Daily Note - December 26, 2021

Published Dec 28, 2021

This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a commission or credit if you buy those products. You might get a discount, or an extended free trial. I only share products I use myself and genuinely believe in. Thank you for supporting me!

Business

Looked through Reddit posts for pains/questions people have, and saved the ones I can answer confidently. One of them was someone who has an idea for a basic web app but doesn’t know how to execute it. I thought Rails would be the perfect tool for the job and I offered to help them get started.
I was responding to a reader who was looking to connect with other beginners, so I looked through my Slacks to see which ones I could recommend. Since they are in France, I recommended the ParisRB Slack. I also suggested they look through this list of Software Development Communities from the Hive Index.
I hadn’t been on Slack in a while, so I thought I’d check in on my former coworkers. Turns out they had planned a Zoom at 8pm, which was perfect since my kids would be in bed by then.
There were only 4 of us in the Zoom, and it was nice to catch up. Here are some resources that came up:
- Write … One Note at at Time
- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It’s available on Scribd, which is a great service I’ve been using since 2016. For $10/month, you get access to unlimited books, audiobooks, magazines, and sheet music. If you sign up with this link, you’ll get 60 days free, and I’ll get 30 days.
- The Mom Test - a book by Rob Fitzpatrick. Both the book and audiobook are available on Scribd. I listened to the audiobook in the car and found it helpful.
- My dynamic daily notes template for Obsidian. I built a macOS shortcut that creates the current day’s note and includes dynamic elements like all my calendar events for the day pulled from multiple calendars (iCloud, Google, Fastmail), and random entries from my public Pinboard reading list. This will be available exclusively to my subscribers, so sign up now if this sounds useful to you. I also wrote a Twitter thread to explain my thought process and how I arrived at this solution.
- We talked about finding your life’s purpose, which reminded of the “Zone of Genius” concept that I first read about two years ago in Clearbit’s approach to management, via issue 349 of the Software Lead Weekly newsletter. I had forgotten about it, but it popped up again this year in issue 453 with Mathilde Collin’s How to find your zone of genius.
- When I searched for “zone of genius” in DuckDuckGo to see who originally came up with it, The Managers Handbook from Clearbit came up, and when I searched for “zone of genius” there, I learned that this term was coined by Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap. Both the book and audiobook are available on Scribd. He later wrote The Genius Zone.
- The topic of building a business and marketing came up, and I mentioned some of the resources I’ve been learning from:
- The 30x500 course I’m enrolled in, where I’m learning how to uncover pain points and build products to solve those problems, using techniques like Sales Safari.
- Brennan Dunn’s Create & Sell newsletter. One of my favorite email marketing teachers. He’s a 30x500 alumnus and went on to create several businesses that bring in millions in revenue.
- Harry Dry’s Marketing Examples.
- I learned that Twitter’s algorithm hates links in the first tweet. To promote a blog post or some other content, first write something helpful/interesting, then follow up later with a link. In Twitter for Bloggers: 7 tips to get traffic to your blog, Monica Lent calls this building an engagement streak.

Home

Made eggs with kielbasa. Had them with the super seed bread from Le Pain Quotidien. The combination wasn’t great. Maybe it was the bread? The eggs by themselves tasted better.
Took advantage of the 60 degree weather and met up with friends at Great Falls park (Maryland side). We wanted to renew our annual pass but no one was at the gate. I think it’s usually free on the 26th. After the park, we continued our outdoor adventures at Brookside Gardens. It was our first time there and we enjoyed it. The kids loved playing in the outdoor kitchen.
When we got back home, Joanna made these sesame salmon bowls that I had saved to the Paprika iPad app. It was our first time making them and they were delicious.