Jul 19, 2021

Spring 2021 retro

The good

There’s a lot of progress made on String Theory that I should be proud of. First off, I did a lot of orders for Northport players and did a good job of making myself well known as a stringer during the playoffs. Next, we added another team member, Makaela, to help us out with marketing. Finally, we also on-boarded four other people besides myself to string and built up some confidence for the String Theory concept. Somebody even reached out to us and asked to become a “theorist”.

Aside from String Theory, there wasn’t too much else that went well. I am walking almost everyday and enjoying that time each day away from the Internet and reactivity. I also learned a lot from reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss as is evident from my blogging the past few months mostly being ideas I learned from that book.

The bad

My health took a bit of a step back this quarter. I gained five pounds and am now weighing over 170. Em and I didn’t commit to the dance class that we initially thought we wanted to do. In hindsight, I might’ve been expecting too much with that.

While the String Theory business grew, I did not make much progress in terms of building new features into the website. String Theory needs more functionality to support more growth.

Writing every day has finally taken its toll on me. It is too much for me and I don’t feel focused enough on what’s important right now: getting String Theory to a healthy place where it is useful for many people and provides a good enough income stream for me to quit my day job.

My reading was also all over the place this past quarter. Even though it is so highly recommended, How to Win Friends & Influence People was a very dry read for me because the references in the book are so outdated.

Looking ahead

The key word for this quarter is focus. I’m taking on less commitments and really want to focus on improving the String Theory website. Now that it is the offseason, I have a chance to implement features that will slingshot our growth into next season. 

I am only committing to write this blog once per week instead of the daily writing I have been doing for the last 6 months. I also would like to correct the step backwards that my health took last quarter and get that back to a good place.