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Island Two-Year Update: Shipwrecked

On Tynan

We were all excited about this most recent island trip. Brian, Elliot, and I would be flying together from Tokyo directly to Halifax, and would be joined there for a few days by Todd, and then by Ben for a couple days afterwards. It was to be the first island trip with no critical imminent deadlines. We would work and do projects, but at our own pace.

Of course, if we wanted to be warm, we'd need to prioritize the woodstove. This was our most off-season trip, and temperatures were scheduled to get down into the thirties. In reality, they hit around twenty degrees.

As soon as we landed, we went to pick up the rental car. The agent apologized that they had no full-sized cars, and that we'd have to take a minivan. All of us appreciate the robust utility of such a large vehicle, so we were excited about the swap. That excitement grew when we realized that every seat was heated.

We drove away from the airport, looking up where we could buy a wood stove on the way. We got there right before it closed, but managed to completely fill the minivan with the stove and a very complicated series of stovepipes.

The Possibility of Being a Horrific Failure

On The Best of Sett

You can't control definitively whether you'll succeed or fail, but you do get to set the parameters. The way I live my life, I will either be an big success or a huge failure. There are a variety of potential paths ahead of me, and zero of them lead to comfortable success or minor failure. None of them lead to numb mediocrity.

How do you adjust these parameters? You set goals and accept risks. If you set goals low and don't accept many risks, you have no chance of huge success or huge failure. You'll end up somewhere in the middle. Maybe you'll end up a bit better off than you expected, or a bit down on your luck, but you'll be somewhere in the range of "fine". On the other hand, you can set extremely high goals, leave yourself no reasonable plan B, and take massive risks to get those goals. It's the only way you'll even reach them, but you may fall short and crash.

In my case, I've put all of my eggs in the SETT basket. I hope it becomes a huge success that makes me a lot of money, gives me some power to improve conversation on the internet, and all that. At this point I've invested two years of my life into it, with no plans of changing that allocation going forward. I've passed up many smaller opportunities that could have made me money. I do have some money saved up, but it's hard to count it as a backup plan when I know with certainty that if SETT failed I'd use it to start another company and go all in.

I work as smart as I can, I live frugally, and I plan for contingencies-- I'm not reckless, but when a calculated risk presents itself, I'm all over it.

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