100 somethings

I don't remember all the details of December 17th, 2024, but since it was yesterday I do remember a fair deal, since it's only one day later.

The climbing gym that I go to hosts art from local artists / gym members (I am not fully sure). I started the day by reaching out to them and asking to buy their art. In a lot of cases their art was already sold. I had gone around the gym worrying that no one was buying the art, and it was reassuring to know that the art was purchased.

I started the day with the intention to go climbing, so I packed a change of clothes, shoes, and a harness, and went to the office. Midday at work I engaged in a discussion of the merits of AI. A teammate of mine is afraid of the threats of AI, but also doesn't want to get soft at work. Maybe it's because I recently started a new job that I am less concerned about my coding ability at the moment. At the same time our role at the company is to deliver customer value, and at the moment how good we are at coding isn't directly tied to our ability to deliver customer value thanks to AI's ability to help write code.

I left work very shortly after 5pm, and barely made it in time for a yoga class my friend was teaching at 6pm. After the class I joined my friend and his friends for top roping. I watched what was an agonizing slow warm up, and then climbed.

My climbing partner was Levi. Who I later learned is doing a draw 100 cats challenge. Levi has mentioned how doing 100 of anything is a really hard task. While the 4 of us were eating vegan Thai food people took turns sharing what they could do 100 of.

I'm not committing to a 100 days of writing, but I do think it'd be incredibly beneficial. I've talked about the benefits of quantity before (there's a link on my about page) . There's another famous case of 180 websites in 180 days. My brother recently started working at a 10 person startup, and I feel like he'll be doing 100 days of coding in no time. One of Levi's friends did 100 days of 3d modeling. He never stopped and now he's really good.

100 days of writing would free my drafts. The ideas or topics that I covered here would be wide ranging. The blogs would be shorter, and easier to read. Perhaps I would engage less in meta topics over writing and or get it out of my system. I am often thinking about the process of writing what I should talk about what I should not talk about. How I should frame it. What constitutes as a story. However, I don't want to be like the standup comic who tells a joke, and then gets self conscious about their joke, and says it wasn't a good one. In many of those cases I've enjoyed the comics joke, and I feel that their insecurity takes away from their performance. Be confident! What about self awareness though?! That's the difficulty, because self awareness requires having a sense of how you are being perceived. If the joke truly wasn't funny then acknowledging it is helpful. Nonetheless, a standup set will natural have highs and lows both in terms of the story but also in terms of comedic arch, and if something wasn't a big deal you don't need to call attention to it.

On x.com the other day I saw a workbook about capturing your dad's life story. It's a work book that asks questions of dad's and let's them write in the answers. I think this book captures a human desire to leave a legacy behind. The book also provides a unique opportunity for connection, because we aren't always thinking of our past, and there's likely a lot of stories that we may be able to share, but we don't recall them and specific questions can aid in that. Finally, having a recorded history of the whole thing is helpful, because maybe you've heard the story before, but you don't remember all the details.

When I saw this book I felt that I'm already capturing some amount of life on to this blog. I do wonder if I should be on substack for better visibility. The other day Paul Krugman left the NYTs and now he's publishing almost every day on substack. A popular internet writer is Gwern, and even though he has his own website, he also has a substack.

Back to the 100 somethings is that I engage in too many things / have a lot of interests to have the conviction of where I want to place the energy for the 100 somethings. In fairness I did have a colleague who one year had a resolution to do a new thing every day (not sure how he managed this), but that would capture the spirit of having many interests in a separate way. I will say that something less physical such as writing does seem like a better commitment then something more physically demanding like a 100 days of climbing.

My counterpoint to the above is that it's very easy to not commit to things in an effort to not be focused, and for the focus to not be present regardless. I'm at the point where I take little to no time outside of the classes I go to, to devote to reviewing the material for the classes. The classes are recreational in nature so there is less pressure here. If I am attending a class one day then the next day it's often a different class taking up my time. A natural thought would be to take less classes so that I can focus on a few. However, I feel that the reality would be that I would focus on less things, but not necessarily that I would take more time to practice each thing. I think the best way to counteract this is by taking multiple classes of the same thing.

Concretely my current hobbies are:

• Tango
• Tap dance
• Klezmer
• Climbing
• Biking - kind of on hiatus due to winter
• and trying to intro programming
• Cooking - with a guest appearance

I guess writing should go on that list as well.