Do you want to be obsessed or mediocre?

A balance doesn't exist when you're chasing your dreams.

gm gm.

It’s Monday morning in Bordeaux, our last full day in the city until we head back to Paris tomorrow.

I spent the better half of yesterday archiving the highlights, disappointments, and mentionable replays of week 1 into this 90 day adventure.

I’m excited to share them with you.

For those reading for the first time, let me fill you in on the last couple of weeks.

I was recently let go from my job. Instead of jumping back into the job market I’ve decided to work on honing in on the following skills, coding, reading, and writing. If you’re interested in the back story, you can find last weeks post here.

As promised, let me show and tell you the things I worked on this week, what I learned, metrics, a reflection on the progress and how I plan on adjusting for next week.

Show and Tell

What I built

32 hours with Patrick Collins

Patrick is an absolute a gem of a teacher. This was my first time taking one of his courses and it’s just so obvious how passionate he is about teaching. He is an OG not just in the web3 space, but in web2 and even CrossFit. Mad respect.

This week I started his 32 hour course, Blockchain Developer, Smart Contract, & Solidity Course - Powered By AI.

32 hours of high quality, free education.

His motive:

To get more developers into web3. Web3 needs more devs and he’s committed to educate any and all developers who are interested in learning how to build in the space.

“Repetition is the mother of skill” - 11:26, 2:12:59, 3:35:00 Patrick Collins

Between Patrick repeating this mantra, and my accountability fren Raza sharing his learning tips with me, I took this advice to heart when writing the first smart contract.

I rewrote this contract 5x until I could finally do it without thinking about it.

Rise Up

I like things that have utility.

I like building things that have utility.

Anyone who knows me assumes I’m a morning person just because I’m pretty jolly when I’m awake before the sun rises, but I actually hate waking up early.

I hit the snooze button at least 6 times before actually waking up.

I’m much better now about it. I know myself well enough now to recognize that I don't need just 10 more minutes of snoozing; I need 20 or 30.

The thing is, I love being up early.

It feels good

So, how do I fix this oversleeping problem?

I’m going to build an alarm that:

1. has no snooze feature

2. allows you to upload an audio file to set as the alarm

The first one probably makes sense, but why do I need an alarm to upload an audio file?

Because I want to wake up to David Goggins.

If I still sleep in after asking myself if I want to be a little btch, then there is no hope for me.

Living with a UI/UX designer has its perks; after chatting over coffee about the alarm clock, Claudia created a mockup for the design. I was stoked.

React Native

For the non-developer readers, React Native is tool that developers use to build mobile applications.

People love it because instead of building for two different platforms, iOS and Android, developers can use this library to create applications for both environments.

I’ve always found documentation to be so intimidating so instead of learning how to learn the right way, I stunted my own growth by relying on coding tutorials to learn the basics.

After three years of this, it ends here.

I went to the React Native documentation and haven’t looked back.

After what felt like forever, I finally managed to retrieve the value from the UI and pass it as an alert.

There was a learning curve involved. For instance, when scrolling, I wanted the scroll to halt at a whole number. I discovered that the term I needed was 'snapping,' a realization that required extensive googling.

What I read

Fiction

I finally started reading the long-anticipated 'Snow Crash.'

Two things that stuck out to me were that you can't change your avatar's height in the Metaverse, but your avatar could be a walking penis, and that the currency denominations reach into the trillions. Weird.

Audiobooks

Maybe spoiler alerts, idk

One of my favorite things to do is listen to audiobooks on runs. This week I wrapped up Endure by Cameron Hanes and started Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight.

Cameron Hanes is one savage. He is a bow hunter who’s passion for the sport has propelled him into places he could have never imagined.

Fueled by the motivation to be the best bow hunter he can be, he runs 100 mile races, trains in the weight room, and shoots his bow everyday in order to be the ultimate predator.

He learned that in order to give himself the opportunity to become the best bow hunter that he could be, he had to be obsessed with the commitment.

“If you’re not obsessed, you’re going to be mediocre.”

He wouldn’t settle for anything below exceptional in bow hunting, so for him, it wasn’t even a choice.

Next on deck was, Shoe Dog, A memoir about Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike.

Did you know that before Nike was Nike, it was called Blue Ribbon?

On a handful occasions, Blue Ribbon should have failed, yet they didn’t.

What began as a “crazy idea” has transformed into a company that generated over 45 billion dollars in revenue in 2022.

Both books were on theme encapsulating the power of following your passions at all costs.

Vitalik’s Blog

I decided to start with The Three Transitions because it sounded like the Q3 Ethereum playbook.

TLDR: In order for Ethereum to survive, it must scale to keep costs low, and wallets need to provide end-users with a higher level of trust while preserving their privacy.

This new trend of increasing rollups and smart contract wallets introduces a new challenge. Infrastructure blockers make it harder to associate the same address across various networks, due to the way smart contract accounts are created and what is accepted by the different l2 services.

This creates a domino effect into other parts of the transitions.

How can payments be made? How will social recovery work? How can I be sure my transaction history is private?

Write up coming soon.

What I wrote

Newsletter

I gotta say, I had no idea how this would be received, and to be honest, I almost didn’t care. I say this because if I really cared, I never would have shared this project. I would have been too worried thinking about what people would think about and my choices.

I couldn’t care if I wanted to really do this.

To me, writing feels so personal. It’s cultivation of my thoughts, opinions, and reflections packaged for another person to read and hopefully ride the same frequency of emotions.

I had so much that I wanted to share, but I really wanted to be sure I was able to do this in a clear and concise manner.

I began to feel as though I were a student in a writing class, wondering how I would receive feedback and improve. I turned to the best writing editor I knew, chatGPT. Once I had a final draft of the newsletter, I prompted chatGPT with the following:

you are an editor. here is the first draft of my blog. please give me feedback on the writing, what can be improved and fix any spelling or grammatical mistakes. please be direct in your feedback

I got the tips on how to improve on the following: flow, clarity, consistency and redundancies. It was very specific too, for example, it informed me that “the transition isn’t clear between losing your job and the 90 day program.”

Spot on.

It was through this iterative process over and over again that I brought my first newsletter to completion.

Repetition is the mother of skill.

Metrics

Twitter

I missed the projected target by over 60%. Woof.

A 1% improvement proved harder than I had expected, but then again, if it were so easy, everyone would be reaping the benefits of compounded growth.

A net growth of 2.08%. I’ll take it.

A lot of thanks for the engagement due to announcing my acceptance into Buildspace’s Nights & Weekends program and pictures like the one below taken by our amateur photographer friend, Kevin.

Thoughts on the Progress

Trash

Slow.

Writing this was actually a really great exercise, even though it was a bit daunting. I felt quite disappointed with the time I spent learning this week.

While jotting down the events of the week, it hit me that, similar to how it's taken me 12 weeks of consistent running to comfortably run 12 miles on Saturdays, it's going to take me a few weeks until I'm heads down for 8+ hours a day.

Some days, like today, being heads down is pretty easy because I get lost in the writing. But on other days, when I'm reading up on topics like sharding or the differences between using a FlatList and ScrollView when rendering, the learning wipes me out. Focusing is an endurance sport.

To be obsessed or to be mediocre

Finally we got to the guts of this week’s major lesson. Can we truly be great at things we don’t obsess over? What about work life balance?

I don’t think it can exist.

Work life balance is a thing when you’re building someone else’s dream, but not when you’re chasing your own.

A dream of mine has been to run the Boston Marathon. I decided in May it was time to get serious about it so I developed the following running schedule.

Besides missing one 3-mile run in week 3, I've consistently completed all of my runs over the past 12 weeks. I've become obsessed with making sure these runs get done, no matter what it takes, even if it means stashing my bags in the Dublin airport so that I could run 10 miles during an 8-hour layover.

I've realized that I'll need to apply the same discipline I've built for running to the seriousness with which I approach my time studying.

Next week

Action Items

[ ] continue tracking time for when I’m studying

[ ] don’t get so down on myself for when I don’t have a ‘perfect‘ day =]

Goodbye, for right now

It feels almost criminal not to enjoy wine in Bordeaux, so in the spirit of being a law-abiding tourist, I've indulged in more wine here in the last two weeks than I have throughout all of 2023.

They're not wrong when they say that good wine doesn't leave you with a hangover.

The thing is, drinking has absolutely no net positive effect on my life right now. It takes me away from reading, writing, and coding, and it’s not helping me become a better runner, so, for at least until October 29, I’ll be avoiding it.

Bloopers

My 90 day plan stood no chance on Friday when I instigated Bordeaux’s most dangerous drinking game.

I stayed in bed until close to 11, then finally got up, laced my shoes, and went for a run.

I ended up clocking two segment PRs.

---

Lastly, don’t forget to follow me on twitter if you’re not already and subscribe below!