Category: Jeremy

It’s been a long time since I’ve last felt motivated to move forward towards any larger goals. About six months actually. Before that, I had many plans that I had started before one day in July when I woke up and thought “It wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved for me to start something and then die.” So I put almost every plan on pause.

Notice I said almost every plan. In the end I reduced my goals down to one: getting my S-ICD surgery completed. I was in no way willing to move forward with large plans when I wasn’t sure if I would wake up the next morning. (This is not a pleasant feeling, and I hope you never have to experience it.) This was one hell of a gatekeeper for me but I am happy to say that after six months of waiting I have crossed off this goal. My chances of sudden death have extraordinarily decreased and I can now move on to other things.

Which brings me to today. I had surgery last Wednesday and I’ve spent the last four days laying in bed recovering, which yielded plenty of time for me to think. But, since thoughts alone mean nothing, I spent this morning documenting the goals I have for 2023. They’re big goals but they aren’t huge. They’re all realistic and attainable if I apply myself. They’re also all SMART goals, so I can track them on a monthly basis. What is measured, improves. So now I have goals. ✅

Which brings me to my next topic. For the past year I’ve been thinking on what I want to do with my life as I am well aware that my long term goals end with me being a solopreneur again. To that end, I’ve been following quite a few folks talking about this on Twitter and yesterday I stumbled across Daniel Vassallo when someone linked to a very interesting Medium post he wrote, Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts. Once I started reading it, I was immediately pulled in as I am far from intrinsically motivated to work for someone else. There’s nothing wrong with working for someone else, mind you. In fact it is likely the absolute best possible outcome for most people. It’s just not my happy spot.

Since I enjoyed the Medium post, I kept reading and found one thing that popped out at me: his idea of Small Bets. Instead of focusing on a single large idea, focus on many smaller ones. Multiple income streams is the path to antifragility, which is a long term goal of mine, and it allows you to experiment with new things.

After quite a bit of consideration, I’ve decided on two small bets I’m going to make this year.

First, I’m starting a home services business. This is one of the ideas that I put on pause back in July, which means it’s roughly 80% complete and waiting for a few more things to go live.

I’ve also decided to author and release my first information product; a non-fiction book around the technical portions of starting a business. I can do this from rote memory, but I’ve met many people who struggle with it. I’m hopeful that I can help a few people get their business off the ground a bit easier.

I can do both of these while maintaining my day job as well, which is a nice side benefit. Now I have small bets as well. ✅

I just got back from a much needed vacation on Kauai with Holly and three other very good friends. Going into the trip, I had Intentions. Yes, with a capital I. I accomplished some of them but not most, for various reasons.

Mainly I had intended to write something while there but most of the time was spent doing not much of anything beyond contemplating, watching sunrises & sunsets, eating great food, lounging by the pool, and watching sea turtles play in the waves. Looking back, I’m confident I made the right choices pretty continually there; I needed the break desperately.

What was I contemplating, you ask? Well, a lot of things really, but the majority centered around what I now understand are pretty massive changes in how I view the world and my place in it. I guess dying will do that to you.

Anywho, in the above picture (that I didn’t know Holly was taking) I was standing and watching the waves roll in and ended up having a conversation with myself about what I want to do with the rest of my life, as one does, and while I had been going back and forth on whether or not I truly wanted to commit myself to more effort a voice popped in my head that said “There are still dragons to slay.” As you would expect this struck me as odd, and not just because it was entirely random and seemingly unrelated to the train of thought I was attempting to follow. I also had no good idea what it meant at the time.

Fast forward to last night, where I somehow stumbled across this ~year old post from Simon Sarris: The Most Precious Resource is Agency. The timing was auspicious to say the least, as agency is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and a lot of my contemplation centered around it when I was on Kauai. A good portion of the remaining contemplation centered around this quote that I cannot get out of my head..

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

John Muir

I’ve always had high agency. John Muir also seems like someone who had high agency, but I would hesitate to even begin to compare myself to him. Even so, the quote resonates with me for many reasons but mainly the fact that someone put their thoughts into words and then acted to change the world around them. A malleable world, indeed.

I’ve also discovered the answer to what in the hell “There are still dragons to slay.” means. I initially thought it was something to do with business as that’s just how I think, but now realize it applies to all parts of my life. There are many things I’ve struggled with, from childhood to current day, that are somewhat easily within my control but I’ve always essentially ignored them and hoped for the best. These are my very own dragons, many of which I have lovingly nurtured through the years. Unfortunately, while “ignore it and it will go away” has largely worked out well for me, a number of the dragons I have left unsupervised have turned into fearsome beasts in my absence, which has caused enough issues that I’m now making a list of my own personal dragons that I get to hunt down and slay. It’s an enlightening experience to say the least, even if it is immediately frustrating a good portion of the time.

I’m giving myself one year of my life – which could theoretically be a sizable percentage of my remaining time on earth – to move from feeling like I am losing precious days to feeling like I am embracing every precious day and living it to it’s fullest.

Something tells me it’s going to be a busy year.

Lately I’ve been spending a decent amount of time working on being conscious of my emotional response to situations, which has lead to me spending a larger than expected amount of time thinking about what matters to me. I believe this is a natural result of focusing more on embracing stoicism because my emotional responses are going to vary depending on what level of concern I have for a particular event happening (or not). This makes sense to me because stoicism basically breaks down to “mastering one’s emotions” when I think about it, so that’s how I end up framing my thoughts.

Side note: I have weird ways of thinking about things, and frequently can’t remember words in real time when speaking. Instead I just roll along with conceptual approximations in my head and try to describe things to people when I’m talking to them. Sure does make for interesting conversations at times, but I digress as this post isn’t about that.

Anyways, this whole process led me to post this idle thought on Twitter yesterday.

In recent weeks I’ve been listing out Things That Matter to Me, and I’m discovering some interesting results. As it turns out, there are many things that I thought mattered that really don’t, and many things that I’ve always known matter to me but it turns out they matter a whole hell of a lot more I believed they did. I was surprised though when I realized there is at least one thing that I used to completely disregard, but after contemplating it for weeks… oh boy does it matter to me.

What’s that you ask? To put it simply, it’s people who can’t control their emotions in the slightest and then try to hide that fact. I’m also curious how many folks aren’t aware of it, but personal agency is a separate topic.

In the end, being around people who do this is just disheartening and I’ve realized having those kind of people around me is a total waste of my time. Most of the things that they complain about – and it’s generally quite a bit – can be boiled down to them dealing with the feedback loop from immediate extreme emotional responses; when I watch them experiencing this it leaves me sitting there staring at them quizzically.

So I’ve decided that life is too short to deal with people who default to extreme emotional responses. I’ve also decided that I would like to be a better person on a continual basis. Because of those two things, I am reorganizing my life to remove people like those I described above, so I can surround myself with more people that will make me a better person.

Note: I already have a number of people that make me a better person but it’s always nice to have more.

Seems kind of simple now that I think about it and I’m mildly bummed that I didn’t figure this out earlier in life. Regardless of that, I am looking forward to see what effects it has on my life.

I was recently browsing Twitter when I came across a tweet I identified with.

Then I came across this reply and something clicked in my head. Loudly.

Being that I’d never heard of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development I did some quick and admittedly shallow reading on the subject, which really made the whole thing resonate more with me. So while the subject itself was new to me (although they’re pretty similar to Kegan stages at a high level and the first four levels of Erikson’s stages are based on Freud’s theory of psychosexual development) my reading left me with the feeling that they’re mostly accurate, at least in how they apply to my life so far. Most especially when I think back on where I’ve been at various stages to date.

Which brings me to why I read the reply multiple times; my life is very different now than it was three months ago, in ways that tend to catch me off guard when I least expect it. There are concrete things like eating healthier and the fact that I can’t do as much mental math as I used to be able to, and there are also these weirdly vague things that I’m just wrapping my head around, like the whole “Why am I striving so hard every day to move a percentage point? How is this really helping anyone?”

Honestly I don’t know why anymore, but my job consists of tasks that are pretty basic for me so I am still getting up every day and putting in the effort, but it also highlights my long held (although stronger lately) desire to get out of tech and into… something else. I don’t know what just yet, but I’m concerned that I might be optimizing my life – financially, physically, and mentally – for a long term path I truly don’t want to take anymore.

All I know for certain at this point is that the rest of my life isn’t going to be centered around technology, that’s for sure. It will most likely be technology adjacent because leveraging technology to improve the human condition is where I’m beginning to find my passion.

Hence the question I’ve asked myself today: “I’m definitely optimizing my life, but for what?”

I’m sure I’ll find an answer eventually.

I was recently in a group chat about improving one’s life and someone brought up the subject of motivations for the changes I’ve been making in my life including no alcohol, much healthier food choices (easier on a low sodium diet), massively reduced stress, and in general taking a different approach to my life choices since I discovered I have dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).¹There is a good article on Wikipedia about this disorder.

As happenstance would have it, this is something I’ve been thinking about for the past month and I’ve come to the conclusion that my motivations most likely aren’t what people think they are²Note that a) I have not asked people what they think my motivations are and b) I am not 100% certain of all of them myself still. so I decided to try and put into words what has been consciously (and almost certainly subconsciously) driving the choices I make on a daily basis for the last month.

So, first things first, I have to say that I am not motivated by the fact that I died for a bit. It’s simply not something I’m worried about anymore; what little fear of death I previously had is now completely and utterly gone. I guess the best way to summarize my feelings on the subject is “Death isn’t really as bad as people think it is”.

So, now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to what I know is actually motivating me for the various large changes I’ve made in my life, which I think are important to go over first.

In the end, there have only been three core changes I’ve made, they’re all pretty sizable, and all have been executed on in a very short time frame. There are also a large number of small changes I’ve made, but this would be a very long post if I went over all of them, so I won’t.

First, I’m now eating a low sodium diet. This was nowhere in the cards for me and was most definitely not something I was planning on. What does low sodium mean? Less than 2,000 mg daily of sodium intake.³I am well under this most days as it’s not that hard when you’re cooking at home. Some days I’ll go above it because I like the NHS recommendation of 2,500mg or less more. =) While this may seem like a lot, it is most definitely not. It makes eating out difficult to say the least, takes the majority of my favorite foods off the table for me, and unless I’m cooking at home generally relegates me to eating things that quite simply don’t have much flavor.⁴Yes, I’m aware that I can use other spices and that there are salt substitutes. They’re even tasty sometimes and I’ll stick with most of them going forward. That said, I in no way prefer anything I have found so far.

I do have to point out that there is one big benefit of a low sodium diet to date and that is a newfound love affair with fruits and yogurt. I’m thankful for that and can’t see this ever changing in my life. Seriously, if you don’t eat a lot of fruit give it a shot.

The second big difference is that I’m not drinking alcohol. While this was a sizable change for me, I was already moving forward with drastically cutting my alcohol intake⁵I highly recommend Sunnyside. I cut my drinking back over 60% without major effort in a ~18 month period and was on track to hit my goal of normal social drinking sometime in late summer 2022. so this was simply accelerating that change. It was surprisingly easy and, looking back, I don’t think that going into cardiac arrest and dying for a few minutes had anything to do with how easy it was. I’d been moving towards drastically cutting back alcohol anyways, this just accelerated the change and then I decided to keep going once I’d crossed the finish line.⁶It’s actually not harmful to drink small amounts of alcohol with DCM, but it slows things down on the healing side and I don’t miss alcohol itself, so I’m completely abstaining at the moment. Given that the root cause of my DCM is likely tied to a thiamine deficiency caused by drinking heavily for about 15 years, this isn’t really a bad thing either.

I have to say that I do enjoy not drinking at the moment. On any given day I have more energy, more focus, and am generally more present than I used to be. It’s a nice change as I honestly can’t remember the last time I went this long without even a single drink and I’m super glad I know what baseline me is like in my 40s. I like that person.

That said, I do miss the ritual itself. I miss mixing cocktails. I miss wine tasting. I miss meeting my wife for a beer at the brewery after work. I’m trying to fill part of that gap by experimenting with mocktails, frequently with THC or CBD tinctures. I’m also enjoying sampling various non-alcoholic beers⁷NA beer has come a loooong way and there are many I prefer to regular beer., mimosas with non-alcoholic champagne⁸I do not prefer these really, but they’re good enough that I wish I had known it was an option. I’ll keep drinking these forever as they’re much, much healthier for you, but it would be nice to have a champagne based one every now and then., and I also drink a likely excessive amount of tonic water and buy limes by the bag now.

The last big change I’ve made is also the only one I’m really, truly happy about: I’m spending more time with my family and less time working, which has massively reduced my stress level. We eat candle lit dinners every night and talk about our days, I have good conversations with my children and have even learned some new things about them, and I feel vastly more connected to them than I used to be. I don’t have anything negative to say about this change and I plan to keep us stocked in candles until the next time I die. I won’t ever go back to what I was doing before.

Now that I’ve typed all that out, I shall come to the point of this long winded blog post: What motivates me to keep up with the changes I’ve made.

To boil it down, the things that are combining to motivate me are, in no particular order:

• I am truly enjoying becoming closer to my family. I’m glad I’m still here to do that.
• My Athena girl would miss me and have no idea why I left if I were to die again.⁹There is a quote about dogs I like, that I can’t find right now, that goes something like “They’re a small part of your life, but you’re all of their life.” This is true.
• I was thoroughly enjoying my life before all this and would have died happy. I do not enjoy my life as much anymore and desire to enjoy it as much as I used to.
• The condition I have is frequently reversible through diet, exercise, and medication.

So in the end I’m simply doing whatever is necessary to try and reverse this so I can hang out with my family for many years to come, play with my dogs, go experience nice restaurants every now and then without having to worry about what’s in the food, go dancing with my wife, enjoy a food truck and a beer every now and then, and generally live a somewhat normal life again.

If I have to take 17 pills a day¹⁰No, that is not an exaggeration. It is, in fact, how many pills I take every day currently., eat the blandest food known to man, and get blood tests on a weekly basis for years on end? Sure, I’ll dig in and live that life for as long as I need to. I’ve had harder times in my life for sure.

Do I enjoy some of the changes I’ve made? Hell yeah, and I’ll keep a good number of them regardless of what the future brings for my health. I won’t ever give up eating candle lit dinners and talking about my day with my wife, nor will I go back to working as much as I was. I won’t ever start taking time for granted again.¹¹I am supremely bothered when people don’t have a sense of urgency now. Life is short, move faster. However, I do want some things back from my old life, namely the ability to go eat at a food truck once a week and wash it down with a microbrew.¹²This is, by far, what I miss the most. I can’t really even put it into words how much I miss it, beyond letting you know that it isn’t really the food or the beer that I miss and, no, there isn’t a substitute I’m willing to accept. Time will tell if I can accomplish my goal but I’m putting in the work, have my motivation firmly nailed down, and I really haven’t ever accepted no for an answer.