This weekend I lost my community.

My weightlifting gym BASA (Baltimore Area Strength Athletes), run by Jason Morstein, permanently closed.

I feel dramatic saying this but it’s true.

Work chat channels are the worst. When left to occur organically, chat conversations are disorganized, nothing is tracked, and everything is forgotten in a day.

It has been exactly a year since I started learning how to play the bass. Other than some middle school experience with music/choir – I started from scratch.

TLDR: Being Obedient = Bad, Being Reasonable = Good.

I love working with Founders. There is a special kind of compatibility I can achieve with someone who is over-indexed on Innovational and Relational thinking because they balance out my Procedural and Analytical affinity.

However, as I evolve my portfolio of startups I work with, I am becoming more keyed into the type of person I want to work with. Here are my 3 Green Flags and 2 Red Flags that I look out for when chatting with a potential collaborator.

This year has been hard. Really hard.

It’s like 2024 decided to be 5 years at once. Maybe it’s a tax thing.

Lately, I’ve been having regular conversations with my mentor and friend, Simon Carcagno, and this man has been on a roll. He will make these, seemingly throwaway, comments and observations that worm there way into my brain and unlock and unblock these mental obstacles I’ve been struggling with since the beginning of 2024.

I’ve never been against gratitude. In fact, I have my whole trifecta of Love – Gratitude – Imagination and how it’s important to tap into all of them.

But I’ve got to be honest.

“Pro-bleeeeeemmmmm?!?!?” she exclaimed, while sticking a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg into my face.

I stare at her, my eyes wide, slightly panicking while scrambling for a better way to explain what I want to say. I draw a blank. I resign myself to saying “existential dread”.

So there I was, minding my own business, when the Digital Wellbeing app on my phone decides to inform me that I’m spending an average of 15 hours a week on Tiktok.

Sir, I think at the app, how could you say something so controversial, yet so brave?

This concept, introduced by this episode of Fixable, has brought together some of my favorite things: mathematics and working smarter.

They say when you make a plan, God laughs at you. Then, God then sends a man to ruin your plan!

This blog post is inspired by a tiktok video created by @notwildin.

I will not help you.

My experience completing the RunDisney 2024 Dopey Challenge. Four days, four races, 48.6 miles.

Nicholas Epley, a Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, once wrote “Your brain’s greatest skill is its ability to think about the minds of others in order to understand them better.”

So, I decided to exercise that skill to understand why someone would support the genocide occurring in Palestine. Here are the reasons I came up with…

Ever since I learned about it on Tiktok, I have always wanted to got to a Taste Film event. Unfortunately, they are based in the UK, so it’s going to require a little extra coordination.

One day I woke up and wrote this.

I didn’t realize I would have actual applications for what I learned in my Automate the Boring Stuff course so quickly! If you have any tasks that require the same sequence of mouse clicks, keyboard taps or anything like that to occur, then I have a time-saver for you!

Have we ever earned anything in our lives?