I previously wrote about my secret, how to be a superhero by merely acknowledging danger. That’s it. There’s danger, point to it. If you do that you’ll be far ahead of the crowd. However, not all dangers require action. There are acceptable risks and acceptable losses, but how do we know which are which?

As you can imagine, I track my goals religiously. I take great pleasure in doing this. It allows me to objectively judge my personal growth over time. It’s far too easy to enter a slump while simultaneously believing you are progressing. Charting my progress is the only way I can prove to myself I’m doing as well, or as poorly, as I think I am. I take it very seriously.

However, I frequently drop one of my goals. Well, actually two. Both are centered around writing. I’ve struggled with this over the last year and with how frequently they get dropped. This week I made peace with not writing.

In the late 1960s, some studies were done to attempt to piece together the Kitty Genovese murder. How, as a society, could we sit by and let a woman get killed right outside her home? While absolutely tragic, failures of all kinds are created from the same psychological reaction that can be blamed for Kitty’s death.

I read something that struck a nerve with me. I immediately felt anger and anxiety, with a cold sweat starting to form on my neck. What horror was this? It was about pivoting. What startups do when they run out of steam. Except this article was encouraging it. Keep pivoting until you are profitable. Eghads!

Pivoting is the opposite of clarification and focus. It’s discarding evolution in favor of revolution. Evolution is absolutely required for a business to survive and grow. Pivoting in many cases is simply starting over. A drastic revolution is forced; and revolutions are so often fueld with desperation. This is why it bothers me.

Two months ago I started a journey of independence. I quit my job committed to focusing on TDP, my healthy lifestyle assistant. Lots has happened since then, some good and some bad. Just two weeks ago I finally published my One month of freedom writeup. This was 2 weeks late because of catastrophic knee failure.

Now I’m entering the third month, my knee is recovering and my vigor renewed. What better way to celebrate than a monthly report.

My wife was a bad driver when we met. I avoided riding with her; I tried to always drive and limit how much time she spent behind the wheel. It took her quite a while to come to terms with this. For a while she didn’t believe me. It was interesting to watch the transition from blissful ignorance to awareness and acceptance of reality. Her world, very distinctly, changed.

I was talking to a friend who felt a bit detached from life. I recommended setting aside 30 minutes a day for any activity that is entirely self-centered. It doesn’t matter what, just something that focuses on you. I hope she does, but she couldn’t think of things to try. This, coincidentally, is a great advertisement for Pinterest.

When searching for something new, it’s amazing how much exists but were unaware of it. It’s really demoralizing and gets in the way of starting new things. I feel that every day I learn something new. Not just new, but that I didn’t fathom before. The world is amazing like that.

If you are a product creator, whether a software developer or chair maker, and don’t thrive on resolving negative feedback you should adjust your perspective. Your products probably suck.

Think about using your product. How does a user feel? Too few developers are the actual primary users of their software; many never use it at all. I used to write software for Amazon and not once did I ever purchase anything off Amazon (now I do). Now I’m building a product I use every day. This means there are many things I see every day I hate.

In my ticketing system I have 432 tickets. 339 are closed and 94 are open. While that is a lot of completed work, it shows how much remains to do. More tickets are added every day and I love it. It is how I measure progress, but the number of tickets isn’t the metric I use.

I intended to write this last week, but life got in the way. It’s been a month since I made a huge decision, and started working on my own.

I’ve been focusing on building a recurring to-do list called The Daily Practice.

I’m not good at matching colors. I can’t distinguish certain colors and I know some I just don’t see correctly. In fact, my eyes themselves don’t agree on what colors I see. My left eye tells me something is blue and my right says it is green.

The result of this is that I just didn’t try. I delegated and attempted to coerce people (now my wife, who fortunately enjoys it) to pick out clothes that match for me. Now I’m presentable!