Hey everyone, just wanted to post a quick update for you.

Ever since I started working for myself painting full-time, I've been absolutely swamped with work. It's a great problem to have, and I'm incredibly thankful that it's gone so well so far. I'm pretty much booked up through July, maybe even early August, to the point where I'm probably about to have to hire some help.

I'm making more money than I ever have before in my life, too. I mention that last part because it simply blows my mind that I can have the level of education I do, and make this kind of money doing something I could have started right out of high school. It's given me some real added depth for one of the chapters I have written.

Because so much of this is new to me (literally everything outside of the painting itself), I'm still very much trying to craft a balanced schedule. My ability to write (though not my ideas/desire) has decreased as I've felt added urgency to finish whatever job I'm on so I can move on to the next. My wife got a planner to help me better organize things, so I'm hoping that will help me on both a macro-level, as well as on a micro, hour-by-hour level. I've never been good at making a schedule, but I'm going to have to get good at it quickly in order to create a more sustainable pace of life.

Part of my desire to bang out as much work as possible last month and this month is that we're planning an extended trip to Missouri to visit family sometime in July. As I did with our trip to the Lake of the Ozarks two years ago, I'm also making it very clear to people that I will be using a good portion of that trip as an opportunity to write. I really want to finish this book so I can start recording it.

This leads me to the third thing I'm working on, which is acquiring either a work space somewhere, or finding a larger place for us to live. I've tried numerous times over the last month or so to carve some time out to record, but it's just not possible in this house with my wife and two kids here. It's too small, and has become a logistical impossibility as long as my family is here. So that's the other thing I'm working on. I've contemplated doing some livestreams from my phone, but those are always so hit or miss in terms of connection and quality that I'm reticent to try it. But maybe I'll give it a go this weekend and see if it works ok.

One quick thought I had for you is to consider the difference between proving someone/something wrong, and changing a mind. A buddy of mine has a son in early high school, and he's become rebelliously conservative against his Progressive mother. He finds himself poking at other kids, kind of seeking to dunk on the ones regurgitating Prog talking points they probably absorbed from their parents (points he probably absorbed from Ben Shapiro OWNS clips or something). He says he can't talk about his ideas at home, and his mom regularly cries because of how much she dislikes America and how bad it is. He wanted to attend the Trump Rally recently held here, which also brought forth crying. Sounds kind of awful.

One encouragement I had for him was to intentionally consider what his goals are when he's dealing with True Believers. Does he want to win an argument, or for them to change their mind? Does he want to show how stupid their ideas are, or for them to realize how stupid those ideas are, and ultimately abandon them? I told him that winning an argument (something both sides tend to walk away with opposite conclusions on, anyway) is often going to be counterproductive to the ultimate goal of the other person abandoning their bad ideas and harmful ideology.

I've talked about this in the recent past, but it's always worth considering 1) what our actual goal is in these kinds of interactions. Is it winning an argument i.e. making the correct counterpoints, or is it for this person to abandon their destructive ideology? These two things are not synonymous.

If we believe we hold good ideas and our interlocutor holds bad ideas, one goal should be to make it easy for them to take us seriously and hard for them to dismiss/hate us. We make it easy for them to take us seriously and difficult to dismiss/hate us by subverting every caricature their ideology tells them about us. This means not looking like we're trying to dunk on them. Always be in an active state of assessing whether or not you're action is in service of a means to a goal, or the actual goal itself. If I want to build a rocket ship and begin by using whatever I find in the dumpster, it's probably worth considering whether or not this means will bring me closer to my goal of a rocket ship, or farther away (every pointless action is fundamentally counterproductive as it keeps us from productive action). We want to draw the shortest line between their current state, and their abandoning of the bad ideas. View it as an ongoing intervention, not an argument. Just a thought.

My question for you is about the writing I'm working on. I thought about uploading the entire thing to Medium, and treating it as a sort of living document that would regularly be updated for anyone to see. Outlines become sections, etc. However, I'd only do this if anyone would actually read it. So the question for you is if this is something you'd actually be interested in (i.e. would you read it/ check it), or would you prefer me upload individual sections as they're completed? The problem with the second option is that if the sections are part of a larger work, there is virtually no chance they would not be revised and edited in some fashion before the larger work is completed. I also have the problem of character limits on Locals, making it difficult to post sections here without arbitrarily having to segment it. A potential third option I've wanted to do for a while is record them as audio essays, which requires space and ability to do so, which as I mentioned, is currently not an option. Maybe I can record a few in Missouri, but that's not a long-term solution. Any feedback is appreciated.

Lastly, today is our daughter's third birthday. It's wild how fast time flies. I never knew how much I'd love being a dad, but it is truly the absolute best.

Have a great weekend, and I Iook forward to hearing from you 🤙