It was a three-day weekend, so I prepared accordingly.

By turning it into a construction site.

Last year, I replaced the mulch in my front yard with river stones.

Not because I wanted my yard to look like a magazine.

I just wanted mulch to stop behaving like confetti.

Mulch was a medium-level annual maintenance problem.

Nothing crazy. Just stupid enough to bother me every time.

When the lawn mower passed by the bed, the air from the blades would blast mulch all over the yard.

Then I had to rake it back.

Otherwise, the next time the mower came through, it would mulch the mulch.

I am now reconsidering my “nothing crazy” claim from three paragraphs ago.

So I thought: river stones.

Clean.

Permanent.

Low maintenance.

And after a full year of all four seasons, I can confirm the stones worked.

No maintenance!

Am I excited?

Not yet.

To prevent grass from growing through the stones, I had installed weed fabric and buried edging a few inches into the ground.

Practical?

Yes.

Ugly?

Also yes.

So this year, I negotiated with my wife for another outdoor project: build a concrete curb around the stones.

That is where the math became dangerous.

I searched around and found that concrete curbing costs somewhere between $14 and $25 per linear foot.

My project was small, around 150 feet, which means I would land on the expensive side of the range.

You can do the math yourself.

I did.

Then I decided I was not ready to pay that much for something that would lay on the ground and collect dust.

Literally.

So, of course, this became a DIY project.

After a week of YouTube, ChatGPT, and dangerous confidence, I figured the materials would cost only a fraction of the contractor quote.

Easy.

Except I had never worked with cement before.

But I was curious.

And cheap.

A dangerous combination with access to YouTube.

I spent a week preparing.

Planning. Measuring. Buying materials.

I was in a rush too.

I did not want to ruin a regular weekend.

That would be wasteful.

I wanted to ruin a three-day weekend properly.

Mission accomplished.

Now it is Sunday, and my body is so sore that I am sitting in my air-conditioned office, sipping coffee, and reconsidering my relationship with ambition.

I had to take this day off from being myself.

Which is when “saving money” became a very flexible term.

I did not really save money.

I converted money into a different currency (and the exchange rate was terrible).

Every DIY project has this beautiful little lie at the beginning:

“Contractor wants $2,500. Materials are $400. Therefore I am a genius.”

That is fake math.

Because the hidden invoice arrives later.

It includes:

Here is the lesson I keep relearning against my will:

Every project has three prices:

The lesson is not “don’t DIY.”

I still like learning things. Unfortunately.

The lesson is to stop comparing a contractor’s quote to the cost of materials.

That is sophism.

If I had a chance to go back and undo the whole thing, would I DIY it again?

100% yes.

Like I said, it was still a fraction of the cost.

So apparently I learned nothing.

Damn.

Till next time.

How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI - 18 min read.

This isn’t another “humans are special, relax” essay. Gilman also looks at the harder parts of AI: inequality, concentrated profits, weak rules, and what happens when junior work starts disappearing.

How to Create Your Own University Course to Teach Yourself Almost Anything - 9 min read.

This is a good read for people who love learning and rarely finish. The advice is concrete all the way down, from building a lecture playlist to planning pages per day to writing a paper, so the knowledge actually has to pass through your brain at least once.

What "Do Your Own Research" Actually Means - 17 min read.

What counts as research? This article makes a useful split: verification is checking a specific claim, while exploration is building context from scratch. Small difference, big consequences. One is fact-checking. The other is where things get messy fast.

This book explains why chasing approval is a bad life strategy, even though most of us still do it. Yes, we want to be liked. But there is a huge and unnecessary price for that.

It almost feels like a library, which, ironically, is a loud signal for me to be quiet and heads-down.

The Twelve-Year-Old Ask: At 12, Jobs called Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts. Hewlett talked with him for about 20 minutes, gave him the parts, and offered him a summer job at HP - a useful reminder that direct asks sometimes beat “proper channels”.

The Walking Format: Jobs often used long walks for serious conversations. The format made the discussion less formal and gave both people room to think without sitting across a table.

The Whiteboard Grid: In 1997, Jobs came back to Apple and found too many products with names that even Apple people struggled to explain. He drew a 2x2 grid (consumer/pro and desktop/portable) and made the company focus on four main computers.

The Monday Review: Jobs ran a regular Monday executive meeting where Apple’s leadership reviewed the business together. Product, marketing, operations, and finance had to share the same facts.

The Obama Guest List: Jobs reportedly declined a tech-leaders meeting with Barack Obama because he thought the guest list was too long. The interesting part is that he applied the same small-meeting rule even when the room was powerful.

The Small Room Rule: Jobs kept meetings small. Ken Segall described a weekly agency meeting where Jobs noticed a new attendee, asked who she was, and told her he did not think they needed her there.

The Prototype Argument: Jobs preferred reacting to real prototypes over abstract presentations. A model on the table made decisions sharper, because people could finally see what was ugly, confusing, or too complicated.

The Box Test: Jobs treated packaging as part of the product experience. The first moment with the device started when the customer opened the box, not when the screen turned on.

The Demo Rehearsals: Jobs rehearsed keynotes heavily before product launches. The final presentation looked relaxed because the messy part had already happened privately, many times.

The Retail Mock Store: Before Apple opened its first stores in 2001, the team built a full-size prototype store in a warehouse. When they realized the layout was wrong, Jobs delayed and reworked it instead of protecting the schedule.

The Customer Survey Limit: Jobs did not let market research make the hardest product decisions. He believed customers often could not describe what they wanted until they saw it working.

A short clip about a common problem: one bad moment can quickly become a whole story in your head. Worth watching if you need a reminder that your first reaction is not always accurate.

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