A Week In My Life | #261

March 23, 2024: Greetings from Austin! I recapped my whole week below so no major updates worth putting here :-)

+ Upcoming IRL meetups in Boston (April 13th) and London (April 18th)

+ Since going full gift economy pay-what-feels-right, we had 25 people join the community in the past week. Pretty cool.

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#1 A Week In The Life

mel

did a great post on the week in the life of a “feral free agent.” I thought it did a good job capturing the wide range of activities that solopreneurs work on during a typical week.

She challenged me to share my week as well, and people have been asking me what I do on a “typical” day, so I figured it would be fun to share:

Monday - Work Day 1

• Writing: Wake up and co-write with a friend at a coffee shop in Austin. I’ve been increasingly trying to shift to writing for three hours on my work days, from 9-12 outside of the house.

• Nap: I didn’t sleep well so I came home and did a quick NSRD nap (my go-to is this playlist from Ayla Nova). I’ve been a big fan of NSDR for years and first got into Yoga Nidra recordings for relaxation in 2013 when I was recovering from Lyme Disease

• Play: Spend about an hour playing with my daughter after her nap. It’s so much fun to have the flexibility to hang out with my daughter whenever I want (but because of this, am finding it challenging to do anything at home these days)

• Podcast: Recorded an in-person podcast with

  Nat Eliason
  and
  sky king.
  on fatherhood. Nat has two kids and Sky is expecting in June. I will be sharing the video of this soon, it was a great conversation

• Dad: I take over for Angie and she heads to Capoeira, something she’s been doing for a couple of years in Austin now. I feed (or attempt to feed) my daughter, bathe her, and then put her down for the night.

Tuesday - Work Day 2

• Gym: I end up waking up a bit early after a good night of sleep and head to the gym around 7:30. I pull sleds, do some pull-ups and pushups, and then do one round of sauna and cold plunge. Regular sauna and cold plunge use has dramatically improved some chronic nervous system issues I had following a tooth infection a few years ago and try to make sure to go as often as possible

• Consulting Workshop: I’m running a 4-week corporate consulting skills training for an advertising consulting firm in LA. Today’s topic is defining problems, developing hypotheses, and presenting solutions to a custom case study I developed. I always have fun doing these sessions as it allows me to teach something I’m good at and also practice reacting and flowing with the needs of the students in real time.

  

• Hang Out: Finish the workshop and hang out with Angie and our daughter for a bit. She has her 1-year-old checkup at 1:30 so we are waiting around for that.

• Doctor’s Appointment: We pay $20 a month to be part of a concierge pediatrics practice that comes to your home for all doctor’s visits. It’s amazing. The nurse practitioner comes to our apartment, does all the standard checkup stuff, and gives her the 1-year-old vaccines. Our daughter is not a fan of the vaccines.

• Virtual Podcast: I recorded a podcast interview with Justin Welsh who recently read my book and said it “was one of the best non-fiction books he’s read.” I am fascinated by this, given that he is one of the most driven solopreneurs that’s out there and so I invited him on the show. We talked about our relationship with work, how he thinks about goals, some of the struggles he’s faced, how he thinks about money, and what drives him. I think you’ll like the episode (a couple weeks!)

• Writing: I have been in the zone with book writing and this day I didn’t get any time to write but am exploding with ideas. I bike to the cafe and write intensely for an hour and a half about a personal experience that I was trying to bring alive. I am finding that a lot of the public speaking lessons I learned from Ultraspeaking are helping.

• Dinner & Bedtime: I head back home to eat with Angie and our daughter and then help put her to bed. I hang out with Angie for a bit and then we both go work on our respective book projects (her latest update here) we are working on now. We’re both fired up and excited about each of our projects which is pretty fun to experience as we keep each other motivated.

Wednesday - Dad Day 1

• Dad Mode: Today is Angie’s day to focus on work (or really, whatever she wants) and so it’s me and my daughter for the day. We start the morning slow, with me attempting to feed her (she’s been quite fussy lately) and keep her entertained. She probably crawls a million steps worth of distance within a day. It’s incredible how active they are at this age.

• Nap Time & Writing: I don’t go into any “dad day” with the expectation of being able to work but if I do get some time during naps it’s a win. I end up using the time to pluck away a bit more at my upcoming book, which is tentatively titled “The Joy of Good Work” (little fun easter egg here for you diligent readers).

• Dad Mode: More feedings and hanging out with Michelle.

• Hangout: I take our daughter to a meetup with Khe Hy and a bunch of his readers who live in town. One thing I like about Austin is that you can pretty much bring a child anywhere. Angie met us there after her gym class which was nearby. Eventually, she hits her social quota and decides to take Michelle home for bedtime while I hang out for a bit.

  

Thursday - Dad Day 2

• Dad Mode: Another dad day and the morning starts off the same as the previous day except Angie is around the house a little more in the morning. We both feed our daughter and play with her before Angie heads to a cafe to write.

• Brunch, Nap & Hang: Khe stops over and grabs lunch and comes and hangs for a bit while my daughter naps. It’s great hanging out with fellow dads who understand some of the demands of having kids and the unpredictability of their schedules. On this day, our daughter is struggling to poop so doesn’t end up napping that well. But she’s sad and lets me hold her which is very nice :-)

• Dad Mode: Angie has personal training in the afternoon and then paint class at night so it’s me and my daughter for the night. We play, she naps for 30 minutes more, eat together on the balcony, have a bath, and then I put her to bed around 8:00 pm.

• Write: I hired

  Alex Dobrenko`
  to vibe-check my upcoming book and he gave me some absolute 🔥 feedback over the past few days and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something I want to write. I head to the computer and get two hours of writing in from 8-10 pm before heading to bed.

  • Alex is one of the best writers on the internet right now and an amazing editor too. Check out

    Both Are True

Friday - Work Day 3

• Hang: I wake up and chill for a bit with Angie and my daughter. It’s nice again after a week-long stretch of rain and cold (for Austin) weather.

• Write: I spend two more hours writing, building upon what I wrote the previous night. In the last week, I’ve started to see the finish line for the book and know what kind of energy I’m aiming at. It’s exciting and it’s consuming all of my thoughts during the week. I’m having a ton of fun writing again which is something I lost for a bit over the last year. This all makes me very happy and again, I’m “succeeding” before even selling a book. Huge W.

• Prepare For Workshop: As part of my weekly workshops for the consulting skill training, I do weekly “action sessions.” This is something inspired by Write of Passage’s “Crossfit Writing” sessions I saw them doing a couple of years back. So each week there is a set of lectures people watch, then an assignment people complete, an action session to walk through the assignment step-by-step with feedback from me, and then finally a live workshop where we recap and present the homework and talk about what we learned. I have had fun prototyping and playing with the formats in the last few years and have now run about 7-8 of these in the last three years and now price these at $25k and up which makes them fit nicely into my life.

• StrategyU Action Session: A 90-minute session with students walking through the assignments. These sessions are always the best as the students almost always have big mindset shifts at the moment as I walk them through different ways of doing the work.

• StrategyU Partnership Calls: I talked with two ex-McKinsey consultants who are exploring alternative opportunities and are interested in learning a bit more about what I’m doing with StrategyU. I’ve been searching for an operator/partner for the past couple of months and have been ramping up my search recently. It’s a hard person to find but I have a few candidates who I’m doing test projects with. Today I’m talking with someone in Miami and Mexico and sharing a bit more about how I think about content-led businesses.

• Gym: I bike to the gym and hang out for a bit, work out in the sun, and then head to the sauna. During the bike ride and sauna, my head is exploding with ideas for my book and I stumble upon two amazing ideas which I write down in my notes.

• Call With Publishing Connection: I talked with someone interested in partnering with me in my attempts to find foreign translators to publish my book. I got her interest after sharing that a Taiwanese publisher thought my book was too controversial.

  • I talk about the challenges I’ve had getting past the gatekeepers in the publishing industry for foreign rights. We brainstorm a couple of ideas and she’s going to use her connections to identify some editors who

  • We talk about me seeing the book as a 10-year project which excites her as she sees so many people “give up” on their book a week after launching. I’m excited to play the long game with this book and see what might emerge.

• Write: I unload those ideas that emerged on the bike ride and at the gym and I’m so excited because I think I’ve finally cracked one of the chapters I’m working on.

• Dinner & Bedtime: Angie cooked dinner and we all ate on the balcony. Angie heads to the grocery store to pick up food and I take over for getting Michelle to bed. She crashes in 30 seconds which is amazing.

• Write: I end up here at the keyboard writing this newsletter post for tomorrow. I actually didn’t know what I was going to write about until I saw mel’s post an hour early and got excited to write this. I have been meaning to write something like this for a while.

Reflections

It’s interesting to look at this week because it looks a bit insane. So many different kinds of work and so many different kinds of days.

But by Friday (right now as I write this) I still feel great. This is the crazy thing. I feel great most days. I have gone years without the “thank god it’s Friday” feeling and I think the diversity and randomness of my days have been such a big part of it.

Everything I did this week was opt-in and if there was anything I’d skip it might be the StrategyU workshops. But in terms of return on income vs. effort, they are great and I also enjoy the workshops. In fact, it’s mostly the selling, contracts, invoicing and prep that drains me. But I’m also only planning on doing two of these big workshops this year. After next week when my second workshop finishes, I’m going to pause those unless I can find freelancers to deliver them. This is one of the benefits of working for yourself. You can decide how much (or how little) you want to earn. I am very comfortable leaving money on the table.

We’re also in a nice stretch with our daughter where she reliably sleeps 12 hours a night and 3 hours during the day so there’s a bit of predictability in our weeks (which was not the case last year)

I feel so lucky that most weeks these days are like this and that I have so many things I enjoy doing. The biggest challenge right now is that the full days with my daughter are increasingly a bit draining for both Angie and me so we are contemplating switching to swapping halfway through one of the days next week.

By The Way, Here’s Mel’s post:

How I spend my week as a feral free agent

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#2 Sabbaticals, Apprenticeships, “Decelerators,” and Quitting In The Middle of Reading The Pathless Path

I talked with

Steven Schlafman

and

Matt Yao

. Here’s why I think this is worth listening to:

• Steve used to be a Venture Partner but realized he was in the wrong life. He blew it up.

• He has gone through his journey of literally starting a coaching practice called “High Output” to now running something he’s calling a decelerator. It's been amazing to see his shift over the last few years.

• Steve is a dad and has two kids and dads are cool here

• Matt is younger and decided to blow up his life after landing his dream job at 22 and then losing his edge over the next couple of years.

• He decided to quit his job halfway through reading my book.

• He quit six months later and embarked on a year-long sabbatical. His writing on this in

  Game of One
  is excellent

• But he says he’s more ambitious than ever.

• And he just created his apprenticeship with Steve.

• Super cool

• Listen:

Spotify

Apple

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Bottom Of The Page Club!

Here are four things worth checking out

1. If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community

2. Buy or listen to my book, The Pathless Path. If you’d like to do a bulk order you can do that here for a discount.

3. You can buy pathless path swag like a hat or shirt here

4. Subscribe to my podcast and leave a review.

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