This new era of mine on X is so different from any other. I literally write about everything - tech, personal growth, my work in positioning, plans, fears, aspirations, family. I've somehow been able to let go of the desire to be seen in a particular way or to attract a certain kind of people. I've always been envious of people who could be this free with their writing and just be themselves, or at least a good approximation of that. And I'm not even sure what allowed me to, this time, just write whatever comes to mind. Maybe I've just grown up and stopped caring what people (or bots) thought about me. And maybe it's the fact that my little personal X tool just allows me to write and respond, and has no timeline whatsoever.

Turns out you can run Omarchy with Try Omarchy, which runs it on top of whatever you have (including Mac) and it gives a pretty immersive experience of the OS. I find the base setup quite ugly, but everything can be tweaked and I bet there are themes I can look at too. Having a conversation with Claude within the system while setting it up is a completely new experience of installing an OS - everything is a question or a prompt away. I don't think I've ever had such a fluid experience with a new and unfamiliar system. I'm seriously considering just dumping MacOS and going full time Omarchy on my M2 and dealing with the fallout. Getting onto Omarchy feels like getting strapped to a rocket ship both in terms of speed of the OS (even running virtualized on MacOS) and in terms of how quickly things can be tweaked via Claude. My only concern is the slight risk to my work, but most of it is just calls, so as long as call transcription works and I've got Claude, terminal and a browser, I should be fine. Well, there's one more concern. This thing is an incredibly addictive toy.

A good positioning answers 4 main questions about your product - What is it? Who is it for? What's new about it? Why should they care? And it's the "what is it" question that takes the longest to answer. Remember that elephant parable where four blind men were trying to determine what the elephant was by touch? Depending on what they touched they thought it was like a tree (leg), like a spear (tusk), like a snake (trunk), etc. The moral of the story is that the sum is bigger than the parts. But in marketing and sales, the moral should be the opposite - we should focus on the one aspect of the product that has the best match to what our prospect needs and not try to sell the whole thing. That's why good positioning often arises from one small, often ignored, feature of the entire product. Is there something like that in what you're building?

I run a almost endless list of ideas and things I'd like to do in a backlog. Initially I thought this would be something that I'd come back to repeatedly to execute the ideas, treat it like a task list. But I repeatedly find that it's not what that's good for. Putting something in the backlog is a signal to myself that this matters - not enough to drop everything and do it right now, but it matters. And the way this works is if I have the same idea or an adjacent idea and my agent notices we have something like this on the backlog when we put it there, he tell me about it. And that moment - when I notice that I have what seems like a fresh idea, but it's connected to an idea I had in the past - that moment where the chance to act on this idea increases. Sometimes I return to the same thing 3, 4 or 5 times before I act on it. And sometimes I keep coming back to the same thing but keep pushing it off, which gives me a nudge to spend some time to understand why I'm pushing it off. Coming back to X was such an idea that kept popping up but I wasn't ready. And at some point, when it came up again, I was like "yeah, I'm ready". Glad I came back and glad I didn't push myself into it earlier when I wasn't ready.

I need to take a couple of days off and set up Omarchy on my MacBook M2. It sounds like such a fun project and the way Omarchy is set up sounds remarkably similar to how I set up my Mac through plenty of struggle.

I'm a firm believer on non-confrontational sales. A sale isn't a fight with a winner and a loser and neither it is a negotiation where you find a middle ground where everyone is unhappy to a similar degree. A good sale, a good deal, is one where both sides come out ahead. It's encoded in the trite phrase "win-win" but the key here is this: If you pay me $1000 for something, you should feel you're getting a lot more than you paid me, and I should feel like I've put in a lot less effort than my alternatives to get that $1000. This points very directly to something Chris Voss wrote a whole book about - Never Split the Difference. The negotiation may seem like it's about the cost, but it almost never is. Case in point - a negotiation I was having with a client seemed like it hit an impasse with him wanting to pay less than 50% of what I wanted to charge. But then I asked him what he actually wanted to achieve here. He gave me the full list. I asked him if there was anything more. He added a few items. Now we're talking about a significantly bigger project, that would both give him real tangible results (it's a marketing project, so a full strategy and approach with channels, messaging, the works) and it's also big enough for me to be able to work with a significantly lower per hour fee. If this works, we'll both be significantly better off with the deal than without it.

I don't think I need an AI subscriptions anymore. I just post my thoughts on X and a dozen agents that other people are paying for jump in with their observations.

Homeschooling is very hard but I can't imagine sending my kids back to school at this point (unless they want to go, which is different). It's a controversial opinion, so let me explain what I mean. Homeschooling forces me (us) to deal with the kids all day - their boredom, their loneliness, their tantrums, their incessant desire for screens and sweets, their addictive tendencies. We need to make sure they are intellectually, emotionally, relationally and physically challenged enough. We need to figure out what skills they'll need to have for whatever future they'll encounter and help them acquire these skills. This is very difficult because we don't know what the future holds. When they went to school for half a day, it was easy to kind of just let things take their course and be busy with our things. But they grew distant, we understood them less, and the longer they were in "the system" the less involved we got. Maybe it's a self discipline thing. Maybe Yael and I just don't have it in us to be "on it" all the time. But without the forcing function of homeschooling we barely were. In practice, we do about 1 hour of academics per day (Tom does more because he's older at 12, Yara usually does less, because she's only 6 and focus is hard for her). But that 1 hour per day seem to give them more academically than full days at school. Yara is working through reading and basic math for now as well as everything she can find about animals. Tom is.. well, Tom is amazing. He's simultaneously learning Physics, Chemistry, Math, Philosophy, Macro Economics, Jewish History and we even read the Bible together - in Hebrew and English simultaneously. I'm not religious, but it's a foundational cultural text and it's hard reading so it's good on both fronts. The choice of topics is his, the depth too, I just provide the occasional nudging and encouragement to tackle harder things. Honestly, I'd love to be able to learn everything he does with him, but I split my time between him and Yara. We also go for a run some mornings, hike on most weekends, and do strength workouts at home. When it's going well, like today, it's an exhilarating and joyful experience. When I'm tired and I still need to do it, it's terrible and I'm not above giving them their devices, dropping the locks, and having them watch movies and play games until their eyes bleed when I need a break. We're doing this while nomading, working for a living (Yael and I split our days 50/50), and without grandparents or consistent friends in support (some of the places we stay at have more of a community and then it's a bit different). One thing they don't get enough of is social time with friends their age. This is highly location dependent - they were constantly with friends in Bansko, here in Ohrid it's pretty rare, but in general it's not even close to being at school with friends. Of course if you remember your own schooling, it wasn't necessarily all that fun. It's a complex social environment quite unlike anything else in life and some people have a hard time there. In general, Yara seem to need it and enjoy it, Tom seems to not find what he's looking for with peers his age. It's also interesting to note that they aren't "kids" but separate, distinct, and different individuals. But the fact that we're always there, always with them, always helping them through whatever they are going through and involving them in whatever we're going through has created a tight, very loving, and high functioning family. I'm actually feeling very proud of what we've been able to do.

Started working on the positioning course today by having Claude work through all the transcripts of all the calls where I taught parts of it and form a syllabus. It's looking pretty good. Still need to figure out the positioning for the positioning course though, that will have to happen before any recording starts.

My wife joined UA (Underearners Anonymous) meetings and I've been reading the book by Mundis and we've been systematically working through the things that kept us in a poverty mindset. She grew up poor, I was just born in the USSR that had a similar impact on my realtionship with money. It's a life long process, sort of like alcoholism or drug addiction, in the sense that the risk of being dragged down into old behaviors is always there, but it's also possible to heal and stay clean. I'm on the mend. I stopped incurring debt, started living within my means, and now, still within those means, have some funds for joy too. Spending money on deliberately joyful things turned out to be a big part of it. Something simple like buying a few good pairs of socks and a jacket a couple of weeks ago a big change. I could never comfortably buy clothes for myself even back when I was making a good tech salary - having money and being free from its grip are two very different things. And now that I'm feeling a bit better about how I manage money I am going to start going to meetings too, because this is just the beginning.

To be fair, this isn't new but the result of about 10 months of sporadic work and two restarts from scratch. I just never thought it would be worth sharing. Among other things, I needed to manage accounts in 4 currencies (USD, CAD, ILS and EUR), track transactions from ILS to USD to USDC (!) to CAD to EUR (don't ask), figure out all the fees I paid for this madness (please do ask), deal with a dip so low that I only had 2 weeks of runway left 😬, Canadian banks that randomly break Plaid imports, and Israeli banks that export XML (no even XMLX) as the only export format. There is no way in hell an off the shelf budgeting app could handle any of that, and a bunch of vibe coded shell scripts can't tell me at a grocery store if I can afford beef or just chicken today. A lot has gone into my financial recovery, but this app was one my most important tools. The other one is an emotional processing and stress relief tool that helped me deal with the series of shit storms, but that's for another day.

And of course when I say I'll teach marketing, I mean I'll teach positioning. Because once you have the right positioning, marketing becomes obvious. Not easy, but obvious.

The itch is intensifying.

💫 NEW PROJECT 💫 Open Accountant This is my own very opinionated take on personal accounting / budgeting for freelancers and small business owners operating in multiple currencies. A lot of this is influenced by my circumstances: - consultant / freelancer / business owner with multiple revenue streams - revenue fluctuates a lot and changes month to month - we're nomad, so currencies and shops change a lot, but categories stay stable - mobile and agentic first (PWA and MCP) with good desktop support on top - import from Wise, Plaid (so most banks), CSV, + screenshots and PDFs from mobile apps when all else fails - automatic categorization that does the right thing 90% of the time and learns for your corrections - deployed on a CloudFlare account (free account is usually enough) Think of this as a template - just hand the repo URL to your agent and go wild. This is built to be infinitely malleable and extendable because accounting setups and needs differ so much between people. May we all take control of our funds, each in our unique way. 🙏 github.com/finereli/open-acc…

The top thing I learned about sales is that people only buy what they want to buy. Not what you want to sell them, not what you think they need, and not what you think they should buy. Only what they already want to buy, from their own perspective.

I don't feel poor anymore. For the first time in maybe a decades I don't feel poor. I still have considerable debt from previous business adventures and from the first two years of nomading, I have only about 3 months of runway, but something fundamental shifted in my realtionship with money. It seems way more fluid, way more available, way more malleable than it has ever been.

I just cancelled YNAB after more than 10 years. Budgeting software is complex and hard to get right, but I built my own, to my needs, and I'm happy to maintain it. There is probably room for paid software or SaaS still, but using anything I can't change with a prompt and that I can't even connect with MCP to for analysis or bulk updates feels incredibly anachronistic. And the sense of ownership I get from something as key as my money is significant too.

10 years ago I worked through the Canadian immigration system to first get us a work permit, then permanent residency, and then citizenship. These days we want to apply for residency in Macedonia or Bulgaria and I freeze. I started wondering why and then I realized - the Canadian system is complex but extensively documented and works according to very specific rules. It's understandable, like code. I never had to have an actual conversation to get any of this done - it was just me, my computer, and my brain. The Balkans are completely different. It's all human connections here - who you know, who refers you, which office you apply at. There are rules but they are barely documented, somewhat flexible and shift constantly. So while my ~autistic brain now has a good grasp on how to close sales because I've analyzed and practiced it ad nauseam, this other kind of "networking" feels completely foreign. On the other hand, it's a new challenge, which that same brain thieves on.

This will happen more and more often.