Training camp and a slurry of ideas
Hey,
Since arriving here on Thursday last week, I’ve swam just over 9km and as of when this email goes out, it will likely be closer to 12km. This is more than I have swam in the last 18 months total. When I was planning my trip to Edmonton, I had one main priority: fitness “training camp”.
Back in 2008 I attended a swim training camp in Venezuela as part of the university varsity team. It was the most intense experience of my life: two workouts a day for about a week. These were most often swims, but we did the occasional run or gym session. I think those 7-10 got me to the fittest point in my life. I was actually so out-of-shape by comparison to my teammates, I spent most of the day after our morning swim sleeping…until our afternoon workout. I only got to the beach once where I earned the worst sunburn of my life. I had to steal yogurt from the buffet to help soothe the pain on my shoulders.
All that to say, if there was one thing I was going to do while I was here, it was swim a lot. I didn’t care if I did anything else so long as I swam. I’m happy to report I’ve done a pretty good job sticking to that! I’ve definitely pushed myself more than expected and am able to go much further than I was even just two weeks ago. Aside from that, I spent two days with my Aunt who lives here, just chatting, and did a lot of reading and introspection. I foolishly only packed shorts and t-shirts when coming here, so I needed to buy yet another hoodie on my trip. I also bought one while in Toronto 👉👈.
What I’m reading
I love to read about money. Every few months I get the urge to read a new book or two from the personal finance space, even if they are all mostly the same. This past week I picked up two new ones that are both pretty meh. Their titles aren’t really even worth mentioning.
I finished Crying in H Mart(excellent) and The Infinite Machine (also great) last week. The other book that I brought with me is Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight, a collection of papers/essays that came out of the Santa Fe institute over the past thirty or so years. I’ve only read the first one but am excited to dive further into it and share what I learn.
What I’m working on
I hit a patch of inspiration in the last couple of days and my mind has been racing. I started drafting two new blog posts that I plan to finish in the coming weeks. I’ve had to try to refine my writing process as I continue to be unfocused and thinking about too many different things at once.
Beyond writing, I’ve also been excited about a few smaller things that have popped up. I’m planning to place a series of small bets over the next 6-12 months of little projects or ideas. My priorities for the next six months are to make & release things and build an audience. I’ve been grappling with (aka: avoiding) the latter for a year or so, but think I will try to commit to it. It will make future projects significantly easier. I’m hoping that if I tell you, I’ll stick to it.
The first one will be turning my Product Tweetstorm from a couple of years ago into a little ebook. I wrote a 100-tweet thread about building products as part of a challenge in December 2019 and thought I could just repurpose that into a PDF/ePub. I only brought my iPad to Edmonton so I’ve tried to do parts of it, but will likely need to wait until I’m in Calgary again to wrap that up. You’ll be the first to know when its done.
Something to share
I couldn’t find anything I wanted to share, so instead I’ll tease the titles of my next two blogposts.
- Falling in love on the internet
- I took Write of Passage and ended up in therapy
If you are interested in giving me some early feedback, let me know!
I hope you’re doing well.
Steven