Hey everyone! Ian here.

Hope everyone’s ending Q1 productively. It’s kind of crazy that it’s already the end of March? I’m already making plans for May and the fall.

Lots going on in my world that I wanted to share with you all. I’ve been working on two different side projects, which has been really fun, frustrating, and illuminating. It’s really honed my product skills around scoping things down to its purest form and building and releasing an MVP, even though its not perfect. Something I’ve started to do is use tools like Lovable.dev, which have great design aesthetics, to turn my entire idea into a prototype. And then build a new, smaller, MVP project with that vision in mind. It’s made things a bit easier.

One of my projects is MizuchiAI, an investment research tool. I collaborate on investing in the stock market with family members, but sending stocks and information back and forth to people has turned out to be really disorganized and tedious. Plus, when I read about different companies, I tend to forget about them because I don’t have a dedicated place to put them. MizuchiAI is a Chrome Extension & product that lets you quickly scan a company, add it to your watchlist, and share it with friends and collaborators. It uses AI to pull info on companies on your watchlists too, so all the research is ready for you whenever you want to dive in. I’ve shared it with a few couple friends and investment clubs and people seem to like it!

The other project is focused on combining genetic health and real-time health data. After my wife’s cancer diagnosis last year, I realized that I really had to take my health a lot more seriously. I started wearing my Whoop religiously and tracking my sleep and food, etc. But you really don’t know if any of this has an impact on your long term health, like reducing my risk for heart disease or cancer. By combining real-time and long-term health, I think you can get a better picture of your overall health and trajectory over time. I haven’t finished building this (it’s very complex) but hopefully will get there by mid Q2.

If you’re interested in checking out the beta for either of these products, just send me an email! I could use all the user feedback I can get!

I’ll be sharing more on these in the coming weeks.

Content-wise, I plan on writing this more consistently. I swear! It’s not like I haven’t wanted to write but I’ve been busy and just very apprehensive to put stuff out on the internet for some reason. I’m trying to push past that, because I love creating content.

Speaking of which, I’ve been working on a new YouTube show about finance and technology for Benzinga, called “Code & Capital.” Here’s a little teaser. We’re launching next month and have some great guests lined up. Really excited to get this going. Benzinga has 20 million monthly readers and 300,000 YouTube subscribers—by far the largest audience I’ve worked with in awhile—so I’m very excited.

If you have any suggestions on guests, please let me know!

As for Machine Earnings, I’ve decided to do that as a YouTube show too. A few reasons: 1) there are a ton of AI newsletters that are really good 2) content consumption is very rapidly moving towards video and 3) I want to keep Machine Earnings casual and fun. I also have been learning a ton about video editing which I’m excited to put to work too.

It comes out next month too!

This is a good segway to today’s essay, which is about reinventing yourself. It’s something I’ve been trying to do for the past 3 years, but it’s A LOT more work than I expected. Something I’ve noticed is that its easy to fall back into old patterns, just in slightly different flavors. Machine Earnings is a great example—I knew I wanted to create AI content and I immediately thought of doing a newsletter and community, because that’s what I did before. But it never felt quite right—for me, usually a clear sign that’s something not working.

Hope you enjoy today’s essay.

Reinvention

There's no playbook or guide to reinventing yourself. But you know when you need to do it.

Life feels stagnant, monotonous. It's not a feeling of good or bad, but really just you feeling the absence of fulfillment. Spiritually and inside you know deep, deep, down that something in your life—probably many things—need to change. The lack of fulfillment and purpose makes life feel stagnant and vanilla. It's the movie Pleasantville in reverse—your colorful world starts turning into black, white, and different shades of gray.

While there might not be a roadmap to reinvention, there definitely are ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong. Usually it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out, and it's different for everyone, but before we get to how, we need to look at why reinvention is important.

Reinvention is the process of stripping your identity down to its core and rebuilding from the ground up. Nowadays it's easy for your identity to get really muddled by outside noise. Perhaps it's others' perception of you, or other times it's the creeping self doubt that comes after running into life's difficulties. The problem of having your identity so jumbled is that you not only lose a sense of who you are, you lose your footing too. You start to flow in whatever direction the wind is blowing. Life starts to happen to you, instead of making it happen.

At the risk of sounding like a boomer, it's gotten easier than ever to lose yourself and your identity thanks to social media. Nowadays it feels like everyone has access to your peace of mind, even if you try to shield yourself from it. Even if you block or mute someone, you don't completely cut them out. You don't want to be rude. So you keep a channel or two open—maybe they can text you, or you still follow them on Twitter. But it's like holding water—eventually that water is going to fall out of our hands and splash all over. Eventually their negativity will spill over to you.

Yes, I know what they say. You must be stoic and not care what anyone thinks of you. That was probably easier a few decades ago. When you could disappear and tune everyone out. But triggers and reminders are everywhere—especially in our digital lives. I guess you can go live like a luddite in the middle of the woods but most of us wouldn't survive 3 days fending for ourselves.

Eventually when you stray far enough from your identity and yourself, you reach a crossroads. Do I continue or do I reel myself back in? Again, none of this is bad or good, it just is. You can go whichever way you want, but each direction has consequences. You can continue to move further away from your identity, and eventually your inner compass moves too. Maybe you like your new life, personality, behaviors.

Or maybe you think you've strayed far enough. That you can't just go with the flow and instead want to take more agency and charge of your life.

It's much easier to continue down a path than to self correct and turn around.

Recentering yourself is a huge undertaking. The first part—honesty—is hard because you're admitting that you're lost and you need to reset. And that's just the beginning. It's a multi-year process. You could argue that you're constantly reinventing yourself as you get closer and closer to defining who you are and what makes you feel happy, but that sort of defeats the purpose of this essay and is another philosophical topic for another day.

I'd be lying if I said that there usually wasn't a dramatic catalyst for this change. You might think the concept of reinvention comes after you deal with a massive failure (in today's ultra-high-achieving culture, failure hits even harder.) But that's obvious. Of course you'll want to change things around after you fail, otherwise you're doomed to fail again.

The more sneaky, and more transformative, catalyst is unfulfilling success. You reach certain goals or a certain lifestyle, or maybe you have the level of fame and popularity that you dreamed of when you were in high school. But instead of feeling happy, you feel empty. First off, if your goals and desires were so easy to achieve, are you properly estimating your potential? The implication is no, you're not. Then you realize that these expectations really come from society and the world around you. Maybe your parents pressured you in a certain direction, or maybe your friend group in college all aspired for a certain kind of lifestyle. Somehow you got caught up in their dreams instead of your own. And their dreams ended up being quite inconsequential for you. Then you realize that the things you were chasing—or being told to chase—were superficial in and of themselves. So many of your dreams were much more about external validation versus intrinsic motivation. Did any of us really grow up hoping to be a microinfluencer for consumer packaged goods? Did it matter how many followers you had on Instagram? Life was simpler and easier when you have 100 versus 100,000. Did it matter how big your house is? No one ever comes over anyway and it's just a lot more costly to clean and maintain, and when things break you have to fix it…it's just a headache.

At every major point you have a choice: to ignore the realizations or dig deeper to get to the underlying truth. The source. Why the hell you did half the things you did. It's important to highlight that because you'll inevitably run into a realization that you don't want to confront or put off. You can do so for a time but you won't be able to progress deeper unless you confront it. It sucks and it's difficult and painful and you probably have to dredge up a ton of difficult memories from your childhood and life. But it's necessary.

There's also the bargaining stage—where you start to say things like "oh well things weren't that bad." Or, "well everyone wants this kind of life," or "everyone did the kind of stuff I did." This one's a tough one because in some ways it's true. Everyone in your life did do a lot of the same things and had a lot of the same desires and ambitions. But it's more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than an absolute fact of human nature. Your world is actually one big echo chamber, and everyone in your world is in it to reinforce your decisions and make you feel better about them. Addicts are a great example. So many addicts don't think they have a problem. "What do you mean, everyone does it" is an addict's most common defense. But that's not true—everyone in that addict's life does the same things the addict does. That's why they hang around with each other. If they hung around normal people, their behavior would seem weird and…well like an addict's behavior. And those people are the problem, not the addict.

It's not just addictions, this is really the case for anything. It could be power and money, it could be a certain lifestyle. You realize that you curate the world around you and that's why things have gotten to the point they're at. The point of where you're reconsidering everything about yourself and your life.

It's really hard to snap out of this but you must splash your face with the cold water of reality. Spend time with people outside of your bubble or people you'd normally hang around with. Do different things. Instead of going to Miami or New York, go to Cleveland or Oklahoma City. People are just as content—if not more content— than the people in your world. They just have different lives and different goals and different ambitions. While that was unfathomable to you before, you're warming up to the idea a bit more.

When you eventually reach the stage of realizing what you actually want, it'll feel great but, and I hate to tell you this, you're only halfway through. Realizing what you want is really important so you should be proud of that progress, but now the key is to design your life around this newfound purpose.

I have to admit, that I'm only three quarters into this journey myself. My life still isn't exactly how I'd like it but it's much closer than it's ever been. And it hasn't been an easy journey—it's been roughly three years and a lot of denial and two-steps-forward-one-step-back's.

One of the biggest problems I've had personally is holding on to fragments of my past identity and trying to recreate the same things. It's as if you're a hoarder and you're fed up with the clutter in your house, but instead of getting rid of the clutter you buy a bigger house.

When I started thinking about how I wanted to reconstruct my life, I knew I wanted to create content of some kind. My brain immediately went to places where I felt most comfortable—writing and monetizing a newsletter, developing a community, etc. But both my instinct and inaction were stopping me from doing it. The reason was deep down I realized that I don't really want to earn my living that way—I just like creating content and sharing my thoughts and opinions with people. And maybe it'll make money in the future and maybe it won't, but that's ok. Satisfying my internal motivation of sharing my thoughts was enough of a reward.

I definitely needed to earn money—my expensive taste wasn't something that I did for other people, I really just liked nice things and needed the ability to afford it. But starting a venture-backed startup or working at one wasn't going to be the way for me to go about it. Those paths felt limiting and constricting compared to other avenues that I enjoyed more, like consulting and building things on my own. I needed to figure out ways to do those things rather than things that I felt like I was supposed to do.

I feel like a lot of this reinvention stuff gets a bad rap because it seems to zap the ambition out of people. There's a joke online that people do ayahuasca or other psychedelics and then quit their job and move to the mountains or something (for some reason, people seem to think all self-realization revolves around psychedelics, when I think that's probably the furthest thing from the truth. But, again, another essay for another time.)

To me, that's the wrong way to think about things. You can innately be ambitious and want to make an impact on the world. More importantly, you could want to do those things and like those parts of yourself. And that's more than ok! I definitely want to make an impact on the world and want to leave my mark in some capacity. But the key is to realize the motivation—is it because you want clout and to get invited to parties or something (external motivation) or you want to make the world a better place and solve some of the problems that you see in the world (internal motivation, ironically enough.) For me, when in doubt, I now always default to trying to follow my internal motivations rather than my external ones. Because at the end of the day, I'm trying to achieve and get closer to inner peace, not external validation. At least not anymore.