tl;dr our hosting platform is having some issues
I hate spam, I'm sure you do too. So you're probably wondering why we shoved 10+ messages in your inbox at 5am PST on a Monday. We also wanted to know.
The first line of questions was, "What did I do wrong?" Followed by, "What did Aaron do wrong?"
Did something in our newsletter settings mess up? Was one of us giving OpenClaw free rein of the site? Were my n8n automations breaking something?
I spent all morning trying to diagnose the problem but ultimately came up empty. Even my brother texted me, "Hey, you should look into this," with an attached image of his inbox. Old feelings started to bubble back up. The morning Reddit thread about a typo in a video, or that one of your editors liked a Joe Rogan tweet. That constant feeling that my little world was falling apart and I had to do whatever it took to make it right.
My old default in these moments used to be fix-it mode. I'm sure plenty of you can relate. It's a false sense of control, a lie that we can swim against an unrelenting ocean. So in this case I did exactly nothing.
About six years ago I felt my world falling apart. I thought there was no point trying to move forward. I found myself hanging out with my brother in his office, just kind of sulking, feeling shitty about everything. "Here, watch this, it helps," he said.
I still share this video with people today. I talk with people from support groups from all types of backgrounds and life experiences. For whatever reason it just cuts through all the noise.
Maybe the whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity. And it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
We're wired to minimize the bad in our past and amplify the good. We call it nostalgia. It's trying to protect our fragile minds, which can be good, but also a hindrance to an objective outlook. There have been plenty of times in my life where a bad thing led to something good, and something good led to something terrible.
We've also been gifted with the tool of pattern recognition. It's more of a mental muscle you need to work out, which can be hard, I know. It's easy to use on a surface level: see a baseball coming at you, swing or don't. It's much harder to apply it to your personal life, to relive shame, anxiety, and past mistakes. Lifting heavy is also hard, but it makes you stronger. Our body is amazing. It repairs itself by going through hardship.
Aaron and I put a lot of work into getting this site going. We're only two people, and mistakes happen, often out of our control. We use Ghost because it's better than WordPress. It's open source, it's speedy, and it gives us flexibility where we need it. I went with a third-party host, Typetale, based on their online reputation. After reaching out about the spam issue, I received this:
I think the old me would have thrown a fit, gone into victim mode, and started hunting for a new hosting provider. Current day me looks at this and sees an independent business owner trying his best. I can relate.
This is in no way meant to throw our hosting provider under the bus, just trying to be transparent where we can. So if you're wondering why the hell we blew up your inbox, there's your answer.
Maybe our host had a bad morning. Maybe the spam sent you here for the first time. Maybe you'll unsubscribe, and maybe you won't. What I do know is that six years ago, in my brother's office, a video about a Chinese farmer and a runaway horse helped me stop trying to grade every moment as a win or a loss. The inbox situation sucked. It also gave me something to write about, and hopefully, some unsolicited wisdom worth keeping.
