is true some of the time and it’s a useful idea to know.

I want to give you guys an idea of how I think. I have a very good memory. I can describe most of the trip to SF but I don’t want to bore you more even more than I already have.

“I have to make a pitch deck for a new feature. I work in B2B SaaS.”

B2B SaaS is a funny meme because it makes something kind of boring sound cool and technical.

I have him making a pitch deck because to me, if someone makes pitch decks excessively, then their job is less technical and more about performing productivity than someone whose main tasks are to code.

What I’m trying to do with this character is get into the mind of someone who feels productive when they aren’t productive.

I would make paper airplanes and when the edges didn’t align, I would want to cry.

^ That happened to me in real life once.

Gantt chart and finish the card on Kanban. Our team leads and project managers all use different version of this stuff called “Scrum.”

There have been a few philosophies of work and systems of tracking and assigning work developed recently. It’s actively debated how often they are useful and how often they are just an exercise in performing productivity. Many people lament how much non technical “project managers” are paid, holding endless meetings which break the focus of engineers, and tick boxes all day.

Scrum is a productivity philosophy and Gantt and Kanban are tracking methods.

I don’t have the Andrew Huberman podcast on. It’s because I finished it already. I have a Ryan Holiday podcast on. He’s talking about Marcus Aurelius. I really like it.

Ryan Holiday who was mentored by Robert Greene (who wrote the 48 Laws of Power), is a pretty popular writer on the “trendy tech bro self improvement” culture. He helped popularize the modern resurgence of stoicism.

Stoicism is used by Americans to deal with the emotional challenges of the 21st century, and used by people from Hyperabad to farm engagement on twitter. (It’s a pretty funny niche industry when you think about it)

No hate but why would you name a city Hyperabad? Why not “Hyperagood” or even “Hyperawesome”

On that same vein. The capital of Pakistan is Islamabad. But it’s a muslim country. A city named Islamabad would make sense in Israel maybe, but Pakistan? I thought they liked Islam there. Why isn’t it called “Islamisdope.”

Recently Elon Musk, the owner of x.com (formerly twitter) revealed the countries that different accounts were from. Apart from the official Department of Homeland Security having been made in Israel, the update showed how many Indian-run white nationalist accounts there were.

If you are reading this 100 years from now, just know that there is an entire industry of Indians who pose as white nationalists.

Ryan Holiday has both podcasts and Books. Podcasts make way more money and fame than books, which is terrible for people who like books. Tim Ferriss wrote two top tier books which literally changed the culture. And then started one of the top rated podcasts of all time. And a few more books.
Everything after his second book (which I read about 12 times) is Good not great.

That doesn’t seem bad initially until you realize: media doesn’t play by linear rules.

If you write 1 amazing book and 100 mediocre ones, then that will have a bigger impact than someone who can write 100 good books.

The same principle applies here, except it’s where Tim Ferriss wrote 2 amazing, generation defining books then made 3000 good podcasts.

If he wrote a third incredible book it would be better is what i’m saying.

His first book popularized the concept of a digital nomad (this was back in 2018). It touches on all three layers, strategy, tactics, and logistics.

Most normie slop only touches strategy.

Tim Ferriss is the rare person who is both polished and popular but whose advice is as useful as it is jarringly specific.

The writing style for this explanation section is inspired by Tao Lin. He’s an autistic writer who peaked the art form of “autofiction,” fiction inspired by your own life, and is delivered by “telling, not showing,” with autistic detail and dryness. I heavily recommend his essay on autism and moderately recommend his book ‘leave society’

My greens are athletic.

My habits are atomic.

My sleep is tracked.

The last section is meant to reference the cadence of this picture.

The meme makes fun of hobbies and cultural identifiers which are often used by millennial people trying to seem quirky and smart. They come off as “soy” which is hard to capture in words. As I write this I realize that it’s inevitable that 10 years from now even the word “quirky” is gonna fade out of use or the meaning is gonna drift. Which is maybe a good thing if our internet culture fades into obscurity. Hopefully people in the future will be building bonfires on the beach and dancing for fun.

Okay now to expand my original point:

Feeling productive feels good but it’s kind of a poor star to reach for.

I’ve found that feeling productive, while definitely a healthy feeling you should get a decent dose of everyday, is not 1:1 correlated with productivity. In fact it’s actually pretty rare for white collar work.

A lot of white collar work is pretending to work. Check out the book Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber. It’s one of those unique books which is as interesting as it is controversial. Even if you completely disagree with the main thesis, it’s still worth it to read. Most people who discuss the book haven’t read the book.

If someone expects you to look busy even if your work is done, they are a sheep and a cuck and don’t understand the point. They are also punishing you for doing an efficient job.

A lot of good work is done in things that don’t look like work. Recently I’ve been playing with automation software and have gotten some good results.

I kind of have manic tendencies where I will overcommit myself to stuff when I’m in my high energy state, and I’ll wake up feeling terrible because there is no way my low energy state can do those things. But automation changes things because I’ll be like: wow I’m such a piece of shit I got nothing done today. And then I’ll be like: no I’m actually objectively wrong, my bot did something tangible for me. And I love that feeling.

In terms of life, my hypothesis is that being productive and feeling productive is something which is good to experience regularly, for mental health. Like lifting. But it shouldn’t be your main emotional driver.

Because most of the kinds of productivity which are high leverage and compounding oftentimes don’t feel productive.

A wide variety of things like automation, delegation, free-form exploration, habit, rest, the pursuit of randomness, troubleshooting, leverage, exponential capital gains, etc