The Week Of Serenity At The Cottage

This Week:

Views from life on Lake Ontario.
My longest streak of 100% sleeps to date!
Posting my 100th Life Update blog post!

June 2024

Su	M	T	W	Th	F	S
26	27	28	29	30	31	6/1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	7/1	2	3	4	5	6

Where In The World Was I?

☕️ Lake Placid, New York
🏠 Sackets Harbor, New York

Live Travel Map 🌎

Metrics From The Week

Very proud of that Sleep Performance chart. It feels very good to be back considering the charts I’ve been posting in the last month.

Back into a good routine working out!

A Morning In Lake Placid

After camping around Lake Placid, NY, I decided to hit up the coffee shop I scoped out the day before that looked good.

Turns out the Lake Placid Marathon was going on that Sunday!

AND the marathon started directly in front of the coffee shop! 😅

Such is my luck. 😂 It was fun though. I love stumbling into things like this (see “The Spontaneity Of Life On The Road” from The Week I Visited The Largest Tree In The World, October 2nd, 2022).

The coffee shop was absolutely floored with people and runners (not pictured), but they cleared out as the race started.

After finishing up last week’s blog post, I ended up deciding to just drive straight to my family’s cottage rather than try to camp one more night along the way. I was bummed to not spend more time in the Adirondacks, but I didn’t love the camping options along my route.

Life On The Lake

My family has this cottage on Lake Ontario that they rent out during the summer, but there were a couple weeks free before the renters started coming up, so I decided to spend some time up there!

Soooo many memories.

The workstation:

Chasing off the geese:

Sunsets

This content is not ready to be made public yet.

Something’s Different Up Here

There’s definitely something different about life up here. Partly this area of upstate New York, but also being right on the water.

I’ve found that everyone waves to you (and back). It doesn’t even really matter if you have out-of-state plates. It really feels like you’re part of the community and that if something were to ever go wrong, that you could go to anyone and they would help you.

It feels weird to say, but that feeling is just so different from a lot of other experiences I’ve had, and it feels quite good.

But the biggest thing has been being on the water.

This place is so unbelievably beautiful.

Many mornings were cool temperatures, hazy clouds, warm sun beaming down, the water as flat as glass, no sounds besides birds chirping, leaves rustling, and the hum of a distant motor boat miles away driving off to their fishing spot.

I am incredibly grateful to be here to experience this.

Business Progress Update

I ended up making a video this week recapping my business hypothesis for the software that I’m making.

Last week I left off having just finished the last title generation algorithm, giving me a full end-to-end flow of channel inputted to new titles outputted.

The problem was that it just wasn’t that good 😅 It wasn’t ranking the channels in my niche well, and the titles it was generating weren’t anywhere close to my style.

So this week I spent a lot of time getting my algorithms up closer to that 80% “good enough” mark.

I spent a lot of time manually crafting my ideal channels list for my niche and working on tweaking my algorithm until it got closer to that output. I used this package called optuna that runs parameter tuning trials on a function that you give it, which was way cool to see it optimizing and minimizing the loss results each trial.

Aside from that, I tweaked my algorithm for identifying outperforming videos and update my GPT prompt for generating new titles. I discovered a new way of approaching the title generation that kept my video title style and the results actually surprised me how much better they are.

So as of now my software can take a channel handle as input, identify creators in that niche, rank them for their relevance, parse out the outperforming videos across the whole niche, then generate new titles in that channel’s style that leverage the success of the videos that outperformed.

I’m constantly trying to balance this optimization line: am I over-optimizing? is this good enough? am I doing too much? does this need to be better?

The degree to which this performs well is still up for debate, but to me it really does feel like I’ve stumbled across something valuable. The big question will be how many others find this valuable.

I think the next big step for me will be starting to implement this in my own videos. That is, after all, one of the reasons I’m posting videos on YouTube. Maybe I’ll get it so the results speak for themselves 😎 But that’s a future problem to solve.

Thoughts From The Week

Internal Friction

It’s been nice to have a consistent place to work at each morning, well, and to not have issues with how much electrical power I’m drawing.

But I’ve noticed that I’m still feeling some friction with the thought of continuing to sit down and work in the afternoons on my software. It’s been a lot of internal friction the past couple weeks on this. I talked a bit about this in this video I can’t tell how much work is enough.

My dream would be to prove that this lifestyle design can lead to the success that I want, but the thing is, I don’t know what the results will be yet. I can’t tell if the results I want require more work than I’m putting in. And I guess, not knowing that is quite a lot of uncertainty.

Recentering

My first full week of 100% sleeps!

I was close to a full week in The Week Of Healthy Food And Grasping At Routine (April 7th, 2024) and The Week Of Expanding Perceptions, Niche Research, and Incredible Food (January 21st, 2024) but it was during this week The Week Of E-Mountain Biking And Refusing Medical Treatment (September 24th, 2023), mid-week (I didn’t add the metrics), that had my longest streak of 100% sleeps to date (7 days).

It has felt good to slow down, chill, and just get into the routine. I’ve been looking forward to saying that since a couple weeks after I left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (see “Acceptance” in The Week Of Spring Cherry Blossoms In South Korea (April 14th, 2024)).

A couple things I’ve noticed about getting 100% sleep so far:

It starts a lot earlier than I thought
- Because of how I usually spend my evenings, getting 100% sleep kind of starts at what time I finish working on my laptop in the afternoons. After I close my laptop, I usually work out, then go straight into making/eating dinner, and there’s usually not much time left after dinner between cleaning up and before my bedtime routine.
- Sure, it’s not concrete and down to the minute, but it’s not like I magically have an extra hour just sitting around waiting to be spent. So I find that if I work too late, and thus start my workout later, that dinner ends up being later, which means by the time I’ve cleaned up, it often gets too close to the start of my bedtime routine, or ends up affecting my sleep quality.
- The other thing is just the power of the circadian rhythm. I love to get early morning sunlight on my morning walks which I find really helps get me tired in the evenings.
- I talked about this in this video from this week Getting good sleep requires more of this than I expected.
Don’t work after dinner
- A fantastic example of what happens when I do try to work after dinner on something that can wait, I got called out for not working out yesterday (December 21st, 2023 DailyV). And that story also goes for keeping my routine working out.
Leave enough buffer
- I’ve been starting my bedtime routine around 1 hour before my Whoop tells me my ideal sleep time is for 100% sleep (based on my strain from the day, average time spent awake, and any sleep debt). By the time my head hits the pillow I find it’s usually around 20-30min before that time.
- I like leaving this bit of buffer (and may need to increase it a bit) because I’m finding some nights my quality of sleep differs. One night I had a big dinner very close to my sleep and it took a bit longer for me to fall asleep. Another night was colder than usual and I found I kept waking up in the morning to pull the blankets over me. This buffer allows for these inconsistencies while still getting 100%.

Bryan Johnson has a great video that summarizes everything quite well if you’re interested ways to improve your sleep! How I FIXED My Terrible Sleep – 10 Habits.

My 100th Life Update Post!

This post is my 100th Life Update blog post! I dunno it feels like a milestone.

To think that this all started with this idea:

202207250959 Post a weekly update on my blog

A weekly recap of little things I did this past week.

Got this idea from Randy on YouTube with his weekly changelogs on his website.

I think it'd be a relatively low effort high value way to remember my life.

And my first three posts that I made:

The Week I Explored Santa Fe, New Mexico

From Camping In National Forest To Soaking In Hot Springs

The Week I Explored Salt Lake City’s Connect Pass

… and every single Sunday since then I’ve posted a blog post (okay minus Spending Christmas With My Family In Santa Fe, New Mexico January 9th, 2023 which was for 3 weeks, and a handful of posts that went out on Saturdays).

I guess the questions are

1. How have I made it this far posting every single week?

I think this is a result of 2 things: 1. intrinsic motivation and 2. routine.

I attribute the core driver for why I’ve made it this far to being intrinsically motivated. My mindset has been and is that writing these posts is one of those things that I would 100% still continue to do even if I didn’t publish them publicly to my website. They’d change a tiny bit, as some context I wouldn’t need to share, but I envision that I would still be writing stories and consolidating photos.

Then the other thing has been just making it a routine. On Sunday mornings, doesn’t really matter where I am, I find a coffee shop (or place to sit) and write.

It’s just… what I do.

2. Is it what I imagined it would be?

Yes.

I love, LOVE linking back to old posts. It’s so much fun to relive memories and have a lens into my past memories. I always envied people like Kara & Nate and Sailing LaVagabonde when they inserted clips from old videos into their videos, and now I get to do the equivalent!

However, one thing I didn’t imagine was just how long some of these take to write. They used to take <120 minutes in the early days, but now they typically take ~2.5-4hrs, with some taking much longer (as you’ll discover below). However, I think for the result that I get, it’s totally worth it.

So speaking of linking back to old posts…

Blog Post Superlatives

The posts with the best stories (okay I can’t pick one):

The Week I Became A Regular At The Phuket Strip Clubs (March 24th, 2024) and I’ll throw in the previous week too The Week Of Sex Shows And Strip Clubs In Phuket, Thailand (March 17th, 2024)
The Week I Accidentally Drove My Van Into A Tornado (June 25th, 2023)
The Week Of The Event I’m Too Embarrassed To Remember (August 28th, 2022)

The posts with my most embarrassing stories:

The Week I Became A Regular At The Phuket Strip Clubs (March 24th, 2024)
The Week Of Intentional Incremental Improvements (February 4th, 2024)
An Embarrassing Story Of A Sewing Catastrophe (October 23rd, 2022)

The story I’m least proud of:

The Week I Got In Trouble With The Monaco Police (October 8th, 2023) – The spoon story in Paris.

The most authentic post:

The Week I Got In Trouble With The Monaco Police (October 8th, 2023) – “A Peek Into My Mind”

The post with the most internal tension:

The Week I Watched A Man Get Knocked Out In Thailand (October 22nd, 2023) – “What Is… Next?”

The most rewarding post to write:

This Is How It Feels To Live With Intention (October 29th, 2023)

The post that took the longest:

The Week I Watched A Man Get Knocked Out In Thailand (October 22nd, 2023) at 7 hours and 15 minutes.

Quote from that day’s note: “7hr 15 min, yep, straight up, a couple pee breaks. I ain’t even mad I’ll take a full day of sitting on a laptop after yesterday lol”

The post with the most pictures: