As I review this list, I realize that I forgot most of these were resolutions. I came out the gate strong. I think I adhered to most of these for at least 3 months. It’s clear that the main reason I failed to stick to some of these is because I simply forgot about them. I did a good job writing these down. That’s the most important thing. But the step that I forgot to do is to have these habits (and goals) visible in a place where I can see it every day. This year, I’m going to print out my goals and habits for 2026 and tape it to the wall in my office.

I’m very optimistic about 2026.

HABITS TO BUILD

• Stick to the calendar schedule you set for yourself
• No Phone in the office when you’re working
• No Phone games
• No Added Sugar. No soda.
• Replace Veg Recreation with Active Recreation.
• If any task takes less than 5 min to do, do it now.
• Work 7 days a week even if it’s just for 2 hours
• Gym 3 times a week minimum. Stay Active on other days
• Sleep 9 hours a day

Today we began preparations for Demo Day. Our event planners came over to the house to scope out the space and to plan out logistics like how many seats we could fit in, sound, equipment, catering, and more. It's crazy to think that the residency is almost coming to an end, but at the same time there's so much time left. Seven days is a long time. In the world of AI-assisted coding, seven days is enough time to launch a brand new production app from scratch. In the grand scheme of the residency, seven days is twenty-five percent.

It's easy to get complacent or to coast for the rest of the month. Most people tend to coast near the end, but this is the time to consciously make a decision and an effort to finish strong.

The strangest thing always happens around this time of the year, every year. People's minds are already on the next year. I'm already starting to see people post resolutions for 2026. The typical cliché phrases like, "2025 sucks, 2026 is going to be my year”, or “finally 2025 is over” are littering the timeline. We're not even in the last month of the year yet. For most people, this is the time where we're close enough to the end that people just tend to check out. It is these moments that separates the high achievers and the rest of the population.

Every year for at least the last ten years, I followed the same routine: The day that I write down my New Year's resolutions is the first day that I make an effort to adhere to them. If I write down my resolutions on December 5th, then I start to work towards them on December 5th. Most people will treat the rest of the year as one last hurrah. It's like that final cigarette before you promise you will quit smoking. But change starts with mindset. And if the mindset isn't there, then the change will be short-lived.

December is 8.3% of the entire year. That's a pretty good chunk of the year. In thirty-one days of December, you can launch an entire company. You can be well on your way to your fitness and health goals. You can become a subject matter expert on a new topic. One month is a long, long time.

Similarly, one week at the residency is a long time. Even as one of the hosts, it's easy for me to start to cruise. Instead, I must remember how important these last seven days are. I should wake up every single day and realize how precious that day is and look optimistically at how much can be achieved in that single day. I'm grateful to have seven more such days and I cannot take them for granted. My goal for the next seven days is to do just that. Wake up in the morning and set actionable goals for that day. Anything worth doing, do it to the best of my ability, and anything not worth doing move to the side for more important pursuits.

Keep your head in the game, focus, and FINISH STRONG.

Practice makes perfect right?

Wrong

Practice makes permanent.

Don't watch any videos, don't watch any tutorials, don't hire a coach. Pick up a golf club and start to swing it. Practice for years. Congratulations. You have permanently fucked up your golf swing to a point where it will be incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, to fix. This is now the foundation of your golf swing for the rest of your life. Practice makes permanent.

New YouTubers often ask me for advice: “I put out a couple of videos and they only got 1000 views.” I give them this look: 😒. I had to make ten videos before I cracked a hundred views. I had to make 20 videos before I cracked a thousand views. Some people just got IT. They turn on a camera, start talking, and the views flood in. They're either just incredibly attractive, incredibly charismatic, incredibly interesting. They just got IT.

But for the rest of us, we practice and we get better. YouTube, like all things, is a skill that can be developed. Anytime someone asks me for advice, I always give them the same advice.

Treat every video you make as practice for getting better at making videos.

Especially today, people treat content creation as a lottery. Unfortunately, people also treat life as a lottery. They believe that success, wealth, prestige, all come from chance. They justify their shortcomings on bad luck, or in the case of YouTube, the algorithm. But the truth is, you can get good at YouTube, and life, if you treat every opportunity as practice.

But not all practice is created equal..

My aunt was my piano teacher growing up. Every time I would mess up, she would make me stop and start over from the beginning. I hated this. I know I made a mistake but I wanted to finish the rest of the song before I had to go back to the start. She used to tell me, "Do it right every time or you'll get good at doing it wrong." Often growing up, we were told to practice practice practice, that repetition is the most important thing. However, the wrong kind of practice is not only pointless but can often be detrimental to progress. It's possible to practice and get worse at something.

I'm currently doing a 30 day daily vlog challenge on YouTube. My justification was that I wanted to get the reps in. The more I vlog, the better I'll get at it. So far, in the last few weeks, I've made as many videos as it would normally take me six months to make. I've been making the videos so fast that I didn't even pause to consider WHY. The whole point was to get better at vlogging, but if I'm being honest, I think I got worse. My days are busy, and I used that as an excuse to push out last minute vlogs just for the sake of getting them out. I think I picked up bad habits and it's going to take me time to filter these out.

I still have ten days left in the challenge, and I'm glad I caught it now. Doing things properly doesn't mean spending copious amounts of time doing it. It just means to be thoughtful and intentional about how you do things. And this doesn't just go for YouTube. Whether it's YouTube, work, relationships, anything. Every time you do something is an opportunity to practice getting better at that thing. When you're done with that task, you will either be slightly better at it, the same, or worse.

Pay attention to how you practice. What you practice and the way you practice is the way you learn. Also stop making shitty YouTube videos. 😛

Gemini doesn’t seem to have this problem as much. Gemini does have a tendency to fall into existential spirals but that’s another topic for another time.

Vibe coding feels like slapping together an app just well enough to present like a functioning app. Some times it feels like a $10/hour dev shop + a decent designer: Don’t look under the hood if you don’t want to be disappointed.

Gemini seems to be better at the more computer science-y stuff. I had Gemini do an audit of my codebase and gave it a list of problems that I had. I specifically asked it to look for ways to optimize concurrency for server calls and to search for blocking server calls that were unnecessary. I also asked it to find middleware issues that were causing latency issue.

The benefit of coding from Vietnam with servers in the US is that latency issue gets amplified. It’s a lot easier as a tester to FEEL the sticky points in the user experience.

Over the last year, so many new LLM models, AI frameworks, and AI tools have released nonstop, not to mention updates and upgrades to existing tools. At first, every new release was met with hype and fanfare and I fell into the excitement and wanted to try everything out. I had this feeling that if I got ahead of the curve and learned new tools before everyone else, I would have an edge for a small window of time. Very quickly, I realized that it's impossible to keep up with everything. The point of all of these AI tools is to increase our productivity, but ironically, trying to keep up with all of them is the ultimate productivity killer.

However, Gemini has been a LLM product that I've been bullish on for a long time. Trying to talk to Gemini is like trying to talk with an autistic savant. Most people will write off Gemini, because on the surface it seems strange. But the longer you talk with it, the more you realize that there are certain things that it is just incredibly better at than other models.

Strange metaphors aside, I'm glad that I'm unstuck now and excited to keep working on SponsorRadar.

1. HRG - Make sure the month goes smoothly. Provide as much value to the residents of HRG as possible and set them up for success in their companies.
2. Daily Vlog on Youtube. 30 Days, 30 Vlogs.
3. Build a House in Da Nang, Vietnam
4. Build and launch SponsorRadar to Production
5. Take Vietnamese Lessons

Today is Day 18 of the Hacker Residency, Day 20 of my Daily Vlog, Day 0 of Vietnamese Lessons.

Around Day 3, I realized how ridiculously stupid this idea was. Usually I’m at the HRG Villa 16 hours a day 7 days a week. Daily vlogging is a full time job. Building a house is unpredictable and commands your attention in bursts. Vietnamese lessons… well I don’t know what that’s like because I haven’t even started yet.

By Day 3, I was ready to quit the daily vlog. In fact, in the last 18 days, I seriously considered quitting the vlog at least 4 times.

But I didn’t…

Sometimes you do hard things because they’re worth doing, because it will change your life, or if even change the world. But sometimes hard things are worth doing just simply for the fact that they’re hard. Discipline is not task specific, you either have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, then build it in one place and you will have it in every place. Most challenges are pointless beyond the fact that they are challenging. We give ourselves challenges just to prove to ourselves that we can do it and to train that discipline. We do it to test our limits, but the funny thing about testing limits is that you often realize that the limit does not exist .

The best advice I got when building my first startup was -"Set impossible goals. You’ll be surprised how often you reach them”

To be honest. I don’t know if I will be proud of myself at the end of the month. Part of me thinks that I’ll look back and think about how much time I wasted on the Daily Vlog when that attention could have been allocated toward more productive areas. However, I think my biggest weakness right now is my laziness and my lack of discipline - the ability to do something I have to do even when I don’t want to do it. If anything, succeeding in this challenge will be clear evidence that every excuse I’ve ever made in the last year NOT to do something, was invalid.

If I can make it through the entire month and complete the Daily Vlog Challenge, I will set a new standard for output and have the evidence to back it up. There were days where the situation would have any 3rd party say that I had a valid excuse to miss that day, but I still didn’t. I’ve experienced the most extreme and unexpected days, often collectively mentally, physically, and emotionally draining. I still made the vlog that day.

It does seem pretty stupid and overdramatic to talk about a Youtube video of me goofing off in Vietnam as a mountain to conquer in the face of adversity. I laugh at it too. But at the end of the day it’s about doing X when you don’t want to. I have yet to experience the hardest days of my life. And there will be plenty of X that I still NEED to do in those moments.

I’m writing this blog to remind myself in the future. If I’m feeling lazy or unmotivated. It almost doesn’t even matter what the thing is, just

DO HARD THINGS

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