If this were you, I’d have ready advice. Just write! Don’t worry about the other bits, things will improve in motion. We are all so good at avoiding the direct route, its a thing I feel in my bones. Like going off to college, when you want to start a business, go start a business!

Either I sucked at giving, or receiving at advice. Because the days of not publishing turned from week into months, as it slowed with a metallic grinding noise, until finally seizing up.

When it all started

I started publishing to reach people. Believing I could develop communication skills and leave a door open for opportunity to come knocking.

But as the publishing got more serious, my writing changed from the lovely act of teaching, into the uncomfortable act of learning, digging and squeezing on ideas until they made sense. A lot of grasping at vagueness, and a lot of empty air.

Rewriting and rewriting, until what was an enthusiastic idea turned into a grey mush.

The effort wasn’t lining up with the reasons I said I was writing.
I’d forgotten why I write.

Squeezing on this idea

Some writing is easy. Journaling is like therapy, it helps me understand myself and clarifies deep thoughts.

But writing in public! That’s a race against readers expectations, real or imagined. The bar is much higher there. I don’t mind the squalor of my private entries, but I’ll sure do a vacuum and clean up before letting anyone else see it.

And of course, this cleanup and endless re-writing, produces a better understanding of the idea, better writing. And I wanted that. I want to understand myself and these ideas as clearly as I can. A clear idea is a brick. Bricks build up into a calm confidence in the things I get curious about, including me.

Running

There was a similar struggle when we were training for a marathon. A lot of training is needed, and it starts to suck. You have to make so much time for it, you don’t know how hard to push or when you can take an easy run. Disconnected was how this training was actually going to help.

Until I got a solid cramp.
Not being able to walk the last couple of meters to the car, was eye opening. If that happened on big race day, I’d be in the middle of no-where and likely need to be carried out. Fuck that!

My next training session had renewed purpose, run hard enough to where I think I might cramp. Learn how to deal with that (salt!) and test myself.

Training had to suck. Because race day shouldn’t.

Why I write this

I enjoy writing when I’m teaching a well known idea, but to get there I need to do the hard writing. The painful squeezing. Because I don’t know myself, or the ideas I’m curious about. It’s what makes writing the new, hard. It has to suck.

I write to understand things, myself being the big one. And I publish, because you dear reader, raise the bar of quality — you are the marathon. Without which, I wouldn’t find depth, just journaling alone… rambling in the dark.
Fin.

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July adventure update
Climbing is the most awesome sport, you should try it!
Vancouver is hella expensive.
Looking for summer jobs is hard, but got my first interview tomorrow. It’s for a barista role downtown!

Novel things found
Traffic circle garden.
Guided tour of the neighbourhood cats.

Now, lazy is good. But tooooo much of a good thing is bad, right?
It was great to have that initial tension release itself, the muscles in my face relax… that’s amazing. After that resting though, doubt and anxiety were sneaking in.

I started going deeper into my head. Where once I was in a rhythm and routine, now I’m left to think about stuff. Purpose, the future, my weaknesses. It’s horrid being in your head so much. It’s how I imagine the road to craziness is paved.

There are sparks of an urge to get outside of my head, to help people, make things. Be useful.

I’m in no rush. I’m still quite happy doing nothing, but the twinge, the call to do something bigger has made its first whisper. And I’m glad, because that means I’m healing.

Some highlights of the nothings, that have taken my time.

Finding a nail clipper near the Bay of Fundy.

The bay is awesome, super high tidal differences, check it out:

Drinking beer from a 710ml can.

Fly fishing in a part of the river that had no fish.

PS: Thanks to all those folks at SmartBear who contributed to my care package, it arrived in the mail! I was super stoked!

The plan was:

• April - end of work

• May - free time

• June - off to Canada 🇨🇦

Free time is exciting, so much potential… rest, fix things around the house, finish off old coding projects, write, read.
Then poof… it's weeks later and I haven’t done much at all.
Rather perturbing, like, I should either be productive or rest — not let it slide by!

There is a metaphor about rocks, pebbles, sand and a jar. It’s a classic, so I hope you don’t mind the retelling of it.

1. If you first fill the jar with sand, you will find that not much else fits in there.
   

2. However, if you fill in the rocks and pebbles first, the things that matter to you, most of the sand will still find its way into the gaps. #winning

The jar is the time we have, the big rocks are big goals, the pebbles are our routines and the sand is the filler activities we all do.

I didn’t block time out for any of my larger rocks, and with time marching on, the days filled up with sand.

But in this time, there were some pleasant surprises.

Like the moments I went outside to play with my dogs. The sun on my face, and absolutely no thoughts… unadulterated thoughtlessness.
I can’t figure out why I haven’t played more in the past, not as a chore to keep them healthy, but simply to learn more of their little behaviours.

And then, there have been some not-so-pleasant reminders.

The mood swings were larger. Without my old routines, the big challenges in my life had nothing to hide behind. They stare back at me, waiting for me to make my move. I hold them back, “this is my holiday, I’ll deal with you soon enough”. But they loom none-the-less.

Staring into a smokey fire, I can let me mind drift and plan a whole new life for myself. I’ve never had so much freedom before. But instead of feeling exhilarated, I feel a little dread. That I will travel the whole world, and still find the same anxieties waiting on the other side.
I was reading The War of Art this morning, and this quote rang out at me:

“... those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”

― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Which is a heavy quote, even if one is starting into a smokey fire.

My comfort is in knowing what my large rocks, pebbles and sand are. That I want to self govern and blessed to be in a position to make these changes.
Let me see what to add to the jar next…

Movie of the week: Stranger than Fiction (2006)

Today marks the last day of my ten years, at SmartBear.
Worked on Swagger, was surrounded by curious people… and had a captured audience on Zoom calls, for my hilarious puns. It was great.

I’ll miss the daily interactions the most.
And so this post is for you, dear colleague, an invitation to follow my journey, that we have one way to stay connected.

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The Great North 🇨🇦

Adventure has beckoned. And Canada is where I will answer it.
Compared to my home in South Africa, it is close(ish) to the diametric opposite spot on earth (look up Antipodal towns!). Far enough away from home (30-odd hours) to feel like the expedition it will be.

When I land, I’ll have close to five-months savings.
No debt, and no kids.
In June 2025, for the summer months at least, I’ll begin my journey with a working holiday, starting in the east of Halifax, NS and heading west.
Taking odd jobs, that are social, hopefully more physical than mental, and most importantly, fun.

I don’t have it all figured out. For what I hope to achieve or where I will end up.

But I do hope to meet people, find love, get disoriented in the city, fish for salmon, see the northern wilderness, swim, sail and sometimes…
Sit in coffee shops – without a device to look into and just… sit.

Money 💸

Saving’s don’t last forever, even on a working holiday.
To keep me grounded, and for the sheer fun of it, the burndown of my finances is going to be tracked online, and I’ll play a game with myself.

It’ll be simple, when my savings drop to a certain threshold, I’ll have to apply for a regular 9-5pm job.
But… I’ll find ways to earn little bits, and every little bit moves that projected date, further and further out.

The game of moving D-day.
Maybe in the future, that day will be so far away it won’t even matter.

What’s it all for?

I hope it doesn’t take too much convincing that this is a hell-of-a-fun trip, but so is building something and taking roots.
If you spend any significant amount of time in a routine, you can lose a bit of yourself to it. When the lines become blurry between what you want, what makes you, you and what belongs to the routine.

I love tech and particularly software, it’s something I will inevitably be drawn back into. And my ambitions are not small. Life will find me searching out what is useful to others and turning it into a tool. If I find it along my journey, hell yeah, but even if I don’t… the journey will still be worth it.

Like… are you the master of your own destiny, do you choose your own path, that sort of thing.

Most of the time, I don’t feel agentic. I get stuck in the routine. I’ll be sipping on a post-work beer with friends. Spontaneous plans bubbling through our conversation, most of them cheeky. Instead of grabbing adventure by the horns and picking something awesome to do, or even just following along and joining in their adventure, I’ll lean back into my routine. Someone has to feed the dogs tonight, right? Could’ve made arrangements, but didn’t.

Lacking the motivation to do anything grand, because I know it’ll exhaust me. It’s stupid and I feel dumb because of it. Fear and routine make bad bedfellows.

However, I’ve come to learn that agency is a muscle to exercise. To stretch, flex and burn. Of the examples that come to mind, let me tell you of my favourite. Let me tell you about the Doom guy.

If you walk up the stairs, hook a right then left to enter my office. You’ll be faced with a larger-than-life pixel art project that hangs on the wall there. Shades of brown and orange, it’s the face of an old video game character from my childhood (DOOM, 1993) and kind of a running joke with my colleagues.

Every day I go to work, I get to see this art project in all of its glory. Hand cut and painted polystyrene blocks. With the recent addition of a light fixture, it’s even a little dramatic.

Finishing stuff is hard. The excitement starts high and slowly fades as time goes on. If we don’t finish soon, then we enter the dip. That part of the project where it sucks, it’s messy, we’ve forgotten why on earth we want this. Just plain sucks. And typically, I jump to the next project. Abandoning it to lie and waste away. Until there’s no reason to finish it.

Not with Doom guy.

Now I can’t recall what made me decide to, but I wasn’t going to start any new projects until this one was done. There were some weeks where I sort-of gave up, where I failed to mix the colours and botched up batches… three times. Where cutting the polystyrene blocks was getting sloppy and sloppier. Where I wished, but resisted, the urge to start the awesome new map idea that was in my head.

My decision to abstain from the new, left me no choice. In fact, it edged me on. Pushing through that dip, I eventually got to the glue up stage, getting excited as the face slowly emerged.

I hung it up and at that moment… it was done. And the world was my oyster.

Completing it gave me a feeling that if I set my mind to it, I could get anything done. My agentic muscle was pumped 💪.

Two things make this cool.

1. It got completed.

2. I chose this random-ass goal myself.

Completing things is like reaching the destination you set out for. Now there’s nothing wrong with going off course. A good wandering about, swimming 🏊‍♂️, climbing tall mountains ⛰️, and abseiling into an abyss 🧗🏼‍♂️. These things are healthy, powerful even. But if you never reach that destination, you haven’t completed it. You may find other adventures, but not that one. Completing things is binary, it is or it isn’t complete.

This unreached destination remains a half thought, hard to use or to talk about, harder still to feel confident that you can reach destinations, that you choose. It’s lacking the agency part.

If you make a claim beforehand, you’re setting yourself up to succeed or fail. It’s risky, its a bet with life. There are stakes with that.

There is an art to choosing goals. Walking a 5km is easier than running a marathon. Harder still is a marathon under three hours (ask Casey about it) !
I make no claim to know the right goals to choose.

A couple months ago, I was working part-time on a startup idea, while trying to juggle my day job, and the other usual stresses of life. Like buying a house, handling a deceased estate, hosting dinner clubs, just existing. It got to the point where I burnt out my motivation. Waking up, I couldn’t be bothered to do anything. Not great.

So I took a break. And afterwards, I knew I needed to get back into things. Restarting my startup made my gut churn, so I decided to choose a smaller goal, with the intent of achieving it — come hell or high water.

Building a journalling-note-taking-AI app, isn’t particularly novel, but it is something I want for myself. To raise the stakes a little, I added a few constraints, one of them is documenting the journey. Which is what I’m doing now.

While it can be frustrating — I’m currently on my 8th, 9th 10th draft — the desire to build the next feature helps pull me through this phase.

Doom guy isn’t my greatest achievement, or the thing I’m most proud of, but it is my favourite achievement. It’s the one that told me I have legs and they can take me anywhere.

So to answer the question about almost agentic. You might be achieving goals, knocking them back like a sorority girl on Tequila Tuesday, but they might not be your goals. Or you might be choosing your directions, but not completing them. You need both to be the master of your boat.

Being agentic, is pushing on the frontier of life, it’s swapping out your city car for an off-roader. You can still follow the well paved roads, established by others, but you can just as easily veer off into the vast unknown.

So without further ado, let me jump back into building the next feature of this product: The timeline view of my notes. Thanks for reading :)

And thank you Mak for all the feedback!

—

The long-ass list below is the log of my work so far. You’ll notice its more ideas than prototypes. This is mostly to keep a personal record of things, but you’re welcome to peruse them :)

Socrates Method prototype: https://socrates-method.replit.app/
Timeline view demo (so far): https://infinite-journal.replit.app/

Week of January 1–5, 2025

• Idea: Use OCR and Dropbox document scanning to get handwritten A5 notes into the journal

• Idea: Use context markers to guide the topic of the note

Week of January 6–12, 2025

• Idea: Use a timeline view to leverage our sense of time to recall notes (e.g., I’m sure I wrote that thing a week ago)

• Idea: Review feature for filtering notes in the timeline by topic

• Idea: A Socratic Method feature to challenge user thoughts with AI-driven questions

• Built: A working prototype of the Socratic Method feature on Replit
  

https://socrates-method.replit.app/

Week of January 13–19, 2025

• Idea: Core principle of Infinite Journal: helping users discover what they truly want

• Idea: Capture emotional snapshots to remember what you felt like at that time

Week of January 29–February 4, 2025

• Built: Updated Socrates app, UX improvements and added Topic buttons

• Built: Initial Infinite Journal Timeline view on Replit

• Idea: Topics can be arbitrary queries. Queues instead of lists

• Idea: Metadata layers to separate human from generated content. Overlay filesystem

Week of February 5–11, 2025

• Built: Added Chunks (later removed) to Timeline view on Replit app.

• Idea: Store non-crafted notes to add (e.g., Zoom calls, emails)

• Idea: Keep provenance of data. Maybe include financial journaling?

• Built: Linked Replit app to Dropbox for data. Polished UI

Week of February 12–18, 2025

• Idea: Pricing model: More you pay, more access to code you get

• Idea: Use JSONL for embeddings and store in Dropbox

• Idea: Consult, refresh, build, test, publish. Like an AI Operating System

Week of February 19–25, 2025

• Idea: Obsidian as the platform for Timeline view and searching?

• Idea: Git-like commits for capturing, immutable, append-only. Jump start feature

I know enough as a product manager, that the road to good business is a good understanding of people and their problems. And that good business is a road to freedom. Making premature solutions is an insidious trap most of us fall for. But talking to people is hard. Finding them, teasing out their actual needs and desires, and often doing this without a clear goal in mind — it’s draining.

I was pushing through several months at this point, finding people to talk to, learning what I could and thinking really hard (lol) before I woke up one morning, and decided I couldn’t do anything useful that day. Or for several days after, which turned into a couple of weeks.

The burn out I experienced felt like the whisper you get when you’re running too fast. Flying down the road, moving my muscles, feeling my heart pump, it’s great, but eventually the whisper starts. The thought of stopping, of slowing down. It grows, as I feel more uncomfortable, as the oxygen struggles to fuel me in pace with consumption. My mental strength resists for a while, as the whisper grows into a plea, and eventually a command. Some switch inside me flips, and I slow down to a crawl, or stop entirely. The crash feels proportional to the push. The more pressure I put on myself to achieve, knowing that it was possible for me, if uncomfortable, the more indifferent I feel after stopping.

Ari, Viktor and I are in an accountability group together. We meet weekly and on one session we got to talking about AI. This was during my quest to talk to people, before I crashed. Ari asked if AI could make phone calls, as he could see avenues in the medical space where this could be useful. Being a compulsive teacher and a touch of a show-off, I plunged immediately into a “yes, but no” answer. You would need to convert your caller’s voice into text, run it through an LLM, before converting that output into a generated voice. And people on a phone call have an expectation of a quick response. After my monologue, Viktor calmly shared a link to an online demo1.

Not only did that prove me wrong. It was a working example of an extendable voice-to-voice tech with latency of < 500ms. Faster than my grandfather could speak, maybe not as fast as someone with ADHD. More than good enough.

This was inspiring. Where voice could be an interface into any application out there.
Pausing my main efforts at a startup, and freedom, I took a brief side quest to bang out a prototype of this that I could use to help me take notes, something I love doing.

Standing there in my office, with a timer running I started to talk to it. And it worked, but there were flaws. As I rambled out loud, the prototype would always respond after a pause. “Ok”, “Understood, Josh”. Which broke my frail line of thought. And some of the phrases were a little different to what I had said, it had taken some liberties in processing my words. It was annoying. So I parked it.

After my burnout/crash, I knew I needed to get back into the saddle.
Althought the thought of restarting my startup (restartup?) caused my stomach to churn, but freedom wasn’t going to land on my lap. I decided that finishing the little side project would be fun, and if I could get it complete, would be worth while.

Finishing things is so important – my greatest accomplishments were things I finished. Sounds silly right? It’s true though, unfinished things don’t count for much.

To borrow from the running analogy, I wanted to adjust my pace to be something much slower. So that I could complete the distance without stopping. For the sake of a win and for the sake of playing the game.

I was going to finish making this thing, then start with a clear mind on the next project, whatever that may be.

There were a lot of directions, features and challenges I could see with building some note taking app. Firstly, who was it going to help?
The biggest challenge I had with my startup with finding the right people to serve, finding out their needs. So to make it easy on myself, and the biggest change of pace, I was going to make it fit my needs alone. I would fantasize about it being useful for others, but build it for me.

The second, was that this shouldn’t remain a project only . My goals of freedom, financial and creative, were still the overarching driver. And to satisfy those needs, this needed to be a complete product. Meaning, it should be publicly available, should accept payment and should do something useful. I consider it a personal product. To the point where I need to pay for it myself, no freebies.

So what am I building now?

An infinite journal. Going to take notes on my A5 spiral bound notepad and photos of it. I’ll type out entries when it’s quicker. And I’ll record voice memos. From these sources, I want to gather similar chunks together and create lists, discrepancies and anything AI can help me on the data with.

The requirements to be accountable to my goals of freedom are:

1. It needs to be public

2. It needs to accept payment

3. It needs to work without any hacks or workarounds

The design involves four components,

• One. Capturing notes — voice, text and photos of notepads.

• Two. Digesting those notes into topics. Summed up notes in one place, like my shopping list or my goal of one day doing a 5km in 20 minutes. Every note adds a bit to different topics, some which are known (because I told the journal they’re topics) and some that emerge from AI.

• Three. Reflection. Notes will often have little to no context. AI can be made to seek clarity when I’m too lazy to add it or too blind to see it as missing.

• Four. Self-improvement. AI is going to mess stuff up initially, and going to be amazingly better in the near future. To fix the bad and keep up to date with the new, requires building a library of examples and expectations. That can be used for guiding the AI.

With this design, here is how I imagine the day-to-day of using this app.

I take a walk. Airpods in, ramble out loud and recording it into a voice note. The note is transcribed and as soon as possible, there is a moment of reflection where AI prompts me for missing context and clarification. Any corrections on mis-categorized topics are added into the example library.

Later, I decide to write an essay about a topic, to clarify my thinking on it. I ask my Infinite Journal about the topic and I’m given a map of past thoughts and explorations on it.

I don’t want it to write the essay for me, I’m not that interested in producing AI generated content. Instead I want to see if it can remove the incidental complexity of writing, ease the friction a little by providing ample material to work from. Part of why I write is to clarify my thinking, which requires effort. Like, I wouldn’t want a robot to go to the gym and lift weights for me.

The first component is underway. Capturing voice memos, using Google/Microsoft to capture hand written documents. It’d be nice to build an app for this, but the tools already exist and I need to do as much as I can manually and quickly to get to something that is useful for me. All good things are simpler than we think. And all software is really just automation.

My startup failed to gain traction because I couldn’t keep up the effort of talking to people. A step that I still believe is necessary and that I will get back into. While my brain feels like I strained a muscle somewhere, I’m going to complete this personal product. If you can’t finish a marathon, run a 5km.

Time to go through 71+ notes.

Fin.

If you like AI. note taking or journalling-as-an-advantage, hit me up!

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Thanks for all the feedback: , , Mak, and !

And for the accountability, and Viktor!

Some folks are scared of the blank white paper in front of them. But me, with a 0.7 gel ink pen in my hand, I savour it. I love it so much, I go out and buy more. A whole ream of five hundred pages, a weighty slab of paper.

Then I think how cool would it be if I had screens on my office wall, I could envelop myself within endless digital whiteboards, so I grab some sticky notes to emulate it. A projector would be even better… wouldn’t that that'd be so cool?

And before you know it, the white piece of paper in front of me... is still blank and I'm tired of thinking, tired of all this inspiring stuff.

Thinking and getting inspired is all good and well, that’s not the problem here.
The problem I’m facing happens when getting inspired becomes my only focus, when I’m more interested in buying the paper than filling it up. It’s the wrong focus, and its a habit I want to break.

Potential is the space you have, if you don’t fill it, then regret will.

Thinking back to the projects I'm particularly proud of, I noticed they exist because I pushed myself to start nothing new until they were done. I wasn’t allowed to be distracted. No more paper until the pages I have are filled. It worked for those, now I need to make it work again.

I think this is what will work for me. One project at a time, so that I’m not constantly trying to create more space, more potential only to ignore and languish through inaction.

What about you? What’s your take on potential, do you want more of it or are you happy to capitalise on what you have now?

Back in the late 2010s I was a Frontend software developer — the guy who makes the buttons on websites. And I came across a video by Bret Victor titled “Inventing on principle”.

Bret explores the philosophy of using a principle to guide where you put your focus. Taking software building as his example, he explores how we could immediately see the changes we make to the program. From visualising the pixels as we type out code, to recording and projecting future states, like where Mario would jump if we made is bounciness, more bouncy (yeah, it’s cool). Bret kept pushing on these conecepts…

Once exposed to these ideas, it is hard to be satisfied with less. I started to go down the Bret Victor rabbit hole. Each video has working prototypes of the ideas he was sharing, and his narrative of “what ifs” kept building. Leading to what I believe will be his crescendo, DynamicLand (such a lame name, though). A shared space, where people work with software by manipulating the world around them (using paper and stuff). 

I’ve kept his ideas, like exciting little treasures in my mind, as I’ve gone about my day. One principle in particular keeps bubbling up. Immediate connection. 

You should be able to get immediate feedback on the creations that you make.

It’s a lens to view the world in. A question that’s fun to ask about the problems in your or my day → Why can’t I change that, how will I know I’ve made a difference?

Let's talk about immediate connection. Or actually, let’s talk about its shitty cousin, indirect feedback.

You’re designing a billboard on a big public road. You’re basically famous, congrats! You sketch out ideas for your burger brand, then diligently work in Photoshop until it’s baked to golden perfection, you can smell it on the screen. A couple hours later the signboard people receive your email with the artwork and begin building. Two weeks later, they begin plastering your creation on the billboard. Waking up extra early, you can’t wait to drive past it. Racing your car that morning, you see it ahead. There it is, and the grey text colour is washed out. Damn. Its so hard to read! Back to Photoshop I guess (you wish).

Working on the computer is not the same as painting the physical sign. It is a proxy for the real thing. A tradeoff is made, where you get to iterate quickly and cheaply on the computer instead of slowly and expensively on the real sign board. But the flip side is that you’ll never be 100% sure about what you’re actually making. You won’t have that connection.

What does ideal look like in this situation? Well, I imagine sitting across the road from the billboard, on a laptop. Every stroke in Photoshop, shows up on the billboard. Immediate connection. 

Working in a studio somewhere for a signboard design makes sense, its an okay tradeoff, its comfy in the studio. But for stuff already on my computer? 

Like why do I have to push a dozen buttons, then five more buttons to get one thing to work? If I want to see a variation of the website landing page, changing a single word , I have to

• create a Jira ticket (need to track the work)

• use a half-dozen sentences to describe the change

• a developer has to go into GitHub, modify the text, push it as a commit

• which goes through a Ci/CD pipeline before eventually…

• …updating the servers…

• …resulting in my one-word change.

This is the real world I inhabit. 

There is a very good reason for each one of these steps in the process, but my God this is not the way it should be. Simple things should be simple and we are far away from the ideal way of interacting with machines. The power is there, the ideas are there but we’ve fallen into the trap of accepting the status quo.

Before the computer mouse, we had terminals and text-based commands. We couldn’t touch the thing right in front of us, we had to type things in to get stuff done. Before screens, we had to wait as the printers hummed, just to see what the output was. 

The older established ways of doing things were not terrible. But they’re not the only way. 

Today I’m a Product Manager.
And feeling the connection I have to my work is anything but “immediate”. 

Writing product requirements, juggling priorities. Waiting for features to be released. Whoever invented the word “sprint” (the Agile folks) must be rolling around laughing, as most companies treat it like a marathon. A former boss coined the grind as “Sprint fatigue”.

But then I realised what it is we do, we make products. And people use them. When I need immediate connection, all I have to do is phone (or realistically, zoom) a customer. And I feel immediately better. 

What do you wish you had an immediate connection to? That you haven’t thought about in a while? Tell me, I’d love to know!

Fin.

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PS: Here is the Inventing on Principle talk

Technology changes quickly, minds change slowly – Bret Victor.

💡 James Clear (of Atomic Habits) thinks Bret is cool too… https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/inventing-on-principle-by-bret-victor

Thanks !

We’d have to ask Alexis Beamont and Remi Godin, the directors of the music video for Let's Go! by French indie band, Stuck In The Sound. 

Their little masterpiece of animation has captured my heart and I want to know how they did that. Specifically, I’m amazed at the amount of story in such a small frame of time. The pacing is so tight, and I need to explore it and see how to move the plot in my own writing. This essay is my study of the pacing of Let’s Go and how I might use those techniques.  

Let's take a moment to appreciate the human emotion of this story. I will do it a great injustice and rattle it off like a waiter giving the specials. This is science, and Let's Go is going to be dissected...

This is the story of a Chinese boy who wants to be an astronaut on the moon. Giving himself entirely to this pursuit, he forgoes many aspects of life as he drives towards his goal.

After being suited up and launched into space, he has made it. Before the unthinkable occurs, earth completely explodes. Flashbacks of lives he could have had boil his disappointment over leaving him derelict and full of resentment. A new hope arrives in the form of a blurry image of a blonde in a space craft. The international space station is orbiting above. He wants a family and this could be it. As pieces of earth's debris starts pummeling the moon, he fights his way to the space station. After a few near misses the station opens and he is pulled inside by the host. To his utter frustration, the "blonde" is a man. No space family. 

The story ends as a PlayStation controller drifts towards him, wiping his eyes he goes and joins the host as player two. 

Damn, that is a cool non-verbal story! Doing the “right thing”, pursuing his dream and being having it fall to nothing — hits me hard. All that life he could have lived! The twist of the blonde being a dude always gets a good chuckle to anyone I share this with. Kudos to Stuck In The Sound for their awesome song and music video.

Want to watch it first, before reading the breakdown? Here is the link:

I’ll also share the same link at the bottom of the post, if you want to watch it after the breakdown (my preference).

But let's talk shop. How was so much story conveyed in so little time? 

As a writer, I’m desperate to be able to convey the same amount of interest and emotion I see here, in my medium of non-fiction writing. The techniques I want to look are around pacing. How quickly or slowly to describe things. Lets go…

Lesson - Don’t fill in all the details

The opening scene is of our boy-hero sitting on his bed, staring at a child’s drawing of an astronaut on the moon. It's clear that this is his drawing, but we never saw him drawing it. Adding frames to show him drawing it, would only slow us down and hurt the pacing. Worse than slowing us down, the details might confuse us... was the boy an artist, what led him to draw this picture?

For good measure, repeat the interesting details.

A famous saying in theatre is ->  if the gun shows up in scene one, it should get fired in scene three. These details we describe in the story matter more than showing us the setting, they become the story. Resist the urge to add too much detail and distract the reader, keep it lean.

If, however, we follow this advice to the letter, we may still end up losing our reader’s interest. Not because we haven’t been diligent and considerate, but because they don’t understand the steps that led to the conclusion.

How do we balance this?

Lesson - Driving the story

In a story, we can be detailing the scene or we can be driving the scene. 
And like great sex, we don’t want it to be over in 5min.

Hiking, traveling, building a career… all of these have one thing in common. The journey is as important as the goal. The pull of the goal drives us but the details in the journey make us feel. In writing, we see the goal as the intrigue or mystery — as the plot that we want to see resolve. And the details are what will make us believe it.

Let’s Go is a short story. Yet it still has scenes of exercising (showing the cost) and of earth’s debris smashing into the moon (showing the stakes). It even sets us in China, where a mission to the moon is a believable goal. Without these details, we don’t feel the weight of the plot.

A great storyteller will incorporate both detailing and plot in such a seamless way, that the reader may not even notice it. The humble writer that I am, I must be aware of which I am doing. Am I detailing or am I driving? Are their opportunities to combine them?

Detailing slows down the reader, and driving speeds it up. Give the reader evidence that the resolution is both interesting and full.   

There is also something more you can do in the details. To build up a store of interest for later on. You can use those details for foreshadowing. 

Lesson - Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is placing hints of what is about to happen in front of the viewer. Priming them to anticipate action. And anticipation… is awesome. Turns out we want to know what’s going to happen. There is an emotional hit we get, when we are able to connect pieces of the story ourselves, to see how the beginning leads to the ending. 

In the music video, we see a girl try to flirt with our hero. After rejecting her, and focusing on his mission, he starts to get sadder and sadder and eventually it turns into a gritty resolve. 

These details are there, in front of us, but we are still focused on the main arc, the story of our hero being pulled by his dream. These details are secondary, and we treat them as such.

But then…

Earth explodes and our hero feels the pangs of lives he never lived, of the price he paid for his dream, turned to nothing. All those scenes of sadness and the girl he rejected, make us believe his pain. We needed the foreshadowing to believe it. 

Give readers the tools to understand your conclusions. In non-fiction, this can be more obvious. State the destination, then expand on the journey. 

Like how this piece, is about pacing in my writing. How I should be conscious of the interest level of my reader and where to add detail.

Details are both for weighting the plot and for building up anticipation for it. But if the plot evolves, how do keep it tied together into a single story?

And that brings us to depth…

Lesson - Building Depth

Good stories have layers. And what I've come to learn that means, is that there are surface-level stories, like the boy wanting to become an astronaut and there are deeper themes, like the man coming to terms with discipline and hope. The astronaut story is enough to capture our interest, but becomes so much more interesting when we learn of the deeper story of cost, disappointment, and resenting the world.  

What fascinates me most here is the timing of these stories.  We'll need to go a bit deeper to understand how that impacts pacing...

Let’s look at the timeline

There are three mini story arcs in this.

1. The "I want to be an astronaut" story ends 28% in, when the earth explodes.

2. The "I want to have a moon family" runs from 57% - 83%.

3. And the "I'm drained there is nothing left" finishes off the story from 91% onwards.

If we plot out the whole timeline, we see something like this...

Notice the intention and obstacle as it changes from surface stories to deeper themes. 
Ultimately, we come down to the core human condition, our boy hero just wants to be happy.

The first two arcs take about the same amount of video time, one third for each, but different character time. Years to get to become an astronaut, minutes to get to the space station. The last arc is the quickest in both time frames.  This is pacing, the amount of time or the amount of words we spend on which parts. And it shouldn’t match the time frame of the story, it should match the interest of the story. 

You can go fast, when the reader knows what will happen and slow when the reader is curious. 

Last lesson, a conclusion

There is one takeaway I have, after disecting this:

The interest of the reader is the runway we have.

The interest the reader has, will dictate how we can play with pacing. When there is high interest, we can expound on details and talk more. When we have low interest, we risk losing them and must move quickly.

The promise of any story or essay is that something interesting will happen. Readers will give us a chance to prove it, but if nothing catches them soon, they will drop. And if we don’t keep their interest throughout, they’ll drop. 

We should not waste time filling in all the details when a few bold strokes will do. 

When we can afford to slow down, because of rich interest, we should use the opportunity to add details that will give weight to the plot or use foreshadowing. Building up a store of interest for later on. And like all delicious things of calibre, build depth and provide a meal worthy of savouring and sharing with others. 

The story in Let’s Go was inspirational and I want to be able to write and convey as much meaning as it did, with as few frames. I want to have that pacing control, and I look forward to applying my newly learned lessons.  

And if you haven’t yet, go and check out Let’s Go, by Stuck in the Sound…

Special thanks to and for their fun feedback!

We had been renting the house for a decade prior, and the owners now wanted to sell. The weeks and months leading up to this moment were a battle of carefully worded back-and-forths and misunderstandings. From the opening conversations about price, and the conditional clauses, down to who was responsible for the odd electrical wiring of the one geyser.  Finding a new home to rent or buy in this seaside town would be arduous for my family of five — Me, my brother, mom and our two golden labradors. We had to fight to keep the status quo.

And then one day, the clauses were all in. The documents looked good, we’d won the timeline we needed for gathering the money, conceded on the fixes and agreed to price and conditions. No more back-and-forths needed. But still, I stood there in my office with the printed pages waiting on the ping pong table for a signature, not being able to move. 

I was realising how big this moment was, the next two, five or maybe ten years were waiting for me to sign.  And I didn’t know what to do so I took a pause. 

Debussy, the famous 19th/20th-century composer of Clair De Lune (and others), has been attributed as remarking, 

“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy.

The silence in music is as powerful as the notes, the character that ties them together into something more than a series of sounds. Without becoming too poetical, my life has been a journey, learning how to product-manage, waking up early to train for the marathon or grinding at a desk to finish writing that technical book. And sometimes resting from those goals. But the rest periods haven’t been well defined. Those silences had been pauses, but not respectful ones.

Let me be very clear… I’m no workaholic I’ve been incredibly lazy at times. A moment of reflection came when I couched so hard, having spent the entire day on it watching TV, that I shrunk my hamstrings and had backache for several days afterwards. That’s just ludicrous. A mental break, sure, but that was about all that’s good about that. That is not a healthy rest or silence. 

An overabundance of silence, of space, can be harmful. Avoiding what we know we should be doing by distracting ourselves, a favorite meme of mine reflects this…

When rest becomes atrophy, when we give up our muscles and our strength it ceases to be rest and becomes something horrible and barren. Like the tossing and turning you have after a day filled with frustrations and shortcomings. Compare that to the rest you can have after a day full.

Days filled with sport, finishing that project, long walks, and swimming until you’re out of breath. Sleep from those days is deep and powerful, it doesn’t even ask for permission.

Even writing demands silence after thoughts have been communicated.
It's why we have paragraphs – like this one.

Rest is only part of it. Silence is the space between events, the more momentous the events, the deeper we need to separate them. We give silence to commemorate those who have given their lives for us, in battlefields, in hospitals and in their own special ways, a stadium filled with noisy people, will stop and pause when called for. To explicitly mark the importance of those sacrifices and remind ourselves how they matter.   

Buying a house surely ranks as a big decision for anyone, what made me feel it so keenly was that the last eight years of savings were at stake, and I don’t need a house, but my family does. The hesitation I felt in front of that ping pong table could easily be justified, but I had already decided to buy it, so it wasn’t just that. What I wanted was the moment to be something more, a moment of respect. For all the struggles that had led me here. 

Without a break in the journey, we forget we’re actually making progress or moving at all. Silence is and can be used as the space between those moments, to show how important the events leading up to it were. To show respect, and to remember it with respect.

I went home to sleep without signing the papers just yet, to give this part of my path one more night. Not to think about it, I spent a normal night with a little music and some TV (with good posture). A moment of silence to mark it with the respect it deserved.

The next day, when I got back into the office I signed the papers and sent them off. 

Shout out to for awesome feedback and Eric Ho for the Debussy quote.

That took me a whole ten seconds to register. Not only did the answer not match the question, but it was the correct answer. Listening to this, my eyebrows were raised and then found new heights to raise to.

We were playing a game called 30 Seconds.
It’s made up of cards with names and the objective is to get your partner or team to guess what’s written there, but without using any of the words themselves. Names like, “The Great Pyramids” or “Nile River”. Saying things like, “It’s a very long body of water, running through Egypt”, might get your team to guess “Nile River”.

The better you are at general knowledge, the better you will do at this game. But it isn’t the brainiest that win. It’s the siblings, close friends and depending on how stressed they are, couples too.

What I’d just witnessed were two very close friends, who knew each other better than they knew their music trivia. George Micheal is not the lead singer of The Beatles, but 30 Seconds doesn’t care if he is.

You can be great, or you can be great for your audience.

As a software developer starting out, I would look at the landing pages of the products I worked on and think, “this is horse-shit”. How could anyone read this and think this isn’t anything but marketing speak? It left me wondering if marketing folks and copywriters had ever been experts in the product, or if they were expected to do “marketing stuff” only. Turns out I was half-right. Landing pages are horse-shit, but they’re (mostly) by design.

They’re not for me to read. They’re for customers to read, and not the end-users of these products, but the buyers. I was an end-user, you see.
The pages were laden with abstract words - Scale, solutions, seamless integration - like lettuce on a burger, they were something to work around as I would look to see what this product actually did.

But to some people, these terms relieved the pressure they were facing at work. These were the problems they were facing, they weren’t looking for the fastest car or the slickest shoes. Their bosses demanded: scale, solutions and seamless integration.  These buyers were the middlemen. They needed to deliver on these terms, not use the product. 

But that was then.

While we still have middlemen, access to trialing products has become simpler and easier. Moving the buying decision to end-users, more often. If you’ve been in the industry you know this to be true. Terms such as “bottom-up” or “DX” (Developer Experience) have become buzzwords themselves, as they reflect this change. 

What hasn’t caught up as much, are our landing pages. Our 30 Seconds partners are changing, and we need to keep up with good copy.
So please, help your copywriters – get them talking to end-users.

Thanks to and for helping me change tack and just publish something :D