Learn From My Mistakes

Short story of how I break life chaos into small, solvable problems - 3 min read.

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It is a very glamorous system called: Sunday Morning Panic Prevention.

Here is how it works.

On Sunday, I make a pot of my favorite oolong, open my notes app, and scroll through a giant swipe file of smart things I shamelessly stole from smarter people.

When something feels uncomfortably familiar, I start dumping thoughts.

No structure. No outline. Just brain soup.

Why Sunday?

Because on Saturday I usually finish the previous edition. And on Monday, the official hamster wheel starts turning.

What I hate most is opening my laptop on Monday and seeing a blank page with a blinking cursor.

That tiny blinking cursor is like a metronome for my lack of ideas.

So I “cheat”.

Sunday me leaves Monday me a half-baked mess of notes.

Not a polished draft. Just enough that when I sit down, I am not starting from zero. I am editing, not inventing.

This tiny routine does one thing: it increases the probability that Monday will not be a creative car crash.

And that is the whole punchline of this email: Life is mostly about managing probabilities.

Not guarantees. Not shortcuts. Just better odds.

You can see it everywhere.

Money

• Some people buy Bitcoin and keep their fingers crossed.

• Some people buy ten different coins and start calling themselves crypto bros.

• Some people buy a mix of crypto, stocks, index funds, bonds, maybe a little gold. They are not trying to win the lottery. They are trying to reduce the chance that everything collapses overnight.

So where do you think Warren Buffett fits?

Group 3?

Wrong.

Buffett manages his probabilities in a different way.

He reads and thinks for hours every single day. He studies companies like it is his full-time job, because it is.

We do not have that luxury. Yet.

We have jobs. Laundry. Families. Notifications. Procrastinations.

So we manage our probabilities with diversification.

Because hope is not a strategy in investing.

"Please go up" is not a plan. It kind of worked for GameStop a few years ago, but that was a glitch in the matrix.

The Matrix has you. Always.

Relationships

Couple 1 feels the tension and sits down once a week to talk.

• What annoyed you this week?

• What made you happy?

• How can we help each other?

It is awkward. There are long pauses. Someone refills coffee. Or wine, if that helps.

Couple 2 swallows everything.

They joke, send memes like "marriage is hell", and avoid every serious talk like it is a tax audit.

Both couples might get divorced.

But Couple 1 gives themselves more chances to fix it while the fire is still small.

For Couple 2, the odds of a sudden "how did this happen" explosion are much higher.

Communication is not romance.

It is reducing the probability of a quiet mini-apocalypse.

Health

You do not instantly die from pizza.

You also do not instantly become immortal from broccoli.

That would be convenient. Horrible for the pizza industry, but convenient.

Instead, it is all about slow math.

• Ultra processed food at every meal raises the chances of the usual fun package: diabetes, heart issues, chronic inflammation, and “body-positivity”.

• Mostly normal food, enough protein, vegetables, and not drinking your calories all day lower those odds again.

Each meal is a tiny checkbox on the long list your body is quietly keeping.

So back to my silly little Sunday tea ritual.

Is it perfect?

Sure! (I bet you almost expected me to say “no”)

It is low stakes and half-baked thoughts.

Does it guarantee Monday genius? Not even close.

But it tilts the probabilities your way.

That is the whole trick.

We do not control outcomes.

A walk here, a hard conversation there, a slightly less stupid financial decision.

None of them guarantee anything.

Together, they make disasters less frequent and wins a bit less random.

Money, health, relationships, career, Starship launches, Zoom calls, performance reviews, even your next TV show choice.

They all run on the same rule set.

It is one long sequence of tiny probability tweaks.

And if nothing else works out, you still get a good cup of oolong.

Till next time.

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The book is worth reading if you’re tired of judging yourself by outcomes, want to stop calling every bad result a “stupid decision,” and are ready to think in probabilities instead of fairy tales.

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Cool Facts About Steve Wozniak

Extreme Deep Work: Wozniak describes working in “flow” so deep he could keep hundreds of design details in his head at once, pulling all-nighters alone to finish a board or piece of code without needing meetings or hand-offs.

Design Under Brutal Constraints: Early on, he set himself rules like “use the fewest chips possible” and “make it cheap enough for normal people,” which forced him to plan designs on paper and mentally optimize every trace before touching hardware.

One Person, Whole System: For the Apple II, he took pride in doing almost everything himself – hardware, circuit design, and much of the software – so all decisions stayed consistent instead of being split across teams and committees.

Steps, Not Visions: His working style was to ignore grand “5-year plans” and just ask, “What’s the next clever thing this circuit or program needs?” That small-step focus let him finish insanely ambitious projects without getting overwhelmed.

Day Job / Night Lab: While at HP, he spent days designing calculators and nights building what became the Apple I, which forced a ruthless priority filter – only ideas exciting enough to work on after a full workday survived.

Play As A Tool: Woz treats fun as a productivity feature, not a reward. Pranks at work, playful programs, and giving away designs to hobbyists kept his energy high and stopped burnout while he was grinding on hard technical problems.

Default To Sharing: His default setting was to show his work freely at the Homebrew Computer Club, get feedback, and improve. That “open demo” loop acted like a live test bench for his ideas before they became products.

Simple Metrics For Life Choices: He has a personal rule that life should net out to “more smiles than frowns,” and he uses that as a quick filter for decisions – if a project promises money but a miserable daily life, he opts out.

Work Alone When Quality’s At Risk: Woz is open about preferring to work alone on core designs, especially when too many opinions would dilute a good idea. For him, solitude is not isolation – it is a quality control tool.

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