I’m down ten kilos

Since I strated the monthly goal and accountability blog posts in the beginning of February, I have lost 10 kilos. I have learned that its about getting there and not getting there now. I have tried to get there now, that has never worked. Patience and continuous incremental progress towards the goal seems to work. To be honest I have been more motivated now than ever about fitness. I have been making use of the COVID-19 epidemic as I am generally not eating out, partying or flying. Helps me stick to a fitness schedule!

I clocked 65.95 day before yesterday. I had been telling myself for a week and a half that I’d have a burger as soon as I hit 66.00. I ordered some from shake shack, it was nice. I am back to 66.30 this morning but I think I should stabilize under 66 by the end of the month so this goal is tracking well.

I was in the super market the other day and I realized how my buying habits have changed. I didn’t rush for jam, cornflakes or Dorritos. I have been buying healthier and snacking on fruits. It will be so until I hit 60. Though cereal comes back at 64. The carrot and stick model seems to be working for now. I’ll talk about longer goals in detail in the end of month / beginning of next month post on the 31st.

I am up 423 km

I have run 423 km so far. I have been tracking towards the goal of a 1000 kilometers at the end of the year pretty well so far. It has slowed down a bit since COVID and the summer heat but its getting there. I’m feeling confident that I’ll be able to meeth is goal. Really proud here, running gets me going! Its the one thing that I have control on and can do everyday that charges me to do other things.

I went shopping

One of the wins for the month of March was an Apple Watch. I bought one a week or two ago. Its a nice to have, still getting used to it. I don’t use/wear it all the time but I haven’t been carrying my phone for the last couple of weeks while running. It comes with Apple pay so I have been saved while not having my credit card while I am at the store. Its comparing Apples to oranges but I like the Airpods a bit more 😛

Reading

Reading is tracking well, I am done wit hall the reading tasks for this month except for finishing Liars Poker. I am 80% done there, I think I’ll get done with the book in a few days. So feeling good on this front.

May Sky Challenge

This has been a failure. I ended up looking at my phones alarm the very first day. I immediately put the phone down and started looking at the Sky, applying the five second rule. The next couple of days after waking up I’d look at the sky for a second and then start looking at my phone. Need some work on this one!

NTC

I split the 13 NTC workouts into jump rope and NTC. I am done with 8 sessions, I feel confident about finishing the remaining 5 in the remaining days of the month.

Side Projects

I somehow managed to talk about this at the end of this blogpost. This has been a failure so far. As you know I set out with making an netlify clone. I eventually changed the goal to make a more selective version of Internshalla that allows you to login with your university email address. I ended up pivoting to a running app where you set a goal and you pay if you don’t meet the goal. While getting half way through I found a website that does the same thing. Is that a reason to quit? If you see my Github you can see that I hardly put in any work, I have been procrastinating. I have spent a bunch of time playing Call of Duty, watching Billions and scrolling Reddit when not working. I guess I should follow Bobby Axelrod from billions and get to work, he did say In the great expanse of time we are already dead.

How many times have you run into this?

I have been writing ideas every time I get them for a month now. I have written down ideas in the past as well. How often has this happened to you?

  1. You think of an idea
  2. You think of its utility, implementation and market
  3. You get really excited
  4. Either you find out or someone tells you that the idea already exists

This has happened multiple times this month to me. The following examples are what I can remember

  1. The run or lose money app, has been implemented by this company called Beeminder. They do a lot more than just running.
  2. While developing the internship project, friend asked “How do we make sure that the job is legit?” I came up with up a SaaS that allows for moderation. You send the post to us and then we send you a callback once verified. With some machine learning/AI we could filter out the obviously bad ones. We can send the ones that pass the smell test to your moderators or our own external moderators. After getting really excited and scaling this idea from a bootstrapped company to a startup in our heads, Sodhi pointed out that there is a company called Besedo that does this and has been in the game from 2003.
  3. Bhavdeep comes with another interesting idea. He says, he has trouble finding information in his existing organization as information can be in Slack, Jira, Email, Wiki, Quip, Github, Internal Websites and his company currently doesn’t have something that does this. A lot of firms end up building this in house, this looks like it could be a SaaS. I get excited and get some buy in from other folks. Ines points out that this already exists, Amazon released something called Kendra just recently.

What do you do when this happens?

Do you take this as validation about a market existing?

I was listening to this podcast by Jason Fried where he was talking about the initial days of 37 signals and how they were just another boutique web consultation company. He mentioned that he had put his opinions on the website, if a customer agreed with his companies opinions then they’d think they’d work well together.

I think there is a market for opinions. Looking at Github market place you’ll probably find over ten Continuous Integration Platforms. Why do I use CircleCi? Well I like the asthetics. All the CI businesses seem to be doing just fine, there are no unicorns though.

Do you just drop this idea and look for another one?