Monthly Archives: June 2025

Diminishing returns of worrying

June 8, 2025: _Micropost 🍪, Life

Writing this just because I’ve never heard anyone talk about it before:

Worrying about things has increasing, diminishing, and negative returns, just like anything else.

The increasing returns are when a bit of worrying about something causes you to prepare for a situation or otherwise act differently in a way that benefits you.

But after a point, the worrying starts to saturate. You’re already aware of the potential problem, and more worrying e.g. doesn’t necessarily help you become more prepared or choose better actions.

Lastly, worrying even more can actively harm you. Maybe it causes undue stress or prompts you to make poor investments, relative to the likelihood of the event you’re worrying about.

So worry, but just enough.

How to be consistent and achieve success

June 7, 2025: _Micropost 🍪, Creativity, Life, Writing

I think the most important part of achieving consistency is detaching yourself from the outcome of each individual work session, whatever that might be. Here are some example ‘work sessions’ from my life:

A particular workout
Releasing a song
Releasing a blog post
Doing a stream
Making a youtube video

Attaching yourself to the outcome (e.g. number of views) will only set you up for failure, since inevitably one of the work sessions will ‘flop’.

To detach yourself from individual outcomes, you have to love the long-term journey of whatever you’re doing. The absolute most important part is simply being there, day after day, week after week, over a long period of time.

This can be compressed down to “Showing Up = Winning”.

If you can reframe the requirement for “winning” from “getting a lot of views” or “breaking my personal record” to simply “I showed up”, you give yourself a massive psychological advantage.

P.S. One extra tip:

An extra tip for the creatives: Reframe each release as another piece of progress in building your large public body of work. It may not be today, but someday, your large public body of work will make it all happen for you — and every release is a step towards that, no matter how “well” it does.

P.S. another tip

Establish the habit by simply doing the activity at the same time each week/day and scheduling your life around that as much as possible. Ideally find a time slot with the least contention against other things that come up.

For streaming, I found that Sunday afternoons was usually free and didn’t compete too much against other plans.

But the “scheduling your life around it” is where the rubber really meets the road. That’s where you prove to yourself that you consider this a high priority to you by putting your time where your mouth is.

Tips for going to conferences alone

June 4, 2025: _Micropost 🍪

Going to a conference alone can be an intimidating experience, but it’s completely doable (I’ve done it many times). Here are my tips:

Optional: Look people up ahead of time and reach out

If you can, try to research ahead of time people who will be attending the conference and reach out online with a LinkedIn or Twitter message. This might give you a nice head start.

Be friendly, open, and seek out others in your situation

You might be surprised how many other solo attendees are at conferences or conventions. These will be the easiest people to meet as your ‘first friends’ — don’t be afraid to approach and say hello!

Set a goal: Don’t eat dinner alone

If a conference doesn’t include dinner, set an explicit goal for yourself to not have dinner alone.

Actively try to meet people throughout the day, specifically seeking out other solo attendees who might want to get dinner later.

Exchange contact info with people you enjoyed meeting, and float the idea of possibly getting dinner if they don’t already have plans.

Detach politely from uninteresting people

Don’t spend excessively long around people you don’t connect with.

After meeting someone, if you don’t find them very interesting and would prefer to keep mingling, it’s completely acceptable to do so. You can say something like “Well it was great to meet you — I think I’d like to mingle around a bit more. Have a great conference.”

Just try to make one new friend

Don’t set the bar too high for what would make it a successful event for you. For me, if I make even one solid new friend or connection, I consider it a win.

Just try to have one takeaway from talks

This is unrelated to going solo, but like the above tip, I set the bar pretty low for what I aim to get out of talks. If I get even one solid insight, thought, or takeaway, I consider it a win. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get one solid takeaway from some talks.

Volunteer

Volunteering can be a great way to automatically meet people (organizers, other volunteers) and get in contact with well known people in the community.

Make it easy for others to strike up a conversation

You can do yourself a favor by wearing slightly more interesting clothing or accessories than you typically might. For example, for me it might be wearing a shirt for my favorite band. Or maybe something topical for the conference/convention. The goal is to give people something easy to comment one which you can talk about, and help get a conversation going, or keep one going if you run out of things to talk about.