[7/10] 2026 Goal Progress

Health

The Big 3, properly pushed to the limit

First off, I made it to the gym.

Bench press: 60kg for about 8 reps on my own. From there I dropped it down — 60kg → 50kg → 40kg → 30kg — and really hammered my upper body.

My deadlift max is 102kg, but yesterday I did 90kg for 2 sets. Squats tend to be the one I can't quite push, usually because of time constraints, but bit by bit I've worked up to 70kg now.

Walked a lot, slept a lot (overslept)

This week I had private errands like going to the hospital, so I ended up walking a lot. In that sense, I got a fair amount of exercise.

Maybe as a reaction to that, I kept crashing at night and oversleeping. For the record, yesterday I slept about 12 hours.

Quitting smoking: total failure

Honestly, quitting smoking is a complete flop. I'm basically buying two packs every morning. No excuses here.

Work

A new project got greenlit

The highlight this week was a new project getting decided. What I'll be doing next is coming into focus too, and I'm happy that I'll get to do work that isn't just refactoring.

Every time you do a 0→1, the nature of the project and its revenue shift. But working within the budget for that, optimizing revenue as a contractor — designing the infrastructure, choosing the tools, thinking through the service — I realized this is something I actually love.

That said, it's not about being dirt cheap. It's the kind of work where you dig deep into each security check and each way things are used, so it's genuinely fun.

A team member's growth is incredible

More than anything, one of my team members has grown enormously.

Someone who used to be passive, bad at taking initiative, bad at sharing information on their own, is now showing leadership. They carry their projects with confidence and a sense of responsibility, and they're maneuvering really well. Their growth over this past year has been genuinely amazing.

What did I do as a manager? Honestly, I kind of dumped a chunk of work on them, then periodically caught their screams and alerts and gave advice. It might look like a nuisance from the outside. But they absorbed the information they needed right there, and got to the point of running the project almost entirely on their own.

For me, I wanted them to be able to run multiple projects solo. So I'd drop them into a project for a week or two, then check the gaps against my expectations — what alerts came up, where things were moving slowly. There's always the chance they're just not motivated.

I catch up on those points in regular 1-on-1s, aligning our understanding and getting our vectors pointed the same way. I adjust what's lacking and what's excessive, and strike a balance. I get them to feel "yeah, this is probably fine," and have them work off of that. Being able to support them that far is what felt good, I think.

The challenge: how to build a state where things run without me

As for challenges, I really want to cut down my own workload. How can I create a state where things run even without me? That's a pretty big challenge.

Systematizing things, communicating things. Capturing the essence of it as abstract information and conveying that to the team. That's the challenge for me.

The challenge: the human bottleneck

The other challenge is, as always, the human bottleneck.

Confirming specs, consulting on architecture — that kind of text communication inevitably becomes asynchronous. There are things that can't be resolved unless a human moves. Firing an AI's reply back at a person's question feels a little off when it's between fellow engineers in-house.

Those tasks pile up and slow things down. This was a bottleneck even back when there was no AI, and I feel like it's still very much there.

Money

US stocks turned positive, so I took some profit

On investing, US stocks have recovered fairly well, so I feel like it's about the right timing. I entered at a bit of a weird spot, so I'm thinking I'll cut it here while it's in the black, watch how things go, and rebuild the portfolio again later.

The profit from selling I'll probably throw into crypto and wait until it climbs again.

An auto-trading bot just calmly watches

The paid-article gig is also going fairly smoothly. What I'm doing is building an auto-trading bot.

I read a bunch of books, first get a feel for it by doing discretionary trading myself, then bounce ideas off AI while backtesting multiple bots. It's now month three of live operation. The interesting part: something that climbed steadily in June dropped about 80% in July.

If this were discretionary trading, I'd be tensing up every day, nervously watching money I'd earned bit by bit, getting jerked around by my emotions, halving it, and then frantically trying to win it back. But with a bot, the nice thing is you can just calmly watch. "Eh, still in the black, so it's fine," kind of thing.

People who can actually do discretionary trading well are genuinely amazing. Tester once said something like he lost 100 million yen trading right before a recording. For him it might be around 1%, but the shock has to be big, and you'd think he'd want to win it back and recover his mood before the recording. And yet, he did that recording looking pretty cheerful.

Not getting emotionally attached to the results, mechanically. It's a thing people say all the time, but someone who can actually pull it off is, seriously, a genius.

Closing

I've got hand surgery next week. So I'll be prepping for that, and there's some real estate stuff going on too, which makes my private life pretty busy. I want to properly rest up next week as well.

Still, this year — with the goals I set at the start of the year — is kind of a "year of production." It's the year I blitz through all the things I'd been putting off. So this is a good kind of busy, I think.

At the same time, I want to do my best to avoid things that will get put off again down the line, things that become a variable risk for me. Scrutinize the information properly. Casting a wide net is fine, but in the end I'm the one who tightens the noose around my own neck, so when I take on something new, I want to think about it seriously.

And then — in a state where things run to some degree without me — how well can the team work? Honestly, I'm looking forward to that. Also, I'm thinking of giving FX a try again, for the first time in a while.