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Dusk

#photography #penf #olympus penf #olympus #vermont

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#photography #penf #olympus penf #olympus #travel photography #manchester vermont #snow #vermont #spring

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Vermont winter dawn twilight

#photography #penf #olympus penf #olympus #travel photography #manchester vermont #snow #vermont #dawn #winter

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XP, UTM, Sony mp3 player

I used UTM to setup XP s3. I grabbed an XP s3 .iso from SoulSeek, and then used this license from this site: M8DPF-XT324-YBKK9-3VF8C-M2X78

These detailed instructions were a waste of time, and I gave up on file transfering and did this method instead.

I just cracked it though! Solution: I am now running a windows XP VM via UTM on my macbook air. I installed SonicStage 3.4 from this link and it worked!. This post made me feel hopeful!

#Sony #SonicStage #WindowsXP #NW-E002F #UTM #Nujabes

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#photography #penf #olympus penf #olympus #travel photography #winter #forest #forest photography #winter photography

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Snow 白

#photography #penf #olympus penf #olympus #travel photography #snow #winter photography #winter #manchester vermont #vermont #northeast #north star #white #白 #kenya hara #hara Kenya

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Solopreneur

I was trying to quantify the long term earning potential of different paths (profit of owner):

5+ years building marketing agency: 200k 15 years in service design: 300k 8 years at McKinsey: 400k 4 years grinding SMMA: 400k? 10 years as a solopreneur: 2.5M (levelsio)

It really makes me think about the value of enjoying life. Years and years of stress sitting in McKinsey or building an agency just feels like a waste. And about the value of building your own things.

But I did some x research and the solopreneurs say it can take a couple years of runway to break even with frugal living expenses.

I think the only way I can do another 2 years of indie hacking with no real guaranteed income is if I love my life.

(-1) living in Manchester (/at home) (-0.5) not having transportation (+0.5) working with SDN (+2) living in Vietnam or Costa Rica or somewhere sick where I can learn new languages and take photos (+0.25) making music and taking photos (+1) having stable low maintnence girlfriend (+0.5) our indie hacker entrepreneur passion (+0.5) gamifying the grind with pomodoros and study culture (-0.5) no in person work community (+0.5) convenient gym (+1) meditation keeping me sane (+0.5) budget for going out to eat

A rough list but I just don’t want to feel like I’m wasting time. And I kinda feel depressed like that in my parents basement. I'm worried though about my spirits getting down from seeing no progress too.

Additionally, I have 23k in student loans to pay off. Need to do my own healthcare soon (5k/y minimum), and would need ≈15k to last 2 years in a third world country. So it's probably best to run up some savings by providing services and living at home for a bit. So I'd need 43k to be debt free and 2 years living, or by contributing the minimum loan payments it would be 20k.

This could take about a year to make, so maybe settling in at home is my only option. I could take vacations here and there to keep myself sane though.

So my priorities will be:

Customer compass. Deliver and expand agency services (Hildene, Merck, Custom Catch). Referrals. Savings + humility.

Learn ads - YTB/NGC

Learn webapps - start with course(?), database, webserver, react+typescript, python/javascript/node/idk

Live a good life - meditate, workout, music, photos, audiobooks, chores, vacations

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Blueprint's Next Frontier (Morning Reflections)

Note: this document contains links to specific moments in youtube videos. You should check it out!

Jaidon’s Purpose

I'm playing the long game here. It's gonna take 10 years. The long game being I want to do what I love. I want to be skilled, I want to be creating things, and I want to be able to make a lot of money doing it.

Right now I'm just focusing on learning about the money part. That's what Blueprint is to me now. I’m locking down sustainable income, so that I can pay off my student loans, get some savings, get a place, continue to travel, and then start cracking the big picture again when I have a lot of space to breathe. When I can do projects that I don’t know how they connect to money, and require time and money that right now I've drained.

The blueprint survival strategy: just put the work in. It doesn't matter what you want, doesn't matter what you like, just focus on what needs to be done. Enjoy the zen of it, overcoming barriers, accomplishing yourself, picking up new skills.

When new things come up, I’ve already decided to stay in this mindset; this is my game right now. This is how I need to spend my time. And it's joyful too, it's not like I'm sucking my life away.

Blueprint’s Next Frontier

Blueprint’s gotta gain momentum. If we knew the perfect answer to this already we would be swimming in money!

In my mind, it looks like us having a compelling offer and a compelling sales process, that gives us reliable control over income. To me this feels like developing a sharp, singular focus. It feels like deeply understanding our target stakeholders, knowing our market. It looks like a reliable strategy to mine contacts and rely on a certain portion of them coming in. It also looks like we’re fulfilling our promises with something that we can reliably deliver in high quality. Which means doing something that is really valuable to our clients and something that we're also confident in. This way, Blueprint has a stable bread and butter that we can take shelter in to fund our offensive initiatives (ex. building our dev capabilities to be able to take on serious software projects).

Jaidon’s Catch-22

The catch-22 is you can't make money by chasing money. Chase your passion and money will follow. I still face challenges because my interests are so multifaceted. I want to do different things every day: I’m doing photography, film, organizing conferences, and now coding.

I want to just focus on one of our strengths, and build a service, reputation, and a way to monetize it. The challenge is that the decision of which interest to focus on is made by the market.

In addition, there’s more layers to bundling interests into a service. We need to play with blue oceans, trojan mice, and effectuation. We need a strategy to dominate our small pond and build up strength, until we’re strong enough to convince the gatekeepers of the big leagues to trust us.

I guess what I've settled on after all this time is that it's always messy. There’s no one perfect answer. Just go for it. Do your best and discover what works.

General “strategy” words don’t work on the ground of the arena, especially when we’re so small and any small wins really boost us. These small wins especially are scrappy and result from action (even uncoordinated).

Target

We’re not training anymore. I don’t want to position us to train up our design skills. We will need to train more, but in business leadership. I just spent years training as a designer! We need paid experience to level up.

A good market for us would have boundaries that impede others, but empower ourselves. We're in a weird mix between competing in established markets and creating our own market:

Graphic design, UX, dev, social media, things people understand and know they need. Yes it’s a big pie, but we’re not fully competent or differentiated. Prospects have the power: lots of alternatives. Yes we can work longer and harder, but our competition will probably deliver better work faster. We have dabbled in entering this world by competing on price. But no serious client wants the cheapest option. Working with more small fish will go unnoticed, and we already have spec work. To make it to the next level, where we’re able to make good income and grow our company, we need to score bigger fish. If we want to develop one of these, we could either really step up our marketing and sales, or grind training/small fish until our skills can deliver top notch quality. Then we can start climbing.

Our core competency: service design. The established service design market is out of our reach. Assumption: companies actively looking for service design/business consulting are big, with big budgets, who are risk averse, and want flashy names to add credibility to their initiative. This market is not conducive to small projects (trojan mice), nor unknown small companies. We don’t have enough reputation, referrals, logos, or testimonials to speak to them, let alone score projects. However, I see opportunity in selling to people who are in our weight class: SMEs. But we don’t sell our jargon, we use service to build everything around their problems or needs. (inspo 1) (inspo 2) (inspo 3) This will require conversations (research) and offer-development. Startups initially sound like a great market because they are a growing segment, are targetable, feel pain, and have money. We learned that non-funded startups won’t pay and just need to battle out product market fit on their own (usually volume outreach). However, I could see funded startups needing someone to own their product and experience. Would they pay a subscription over employing someone? Who knows. Again, conversations are needed.

Selling AI: either selling apps or services (strategy or dev). Apps: We could sell Workshop Bot or Living Persona, but I think we’re on the same page that investing in this is not high yield, because we can’t afford the necessary dev costs to make them quality products. In order to sell AI dev, I think we need stronger capabilities. This means a CTO with a grindset (so that we can take on small/medium fish for low pay) or devs on payroll (which requires big budget projects over $10k/m, again not in our weight class yet). Another option is stringing out Marc. But will other design consultancies buy custom colab notebooks? I don’t trust this enough to place it as our company's long term priority. Assumption: those who would invest in AI strategy are either 1. big companies with their own internal departments (out of reach), 2. medium sized tech companies (maybe with weak design capability) or 3. funded startups. I don’t think tech SMEs or funded startups would want to buy AI strategy from non-devs, though I made the best case I could in SDD Seoul: Form and Cloud: SDers can tap into the needs of society, and can help navigate a market first approach. To be clear I think it’s easy to sell AI projects, but they are too hard to fulfill without devs on payroll or a grindset CTO.

From this point I see 4 options for us:

Selling SD to SMEs in our weight class, using a service first method.

Selling SD to funded tech startups, starting with research/effectuation.

Selling AI software with devs, starting with recruiting and research/effectuation.

Continue to follow the opportunities with Scott, SDN, and any other “big players” who might earn us access to big leagues.

For strategies 1, 2, and 3, sales outreach is the battleground.

For strategy 4, I assume it’s just delivering good work, finding excuses to get in front of people, impress them, and be top of mind when an opportunity arises.

I don’t want to give up #4, because I still feel a lot of potential with SDN even though I don’t see the direct relation now.

I previously chose #2, but #1 sounds good as well and may be more stable.

Boosts

I will see business success with Blueprint making up a large income stream for myself in under a year. For that to happen, these patterns need to be established:

I will remind myself to stay content in the zen of doing the work that needs to be done. This is the season.

Continue to do rescue time reports. We need to focus on high leverage activities that result in concrete progress to cashflow. We need to keep our work connected to tangible outcomes. To me this degree of intention and seriousness is foundational to being a truly powerful human.

Use the Reshift project as a big bragging piece. Actively seek to trade up for speaking engagements and online exposure. Publish honest content. Continue to fight for a good relationship with social media.

Do KOLB reflections every day.

The KOLB Experiential Learning Cycle is foundational to learning psychology. I learned a framework from Justin Sung to explicitly write out an 1) experience, in all details 2) reflection, including my own thoughts, opinions, emotions 3) abstraction, looking at tendencies, root causes, trends, and 4) experimentation, to embed changed intentions and behaviors into my life. It’s like exercise: tiring, takes me a long time, boring, at times demotivating, but I’ve really seen results.

Be better than we were yesterday. As an individual, I will compete against my highest potential. I will always add my masala and passion, aiming to deliver exceptional work. Things will always be messy and conditional, but I will continue to focus on being the best we can be and put the time in, because we don't know what Blueprint's grand slam will be.

Next Steps

Talk about these targets.

Talk about information missed.

Choose our next target together?

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Bauhaus Museum Dessau

#photography #penf #olympus penf #street photography #berlin #olympus #travel photography

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Cut through the noise

People just cluster around because they don’t know what to do. Autopilot. Emotions push us around here and there.

I know what I want: to cut through the noise. Not get lost in aesthetics, selfishness, trends, impulses, art museums, drugs, culture, greed, news, lifestyle. I want wealth, relationships, consistency, tapped into the hotbed of skills.

The world is continually putting itself together. Success, life, is not about what i want.

Put in the work and results will come. And it will always be hard work. But it’s also the greatest game.

Work hard. Move fast and break things. This is the climate for innovation, pushing the boundaries, ambition, discovery, pioneering, upward mobility.

Enlightenment isnt about unlimited inner peace. Its about doing the work. Freedom. Freeing all beings. What does that even mean in today’s matrix? Mental clarity, intention, attention. In our increasingly flexible society: in work, home, travel, personal projects, friend circles.

#photography #penf #olympus penf #berlin #travel photography #casual photography #street photography #documentation #docu #upward mobility #reflection #journal

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Progress

In order to stand strong in today's world, Buddhism needs a clear relationship with "progress". Though there may have been a time in the past where society and time appeared to stand still or be cyclical, today's world is one of progress, future, making change.

The nature of reality didn't change, but our cultural operating systems did. Now we all see through the lens of a global, future focused, industrialized world.

I believe Buddhism's relationship with progress is:

Progress vs stagnancy, both are constructs. Stand in the real world, free, able to make change. This is done through meditation, understanding the skhandas, dependent co-origination, genjokoan.

Reaching enlightenment in today's world involves understanding your role in the global society. Involves taking action, taking care, bearing witness (learning). Involves addressing the koan of everyday life. It's a complex matrix to free all beings, but in these complexes are where our sankharas reside and where we live.

-

A painter makes art with paint on a canvas. A sculptor makes art with wood and a chisel. Emotions are just another medium, another canvas.

Mental clarity, emotional literacy, distinguished taste.

#photography #penf #olympus penf #street photography #berlin #travel photography #darkroom #darkroom app #casual photography

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Value - Facing Problems

Solving problems, making things better, takes emotional labor.

This discomfort, baselessness, overwhelm, and stress I'm feeling is the emotional labor that's required to solve problems. Society is so complex and messy, and improvement means focusing on the problems.

Success is just like a relationship: it takes time, energy, consistency, love, support.

It takes focus –lots of nos– to create something truely great.

It is uncomfortable to be a leader. In order to weather the hard times, I will remember my friends, those who believe in me, the girls who wrote me letters in Seoul, Chongyuan and Priyanka who were so proud of SDNLF. Natalia, who is proud of service design club. Tanuj, who sees my wiseness. I am valuable, I have skills, I have many people behind me who believe in me. I will focus on the love I give to others.

In order to make the world better you always have to face new information, new challenges, solving conflicts. You are always climbing the mountain. This is the role of designers.

Design is changing circumstances to preferred ones. Marketing and sales makes change happen. Politics is power. Leadership is guiding others. Action causes conflict. Long term value requires short term pain.

#casual photography #photography #street photography #olympus #penf #europe #berlin #germany #lightroom #darkroom app #cathedral #church

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Simplonstraße

#street photography #slow living #penf #olympus penf #travel photography #berlin #photography #darkroomapp #darkroom

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Thinking in Decades

This list will hone my... Ambition, simplicity, diversity? No. Things I will need to work towards.

10 years

strong cashflow (like Alex)

great people around me (like Shin, Grace, Moon, Lester, Tanya, Milly)

millionair

impact and message spreading emptyness and compassion in the arts and culture sector

5 years

500k in my bank, or (moore in assets)

my own personal community, to work life balance with

my own event (I am significant contributor)

artistic practice (strong instagram or YouTube presence)

Continued involvement helping to build SDN (stable cashflow, cultivate message and experience)

3 years

profitable business - can get entrepreneur visas

live in multiple countries to speak more languages

1 year

great NGC and redefigned SDN

financially sustainable

meditator

motorcycle license

integrate visual arts into my relationships and presence: posts, DMs, print gifts

consistent fitness

Months

Marketing and finance education

Fitness practice

A study practice (with rituals)

Reflection and KOLBs

Social media consistency

Notes

Birgit stopped giving when it was successful, and it started to die. Now everybody is low energy. Maybe they are comfortable or don’t know how to make it successful. Just need to be dedicated and consistant.

Chase your passion and money will follow. It just takes time and dedication. You don’t chase money.

I don’t care about publications or resume stamps anymore, I need to be dedicated and focused on my business.

I can make my business about anything: what is most suited to my passions? A better question is: based on my life so far, what adaptations do I want to make to better align my business and interests?

Incorporate photography (or film, or art): beyond basic illustrations. Provide an artistic component. Artistry is a positive differentiator for those who have passion, curiosity, wellroundedness! Don’t represent myself as an employee or sales man. I am a friend, creative partner, collaborator.

Continue events: events are the future of experience! Some incarnation of this will be my dream future that is also profitable

Education: finances and marketing experience

Reflection and KOLBs

A study practice, with rituals and spaces

You want to create your own market. There should be few emancipatory people there already.

Business is the passion for making the machine that delivers, sustains, reaps. Design is passion for improving the bits of society (innovation). Marketing is controlling diffusion in the social system.

Always ask: what service is this providing? - Content, business models, designs, advice, speeches

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#penf #photography #street photography #travel #berlin #olympus #olympus penf #travel photography #fish #fishtank #night photography #laowa #7artisans