Summer is well and truly here and I find I have to shave more. However, the shaving takes off a layer of skin so I have to be careful about the sun, its a fine line, you want that tan, but you don't want that burn.
I am no good at rewarding myself for the small victories in my life. It was a challenging week where nothing just worked out how I was hoping. Those moments where the dice could tip over to a 6 but falls back to a 1. Was it bad luck or bad management, maybe its a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B?
One of the things that didn't work was that I am trying to develop a shaving cream to provide another option for all you beautiful people. It did not go well. I had many little cuts and it was clogging up the razor.
I loved the world of basketball and sports in general. I am probably very biased here because I was good at sports and you generally like the things you are good at. I knew even if I lost the game, if I did well or if I did poorly. The ability to have some level of objectivity helped me get better at sports, focusing my efforts on what mattered. I often wonder if I was built for sports (i.e, that my mindset was innate) or if sports built me (i.e I developed the mindset through competition), maybe it's a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B?
Saturday was a beautiful day here in Auckland and it was probably the most lonely I have ever felt in my life. Through a combination of mishandling, bad luck, optimism, and slightly bouts of delusion I find myself in my late 30's single, and running StraightFace from my apartment. Working from home means that I rarely see other people except for going to the gym and the odd meeting. On this beautiful day, all I saw were couples having fun enjoying each other's companies.
I immediately thought of Roosevelt's quote, comparison is the thief of joy and so I went to have my first swim of the summer pondering was I feeling lonely because I was missing other people or because I saw other people enjoying each other, maybe it's a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B?
I find the water really calming. Partly because I run hot and am always 3 or 4 degrees too hot for the room. If everyone is cold I feel great, and if everyone feels great I am sweating. It's a challenging lugging this big rig around. The coolness of the ocean didn't bring any respite from the loneliness, but it did bring down the body temperature and helped reset my thought process.
One of the things that I just can't get to work is a loyalty program. With all this amazing digital technology you would think that anything can be done, and it can with enough money but there is no out of the box solution yet to do what I want.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising and I have had many kind comments sent my way. I know that people have told their friends and I really appreciate that, it means so much to me that you would recommend us, so I was trying to find a way to reward everyone for supporting StraightFace.
I was looking for a system that would give you a link to send to your friends that would give them a discount on their first order and you some cash of your next order. However, everything had what they call in fancy business school high transaction costs. Basically, you would all have to do a lot of work to get anything back and it would be more work than its worth.
You would have to log in, find a code, send the code out, then you would have to redeem a discount code and then sign up to a new subscription using that discount code. It's so strange to me that that is the closest system I can find so far. The journey continues.
Life is full of ups and downs and nothing is final, and failure isn't fatal. I know that I need to do more to meet other people like not being so shy, it's one of my many work on's, the question is life about the luck you get or the luck you make.
I think it's less about column A and more about focusing on column B.
Shave well, be awesome, go out there and make your own luck.
Luke
