DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Financial captivity

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #62 • View online

Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Welcome to the 62nd edition

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

Welcome to all the new readers ❤️

I probably sound like a broken record by now, but this week has been really tough. Going through a separation is exhausting. I’ve spent a ton of time introspecting and thinking about the future. I’ve also explored my options regarding housing and hope that this will all soon be behind me… I long for normality and stability.

I’ve had a really hard time working, as I have all those thoughts that overwhelm me. My baby has been sick for more than a week, and now it’s my turn.

Given the changes in my life, I’m going to feel more financial pressure than ever before. The thing is that I won’t be able to pay rent with my half-time job alone, so I need additional income. I’m lucky though because I still have options. One is to go start working 4/5 of the time instead of ½ as an employee. Another is to secure one more contract as a freelancer to ensure I can create a large-enough buffer for me to keep working on side projects.

I’ll do everything I can to remain able to continue creating products. Going back to work as a full-time employee would leave a sour taste in my mouth. But I realize how privileged I am…

For now, it’s okay because I have an ongoing consulting contract, but there’s no guarantee that it will last for long. So I guess this means I’m entering a critical period of my solopreneur journey. 🙏

Next to the landslide of emotions, stress, and anxiety, my separation also creates another problem. There’s of course never a “right time”, but having to recover money from the stock market when everything is going down feels quite bad…

The "performance" of the S&P 500 index so far this year

Obviously not the greatest moment to need that money.

For the past 3 years, I’ve been working hard towards financial freedom. But now I’m in financial captivity more than ever!

The Lab 🧪

This week has been quite frustrating. Sales have dropped quite sharply:

My sales on Gumroad for the past week

It’s a bit disappointing as I thought I was starting to see some momentum. My wild guess is that the combination of my lack of marketing for my products and the economic context have contributed a lot to this situation.

As a result, I’ve decided to remove the tiered pricing on the PKM Library and on the Obsidian Starter Kit. My rationale is that both products have reached their “best price” for now. I’ll adjust later once I have added more value.

I’ve continued working on the Obsidian Starter kit, but didn’t deliver much this week; my mind was clearly elsewhere.

Things I've learned this week

Some of the notes I've taken this week

This week, an idea that I found fascinating is that we become what we focus on. And it’s so true. We can achieve anything we want in life, but we can’t do it all. So we need to choose a few things, and focus on those long enough to achieve significant results.

Another one is the fact that we should focus on cheap ideas instead of expensive ones. Once again: small and riskless bets instead of winner takes all bets with huge potential upsides and downsides.

Recent articles

No new article this week

Books corner

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

Learning requires focus. But, unlearning and relearning requires much more - it requires choosing courage over comfort. In Think Again, Adam Grant weaves together research and storytelling to help us build the intellectual and emotional muscle we need to stay curious enough about the world to actually change it

amzn.to • Share

Quotes of the week

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” — Angela Yvonne Davis

Tips of the week

Learn about the concept of cognitive fusion and cognitive defusion.

Cognitive fusion is when we consider our inner voice as “us” and believe what it says. Cognitive defusion is when we instead observe our thoughts as products of our mind that we don’t have to automatically accept as reality.

Cognitive defusion is key to fighting anxiety and maintaining better mental health. It kills me that we don’t get taught that in school!

How cool is that?!

Under Pressure - Queen x Peter Bence (Piano Cover)

I rarely share music in this newsletter, but why not?

Peter Bence is a wonderful artist. Check out his covers. This one of “Under Pressure” is epic!

www.youtube.com • Share

Thinking and learning links of the week

Writing Advice for students (U Toronto)

Your description for this link…

advice.writing.utoronto.ca • Share

A brief, informal guide to doing grounded theory - Fulcra

Grounded theory is an approach to analyzing data by letting the powerful and important insights in the data emerge through deep, iterative reading.

fulcra.design • Share

Readwise plugin tips for Logseq & Obsidian

Hello friends welcome back to the channel. Today we will be looking at how to use Readwise effectively both in logseq and Obsidian. Before we get started ple…

www.youtube.com • Share

🌠 Database Plugins and More New Themes

Eleanor’s out sick, but will hopefully be feeling better by the Linking Your Thinking Conference later this month 👀

www.obsidianroundup.org • Share

PKM Weekly May 1 2022 – Issue 017 – Curtis McHale

Your description for this link…

curtismchale.ca • Share

PKM Weekly May 8 2022 – Issue 018 – Curtis McHale

Your description for this link…

curtismchale.ca • Share

Tech links of the week

PyScript | Run Python in your HTML

Python for Web development. A really cool project created (AFAIK) by the guys behind Anaconda.

pyscript.net • Share

GitHub - microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners: 24 Lessons, 12 Weeks, Get Started as a Web Developer

24 Lessons, 12 Weeks, Get Started as a Web Developer - GitHub - microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners: 24 Lessons, 12 Weeks, Get Started as a Web Developer

github.com • Share

Use Playwright to Test and Automate Web Applications | egghead.io

A course about Playwright created by Basarat Ali Syed

egghead.io • Share

End to end typesafety with tRPC - Kristian Dupont

Speaker: Kristian Dupont (@kristiandupont)Presented at Copenhagen React - April meetup! 🐇https://www.meetup.com/Copenhagen-React-Meetup/events/284378391/

www.youtube.com • Share

Dockerfiles now Support Multiple Build Contexts - Docker

Dockerfile v1.4 and Buildx v0.8 now enable developers to define multiple build contexts between Dockerfiles. Follow along as we tackle some examples.

www.docker.com • Share

That’s all folks!

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