Parent page - My Eras (index)
Previous era - Era 15 - Asia
Next era - Era 17 - “Life Itself” intentional community → Kensho
Switching projects to Refract (mental health startup)
So after my meditation retreat I started to notice that the project I was working on with my friend wasn’t feeling alive, and also I had a strong sense that Asia is just not the place for me. I can’t handle hot weather → being miserable outside is really terrible for quality of life IMO. Plus I’d been in Taiwan for multiple months and couldn’t speak the language but wasn’t motivated to learn as I knew I didn’t want to stay there, so I was feeling pretty alienated, being in a language where you literally can’t say anything…
So I decided to yolo it and return back to home, stopping off at a few places along the way.
”Alex is Questing”
I also had a strong sense that I wanted to be concretely useful again; starting your own project is cool, but there’s this strong “will this even work, is this all wasted time” feeling that is super different from the startup environments I had come from, where I had a high feeling of competence and usefulness.
So I started my “Alex is Questing” initiative; basically I put together a quick Google Doc that I sent to a few tpot solopreneur types who seemed really cool, saying that I’d do some work for them for free as an initial experiment.
This led to 3 opportunities, and after briefly trying to juggle all 3 I realised that this sucks for 2 reasons:
- If you can only give a project 5-10 hours of your time per week, you won’t be given any interesting/high-leverage projects to work on, and won’t be properly onboarded etc
- Context switching is a bitch
So, I picked my favourite project of the 3, and said “hey, what if I went full time for a bit, and you don’t have to pay me”
Surprise surprise; they said yes, because hey, competent dude is offering free labour? Nice. (It did end up paying in the end)
This project was Job - Refract, I’ll give more detail on that page
Tirana, Albania
Barcelona
Back to England for Christmas
Next era: Era 17 - “Life Itself” intentional community → Kensho