[6/13–6/19] 2026 Goal Progress

This is one of those "let me check whether I'm actually doing the things I said I'd do" posts. The week started with an injury and ended with me deciding to take up parkour. Quite a range, honestly.

Health

Turns out I need surgery

I'd hurt myself, so I went to the hospital, and they told me the bone is deformed and we should operate.

Honestly, I can't even do a push-up with proper form right now, so I haven't been able to hit the gym. But I can still move my lower body, so starting next week I'm planning to restart the gym with a lower-body focus. It'll be my first time back in about a month and a half, so I'll ease into it without overdoing it.

In terms of exercise, I did at least play tag with my kid at the park.

Quitting energy drinks

I'm done with energy drinks.

Honestly, the biggest reason is that they just stopped working. Monster suddenly tastes cloyingly sweet to me, and Red Bull does nothing anymore. There's just no point.

So for now I'm switching to coffee, and eventually I want to go all the way back to plain water.

Sleep and meals are a bit irregular

My sleep is all over the place. It's not like I'm living some weird lifestyle, but my wake-up time just won't settle. I got up at 5 today, and at 8 yesterday.

What bothers me is that my body feels really tired when I go to bed at night. And my meals are inconsistent too — some days I skip lunch, some days I eat properly. I need to fix this. Working out makes me hungry, too.

Work

In the 3 days Fable 5 was live, I hunted for business seeds

Work was mostly grinding through tasks while improving my AI-powered workflows.

There was a lot going on with Claude, too. They said if you run things programmatically on GitHub Actions you'd have to change your billing method — but in the end it couldn't be changed, or nothing changed. A model called Fable 5 came out, but it got pulled from public release for a while due to something with the US government.

Still, in the 3 days Fable 5 was live, I managed to build a bunch of products. Showing those around internally led to scouting for the seeds of our next business idea, which was really great.

The fun thing about the AI era is that, for problems in your own life, you can build on the premise of "make it, use it, throw it away if you don't need it" — you just rattle off the requirements and AI builds it. Everyone can now see the ideas in their head as actual, tangible things.

And once it's a tangible thing, you want to explain the problem behind it. When you share that sense of a problem human-to-human, discussion is born — "yeah, I get that," "and on top of that, it's like this." It turns into "maybe everyone's actually struggling with this." Better products get built through conversations between humans. Getting a glimpse of that structure was a nice discovery.

What I'm struggling with is my own laziness

The thing I'm struggling with is my own laziness.

On good days, I write out everything I want to do in the morning and just hand the instructions to AI right at the start. I focus on the main work that actually needs my brain, and by the time that's done, most of the other tasks are basically finished too. Then I just review and move through them one by one. That way my to-do list for the day finishes pretty fast.

But on days when I'm not feeling it — especially now, with the rainy season — even though all I'd have to do is give AI its instructions, there's a version of me that can't even be bothered to do that. I could solve it with a system, but then, well, humans become unnecessary. That feeling keeps cropping up here and there.

I need to get used to cycles like dynamic workflows and loop commands, where things keep improving on their own by evaluating the quality of the output.

But the work I used to do as my main thing keeps shrinking, and even though I should be happy about that, there's a kind of loneliness to it.

I used to write the programs myself, look things up, read the docs, get a little drunk on the version of me that finally "got it," apply that, watch it actually run, and want to brag to my friends. There was that sense of achievement. Now AI just casually does all of that. As long as I'm not doing anything weird and it produces what I intended, the flow is just "ship it."

In terms of evaluating output, expertise is still needed, so I do think I'm useful there. But it's completely different from the days a few years ago when I felt myself growing rapidly, day after day. It's a little lonely.

Money

Portfolio drifting down, sold SpaceX early

My portfolio is still set up the same way. But US stocks are dropping hard.

SpaceX had its IPO, so I bought after it went public, and when I woke up it was up 20%, so I sold it right away. Bit by bit I'm in the green like that, but the bigger-weight stock I'm holding is just drifting down. Well, it'll go up eventually, I figure.

The paid-note project is also going very well and getting into an interesting phase. It's an area I don't fully understand, but I look at it and touch it every day — I'm growing, and the product itself is growing. Once I've run it properly for about a year and it produces results, I'd like to be in a position to say "you should try it too."

Moving abroad is on hold for now

There wasn't much movement on moving abroad. If anything, I've toned it down a bit.

My kid has friends here now, and separating them from those friends feels a little cruel. That said, once my kid is in the upper grades of elementary school — Japan has its good points, but I want my kid to see more of the wider world too. For now I want to respect my kid's current activities and move forward from there, so it's on hold.

169 days of English

For English, my Duolingo streak is at 169 consecutive days. Hitting 100 felt great, but the stretch between 100 and 200 just doesn't get me very excited. I think once I hit 200 I'll be like "nice work, me" again, though.

Still, my exposure to English has gone up and I've kept it going, so now when English suddenly pops up, the resistance is basically gone. That's big. A friend I told I wanted to study English suggested we do all our LINE messages in English, so now we text in English. When a push notification comes in in English, I can read all of it, understand it, and the reply I want to send comes to mind. The words still don't come out, though.

Other

Pretty Cure, and a fight with my wife

My kid is hooked on Pretty Cure. That's fine in itself, but my kid keeps wanting all kinds of merch, so I'd been buying various things.

The other day, we had a fight out in public. My wife had said she'd buy our kid some Pretty Cure merch, but I went and clicked "buy" on something around 6,000 yen that I'd had sitting in my wishlist forever. My wife said "well, that's nice too" at the time, but looking back, because I bought it, there was nothing left for my wife to buy for our kid. Parents can't buy the same thing, after all. So I ended up being the only one who got to look good to our kid, and my wife couldn't — that's what the fight was about, and I caved completely.

From now on we agreed to actually talk it over and decide together what presents to buy.

Starting parkour

The most striking thing was that, by chance, a famous parkour guy came to play at the park.

My kid was playing tag with him, and watching my kid run in that moment — it was the fastest I'd ever seen. There really is a way of playing that draws out someone's abilities. The guy himself has incredible stamina, doing backflips mid-run and all. Sure, part of it is physical ability and youth, but I thought: drawing out someone's abilities is something that has to happen human-to-human.

It's like cram schools, right? You draw out the student's motivation and raise their grades. But in sports, you don't get better on motivation alone. There's the instinctive sense of danger, the defensive instinct, not wanting to get caught. Kids live by instinct, so I want to engage with them with an understanding of that.

So I'm thinking of starting parkour myself. I'm really doing it this month. I'm in my early 30s, so if I'm going to start a new sport, now might be my last chance. I want to go off, just once in my life.

AI is incredibly capable as a brain, so maybe humans should focus a bit more on the physical side. Even today's white-collar workers might end up in a situation where they have no choice but to move to blue-collar work. When you think about it that way, what white-collar workers should do now becomes clear naturally. Make a living off localized expertise, while holding a management perspective. Think about your company's survival strategy, and build your current strategy with the state of AI a year from now in mind. There's no point building a strategy that'll just get absorbed by AI a year later.

And while building something to generate side income with AI, also do strength training, move my body, build stamina. Build up my fitness, keep my mental health in good shape, and concentrate on the things that make life between humans enjoyable. That's what I think I need to do.

Closing

Next week: restart lower-body-focused training. It's my first gym session in a month and a half, so I'll ease in without overdoing it. Keep a regular early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule, and give my kid a good start to the day too.

It hasn't officially hit the rainy season yet, apparently, but I always get sick at the change of seasons, so I'll keep that in mind, rest my body as much as I can, and try in a relaxed sort of way.

On the work side, I'll try 5 new AI-powered workflows every day. I want to gather up the ones I think are good and take it all the way to sharing them internally. This week, between gathering AI-related info and building practical products, I spun up about 7 of my own ideas locally and built native apps and such. Each one is actually pretty usable, so — I'm not thinking too much about monetization, but if it develops into a business, it's the same thing anyway. I want to keep going so that the stuff I've worked on in personal development can be offered not just to me, but to the people close to me.

I'll get back at it next week.