How did I end up here?

Hey. So We hit record here and the title of this is going to be How did I end up here? And this is not Uh this how did I end up here is not an existential thought at all. I'm literally reading a blog post before I hit record and wondering Wait a minute, how did I end up here? I was supposed to be focusing today. I have another Laracast series to record. I have to be like planning stuff and executing stuff and doing stuff, you know?

But I'm reading a blog post about free as in beers and free as in speech software written in two thousand and two. I don't know why. I do, but I it's just like that moment where you go like, whoa whoa.

And this is the nature of distraction, really. And as much as I want to blame AI for all of my distraction problems, these go way, way back. But I just thought it was funny, so I wrote it down because I think there's I think there's a takeaway or two here. How did I end up on Joel Spolsky's 2002 blog post? Called strategy letter V. I have no idea. No, I actually do. So what happened is

We go back to yesterday. Yesterday I get an email. I check my inbox actually, which I haven't done in a few days. And I'm scrolling through because I was focusing on recording and not all this other crap. But I am done with that one thing. So now I'm clearing the inbox and I see a message from someone at Indie Hackers. and they said, Hey, we wanna interview you and it it's just like text based, you know, and I'm sitting there, I'm looking at it, I'm going, Huh

Is this the kind of thing I say no to or yes to?'Cause it's like, okay, it's text based, so it's on my own time, it's easy. Um it's easy in the moment I'm thinking it's easy, right? And I'm just going, Oh, it's an easy thing and I so I I hit reply and I'm in the middle of replying to all these other people who are like replying to my flux emails. So I'm saying like, Hey, thanks, glad you like Flux. Okay, yeah, we'll look at that thing. Okay, whatever.

And so I'm already kinda in the like, you know, being a nice guy reply mode. And so I just start typing out, yeah, sure, why not? And I'm as I'm typing it, I'm realizing that's the wrong thing to ever think in in business, in work, I'll say. is why not? You know? That's the wrong framing. You don't do things because you can't think of reasons not to do them. You you you default to not doing things if you have no reason to do them. You know what I'm saying?

Do you don't do something unless you have a good reason to. And I don't have a good reason to say yes to this Indie Hackers article or, you know, and I don't even who knows what this even is, you know? Somebody from Indie Hackers, I'm sure that that's legit. Indie hackers. I have no idea how legit it is anymore. I ba this feels like a distant memory. Like, oh yeah, indie hackers. That was like a sort of big thing at one point.

Did I know the creator of it or did I follow them or did I think I thought it was a big deal, but then maybe it got sold and bought by another company and now it's just like a content farm? Like I don't even remember if that's the story or not. But something tells me there's somet but that's all to say that I don't really know what indie hackers is anymore. Does anybody care about it? Does anybody look at it? Why am I saying yes to this thing? Do I feel like is it an ego thing? Is it like

Like, oh, I want people to be like I want my dad to be proud of me or something. So I look, dad, I'm on a ball a blog post. Like, not that he's ever gonna see it, but like, you know, my ego dad. Imaginary dad in my head is like Yeah, you want your you want stuff to be written about you, you know,'cause that sounds impressive or something.

Right. So there's like that, just defaulting to like, yeah, sure. Um but so this is coming on the heels of I've been listening to this uh podcast on Spotify. It's really short. It's called Life Wisdom what's it called? This is the kind of thing I I would probably pass by normally. Life wisdom by words of Taoism. And I don't know how I stumbled on it. The Taoism part is probably what drew me into it. And I r highly recommend it. Highly recommend it. Like go check out Life Wisdom.

by words of Taoism. This is not the most profound thing in the world, but this is the right thing to listen to when you're going on a walk in the morning or something. I promise you. Because it is all about like, okay, so if I click on this, like The first one. Returning to your inner rhythm. Okay, I don't know what that's about. Spring, the season of letting go. Like these are the um These are the lessons that I'm always

drawn to and are always good for me is letting go. How to stop chasing time. take a step back to see things more clearly. One step at a time. Let solitude refresh you. The illusion of control. Effortless discipline. Everything has its timing. The feeling of being overwhelmed. You know, these are all like this is really good stuff. So there's one on Uh maybe okay, simplify your life, I think that's what it was and

Maybe that's what it the trap of always more, you know, you get the thing. So I don't remember what it was, but it's just like Oh, I think it was on like being overwhelmed and you know, literally directly addressing saying yes versus saying no and how, you know, if you say yes to everything

y you e your yes, you know, doesn't mean very much. And the more you say no to, the more those yeses mean. You know, you're creating space in your life. The analogy of the um empty emptiness, an empty cup, whatever, like the gardener who is, you know, creating a beautiful garden by by cutting down bad limbs, by removing things, you know, by

you know, oh your garden is so beautiful, how did you do it? He's like, Well I I didn't I don't garden. I just remove limbs that don't produce fruit and that cover sunlight for other limbs and things, you know, whatever. And it's like you have this great garden because you remove bad or useless things from your life. And this indie hackers invite is a perfect example of a useless thing. It's not bad. It's just noise. It it's not gonna do anything for anyone. It's just noise, okay?

In any meaningful way. So all of this to say that I reply Yeah, sure, why not? And I threw in there I think I already did this for you guys sometime in the past, I don't remember though. And then so'cause I feel like I did. And then So today now I'm focused on the next su the next Laircast series and all of a sudden a notification pops up on my Mac in the top right that says

Indie hackers. It's like, oh, it's a reply from the Indy Hackers guy and I just read the little snippet and it's and it's like like, oh, I didn't know you already I don't know if you already did one, like it must have been some with someone else, like or one of my colleagues or something that I don't know, whatever.

So I kinda took it as like him saying, like, Oh, you might not be right there or like, you know, maybe you're right, but I I didn't see it or something and I was like, Oh, maybe I'm wrong. So just saw that p come across the screen and just that tiny little tinge of curiosity propelled me to open a new tab and search Caleb Borzio, Indie Hackers. And there's all these links and I'm like, oh, it must have been for my hundred K a year GitHub sponsors post that went sort of viral.

So I click on it. I'm like, oh, but they're just sharing a post. So maybe that's what it was. And then I'm like there's other ones. And then I see in the list there's a a um uh hacker news list like just in that search for Caleb Porzio Indy Hackers there's a hacker news link to like when that air and I was like, Yeah, that was kinda interesting that when I said that's a whole other thing that uh I did that post that just offhand kind of post of

Um, I don't want to say offhand. I put some effort into it, but like I just hit 100k a year on GitHub sponsors and it went fairly viral-ish. And then like five years later or something, however many years later I'd I'd been waiting until I reached like a million dollars in all time GitHub sponsors revenue. And then when I did, I like did a big post about it and was all like prepared for it this time and like told people about it and nobody cared. And it was just like

Man, you learn those lessons so many times where it's like y there's no exact takeaway. Um, but there is one exact takeaway and that is that you never know what will work, you know. So anyway, that didn't work, but but the other one did, and so I click on this indie hackers thing and I look and it's like

It's like a I I click on it and I'm like, whoa, fourteen hundred and sixty nine points on indie hackers, like that's a lot, you know. I like five hundred comments. This is in twenty twenty, June twenty twenty. I was like, holy crap, like this that's kind of like a lifetime achievement in a small way. Like it's something so what I do is in my documents.

folder, I have a little folder called archive and it's just random little things that I'm proud of for myself that like I want to look back on at some at some point, like a little scrapbook basically. And I'm looking right here, it's maybe thirty like screenshots and there's random things. I just opened a random one, it's when Chris Coyer followed me on Twitter, you know, forever ago.

It was like, Oh, that's really cool and I took a screenshot of it. Like things like that. Some of it are family things like a fishing trip w that I took one time and you know, whatever. Anyway. So point is is that I thought like, oh, I should screenshot this and stick it in the archive because it's by far my most you know, widely read

tech thing maybe of my entire career. Like I should take a picture of the amount of points that I have on it. You know, I should start reading the comments, you know, while I'm here. So I start reading the comments and It's kind of crazy stuff in here. Like people talking about other countries and donation laws and and you can't even like that's just so much content on donation laws. Like this is just for my

my GitHub sponsors thing and then so and then you get some of the haters that are like, What's this guy talking about calling it sponsors? He's like, he's just selling stuff. He's selling you know, videos about his open source software. So then I see this comment says Joel Spolsky does a good job of explaining what's actually happening here in his old strategy letter V from 2002. Caleb hasn't discovered some secret means of convincing people to pay for open source.

They can download for free. What he's done is create a commodity, the open source package, and then once it's popular, make a tidy profit off its complimentary product, complementary product, training video. Unfortunately, it's still true that people generally won't pay for software they can download for free, but you're if you're willing to dip into some other types of work, consulting, creating content videos, then you can make more than enough profit to keep going indefinitely.

Totally right. Great comment. Very insightful. I've thought this plenty of times that like I even felt like a little bit of a fraud when I was posting it, but it was true. Like these people are supporting this software. Well yeah, like I definitely amped up the sales when I told people they couldn't watch my videos unless they sponsored me. But nonetheless, it's like, whatever, who cares? It was from GitHub sponsors and that's all I said is that I'm now making a hundred can GitHub sponsors.

And uh so this person is like, well, it's actually, this is the underlying economic thing going on here. Then he links that Joel Sposky blog post. I start reading it. I go, this is pretty engaging. The the concept I liked like right out of the gate. Here it is. Every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too expensive.

Chicken is a substitute for beef. If a chicken farmer if you're a chicken farmer and the price of beef goes up, the people will want more chicken and you will sell more, right? So that makes perfect sense and I'm like, Oh, I love that. You know, I love these kinds of things. A compliment is a product that you usually buy together with another product.

Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town when the local five star restaurant has two for one Valentine's Day special, The local babysitters double their rates. Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service. So, all else being equal demand for a product increases when the prices of its compliments decrease.

And I'm like, oh, that's great. That's really good. And it sums up, you know, why, you know, so then he kind of goes on to talk about like open source and Linux and people getting it wrong and free as in beer versus free as in speech. And eventually, you know, but it let's not even get to the end. I only read like up to that far and then I got distracted by something else or something. I don't know. It's like and then I get I go back to my computer and I go

That was that moment where I'm like, okay, I'm currently reading a blog post. It's like you kind of wake up and you go like What does this have to do with anything I'm supposed to be doing today? Like nothing. So that was the first thought. It was like, what does it have to do with anything? Nothing. It has nothing to do with anything. There's no concept I'm gonna be reading about here on complementary software that is gonna help me record this series. Nothing. This is a waste of time.

However, the I am unwilling to close this tab because now I've been teased and I see that there is some vac mean, you know. I love a good old software, you know, uh blog post by a by like a legend. that that like has stood the test of time and gets referenced on hacker news. Like those things are very valuable to me.

I might be deluding myself, but it just feels like if I hit X on this tab, this will disappear forever. And I just can't do that. I can't do it. Not until I've at least finished the post. And then if I finish the post, that's a whole other conversation about okay, if I fully absorb all of the knowledge that's like put out here in this post. Where does it go when I hit X? What happens to it? Maybe I remember it enough to reference it at another point in time. I probably won't.

It will just disappear. I think that I've like, you know, logged it away in my brain, in my files or something, and that's just not true. It just passes over me the way these things do. And I remember talking to you about this.

Was it last year? It may have been, maybe two years ago, when I read The Emith Revisited. It was like the first book that I picked up and I decided Or I like realize whoa, when you read stuff like this, it just passes over you, and there's so much good stuff in it, but you just never do anything. So I like was determined that this book was not gonna go that way. So I took like really detailed notes on every chapter, summarized it, you know, then wrote like a post on it.

Um, and tried to implement like pieces of it as I went and whatever. I don't know if I succeeded, but I at least remember it better than I do other business books.

Um but anyway, none of this has anything to do with what I even recorded this for, which is this question of how did I end up here and how I thought it would just be a fun tale because I bet you could you could point to at least this happening once a day, if not twenty times a day, where You're just on the internet and it's so hard to not get swept away. And curiosity is this beautiful, wonderful thing that if you have, it it makes you a better creator and explorer and all of these things.

But it also, this is the con of curiosity, is it draws you into other things. You have to protect. If you are a curious person, you have to protect your curiosity. By not exposing yourself, by not having notifications on, by not exposing yourself to random bits of interesting nuggets, because they will pull you away.

And it it is good to be exposed to these things, you know, when you're just kind of bumping into them and encountering ideas, but I'm not sure it's better than of than having silence where your curiosity is is sort of directed in one direction, you know?

Um, I don't know. So I've just been thinking about focus so much lately. Like this is a little maxim that I came up with this morning because I'm so this next Laracast series is on AI and how I use it. And I keep feeling like a fraud because I'm like I d haven't figured AI out, but then it's like, well, no one has. The reason that I haven't figured it out is because it changes all the damn time.

And nobody has figured it out. So by this definition, anybody who's talking publicly about AI is a fraud because, you know, even the people that I thought like were it's like uh like uh Tobias Petri, I think. No, is it it's um Tobias? No, not Petri. T the other one. The the other one's very Tobias's. The the uh

He's got a lot and he he got big on the Ralph Loop trend and everything and like now everybody's like Ralph Loops are stupid, nobody hears it, nobody talks about him anymore. And it's like, Oh well those are out, so now this guy's out you know. It's like you attach yourself to one of these things. and you're out, or you start building, you know, a harness and and you get too deep in a harness, or you start, you know, only talking about a specific

harness, or only talking about a specific model, or only talking about a specific technique, or being like the open claw guy or or whatever. It's like, you know, you you just fall by the wayside and um You know, you're out with whatever thing. You have to s you have to whatever. I mean, okay, what I'm saying is is a a tangent in itself.

Can you hear the distracted brain that I keep blaming AI on? Uh, but it's so anyway, I'm supposed to do this this Laracast series on AI. I'm feeling like a fraud, but I'm trying to like What are the things that I actually believe? What are the things that that I've actually found useful? You know, there must be something I can say that's like. But I what I keep reminding myself is um did I even say that? Yeah. I'm like stuck in an AI distraction.

Brain brain fog loop, a sort of Coke Zero will remedy it. Keep reminding myself that this series is called How Caleb Uses AI, not how to use AI. It's how I use AI. And in it I'm realizing my one of my biggest kind of things is not letting it destroy your focus. And so the maxim that I came up with this morning, because I was like writing an outline and It's like I'm I'm just not as afraid of AI taking or stealing my job as I am of AI stealing my ability to focus.

I think that's honestly the real danger is that, you know, it might steal your job, very possible, but I think you should be more worried about it stealing your focus. I think you should be more worried about it drawing you in. And you feeling like you can do a million things at once. And you end up just scrolling stuff and on YouTube all the time and half distracted all the time and reading random crap and just bouncing around, you know, just lopping up all of these quick dopamine hits.

with the next prompt and the next result and it is it's that little bit of like When you order something on Amazon and you're just like you know, I'm so aware of of that dopamine trap where you know, occasionally I end up in these little Amazon s you know, phases like at Christmas time or if I'm doing like a new like when I was overhauling my like studio, like things like that. You end up in this Amazon zone where

It's like every day you got a new package coming and you just you need one to be coming every day and you're so excited, you know? It's like just this nice little oh yeah, oh sweet, oh cool. That you know, that new mount came in today. Oh great. Uh, you know, that new bag, that new

watch that that new wristband for your garment watch, whatever. It's like you're just excited and it's this little thing and then you open it and then you're done with it. You're like, oh this is so stupid. That's the you know, we've talked about that at at length, but Similar to that. Um, prompting is that way where there's like this little nugget at the end that you put out a prompt. It's the same as ordering something on Amazon.

It's like Ooh Ooh the prompt is finished. Like ooh the dangerously run code that was running for like you know, twenty minutes to do something, you know, or whatever. Like yesterday I needed to write a Laracast's outline for the series and so I was like, ah, I just couldn't bring myself to like do manual labor. So I just had like Claude dangerously skip permissions, like here's all the MP fours.

go and if I'd haven't learned my lesson about deleting Lyric Casp series. I literally put dangerously skip permissions and sick clawed on a folder with these files in it. And I'm like, Yeah, just, you know, go through and use like, you know, just get me transcripts for everything for all these, put them in markdown files next to the original MP four files.

you know, convert the MP4s to audio as you need to convert them. Um, you know, I here's an open AI key with credits in the API so you can use Whisper Pro or whatever it's called. And get all the transcripts, put them in MD files, then crunch them into a summary of every video and what it's about, and then crunch that summary into an outline. Um and here's the last outline I wrote for Laricast and make it, you know, kinda like this.

And that's the kind of thing that's like, ooh, you know, I'm rubbing my hands together. I'm like, ooh, here we go. You know, in an hour or in forty five minutes I'm gonna like go back to this this terminal tab and like have something to open. I have a new package that arrived to open.

So there's this dopamine problem, there's this focus problem, there's this how did I end up here problem. Um, and that's the thing that, you know, when I'm recording this series and talking about my philosophy of it, I think that's the biggest one is like protect your focus. And I'm not a guru on it. I don't know exactly how to do it. But I think what what you start by being aware and by not um

you know, by not reaching to open YouTube, um, even blog posts, even your email inbox, whatever. It's like, can you be doing stuff if you need to, you know, actually here's something that I recommend. If you have to wait. I invented a new um alphabet. Uh a new font, I should say. That so I have this this notebook. I highly recommend the Ugmonk Lay Flat notebook. I just freaking love it. Ah it's so nice. I highly recommend it.

You know, I'm I'm kind of a notebook guy, and the last notebook that I got hot on was those uh I can't uh puck a pads, you know, but then I switched to um to the Ug Monk like task list cards and I got away from the notebook, but my sister got me this for Christmas. And it's actually fantastic. I love it. So check it out. Ugmonk, Lay Flat Notebook. It's fantastic. And it's a grid pad, so all the pages have a dot grid on it. And I just you know, I doodle a lot, so

Doodling, really what I'm here to say is when AI is cooking, you should just doodle um instead of watching YouTube or opening something that'll draw you into it. Um and I like find myself like trying to construct letters with just four dots, like tr connecting the lines like I whatever. It's it was just kind of fun. I was like, oh, can I do the entire alphabet with just four dots and lines connecting them?

and no like half lines or anything like that. Like, can I do that? And I kinda did. I found it was a lot of the same joy of designing APIs where there's like hard constraints and you're trying to like see if you can

kind of like fit something into the shape of another thing, like make it make it represent something else. This could be a whole episode on itself, just this feeling, this idea of like how can I get this thing to represent this other thing? Like how can I take this set of primitives to represent this abstract concept and it's a really enjoyable process.

Um, with trade offs in style and philosophy just f frickin' making an alphabet on these so I'm looking if you look down, it looks like Star Wars font. That's what Hannah said. And I have this whole page of like you know, scratch padding like the alphabet and like different characters and numbers and writing sentences and seeing how they look and then doodling

around all of them and whatever. And you and there's to do lists mattered in here. There's a outline for this episode, the how did I end up here in here. So, you know

Use your idle time with a scratch pad maybe is one thing. Another thing I s I uh watched a YouTube video Thank you. God, I have a problem. I I allowed myself to open YouTube because I had food. So like I brought I actually had Chick-fil-A breakfast as like a treat, you know, today. I woke up and River's sick and whatever. I'm like, you know what, family, we're getting Chick-fil-A breakfast, except for River'cause he would just throw it up.

So I have it at the the desk and I'm like like I'm eating Chick fil A at my desk. So oh I can't I'm greasy fingers, like I can't be working in between you know, I need to open YouTube and So oh but I'm not gonna do something like brain rotty, I've watched some guy talk about focus and staring at a wall. It's kind of a good video.

And but he's talking about productivity and whatever and he's trying out this thing for a week where he like doesn't have screens or something and stares at a wall. It's his rule is when I'm not working, I'm not working. Like if I'm not working, I'm doing nothing, I think is what he said. And so he does this stare at the wall exercise for like ten minutes. He gets up to like twenty minutes just staring at a wall and describing that it's like this magical cure for lack of productivity.

So I might try staring at a wall, but that's what this is. It's like now there's this concept of downtime and we have to figure out what to do with it. Um and something that occurred to me is like That you know, th it's dr it's drawing you this is the most distracted podcast ever. How did we even end up here together collectively?

But when how like if so this curious mind that has this downtime, right? And like if you open something like YouTube, it will draw you in, you know? It draws you in. Okay. If you open something like Hacker News, these things draw you in. There's plenty to look at, and then there's there's plenty of curiosities in there that you go, ooh, interesting. And then you dig and you dig and you drill and you drill and you drill. Right? You your curiosity just sweeps you away.

So it's like you do have to replace these things with things that push you back into work because these things pull you out of work. So if you have, you know, a minute. of downtime because you're waiting for a prompt and then you open something that is that is drawing you to itself, like that's so dangerous. You're setting yourself up for failure. So what I'm just trying to think like what are the things that I could be doing that push me back into work?

I think one thing would be um putting my hand on a hot uh on a hot stove would be one thing that would be pushing me back into work. That's a joke and an extreme example. But the things like that, what the what are things that You know, they're like exercising is one of those, like Push up running. You know what? That's a good one. Running sucks. I hate being in the experience of running.

So if I was running and the only way I could stop is if I was working, you know, if like the pro I'd be like please finish, please finish prompt, like please just be done so that I can go back to work, right? Like we need things like that. that both benefit you and push you back into the work. Stretching, things like that. And then there's neutral things. I think picking up a guitar.

It's something that I did at home. A lot of a guitar here, but like picking up a guitar is a good one. But it does that does draw you in, not as bad as YouTube. But it does draw you in, you know? You get to like you'd kinda rather be fiddling with a guitar than fiddling with a prompt. So I don't know, I'm still figuring it all out, you know? But These are just some thoughts. These are some scattered thoughts. How did we even?