This is my journal entry from January 21, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
I loved waking up with the kids this morning. I woke up at 3 in the morning thinking about my business and dating and all that stuff went over in my head. I'm like, these letters, you know, I gotta test a longer letter. I need to deliver my shorter letters. And I couldn't go back to sleep. I got close one time, then I woke back up. And I was up as soon as the light came on. I hopped in bed with my son and started snuggling him, which was awesome. And the kids were up and ready. We got to school, which my son said was too late to read his Pluto book. But we played in the car as usual and got some good snuggles and a nice hug before school. Then I came home and after all that time up at night, I decided. What I really want to do is I want to dictate another 10-page letter, and I want to test which letter works. The day before, I got 101 page letters started, and I want to test out which one does the best. So this morning, I dictate, before playing tennis with a friend, an entire 19-page letter. In a little over an hour. 19 page transcript. Like single spaced. No like paragraph marks or anything.
I then go to play tennis with a friend. We are doing awesome in the warm up. Like all the shots are going in. We have a good conversation. And the first three games. We are neck in neck. I win. Each of us wins the other serve. I win his serve and start off 1-0. By 3-3. He's serving. and shit just fucking falls apart for me somehow. Not sure what happened, but my friend wins nine games in a row, winning the first set 6-3 and the next set 6-0. I tried to crank it up the last couple games, but I could not win. I mean, he was hitting a bunch of winners. He got a decent number of errors out the first few games, but he was playing great. He likes to minimize his play last times, but he was on point those next nine games. After one of his former roommates came to watch us play too and we talked with her a little bit, then I got in the car and I'm realizing I'm gonna need more paper and I want some thinner paper. I don't want to use 28 pound paper in a 10 page letter in a 6x9 envelope, this is too heavy, thus I need more paper. I want to go to the office-supply store, so I figure I might as well go over to where my gym is and stop in and see if the woman who works there is there today, just want to say hi to her.
I'm like something's gotta happen, I need to like get her phone number or something, you know there's a nice energy with her, there's tension there. I'm like we need to see if we can take this to the next level. She for once is not there, but I run into a reader who bought seven of my books and we have a nice conversation for like 20 minutes. After playing tennis, I thought I was going to lift some weights, but I end up just refilling my water and going over to the office-supply store. The guy at the store shows me how I can buy a 5,000 sheet of paper box. And if I get the $50 a year business subscription, I can save money on it, like $20 plus on this thing of paper. So I'm like, ah, fuck it. I'll just buy it. So I buy the subscription. I buy the 5,000 sheets of paper, bring all of that home, have a salad. And then go to town editing. Just go nuts editing with ChatGPT, reading through it myself multiple times. I get one version of letter from ChatGPT. It's incredible. I got it down to like 14 pages or something. I fed all of it in, in one text message to ChatGPT and it fed me out an eight page letter that was very well done. All in one message. I'm amazed with what these people have got the abilities of this thing up to. But I realized I should go through and manually just make those same cuts and try and cut stuff that I can see is repetitive because ChatGPT kind of left some stuff in that should have been cut, but it gave me a good idea of what it should feel like. So I went through and cut it down from originally 19 pages to 10 pages. And then I went through it a bunch more iterations with ChatGPT to try and polish some of the little details where the edges are rough or potentially offensive or why I'm losing people.
Finally, I get a nice 10 page letter with narrow margins, 12 font, single spaced, and a nice 10 page letter done. I start printing it and reading over it and test the envelope fit. And I'm like, yes, this, I got to test this. I got to test this 10 page letter and compare it to the one page letter. I want to see if either of these approaches work and if one works, which one works better? And in the middle of that, my friend from college calls. So I figured while he's on the phone, that's a good time to walk the neighborhood and try giving out some of the letters. I grab a stack of the letters, maybe 30 of them, and I start walking the neighborhood. In 25 minutes talking to my college friend, I managed to deliver about one letter a minute, which is about the pace I figured it'd be at. But it was a bit awkward being on the phone with him and walking up to people's doors while I'm delivering something. And I figure, well, from now on, I definitely want to make sure I'm not on the phone delivering these. But man, time is the main constraint I have. I'd like to deliver thousands of these. Because if I could deliver thousands of them, that would be an effective test. And then if I have the test done, then I can see, is this worth scaling? Is this worth doing more of? Or do I need to move on and think of something else because I'm stuck. I'm so stuck on this delivering letters to people's doors. It's like I can't think of anything else. I got to prove that this works or prove that it doesn't work.
I wrap up right when I've got the 10 page letter. Nice and done. And I print out like seven copies of it. And then I head to the AA meeting that I'm chairing. I get there. And one of the girls I talked to from before, I had asked her to do the lead. There's six of us, she does a nice lead, we all go around and share, then one of the guys gets there a little after, like 30 minutes after the meeting started, and he shares that he's looking for work and he's doing this shitty door-to-door sales job right now and I'm like, hello buddy, you are looking for work. And he tells me that I can pay him $20 an hour or $100 a day to deliver. I'm like, fuck, this guy could do hundreds of these a day. I'd only need to pay him a few days. I start thinking, what's the minimum I could promise him? I'm like, I could definitely give him 10 days. That'd be 50 hours of work. That'd be $1,000 I could commit. Meanwhile, I just asked for $15,000 more from a credit card on a balance transfer, so I can risk $1,000. And my calculations, this guy should be able to deliver in 50 hours and doing maybe a letter a minute. This guy should be able to deliver like 3,000 letters for me. 3,000 letters for $1,000 paid to him. And it should cost me, even if they're 10 pages, let's call it like 30 cents or so for each letter or less. So we're looking at 3,000 letters, 30 cents to print each one. So I'm looking at less than a dollar to deliver every letter plus my time. ChatGPT calculated the main cost of me doing these myself as opportunity cost. So if I could drop the opportunity cost to pay somebody else to do it, that would change everything. I'm like, shit. So I exchanged numbers with this guy.
I have a couple of days before he's going to be ready to get the letters. He's going to either be ready Friday or Saturday. So I'll print out hundreds more of the short letters and get those ready. And I'll get a few hundred long letters ready so that in five hours he should be able to. I definitely want to have at least 300 letters he could deliver. If he's going to work five hours, he should probably not run out of them. And I should have at least like 300 for him to deliver, if not more than that. And then we can see. Now, as I'm thinking about this, the total expenditure to deliver several thousand letters should be a couple thousand dollars and a drastically reduced amount of my time. Although getting that many letters for him will take hours for me to prepare, too. It took me about an hour to prepare 100 of the short letters and would take longer to prepare the other one. So if I'm looking to prepare a thousand letters, I'd probably be looking at a little under 10 hours to prepare short letters and maybe 12 hours. So you're looking, it might take me 20 or 30 hours to get 3,000 letters ready for him. But that then is enough of a test where I could see if I deliver 3,000 letters around the city, I could literally get a single client that would pay for that. Or I could get some book sales, a few clients, a big opportunity to speak somewhere. It's enough where I'd know, all right, that idea either worked or it didn't work. That idea either got things going or it didn't. And then I was thinking like, man, I really need to know because if this isn't going to work, I've got to come up with something else.
Sometimes I think like I could be really fucked. I essentially only have money that I borrowed already. Like I've blown through a lot of money in four months here pretty quickly. And I've got, if I get this 15,000 more from a credit card, I've got 30,000 more. And then a 5,000 more in 0% credits. Better start bringing some more fucking money in. This shit could get fucking wild. Earlier in the day, I got a phone call in between all these and the work I was doing. I got a phone call from my barber. I left a book at his shop a month ago. And he just now was thinking that he'd really like to get his book done. He went through and wrote his book and now he's ready to publish it. So I didn't know what to say immediately. So I told him, let me come over there and get a haircut. I took a little shower because I'd been outside in the sun and stuff from tennis. Took a little shower, and then I went over to see him. I asked ChatGPT how much I should charge, too, and it said I should charge at least $1,000 to take something and put it all on Amazon and publish a book. Because, I mean, some of these others are charging much more than that. $5,000. Charging $1,000 a month. And I don't want to undercharge my services, either.
At the same time I think for my barber, like he's a barber, he has a service I could use, haircuts, I could just maybe trade him haircuts for a book service and especially if he refers people. So I get over there, my barber's happy to see me, he keeps saying over and over that people knew me and saw my book and I'm a celebrity, while I note the power of his repetition as he says things over and over again it tends to make it so concrete, like wow that power of repetition. He must have said 10 times that I was a celebrity. I'm like, this seems to work. He seems like he's very intent on building me up and making me feel good, and the repetition is a key to that. I then talk to him about the details of doing the work with him. He's got everything written out in a notebook, and I say, what I need you to do is dictate your notebook. Read your notebook into your phone, into the voice notes, and then give me the audio file, and then I can transcribe it. And he says, well, how much is it going to cost? Well, I said I would generally charge at least $1,000 for something, assuming you could get me the dictations and I could take transcripts. However, you know, what if I take like a year or two of free haircuts or something? I noticed that he braces and seems to not really like that or feel like that's fair. And I started exploring like, well, you know, I guess from his point of view, he charges $20 a haircut. He's looking at giving me 50 or 100 haircuts. That might seem like it's not fair to him. So I try and work with that. I talk to him and say, you know, I could do referrals with you. You're in a great position. He's got great marketing with his business. I'm like, you know, I could give you a referral fee. He says he doesn't want a referral fee. I'm like, OK, how about this? Like, why don't I'll just, you know, we'll work on this book. You dictate it. Just give me some free haircuts, you know, and when it's enough, you know, it's enough. Like, all right. And he seems to feel a little bit better with that.
And he doesn't seem to be ready to start with a free haircut right this fucking second. So I give him $20. I'm learning to read like where people are feeling and where I feel. The haircuts are $17. I give him $20. He doesn't seem to really be happy with a $3 tip. And I think I gave him $20 last time because I usually tip $20. That's the thing. As much as I fucking tip. It makes me not want to go places because I don't want to be a cheap ass tipper. So I give him a $20 tip, technically $23 tip for a haircut. And then he gets three other people that come in. One of them is a guy who also is an author. He recently self-published a children's poetry book on Amazon. I order this book because I want to support the guy and I want to show it to my kids so I can show my kids, you know, a poetry book, a kid's poetry book. And then, you know, I also want to show it to a friend because my friend has poetry and she should probably do a poetry book also in addition to her other book. My friend, I get her manuscript edited and send it to her and we're ready to order. We're ready to publish her book. So I'll wrap up the evening by publishing her book.
And man, I'm grateful I had so much time to work today. Sometimes like days with the kids that are full, I'm like, damn, I have like no time to work. But I'm starting to look at it now like days with the kids are like weekends. And for me, where I can just focus on my time with the kids and then when the kids aren't here, I absolutely hammer my work. Whatever it is, I go to town on my work. And I'm grateful I love the work I'm doing. Even though there's not an immediate paycheck coming in, I do love what I'm doing. I am getting way the fuck behind on these journal entries, but there will be catching up on that. And I'm looking at, you know, these are mainly for me to do a 10-step. These are for me 5, 10, 15, 20, 100 years from now to listen back to what I was doing. And these are for my kids, grandkids, and anybody else who is interested in my life. Like, this is a legacy. This is something I wish I had something like this for every day of my life up till now. And I'll tell you what, I thought about yesterday. I thought about, like, fuck it. Why do these diaries? You know, I'm behind on transcribing them. There's no point in doing them. Blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you know what? Keep going.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.