ChanningAllen

Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.

It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.

Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.

I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.

Does this do anything to change your mental model?

> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.

In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.

It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.

This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.

I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:

> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.

It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.

In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.

Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.

Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.

> I believe OP would agree that the Plan should be low quality, at least at the beginning.

OP emphatically agrees. Overplanning is arrogance in a world with so many unknown unknowns.

> It depends… Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.

I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.

Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.

Nice app! I've rolled my own custom solution inside of Notion, or else you'd probably have another signup.