Or, how not to succeed. I was driving to work today listening to a talk from church and had this thought pop into my head. “What do I work on next?” If you haven’t noticed, I don’t like being stagnant. I was feeling OK with life, and they always talk about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. At church, and oft-heard refrain is that “God afflicts the comfortable,” to which the given prevention is to always be afflicting yourself.

January 10, 2022 marks: 8 years

Imagine in your spare time that you wrote a book. Let’s say it was the worlds best book on painting houses. You figured out how to paint a house in the most efficient and attractive way possible and decided to share it with the world. Now, lets say that you believe that information is meant to be shared and it is wrong to charge people for your book. Or maybe you think it is impossible to get people to read your book since house painters don’t generally buy books or something.

I always felt vaguely frustrated by the phrase “expect the worst but prepare for the best”. How do you prepare for the best if you’re expecting the worst? Shouldn’t you be preparing for the worst? And why even bother preparing for the best if you’re expecting the worst?

Yesterday I read an article posted on Lobsters about Cross-Checking. I’d never heard that term before, but I definitely understood the message. It was, in an oversimplified summary, building minimum viable solution or at least knowing what it could be. I am currently working on a log management tool. It’s primarily for me to use, but now that I am I figured why not build it for other people to use as well.

I come from a family with a strong tradition of hard work. My mom can outwork pretty much anybody. All of us work hard because of it. It’s a common complaint from my wife and the spouses of siblings that they feel like they just can’t work hard enough to meet the (imagined) expectation to be as great as her. About a month ago my wife and I decided to go into business doing real estate investing with my parents and one of her siblings.

So I’ve been working on a project recently. I really enjoy programming. It’s weirdly relaxing for me. I can get in a zone with something that’s comfortable to me and it has this great sense of accomplishment. With the bot I made I was deploying using ephemeral servers (they get destroyed at every deploy), which makes looking at logs really hard. But log management tools are extremely complicated and expensive. I tried setting up Logtail and gave up after several hours.

OK, but if you commit to something, don’t do it slapdash. Go all in. Seriously. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time. Also, slapdash is the only acceptable alternative to half-a**. Change my mind.

I don’t know when I first heard this. Maybe I made it up, but I doubt it. A month ago I almost quit pilot training. It was hard. I was overwhelmed, lagging behind, struggling with things like my ability to finish, whether my family could handle the pilot life (or even the military life), and if I even wanted to fly. My wife and I had already decided to have a final discussion about whether to finish pilot training after my navigation block checkride.

A fun pilot-humor version of an old classic. Merry Christmas, folks. Twas the night before Christmas, and out on the ramp,Not an airplane was stirring, not even a Champ.The aircraft were fastened to tiedowns with care,In hopes that come morning, they all would be there. The fuel trucks were nestled, all snug in their spots,With gusts from two-forty at 39 knots.I slumped at the fuel desk, now finally caught up,And settled down comfortably, resting my butt.