Life Update
I just got back from a great Costa Rica trip. My time was punctuated by endless surfing, seeing friends, getting destroyed by mosquitos, and dropping acid while lying in bed for 6 hours.
Let’s talk about the acid trip.
I like to do intensive solo acid trips every few years. This means swallowing 2 to 3 tabs, putting on some great tunes, and covering your eyes and not moving for long stretches of times. Some of my friends call this torture. But I find it to be the most spiritual enlightening thing anyone can do.
So the timing felt right when I was in Costa Rica earlier this month surfing for a week by myself before meeting friends. I had just launched a new business. I was going through a recent breakup. A lot of things on the surface felt unsettled and I was looking towards my subconscious for something to grip on.
I took popped in two tabs and waited. Thirty minutes in the anxiety attack begins from the come-up. I start panicking and quickly change the songs on Spotify to placate my nervousness.
I start meditating to break through the thought loops. I was starting to think of all of my troubles. Work, failed relationships, Oppenheimer’s life….
And then finally, I began to sink beneath the surface. Literally.
I was a scuba diver that suddenly broke free from storm waters by diving underneath where it was endless ocean in all directions. Where was I going? Darkness enveloped me as I sank deeper and deeper towards the sea floor.
Intuitively I was searching for something. Maybe a feeling? An identity? Aren’t I supposed to be experiencing ego disillusion right now I thought.
There were sensations of feelings that I had gone back to many times in my life. There was the anxious and angsty kid in high school trying to understand why. The single guy in his 20s who didn’t know where to go in his career or his love life. All of these identities felt singular in that moment.
Finally I see a trap door at the bottom of the ocean. My heart was pounding in anticipation. Behind it, I intuitively knew could be good or bad.
I pull open the door and hold my breath. Instantly an orange warm glow expands all around me. Optimism, the treasure I had stored years ago, was still there.
And I started crying. Bawling actually. Endless tears are streaming down my cheeks. My pillow is damp as my shoulder’s shudder hard.
Because after a few months of uncertainty across life, work, and my future - I felt vindicated by feeling the orange glow of positivity that I knew to be true but was always hard to see.
It was tears of happiness for what I knew to be true in myself. It was tears of relief that I had not opened up a deep dark bottomless black pit. It was tears of peace and understanding that gave me assurance that things would be alright in the long term because positivity was assured at my core.
And so the rest of the acid trip was guaranteed. I saw fake iguanas on the ceiling, I observed real iguanas playing by the pool, and ended the day surfing across the shimmering ocean sunset.
In retrospect, I may not have completely hallucinated the exact scuba dive. But the nice thing about acid is that it blurs what’s real and what’s not into any kind of takeaway you need. Maybe I was hallucinating excessive confidence from my soul. But it was what I needed. And I believed in it.
I believe in the reality distortion field. One where at my core, it feeds positive energy and abundance across to the people I work with, to my family and relationships, and to all facets of what I invest in. And even if the pathway to getting there is going to be rocky, at the end of the day it’ll all be okay. Negativity doesn’t stick. Positivity is exponential.
I don’t know if psychedelics is for everyone. It’s not always enlightening. I didn’t have any major life changes or action items I needed to take from this trip (previously I moved out of SF after an acid trip).
But sometimes it helps to take on a different perspective. One where your ego is gone. Another where you’re looking at life from 10,000ft above or below sea level. It’s all subjective. And to end the thought - I can only give you a brief glimpse into my own.
Interview Query Update
After two weeks of vacation in Costa Rica, I’m back on the grind this week. I’ve made 0 progress on Yo! Focus since launching. Because as expected, running two businesses is hard, and Interview Query needs a bit more of my time after vacation.
My goal for the beginning of the year was to slowly extract myself from Interview Query and to get it into a state where it could run itself. As expected, that’s turning out to be rather difficult. But any founder that expects to sell a business or own one with longevity understands that they can’t be a bottleneck for their business to succeed.
After three years of working mostly full time, I set a goal / constraint for slowly ramping down my hours in the business. I tracked my hours every week and compared them against my goal.
Timeline
Q1 2023:
Goal: 24 hours
Actual: 21.75 hours
Q2 2023:
Goal: 18 hours
Actual: 20.33 hours
Q3 2023:
Goal: 12 hours
Actual: ~15 hours (so far)
Q4 2023:
Goal: 8 hours
I’m going to be slightly behind pace but I’m okay with that.
True passive income is kind of a lie. Unless you’re investing in index funds, almost nothing is truly passive income. And even those dividends + returns on investment are over a 30 year plus time frame that you can’t exactly actualize.
Still the goal of Interview Query is to become an asset class that can return dividends and value to its shareholders. AKA - growth was not the number one priority anymore. Not that it really ever was to be honest….
One realization I had though is that it’s clear my job is to set the vision and direction of Interview Query so the rest of the team can execute on it. Doing that requires a lot of thinking, strategic planning, and deep focus work.
But that’s good! That’s the work I might even do for free!
But to get there and to operationalize yourself out of the day to day execution, the product specification of the question feed or onboarding flow, the process to ramp up leads and growth on Youtube, does take it’s own kind of skillset. But it’ll be required for anyone who’s looking to become an owner and not just an operator.