Our normal game was 10-20 Limit, which you’d normally buy in for about $400-500. We walked up to the podium and asked for the game. They looked at us like we were a little bit crazy and said, “we haven’t had that game since 2019. Do you want 20-40?”.

The buy-in for 20-40 is twice as much and the players tend to be a big step up from 10-20. I had played it occasionally in the past, so I knew it wasn’t too crazy of a game, but it was definitely jumping into the deep end of the pool.

The first thing I noticed was how fast the game felt. It reminded me of the first time I played poker in a casino, when it felt like I could barely keep track of what was going on and whose turn it was. When you play poker regularly the game changes to feel very slow. People sometimes even bring tablets and watch movies while they play.

Luckily, it came back quickly. It was interesting to realize that poker was still somewhere in the back of my brain. I found myself raising and check raising without really thinking about it. Layers of the game came back to me, almost like they were being installed in my brain as I played. I’d think things like, “oh yeah, I should know how much money is in the pot”, and the realize that I already knew if I just thought about it. Same with odds of making various hands. My hand reading wasn’t as good as it used to be, but the only times I was suprised at what someone had were when they played so poorly that no one could predict what they were holding.

I always tell people that they should play poker for the way it trains your brain, but not having played in so long made me forget exactly why it was so good. I don’t think that playing a few times in a week is enough to actually have any effect, but I could definitely feel it sharpening my brain in the same way you feel your muscles working out at the gym.

It was also really interesting to be immersed in a world that I had left for so many years, sort of like visiting a country I hadn’t been to in a while. I recognized some of the old regulars, and many of the employees. The hosts couldn’t remember our names, but they remembered us and knew we hadn’t been there in a while.

I was also a little bit surprised to see how bad the other players were. There weren’t any absolute maniacs like there would be at lower levels, but even with a thick layer of rust I caught many obvious mistakes even within the first 15-30 minutes of playing.

At the poker table you think about who you’re likely to make a profit off of and who is likely to make a profit off of you. When I played the $10k buy-in World Series of Poker game a few years ago almost everyone was a pro I recognized and I quickly realized that there was no one there I could expect to profit off of. At this table, though, there was no one I think could make money off me and a lot of people I could make money from.

Anyway, the point of all this is that in 2021 poker is still a totally viable thing to do. It’s really amazing for your brain, the sort of analysis you do in the game is directly applicable to real life, and it’s still very easy to be profitable (at least in real life in Vegas, which is generally not the easiest place to be profitable).

I’m not sure if there are better books these days, but I started learning poker with the book Winning Low Limit Hold’Em by Lee Jones, and it’s a really excellent book. It has just the right amount of information to get you to profitability without bogging you down in so much detail and theory that you walk away.

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Photo is from opening night of Shin Lim‘s new show in Vegas. I expected that it would be good, but it was actually really excellent. It probably had more tricks that I couldn’t figure out than any other magic show I’ve been to.

I’m about to start Tea Time with Tynan #8 as I post this. I’m going to try to do one next week too, but I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be able to.

They all have two things in common. First is that they are absolutely world class. I travel enough and eat enough food that I know what’s good and what isn’t, and all of them are literally as good as it gets within their field. The second thing that they all have in common is that they didn’t have backgrounds in food.

Once or twice is a fluke, but to see so many world class food companies start from inexperienced people really got me thinking.

I noticed that they all had the exact same approach. They all sourced the very best ingredients possible. The shave ice is all organic fruit and sugar, with no flavors or dyes. The pizza place cold-called the most famous meat supplier and got them to make them a special pepperoni blend. The sushi chef, who operates out of his mom’s house, flies in the best ingredients from around the world.

They also all cared. I don’t think I quite understood just how little most restaurants care until I saw how some of these people operate. They take pride in what they serve, they see it as an extension of themselves, and they care about learning their craft. All of them are constantly trying new things. The shave ice place is always testing new flavors; the pizza place is making totally different types of pizzas, most of which never make it to the menu; the sushi chef experiments with dry aging and unusual fish.

It turns out that excellence is attainable if you just get the right ingredients and care enough to learn and iterate until you get a good enough product. Maybe that’s not true for every single food, but the cross section that I’ve seen is so broad that I suspect it probably is. It’s also probably true for a lot of other fields. Sett wasn’t anywhere near excellent as a business, but we wrote it ten years ago, stopped working on it seven years ago, and it’s still ahead of its time in many regards. Minaal backpacks and Wool and Prince clothes are excellent because they used the best materials and cared enough to make something great.

Once you realize this, you’re forced to confront the idea that most people just don’t care. A meal isn’t bad because it couldn’t be good, it’s because no one cared to make it good enough, or they cared more about squeezing a little more margin out and hoped that you wouldn”t notice.

Realizing this puts a lot more in reach. You don’t need skills or background to make something excellent, you just have to find the right raw materials and care enough to put in the work to make it great.

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Photo is the sushi I mention in the post.

No Tea Time with Tynan tomorrow, but we’ll be back in a week with Tea Time with Tynan #5. Please join and chat with me and other readers!

It’s important to create a very strong filter, one that catches 99% of the stuff that you’re exposed to, especially the useless stuff that masquerades as important stuff.

You need to know what you want to come out of the end of the filter. It’s not enough to think about what’s “bad”, but rather you must know what matters to you. For me it’s quality time with friends and family and trying to do and learn about stuff that others don’t (so that I can bring it to you and my friends in a usable way). You could pick apart my life and find some other stuff too, but the vast majority of what I do is aimed towards those goals.

When you encounter something vying for your attention, ask if it is aligned with what you want to come out of your filter and whether it is actionable or not. If it meets these two criteria, go for it. If not, ignore it and move on. If you find that you are frequently filtering something out that you wish you didn’t have to filter out, that may mean that you need to change to a different filter, maybe because you’re at a different place in your life.

Some examples:

I almost never comment on politics and the news. Even if I got really into politics and was totally up on all of the news, it wouldn’t bring me more quality time with friends and family. It also doesn’t qualify as learning about unusual stuff, since it’s literally what everyone learns about. Also, neither one is actionable at all. I will never care enough about politics to run for office or seriously help a candidate win, so I’m not going to divert precious energy there.

Most choices from my life are replaced my strong defaults. I wear the same clothes every day and eat the same food every day because making choices about these things is a waste of focus and energy.

I don’t go to parties or large gatherings because even though this could result in me making new friends that I could spend quality time with, I find that I have MORE leverage just spending quality time with the friends I already have (and I accidentally make a few friends per year anyway).

Goals often require supporting actions which take up focus. That’s totally fine and necessary, but it’s important to make sure that the focus they occupy is proportional to the role they play towards the goal. For example, staying healthy matters because it allows me to have more quality years of life with which to spend with friends and family and it keeps my mind sharp. So I work out every other day and eat reasonably healthy food. Getting totally shredded would take up a disproportionate amount of time relative to the role it plays in my goal, so I don’t spend effort on that.

I also end up doing a lot of stuff that seems like a waste of time. In order to discover things that others don’t, I go down a lot of dead ends. Before the multiple-property-buying thing that I always talk about, I spent a few days trying to figure out how to make time shares worth it. Before coming up with How to Manage Your Finances Like a Billionaire I had to research all sorts of investment, tax, and insurance products. To find Budapest I had to visit a bunch of countries that were just OK. I don’t beat myself up about wasted time because I know that those are the sorts of things that should be getting through my filter, because in aggregate they end up producing the results I want.

What do you want your time to be going towards? How much of it is going towards that now? How much of that remaining time is high-leverage? How much could you cut out to make way for more of the best stuff?

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Photo is the mountains near Mt. Charleston in Vegas.

No Tea Time with Tynan this weekend, but I think I will schedule one for the following Sunday.

Everything I write comes from this privileged background. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about that, since it is my reality. Several people brought up privilege in my recent survey, though, so I wanted to address it and also share what I think are some productive ways to think about it.

First, I think that privilege is a great thing. My grandparents grew up dirt poor (and first generation immigrants on one side), and through two generations they were able to get where we are today. America (and the world) had MORE problems then, but even so, that sort of mobility was possible. (And yes, I understand that there are some key things that are worse today).

When thinking about privilege I think we should focus on how to get more privilege to people who don’t have it rather than demonizing those who do. For example, billionaires are very unpopular these days, but I love them. My life has unambiguously become better due to many of the billionaires. Rather than pick at their faults, which they all certainly have, we should be focusing on how we can create an easier path for less privileged people to get to that same level.

This is a big reason that I’m a huge proponent of universal basic income. I think it would eliminate a huge portion of the functional gap between the haves and have-nots. In my experience as well as the experience of those around me, the biggest change in ability comes once you can live extremely frugally and have most of your time to yourself.

One of the things that most bothers me about the idea of privilege is the victim mentality behind it. Even if you are an actual victim, feeling like one is not productive. My wife grew up poor and didn’t own shoes until she was a teenager, but she never felt like a victim, and instead did everything she could to improve her situation. By the time I met her she had a master’s degree, significant savings, and many pairs of shoes. I think this story is true for a lot of immigrants in our country, a group that we traditionally see as underprivileged.

In a more general sense, those who tend to succeed are those who focus on their strengths and tackle obstacles where they have agency or leverage. Those who tend not to succeed are those who focus on things they can’t change.

All that said, I think there’s very little worse than lucky people like myself who don’t realize that they’re lucky. I had it easier than my parents, they had it easier than my grandparents, and they had it easier than my great-great-grandparents. As I’ve written about before, a huge part of my success (not just financial) is due to factors I had zero control over. I am proud of what I have done, but realistically I’ve only run the last mile of a marathon that was mostly run for me.

We should also realize that even if we have less relative privilege than others (which is true for all but one person, whoever he is), we all have a certain amount of absolute privilege for which we should be thankful. We were all born, we all have access to computers, we all have unlimited opportunity ahead of us, we have access to infinite amounts of knowledge, we can make friends, we have self-awareness, and we have infinite other gifts.

Privilege exists, we’re all recipients of it to a certain extent, and since privilege is a part of where we started in life, it is woven into our paths. We can’t escape that, and there’s no reason to try to. Let’s acknowledge our privilege, be grateful for it, help those who don’t have it succeed in spite of it, and have compassion for everyone.

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Photo is a wild donkey I saw near Lee Canyon Ski Mountain in Vegas. So cool!

No Tea Time with Tynan tomorrow, but I will be back on April 4th! There will be a loose theme of Home Improvement (improving your space, lighting, DIY, home automation, etc), but you can ask questions about anything. It’s really fun to connect with readers and answer questions. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and enable notifications, or just set an alarm.

Here’s the link: Tea Time with Tynan #3

It’s also interesting that we have specific identities to each other. To her I’m “the habit guy” and to me she’s “the 50+ makeup lady”. Hopefully there’s a lot more to each of us than that, but the internet has made it so that we come across so many different people that we are forced to distill people down to an identity.

To some extent, I think these identities have always been there, but they’ve been internal. In high school I thought of myself as a slacker who did crazy things. If someone suggested doing a crazy thing, like climbing a construction crane or jumping on a moving train, I would go do it. I liked doing those things, but I also felt some sort of obligation to my identity. People liked me for who I was, so on some subconscious level I wanted to reaffirm that identity.

This was also true of negative habits like slacking off. Even if I had time to do some homework and really didn’t mind doing it, I might be more likely to put it off and try to do it in the morning before class, because that’s who I was.

One of my identities was someone who was shy and bad with girls. When I learned pickup and, over the course of a couple years, shifted my identity to being someone who was good with girls, two things changed.

First, I realized that identity was malleable. If I could go from being so bad to so good at something that felt like a core attribute of who I was, I could probably do that with anything.

Second, people just updated their map of my identity. Once I tried to show off for some friends to walk up to a random girl and get her number, in hopes that it would inspire them to also learn about pickup. I overheard one say to the other, “Well yeah, but he’s always been good with girls.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, but it was interesting to see how quickly I could be redefined.

The point is, we treat identity as a boundary, when really it’s just an ephemeral summary.

It matters somewhat how others think of us, but it matters far more how we think of ourselves. It’s so common to see someone who lets a negative identity hold them back. They’re a loser, or poor, or lazy, or flaky, or a liar. No one wants to be those things, but it’s comfortable to live up to your identity, and most people’s actions are dictated more by comfort than desire.

How do you want to think of yourself? How would you like others to see you?

Really think about it. As you do, you’ll probably find your mind shooting down ideas. You’ll think, “I want people to think of me as funny”, and your brain will say “but you’re not.” Push through that and allow yourself to be honest about how you want to be seen.

Think about how people see you now. Some people will have trouble being honest with themselves here, either because they’ll put themselves down or because they’re too blind to their weak points. Sometimes it’s easier to think about how you would see a clone of yourself.

I have a fundamental belief that others will always see you for who you are. You can try to hide it and can limit interactions to the superficial to prevent them from figuring you out, but I think these efforts usually fail, especially with time. Because of this you must actually become who you want to be seen as, and you should advertise accurately (i.e. don’t try to pretend you’re someone that you’re not).

Identify the gap between how you want to be seen and who you actually are, and work on closing that gap. If you used to procrastinate like I did, update your identity to “someone who is working on overcoming procrastination”. It’s honest, but it’s also useful, unlike “someone who procrastinates”. Don’t try to fix everything at once, just pick one or two things and get them to where you want them to be.

Catch yourself when you say things that reinforce a bad identity. If someone says, “I’m always late”, I know they are not going to change. Subtle things like blaming things on “the rich” are also bad, because they reinforce your identity as someone who is poor. Identity is just a construction of language, so we can’t allow ourselves to use language to cling to bad identities.

I will literally never say anything bad about myself that is forward-looking. I don’t mind saying, “Wow, I really messed that up. I’m totally responsible and should have known better.”, but I will never say, “I’m such a loser. I always mess stuff up.” Our brain, which controls most of our actions through the subconscious, is programmed by our thoughts and speech.

Don’t choose a one-size-fits-all template of an identity. Don’t be “a gamer” or “a stoner” or “an entrepreneur”. Those are boring and limiting. Make up your own identity that is true to who you are and how you want to live. It should be a little bit difficult to describe yourself, because no individual can honestly be categorized easily, but it should not be impossible, because you should know who you are.

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Photo is a helicopter we saw on Lake Mead. I think it was some sort of military exercise.

For the first time in years today I had the thought, “maybe I’ve written everything I have to write and I should stop blogging.” Then I thought about the people who prepaid a year of Patreon and felt like I couldn’t quit!

It didn’t occur to me that everyone didn’t do things like this until one of my roommates hired a handyman to hang a single picture frame. My father was a carpenter and handyman, so like when you copy a copy in a xerox machine, I was a worse handyman. Now that we have a new old house and there are almost unlimited projects ahead of me, I think a lot about how lucky I am to have a father who taught me this stuff.

As I see others approach similar projects, I realize that although there is a skill gap, there are also some gaps in perception. Understanding a few things about construction and doing projects can make you feel much more comfortable and willing to try by yourself.

1. Almost anything can be fixed easily and cheaply, so you don’t have to worry too much about messing things up. I recently wanted to see what was in the crawl space above the ceiling and there were no hatches, so I just cut a hole in the wall of a closet and peeked through. Once I saw that there was enough room for me to crawl around up there I expanded the hole to be just barely big enough for me to squeeze through. I don’t mind doing this because I know that the small hole would be trivially easy to repair, and even a big one isn’t all that hard.

2. Most mass-market construction jobs (i.e. not detailed finishwork) are intended to be as easy and standardized as humanly possible. Construction is so ubiquitous that everything has been made ultra-efficient. I learned this mostly when we built a loft in the yurt on the island. Building such a large structured seemed complicated, but it turned out to be very fast, easy, and cheap, because that’s what the market demands. We didn’t do it perfectly, but we weren’t that far off either. So when you’re thinking about tackling a job remember that there’s a huge industry that has tried to make it so that any unskilled laborer could do the job. A friend and I recently resurfaced a bath tub, something neither of us had done, but he has a similar upbringing and attitude, so we just followed the steps and knocked it out in a few hours.

3. Only the outer layer has to really be good. If you go to Home Depot or Lowes and buy 2x4s (a standard size width and height of wood), you’ll notice that none of them are straight. They’re all warped, cupped, and twisted to various degrees. But once they’re put together and finishing layers are put on top, they make pretty straight walls. The point is that you can mess up a lot of stuff and be inaccurate and stuff will still come out pretty well. When I redid my old bathroom I tore out all the old stuff, framed in the new tub, but then hired someone to do the finish work because I didn’t think I’d be able to do a great job.

4. Materials are usually cheap. An 8 foot long 2×4 might only be about $6-7. So generally you can just try to build something and if it comes out terribly you haven’t wasted a lot of money. Some materials like granite or nice tiles can be expensive, but most of the cost of construction is usually the labor. That means that you can save yourself serious money by doing things yourself, and that if you try and fail you probably haven’t lost much money.

5. Youtube knows everything. There are so many good videos of carpenters and other tradesman doing things that you can figure just about anything out. Very often the task is much easier than it seems like it would be, and seeing someone explain it and go through the steps gives you the confidence you need to tackle the project.

6. Electricity is the easiest. Most basic plumbing is super easy. Electricity and plumbing seem scary, but in my experience they’re actually some of the easiest projects. If you turn off the breakers and use a non-contact electricity sensor, you can be very confident you’re not going to be electrocuted. Replacing lights, fans, outlets, or anything like that is simple. Once my 16 year old cousin visited and I taught her how to replace light fixtures so that she could help me. Plumbing is a little bit more complicated, but only because there are a few different standards for fittings. If you bring the old pieces into Home Depot and tell them what you’re trying to do, they’ll give you the correct ones. Connecting them is easy, but just make sure to check for leaks and check again after some more time.

Generally speaking, you can probably do most household handyman tasks by yourself. They may not come out as well as a professional could do them (and, honestly, it’s amazing to see how good pros are), but sometimes it doesn’t matter. We wouldn’t have paid the $1000-2000 it would have cost to repair our shower, but the $150 + our labor was a no brainer. Other times, like in replacing fixtures, you’ll do it just as well as a pro. Don’t be afraid to try, even if you have no experience, as you probably can’t mess it up beyond repair. Besides saving money, and often time, it’s very rewarding to be competent enough to fix your own home and to make improvements to it as you wish.

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Photo is me pushing through into the attic in my pajamas.

Last year I wrote that it felt like such a dense year, with almost every day being packed and accounted for. This year was mostly the opposite, with long stretches of empty time with not only nothing to do, but very little I could do.

While I wouldn’t want every year to be this way, it was really refreshing to have such a big change and to take on the challenge of adapting to it.

As usual, here are the highlights of my year:

Japan Apartment Completes The Empire

As you may already know, I buy properties with my friends to use as home bases around the world. I knew for years that Japan would be the last feather in the cap, but it was by far the most challenging one to find.

The main issue is that there is no one obvious best area of Tokyo, and you have to really sort by commute time to places you like to go, which ends up being a tedious process.

We ended up getting a tiny but awesome little apartment in Nakano. It’s really a best-case scenario of amazing location, great views, and a nice adaptable space. I visited it once to get the keys and once again as the last trip I got to take before COVID forced a lockdown.

Besides the excitement of having a cool place to stay in Tokyo forever, it feels great to close the chapter on looking for properties to buy.

Tea Ceremony

(Todd doing tea ceremony in Hilo pre-covid)

I made a lot of progress in tea ceremony classes and while I am still a beginner in absolute terms, I do feel like I’m starting to “get it”. It’s the sort of thing where I’m sure you look back every year and can’t believe the dumb mistakes you were making back then.

It’s been fun to dig deeper into an esoteric topic with no practical value other than the learning and practice itself. It feels a little bit like social meditation where you get to drink delicious tea.

One Cruise

(me at the Louvre)

I had at least five cruises planned this year and only got to do one. But… it was still an awesome cruise through the Middle East on one of my favorite ships (Jewel of the Seas). I scuba dove in Oman, visited the Louvre in Dubai, and ate a record 16 lobster tails in one sitting. I also remember doing a ton of work, but I can’t remember exactly what I worked on.

The cruise was intended to be one of many, but managing to do one cruise before COVID struck now feels like such a treat. I think there’s a decent chance I won’t get to cruise at all during 2021, though I hope I’m wrong.

3D Printing

(I designed and 3D printed a lit for this chaire, a tea container used in tea ceremony)

I had always wanted to buy a 3D printer and learn how to use it, and COVID gave me a perfect opportunity. The technology isn’t quite mainstream yet, but it feels completely magical to imagine an object and then be able to make it real within an hour or two. I go through phases, but very routinely use it make little jigs and parts for different projects. Last week I wanted some hooks to hang robes near the hot tub, so I just printed a couple out and they were ready before I went for a soak.

Health + Fitness

My general rule is that I’m 100% strict when I’m home and eat what I want, within reason, while traveling. Well… I’d been doing a lot of traveling. The heaviest I allow myself to get is 165, and that’s where I was when I began to quarantine. For most of quarantine (until I moved) I hit a really strict diet and workout regimine and got down to 150lb and 13.5% body fat from 165 and 17%. 150 is the lowest I like to be, so I’ll be ready for some buffets once I can cruise again.

I don’t really care much where I am between 150-165, but I really enjoyed turning on the discipline and seeing the results.

I also bought a sauna and hot tub off craigslist and have probably done one or both of them about 50% of the nights I’m in Vegas. I’m skeptical of the health benefit claims, but maybe there’s something to it.

Coaching

As I was thinking about what I really enjoyed this year, coaching came to mind. I always enjoy it, but I think it was extra enjoyable this year since it was so easy to schedule. A bunch of my clients had huge wins and breakthroughs and it has been a lot of fun to be part of that journey.

The biggest challenge was that many people want to work on social group stuff and I don’t feel like we were able to get the kind of results we could have gotten without a lockdown.

Clearing Backlog (email spam, moved sett, etc)

I had a HUGE amount of random tasks, mostly tech stuff, that I was deferring because it was never urgent enough. A perfect example is moving the Sett server to my own server from AWS. It only took a few days, but it was a few days of complete focus and dealing with dozens of unexpected roadblocks. I had been dreading this for years and just kept putting it off because the extra $100 a month charge didn’t matter that much and I had more interesting work to do.

After doing it I realized that I had wasted almost $10k on these charges!

That was the worst example, but there were a lot of other little ones like moving newsletters in-house, writing some analytics software for my services, cleaning up a bunch of cruisesheet stuff, fixing my spam filter, etc. Now all of these things are done and while the impacts are relatively minor, they add up and I feel great having no deferred maintenance.

Investment

For the first time ever I understood the point of building a portfolio and investing.

I won’t rehash it all here, but I feel like my understanding of personal finance is finally complete and my system for managing my finances is exponentially better than in previous years. Most of the satisfaction here is in finally understanding how everything fits together, not so much that I think I’m going to have wildly different results.

VR

In a non pandemic year I don’t think VR would make the list, but it ended up being a surprisingly satisfying way to connect with friends. Even though I was at home the whole time, I feel like I’ve been in all sorts of virtual worlds, mini golf courses, and escape games with my friends. The technology has now gotten to the point where experiencing VR is accessible and worth it for most people.

I can’t remember the last time I played a game, but I’ve played almost 700 games of Population: One, almost all of them with two friends on my team. The game looked so stupid to me, but it ended up being really interesting and a great way to spend an hour chatting with friends, flying around with them, and trying to strategize against other teams. I suspect that once I can travel and see my friends in real life I’ll play a lot less, but for now I really enjoy the time spent in VR.

Vegas / Moving

My only actual stated goal last year was to spend more time in Vegas. I’m not sure I had this much time in mind, but I certainly got my Vegas time in. I used to say that if I had to live in only one city and never travel I wouldn’t choose Vegas, but I think at this point I probably would. We’ve found even more to love about the city, and I appreciate it’s strengths even more than I did before.

The one weakness in my Vegas life which COVID exposed was the lack of outdoor space at home. At one point Lake Mead was closed, Red Rock was closed, and the ski mountain, Lee Canyon, was closed. Those are my three go-tos for outdoor recreation in Vegas and I started to feel pretty confined being in an apartment all day. We even looked up a random hike to do off a highway somewhere and it, too, was closed.

Our new house has a pool, a big patio, and a good sized yard, tons of big windows, and it makes a huge difference. I love having some space to just walk around, hear birds, and get some fresh air.

The house also has hundreds of unfinished projects (this week I’m setting up a hardcore video camera system, refinishing and installing a cool old wooden door, and building a mount for the projector screen). I had run out of projects to do at our apartments, so it’s nice to work with my hands again.

As you might guess from my history with properties, another couple of friends have already bought a house down the street and at least one other friend is actively searching. It’s nice to have the space and facilities to have each other over to cook meals, swim, sauna / hot tub, or just drink tea for hours.

A Big Secret Project

Early in quarantine I grabbed the bull by the horns and started a big secret project that had been sitting on my todo list forever because I just wanted it to exist. Unfortunately I got to about 95% by the time we bought the house, and have made no progress since then. The main problem is that I do projects because I want to use them, not so much because I want to make money, and it’s now useful enough for me to use but not polished enough to sell.

I generally force myself to finish what I start, and I already have another project I want to do, so I think I’ll finish this one within some number of months.

Next Year

It’s hard to set goals for 2021 because so much of the year will be dictated by circumstance, but next year I want to…

…get the house fully remodeled and set up, which I think will happen no matter what.

…do more Superhuman events and will plan them as soon as it seems responsible to do so.

…launch the secret project and announce the next one as well (it’s catered towards blog readers, so I’ll make sure there’s enough interest)

…make up for lost time and spend more time with friends and family I wasn’t able to see this year.

I don’t have a lot of goals these days because I am completely happy with my life and don’t really need anything else. Most of the things that I hope for are good things I want to happen to other people in my life.

I hope that you had the best year you possibly could in 2020 and that 2021 is even better. More than most years I think it will be interesting to look back on this post next year. If you want to send me your yearly summary and goals, my email is my name at my name dot com. I’ll read them all and try to reply!

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Top photo is part of the tea room at Yakumo Saryo in Tokyo. It’s one of my top 3 tea houses in the world.

Most people will use a combined version of several of these levels, so you may not find that you are entirely described by just one.

The easiest level is to do the wrong thing. For example, if you eat garbage food, do drugs, and play video games all day, you never really have to challenge yourself. Most people are resourceful enough that they will figure out a way to survive in this situation, but they will probably not find that their lives become better over time.

The decision making process here is a simple and likely unconscious, “what would give me the least immediate pain?”. Ironically the avoidance of immediate pain usually generates (with interest) future pain. Avoid the pain of being healthy now and you are likely to be plagued by disease for decades.

The next easiest level is to do the right thing without thinking about it. It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is without thinking about it, but you make an effort. The decision making process is an unconscious, “what will make me feel like I’m doing the right thing?”. You may not eat fast food, but you probably eat things that say “33% less fat” because that seems like a smart decision. You base financial decisions off the advice of those who benefit from those decisions. When the mortgage broker tells you that you can afford a house that costs $X, you buy one that costs $X.

Following this method allows you to abdicate your responsibility. If things don’t go well for you, you can tell yourself that you were just doing what other people told you to do and that everyone you knew was doing the same thing anyway.

The next level is doing the right thing, but focusing only on the how and not the why. You know that you should get a degree, get married, have kids, have a good career, and buy a few status symbol items, so you do so. In this life you don’t suffer physically, but you may suffer mentally, feeling unfulfilled and feeling like nothing is ever enough. You have many victories along the way, but they seem fleeting and unsatisfying.

The decision making process for this level can be summarized as, “What action would improve others’ opinion of me?”. This level is harder than the previous because it requires some autonomy in achieving goals. Because most others are chasing the same goals, there is an element of competition. The focus on how to achieve these goals usually completely clouds out any sort of consideration of whether or not those goals actually matter.

The last and hardest level is to try to figure out what the right thing actually is, and then do that thing. The right thing isn’t a universal right thing, but rather an individual right thing. We are all different in our abilities, desires, and circumstances, so our ideal paths are always very different. This lifestyle requires sacrifice, mostly in certainty. Whether the promise is actually true or not, society promises us a certain level of happiness if we just do what it tells us to do. Deep down I think we all know that if we stop doing what society asks of us, we are then responsible for our own happiness. That can be a heavy burden.

My first thought after dropping out of college was, “Well, I’m responsible for myself now.”

Everyone is different, but I’ve found that people who fall into this category are less likely to drink, more likely to have unusual careers or jobs, more likely to work out and eat healthy, and much more likely to have really random hobbies.

The decision making process here can best be boiled down to, “What do I actually care about, why do I care about it, and what’s the best way for me to get it?”. These questions are so open-ended and wide ranging that just about everyone comes up with different answers, and short-term outcomes vary wildly. I have noticed, though, that people who have lived life like this for a long time tend to all have good results in the long term.

The payoff for living this sort of life is contentment and satisfaction. It’s hard to not be content when you are actually living in accordance with your own goals and actively working towards them. It’s not uncommon to second guess oneself along the way, but seeing the results at the end tends to foster a deep sense of confidence, not just in the results but in the feeling that the results mattered and that future results will also be good.

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Photo is me skiing in Las Vegas for the first time of the season!

Five years ago I bought an apartment in Vegas. It cost $50k, was in a great location, and had two bedrooms. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but it was just such a great deal that I figured it was impossible that I wouldn’t find some good use for it, whether it was renting it out or using it as a crash pad (at the time I visited Vegas every month).

During the renovation I spent more time in Vegas than I ever had, and lived more like a local than a poker-playing tourist. Through that process I discovered that Vegas is the best place to live in the US (unless you need a local job or good public schools), and ended up moving into the apartment full time. Eventually I even sold my RV.

My apartment here was great. I assumed I’d keep it forever, so I went crazy with renovations, doing things like putting heated black marble floors into the bathroom and building a tea room. Once my wife and I decided to move in together, though, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be enough space. Luckily the apartment next to us went up for sale, so we bought that one too.

There are some major benefits to having two separate but adjoining apartments. We each had our own space to do with what we wanted, but shared the main living room and bedroom. However, after a while it became clear that we weren’t going to live in two apartments forever. For one, it was a little bit annoying to walk between the two if you needed to grab some food or a tool or something. We were also paying two HOA fees, which felt like a waste. Having two kitchens never really made much sense.

But maybe the biggest driver of the decision was realizing that having two apartments in cash was a poor investment strategy. Both apartments had appreciated to over $100k, which meant that we had $200k in net worth earning nothing, despite having access to a wide array of really good safe returns. We realized that if we just got a mortgage on a new place we could lock up that $200k+ in a safe interest-paying account and the monthly earn would cover the mortgage of a house that cost ~$400k. I don’t think that HOAs are generally a terrible deal, but paying double meant that we were spending $400/mo, which could be better allocated if we had a house.

Before COVID we were in and out of Vegas all the time so the apartments worked really well. But being here for almost six months straight (at the time of the decision) made us realize that we wanted some outdoor space. Moving to a house got us a pretty good sized lot with a big pool and plenty of space to plant plants.

I still miss some parts of our apartments. We only moved about 5 minutes away, but the apartments’ location was so good that now most things are a few minutes further away. We finished the apartments to such a high standard that our new house is not (yet) as nice. Overall, though, it’s fun to have a bigger space with a lot of potential and a lot of projects for me work on.

Right now we’re mostly moved into the new house, though the living room is totally empty, the guest bedroom is just a couple mattresses on the floor, and every few days I realize I left some little thing at the old apartment. I’m not exactly sure what we’ll do with the apartments, but we’ll probably sell one and rent one out (if you’re looking for an awesome 2 bedroom in Vegas, let me know).

The other day my friend Todd asked me how long I thought I’d live in the new house. I am terrible at predicting these things, but I’m going to guess 8 years so that we can check later. I actually think it will be our forever house, but I think I also thought I’d never sell the RV, so I’m discounting my estimate.

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Photo is the old living room and tea room. I bought the apartment sight unseen mostly because it had that little area to build a 2 tatami tea room.

This year I’m grateful for my country, the United States. This has somehow become a slightly polarizing sentiment and sometimes interpreted as being partisan, and it’s become en vogue to bash our country and focus only on its faults. And, yes, our country has its faults, both at the highest levels in government down to all of us as individuals. But we can be grateful for something even if it isn’t perfect.

I’m grateful that we live in a country where a good life is possible for most of the population. Opportunity may not be distributed as evenly as we could aspire to, but we have a country where people can visualize a life they’d like to live, whether urban or rural, frenetic or peaceful, tropical or in the desert, and can work towards getting that life. I like that we have so many states that are so different, and that we can window shop between them and choose the one best for us.

Congress has an abysmal approval rating, and our president’s rating isn’t too impressive either. And yet, government functions enough to keep us safe and stable. Often as Americans we take this for granted, but if you look at what entire populations in many people in other countries have to deal with, we have it quite good. I’m grateful for the system that we have which has held up remarkably well to the challenges of our current times, and to all the people who work in government, often in unseen positions, who are the gears that keep our society moving.

I’m also grateful for all of my fellow citizens. I probably disagree with nearly every single one about something, and most on at least some fundamental issues, but I also see Americans band together to help each other in times of crisis and I believe that most people want what is best for the country, even if we can’t agree on what that is. It’s easy to demonize other groups, and there are certainly some small ones that deserve it, but I think most humans, Americans included, are good people who want to do the right thing.

When I could travel all around the world I was constantly in awe of the natural wonders in other countries. Being mostly stuck in the US for the past nine months has helped me be more grateful for what we have here. I had some vague prejudice against Florida, but when I visited a friend there early in the pandemic I was struck by how beautiful the beach was, with plovers running away from the tide and giant pelicans flying above. We took a little hike and saw armadillos, too. In Vegas we have an incredible lake, Lake Mead, which I’ve boated on and even scuba dove in for the first time, and soon it will be time to ski in the mountains. In Hawaii we have volcanoes, reefs, and flowers and greenery everywhere. Had I traveled more around the US I could have seen just about every other kind of ecosystem that exists.

The more we are grateful for, the happier we will be. Nothing is perfect, which makes it very easy to focus on the positive and be grateful, or to be negative and be ungrateful. Being ungrateful is easier and often more popular, but it’s better for oneself and those around us to be grateful. America isn’t the only great country in the world, and isn’t perfect, but I’m grateful to have been born here, to have grown up here, and to continue to live much of my life here.

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Photo is a sign above a paleta stand in Hilo, Hawaii

Gear post is coming! I waffled on whether or not to do one this year, but tradition is tradition. I’m currently in the middle of moving (stil in Vegas), so I’ll see if I can get it done in the next week or two.