These sounds are falling through my mind
new company perks:
Scotland kickoff in 2.5 hours and i’m cramming on a few experiments with figma and claude design systems.
A long time mentor/friend shared this video after we had a lengthy discussion on scorecards and comparison.
Another friend from Singapore launched a new biz focusing on helping founders grow calmly versus growth at all costs. They just received new business cards, and I love seeing friends launching and chasing new ventures. Happy friday.. gooo Scotland!
Vision questing, ideagazing, and deep work happen best off grid in minimal designed + low resting heart destinations. 35k feet is my ideal place for deep work, but i’m not flying anywhere to reach that peak state. i’m just over in west vancouver. A few quotes circled from journal.
You have to be a bad actor, and see them, before you can become a good one.
Everyone is a flower grower
Vancouver is world cup cray at the moment. Today, i’m teeing up a 2 week sprint to close out the q. Working on a new design system with claude for a new brand. Following that, spending a few hours tidying up this website css/styling/design love
starting a new dicovery collective called junastar! i’d rather show than tell… but things hit the feels and became real once that red starburst certificate of incorp hits your inbox. Mucho excitement.
new energy.. so for today i’ll start cleaning up my digital house (this website), figma reps + some design cycles + write a newsletter draft.
creative maps only take you so far
feel your way
Re - acting and the creative act
“total immersion into possibility. It’s infinitely interesting, there’s no bottom to it. A lot of it just great, deep, belief”
8:28 is like flying
ahh, already feeling soo much better about wispr flow
Quick reflection before kicking off several 30-day challenges. May had a bunch of highs and lows.
Highs = Lost 8 lb, increased VO2 max by 6 points and daily steps to 14k. Wrapped a number of personal and offline projects that I’m withholding for now.
Lows = last commit to Boom was over two weeks ago, newsletter over a month
My biggest takeaway for this month. Crushing offline or non digital to-do list items feels heavier. The good kind of heavy. More uplifting and carries momentum
Officially wrapped two projects today, as well as a bunch of personal DIY offline projects.
It’s been neat to watch Vancouver slowly decorate itself in time for the World Cup. Not entirely convinced locals are that excited but when it officially kicks off in two weeks I know it will mirror that of the 2010 Olympics.
On the builder side of things, today I submitted name requests for a company inc, which is always a lot of fun and thrilling bc things start to become real. More on that later.
Observation: there’s a lot of hype or focus on distribution first, especially from all of the marketing camps and marketing ai agent startups. Distribution for the sake of distribution. It’s one way of operating. <retracted>. if time allows it, I’ll write a few words and put some slides together on where we’re going or what has me excited. The questions I hear constantly within my circles from other builders not knowing what to build, which hills to stand on, and this obsession around distribution. More later
Speaking of obsession, I caught the breakout film Obsession earlier this week and highly recommend going in cold without a trailer.
This afternoon checked out Web Summit Vancouver, met up with a few founder friends and a bunch of faces that I haven’t seen in a minute. Hoping to chat with a few people and friends of friends from Singapore and Southeast Asia that made the big trek. Attaching a few photos below.
“Planning and execution. That’s all there is.”
The room was absolutely packed. My friend Nate had invited me down to Palm Springs and treated me to a surprise evening at the Purple Room, a drag queen musical. Our dinner table was right near the front, and Jeremy, seated to my right, caught my attention early as he dropped various business knowledge bombs between numbers. He was in his 60s, a successful entrepreneur who’d felt the full weight of the wins and losses that come with a long career of company building.
His point was that when a project or venture goes sideways, it’s almost always one of those two. Sometimes the plan was wrong from the start. Sometimes you executed flawlessly against a plan that was never going to work. Sometimes the plan was right and the execution fell apart. Occasionally it’s both.
It’s been 11 years since that conversation. I’ve replaced post-mortems with a simple stress test: did we have the right plan, and did we execute the plan?
Wrapped two huge projects and a 14-day pilates challenge. The reformer ain’t no joke. Kicking off a 30-day challenge starting right now.
Web Summit Vancouver starts Sunday night. My schedule is getting a bit jammed but curious what this year’s theme will entail.
Sun is pumping in Vancouver today. Sitting outside the Vancouver Art Gallery doing a bit of a quarterly reset. Head down, Moleskine out, thinking through what the next few months actually look like.
This weekend I’m hoping to finish an alpha of Boom. The last 5% of even a rough MVP is always the hardest. This has been a 30 day build and this weekend will mark the only time in Figma. And it sorta shows haha.. Sunday is the day where I’m planning to pour in some polish and actual soul. Make Boom fun, at least to me.. that was always the whole point of this thing!
