The Week I Stopped Ideating And Started Coding

This Week:

• Started actually coding the MVP for my YouTube content generator idea.
• Moving my learning curiosity towards cultivating and controlling sexual energy.
• A bulking/muscle progress update.

February 2024

Where In The World Was I?

• 🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Metrics From The Week

🛏️ Hostel Update

I was at The Bed Sunday, moved a couple blocks south to The Freedom Club Monday to Friday, then moved a couple blocks west to Ohana Friday until present.

Most of that doesn’t matter as I’ve been generally in the same area this whole week, but thought the context might help for the rest of the post.

Business Progress Update

After last week’s revelation (more like, Saturday’s) of buying Pieter Levels’s Indie Maker Handbook, I started reading it this week.

The first chapter is on finding ideas and the second chapter is on building MVPs for your ideas quickly. The third chapter is on launching your MVP.

I wanted to read this book as a guide and not a “regular” book, so I took notes along the way and decided to do everything step by step. I don’t have an MVP yet to launch, so why read chapter 3 yet?

It felt like I was finally given “permission” to actually build this idea that I actually wanted to build.

So this week I actually started coding…

As of Sunday I have 2 scripts/programs: a ruby one that can pull all the comments from the last however many videos of however many creators you input. Then a python one that parses through all the comments and pulls out questions and requests.

I started with a conditional algorithm looking for specific phrases, but I started implementing a basic ML model to learn and get better with feedback and it’s actually pretty good.

I spent a lot of time manually reading through comments, looking for the right questions and requests, trying to figure out the right structure, phrase, and words people use. One thought I had here was that I feel as though if this weren’t my own problem I’m trying to solve, this manual reviewing would be so unbelievably boring and that I wouldn’t have the full context to know what I’m looking for.

I think I’m understanding the advantage you have to solving your own problem because of all the context that you have.

I don’t really have much to (literally) show. I’ve been deep in VS Code, ChatGPT (coding is literally insane nowadays), and spreadsheets reading people’s YouTube comments.

It feels like I could endlessly optimize my new ML model, but the next this is trying to figure out how to filter down the comments and questions even more. Right now I’m getting about 2,500 extracted from a total of 20,000 sentences, but displaying 2,500 comments to a creator isn’t useful. Then at some point I need to link all this together and ship it up to a server for real user input. There’s still lots of work to do before I’m ready to launch anything 😄

All that said, it’s been actually quite fun coding this week. I, as a creator, have already found a good number of content ideas from this already.

Like here’s what I’m talking about. These are all from REAL comments! Out there just ripe for the pickin’!

• How do you decide which goals to prioritize?
• What if you’re bulking? [How do you do intermittent fasting while bulking]
• How do you find your curiosity/interests?
• Could you make a video about the right amount of deep work?

I’ll never run out of content ideas again…

It feels like I’m actually getting somewhere and have something valuable, which has felt good!

I spent a good number of days in Lost x Found cafe grinding all this out. Close to my hostel, excellent coffee, great tables and outlets, good wifi. Just everything I could ever want.

The baristas in there recognized me after the second day and asked if I wanted a double espresso as soon as I walked in the door 🥹 It felt a little sad moving hostels this week because I’d be too far away from this cafe 😢

Food Struggles

Moving away from my dream location ~2 weeks ago in KLCC with Agrain, La Juiceria, and the Avenue K mall, it’s been a bit of a rocky time in regards to finding good places to eat. Let me rephrase that, “healthy, high quality, affordable, places to eat.”

There are PLENTY of places to eat, but I’ve raised my standards in the past couple months especially for the regular/daily meals.

I think this story was a good representation of my mindset this week, starting at 7:15s:

The TL;DR: couldn’t find a good healthy food place to eat, didn’t want to go back to the same food court Thai place I had been to the same day and previous 2 days, went to Five Guys, decided against it, walked around the mall looking for another place, got impatient and frustrated, couldn’t decide or find anything good, ended back at Five Guys.

So with that context, when I moved to The Freedom Club, I found and got into a pretty decent rotation – SALA for lunch, Salad Atelier for dinner, though dinner didn’t end up there every night…

One evening I went to the gym around 5-6pm and it started absolutely bucketing down rain halfway through. I told the full story here:

The TL;DR: I waited ~30 min, the rain cleared up barely, I decided to just go for it and run, only about 3 blocks to the mall for dinner, I got absolutely soaked, security stopped me from entering the mall and told me to wait until the “water is finished,” which would’ve taken probably hours, so I just turned around and ran back to the hostel. I ate my overnight oats (thankfully I made them earlier) and didn’t order food delivery because it was too late.

All that to say, it just feels good to not have to search or decide where I’m going to eat for lunch or dinner. Yes there’s room for novelty and trying new things, but for the majority of days, it’s just easier to pick from 1-3 places. The amount of decision fatigue I get trying to search for a place to eat is insane.

My Current Curiosity: Sexual Energy

I’m not really sure how to lead into this so here goes nothin’. I’ve found a lot of benefits from nofap (improved focus, energy, confidence, etc.) and controlling sexual energy, but it’s not exactly easy to do.

I’ve noticed an incredibly strong (increasingly strong?) sexual energy in the past ~6 months. This week I started to get more curious about learning how things actually biologically work and how to control (“harmonize, redirect, harness,” etc.) your sexual energy.

I came across some old methods like Tantra and Taoism that include methods exactly for this and decided to pick up this book Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy by Mantak Chia. It seems really quite interesting and exactly what I’m looking for.

I’ll share more as I learn more about this.

This content is not ready to be made public yet.

Be Your Own Stoplight 😤

I went on a run one evening and wanted to make it up to KLCC park (a great park), but it was a bit far and I had to cross a whole bunch of intersections and streets to get there.

One of those crosses was kind of hilarious. I briefly mentioned this story around 5:00s in this video:

Basically I came to this 3-lane road and saw this group of maybe 5 Malaysian women (plus a couple others that joined later) waiting for a gap in the cars to cross. Being on a run, I was high on whatever chemicals you get from running and thus high on confidence and impatience.

With this sort of masculine/testosterone context, this thought came to my mind that was like “what if you stopped traffic for these women and let them cross the street.”

My first reaction was like “hah, lol that would be funny and super alpha”

But then I was like “okay I actually do need to cross this street and I don’t think there’s a stoplight upstream that’s gonna give us a gap here…”

And so after maybe a minute and no sign of cars slowing, I walked in front of them and slowly out into the first lane. The car slowed to a stop, then I moved to the next lane, then the next, eventually crossing the whole street. I sort of glanced back thinking that the big group of people would have jumped in on the opportunity and followed me across, but I was completely alone 😂

Welp, I tried… sort of… It was kind of a half-assed attempt at the goal of getting everyone across the street, but I mean hey at least I made it! 😄

My confidence and adrenaline was absolutely PUMPING after that, I felt like I could move the world 😂

Goldilocks Of Picking Hostels

After straining my neck at this The Bed BB hostel, I moved to The Freedom Club which I thought would be better but was actually not as great as I imagined.

They only had 2 seats with normal height tables, the rest were about knee height, absolutely awful for my neck. That’s how I ended up at Lost x Found cafe so much this week, which I’m actually very grateful for.

(I don’t have a picture of the knee-height tables I’m talking about, but this pic was upstairs:)

And with all this food struggle this week, I almost booked The Bed KLCC again, which seemed to hit everything the best. However, I ended up coming cross this other hostel just a couple blocks away that seemed to have most of what I’m looking for AND be really cheap (~$10/night update: it’s actually $7.50/night; I paid $9.50/night I think because of Chinese New Year weekend; the value per dollar is actually nuts 🤯).

It’s not quite perfect, but it’s actually quite good, better than I was expecting. Some things I just have to get used to. As always, I’m a human, I’ll adapt to the environment.

But one of the cool things about this hostel is that it’s like part of a condo complex high rise. It’s as if they converted a multi-level 5 bedroom condo type of place into a hostel. So with the hostel comes a pool, little fitness center, kids playground, and even a sauna!

The new workstation setup:

I started to get a bit congested, sore-ish throat, mild headache this week (I think it was that guy at the last hostel that kept sneezing, oof 😡😂)

So, I decided to check out the sauna. My first-ever sauna experience! It took a long time to get up in temperature. It started at 37ºC and was set to 80ºC. By the end of about 45 min it got up to 58ºC.

It felt really good! I did 3 ~15min sessions and I took a mini-“cold plunge” in the pool in between. LOTS of dopamine from that.

Bulking Progress Update

Here was my last update: https://petermeglis.com/blog/life-update-april-23rd-2023/#Lifting-Progress-Update

Honestly I kind of have no idea what my actually weight is because I’ve used so many different scales. But this is the data that I have:

Part of the reason why I wanted to put an update in this week’s post is because some of these hostels have just had really good lighting 😂 But I also made a “body progress pictures” photo album that’s been really inspiring to look at how things have changed. And it’s been almost a year since the last!

• Left: November 13th, 2022 – 172.4 lbs
• Middle: April 21st, 2023 – 188.2 lbs
• Right: February 5th, 2024 – 176.6 lbs (apparently?)
• +10 mo, -11.6 lbs, -0.37 in beard length, -my expensive phone (RIP), +good lighting

Tried to get the arms level. One of these days I’ll learn how to actually take good pictures 😅

• Left: December 17th, 2022 – 174.6 lbs
• Middle: February 3rd, 2024 – 177.9 lbs

Harder to see a difference in this one ^. None of the new/recent photos are with a pump 🤷‍♂️ and I don’t have a great back comparison picture but the LATS have been coming in real nice 👌

Interesting Content From The Week

Like last week, I’ve been listening to and resonating with a ton of 1stMan content, old and new. The transformation he’s documented is insane and I think serves as a substantial backing for what he’s been sharing.

Here are the one’s I found most interesting:

The Otherside of Male Life (Motivation) (from 1M)

Money, Women, “Game” & Life Experience (Rant) (from 1M)

Most Important Decision in Male Life | Stick or Twist (from 1M)

The Average Man Fallacy (from 1M)

First Gen of 20yo Men That Women Don’t Want (from 1M)

NOFAP Beyond 3 Months Makes You Weird (from 1M)

Do Men Want To Be Challenged In Their Relationship? – Whitney Cummings (clip from Chris Williamson)

One thing I’m still trying to figure out here is what my own version of his strategy looks like in terms of dating women until your prime. Just haven’t thought about this much yet.

Reflecting

One of the things I did this week was think about the biggest shifts and changes that have occurred in the last 3-6mo for me.

I want to document all the “ladder rungs,” the things that actually made a difference, as I continue to improve.

I know I want to package this up and share it somehow/where I just don’t know how yet. When I put them all together like this it feels like I’m not doing it justice because these are literally the most influential changes that actually changed my behaviors and made a difference… and I’m just tossing them in here like “oh and btw yeah here’s my list of things so you can skim though.”

But until I figure out how to do that I did want to at least document it here since it was part of my week.

Here’s a snippet, just the top summarized notes:

...

## Biggest Shifts? (Summarized)
Environment, accountability, finding and working towards something I value, learning from people ahead of me, tracking metrics, feeling the pain of the opposite.

Top:
- Being more intentional about time and improvement: my environment, accountability from working around high-level people in Bali, from DailyVs, actually working towards something I value.
	- Having a project to apply what I'm learning to get better at energy, focus, prioritization.
	- Actually writing down how long I work and what I accomplish during my daily plans.
- Direction and business: experimenting with criteria, paying for guidance, accountability from working with [my brother], actually coming up with a 10yr plan that feels the most accurate I've ever been.
- Better control over my sexual energy: added friction from being in hostels and shared environments, drawing the connections between ejaculation and changes in motivation and discipline, working towards a valued goal.
- Obsidian workspace upgrade: full credit to [The French Guy] for swiping the structure.
- Not watching YouTube as much: taking care of mental health, walking, eating well, working out, accountability from being around other people working (Bali, and some hostels), having a thing I want to work towards, meditation.
- Tracking my health metrics with Whoop.
- Motivation to eat clean: Eating like shit for 3mo in Europe, then physically seeing and feeling the affects accumulate in my hair falling out in Thailand, being in SE Asia where I can access heap but high quality food.

Others:
- Increased social confidence: either external/uncontrollable (right place, right time like Berlin) and nofap.
- Deepening existing relationship with [cousin]: mounting evidence and assurance that she WANTS to chat with me.
- Bulking: just showing up, being full after meals as an indicator.
- Learning what I'm uniquely good at: just experimenting and doing things long enough, journaling, organizing information, seeing the patterns in my behavior, rereading notes from years ago.
- Completely different perspective on the world: meeting and speaking with other people from countries all around the world. 
- Using ChatGPT multiple times per day.

...

Food From The Week

Pad thai extra noodles extra chicken and a thai iced tea for 29 ringgit? Com’onnnnnn 😍. I walked 20 minutes back to this food court last night just to get it again 😂

Some Color & Views

Happy Chinese New Year!

What’s Next?

Get me back in the sauna that thing is cool (wait no, it’s hot not cool 🤪)!

Location