I’ve added an AI to Tres Cosas that guides your sidequests based on your activities and connections. It’s an incredibly easy way to make daily improvements.

For example, Life Coach AI will automatically recommend someone for you to contact today based on folks you’ve included in previous sidequests. Or, if you’re tracking a lot of fitness activities in Tres Cosas, Life Coach AI might suggest a breathing meditation routine to add a little variety to your wellness sidequest.

Check it out! It’s also free :)

And if you already have Tres Cosas on your phone, just click the flames :)

I was talking with a friend recently who’s feeling stuck at work. Middle-aged, everything seems hard. Struggling to find the next opportunity and dissatisfied with the current one.

They’re unsure how to escape this rut.

I listened to a podcast this week where an actor from a recent action movie shared insights into his grueling training process. Beyond the restricted diet and intense workouts, he endured injuries. One stunt left him with glass piercing through his hand. On another morning, he woke up with his arm completely swollen from a staph infection.

When the hosts, surprised by his commitment, asked why he doesn’t just choose lighter roles, like a sitcom, his response was: “No one thinks I’m funny. I would love to do a sitcom. Everyone’s like, ‘He’s so serious. This guy is so serious.’ I’m doing this because this is what I got, guys.”

“This is what I got.”

Daniel...

Move your life forward with three easy things

Hey! Today I want to announce the launch of Tres Cosas. A side project I’m releasing into the wild.

I was struggling with a few things after the pandemic: losing a few pounds, reviving friendships, too much social media, and not creating new fun software projects for myself. One of the things that helped a bunch was inspiration from Ali Abdaal’s book Feel Good Productivity to just focus on a few daily side quests. Side quests (in my words) being tasks that really don’t matter. They’re just fun. No one is going to get in trouble or lose their job if they don’t do them. They aren’t my todo lists or work backlog. They’re just incremental things that take a few minutes of time and cause zero stress. They aren’t goals. They don’t have success criteria other than “done”. It’s “spend 5 minutes looking up on Yelp a place with less saturated...

Recently, (I hope you saw), I launched a thing I’ve been working on like crazy, Locomotion!

But… despite a ton of interest, kind words about the product, lots of social media love, folks haven’t purchased Locomotion as much as I had hoped. That’s a result that can easily lead to a feeling of disappointment.

How do you deal with that?

A couple years ago I got my wife rainbow-colored roses.

I didn’t even know these existed but turned out to be a nice hit with my wife and kid. Naturally, I’ve wanted to buy more of them. Small problem. They’re crazy expensive. $50 for a dozen. I can get 12 white ones for $8 at my local grocery store.

So, can I just make my own?

This also was the perfect chance to teach my daughter a little something about the scientific method.

Step 1: Ask a question. Can we make our own rainbow roses?
Step 2: Research. We read articles and watched YouTube...

This last summer was my daughter Addison’s first dance recital.

That’s a big deal for a 5 year old and her parents! Tons of practice, both sets of grandparents coming, and one giant crowd of people to perform in front of.

The performance was awesome. But afterwards, I had the responsibility of picking her up from the “green room”.

The green room was just a small gym located near the entrance of where the recital took place. Everyone would drop their kid off, then proceed to walk down a long hallway to enter the auditorium and find their seat. After the performance, the parents were asked to send just one parent to go back down that long hallway from which we came, to pick up our kid.

Now, I don’t know if it was most of us not paying attention to the “single parent” rule, or everyone just having way too much fun chatting in the hallway, but getting back to the green room to pick...

It’s been over a year in the making, but today my family would like to announce our latest adventure: FilmHope.

Are you the type of person who doesn’t measure anything? Do you buy your clothes without sizing them up? If someone asks says something costs $5, do you just give them whatever wad of cash you have? Do you show up to everything whenever you darn-well-feel-like-it?

Of course not. So why do so few people measure and optimize the performance of their YouTube videos? Because it’s been so difficult.

Until today.

Toady, my family is announcing the launch of FilmHope. FilmHope is the super easy way to test different titles and thumbnails for the YouTube videos you upload. Just upload like you normally do, go on over to FilmHope.com, pick your recent video, and choose a new thumbnail and/or title.

Within 24 hours, we’ll email you with a statistically significant result of...

Hey. I know I’ve been radio silent here for awhile. I’m sorry about that. But I’ve needed the focus to get a new product built. If you’re interested, let me quickly tell you about it.

Do you do any stop motion movie making? If you don’t, it’s probably because it’s so darn difficult.

Stop motion is beautiful, but it’s insanely tedious. Move something. Take a picture. Repeat. Over and over and over, until your fingers bleed or you give up.

So… what if I told you, you could remove the whole taking a picture part? Instead, what if you could just record a video of you moving the characters and objects in your scene and a computer did the rest? Is that something you might be interested in? :)

If you could eliminate all the picture taking, you could do this so much faster. You could use cameras that don’t have fancy stop motion software. You could actually make stop motion movies more...

Almost two decades ago, a young filmmaker landed on the Hollywood scene with a movie that became a big deal, winning awards, and making princely sums of money at the box office. But after that debut, as many critics and fans would argue, every movie he made was worse than the one before it. It got to the point, no one would make a movie with him anymore. His career was over.

So where does this creative genius go from here?

There’s a “YouTuber” I watch closely.

He builds props from random scraps of wood he’s been hoarding. His movie titles are made of inelegant blasts of spray paint. Instead of using the animation capabilities of his editing software, he uses a vacuum to animate paper cutouts to move across a table he built from previously mentioned scraps of wood covered in old previously mentioned wayward flecks of spray paint.

Sure, at the beginning of his career, he was...

After watching a Casey Neistat vlog, something peculiar often happens. All day long I’ll find myself humming parts of the music from an episode. He’s created an earworm.

A catchy song or tune that runs continually through a person’s mind.
Earworm

Earworms aren’t peculiar though. They happen all the time. Just listen to a top 10 list on your way to work. You’ll be humming something too probably. What makes this peculiar is that the same song itself from the musicians SoundCloud page isn’t all that earwormy to me.

I mean no offense to the wonderful musicians often found in Casey’s work like Andrew Applepie, Jeff Kaale, and Maxzwell, but there’s something going on when these songs are mixed into Casey’s vlog.

What secret magic is Casey adding to these tunes?

David Huron is a professor in two different departments at Ohio State University. The School of Music...