My son was born on March 18 at 6am.

There are no words for how much joy that sentence brings me.

Mommy and I love you very much son and we can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives raising you.

You are very loved and you have a great support group.

I have a treadmill desk and it makes it so easy to hit 10k steps a day.

My setup is that I have 3 monitors for my “sitdown” desk, and whenever I want to switch over to the treadmill, I just hit a couple of buttons and then my display from my computer shoots over to 2 monitors on a standing desk that has a treadmill under it.

I highly suggest a setup like this if you are a desk worker.

It could save your life.

The one thing we can all learn from the Hannah Barron situation is to lean into your own strengths.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the original tweet.

This accent needs to be illegal and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this.

There is NOTHING feminine about American women.

American women are literally men. pic.twitter.com/iypi1CGNov

— Samirah (@SameeraKhan) March 9, 2024

This blew up to 60 million views as of the time of this post.

Then this is her response:

This young lady just BODIED everyone that was giving her grief. And she did it by being bout the sweetest young thing you ever did see. Kudos young lady. pic.twitter.com/PAaOb2ihmo

— Phil Labonte, Talent Terrorist (@philthatremains) March 11, 2024

Her response video to the bullies calling her out was A+.

“Build your own box and don’t try to fit in anybody else’s” - Hannah Barron

What box are you trying to fit in? How can you fit into your own box?

I’m going through Wes Mcdowell’s Profitable Website Launchpad course and I highly recommend it.

Yesterday, I wrote up content for a new website I’m launching soon.

It’s the best content I’ve ever written.

Below are the notes I took from that course summarized by Claude AI.

1. Identify your client’s main problem and the symptoms/emotions associated with it. Focus your website copy on addressing this core problem.
2. Position yourself as the mentor/guide who understands the client’s problem and has the authority and experience to solve it. Use testimonials, stats, and logos to build credibility.
3. Have a clear call-to-action telling prospects exactly what step to take next. Make it specific and benefits-focused, not generic like “Contact Us.”
4. Outline a simple 3-step plan showing prospects the path from where they are now to achieving the results they want. Give your process a memorable name.
5. Focus copy on benefits (what your service does for the client) more than just features. Tie benefits to emotions.
6. Overcome common objections upfront on your website, like price, time commitment, skepticism, and trust.
7. Motivate action by raising the stakes - highlight what prospects stand to lose by not using your service.
8. For the home page, follow a proven layout: Hero section, problem, solution, benefits, process, testimonials, features, and a “wild card” section.
9. Build dedicated pages for your core services, about page, pricing, FAQs, and success stories. Keep the focus on the customer.
10. Use a lead magnet that promises a desirable outcome to capture email addresses and generate leads.

Yesterday I updated this website to show the entire post on the homepage and on the all posts page, ala Seth Godin’s site.

It took me way to long to figure out.

The posts astro component used a Card component to show the posts and I couldn’t figure out how to pass the post content into it.

In Astro, the blog uses content collections.

In order to grab the content of a post, you must use a promise that returns an Astro component, at least that’s how I understand it.

I don’t believe you can pass an entire Astro component into a TSX component, which Card was.

So I ended up stripping out the card component and transferring the markup to the posts Astro component itself.

If you’re interested in that, you can see the commit here: https://github.com/richiekastl/richiekastl.com/commit/d05bb9c31af4d8b6cb43249ffb6c4b448d432fed

I also changed Twitter to X, because you know, that’s a thing.

Scott Adams coined the term “systems over goals”.

Having a system of good habits leads to better results than just setting big goals because systems make you do the right things every day without needing lots of willpower.

If you’re trying to lose weight, have a diet system that you follow instead of having a lofty goal.

Every day you don’t reach your goal, you will feel like a failure.

Expanding on my post from yesterday, I wanted to talk more about how to be productive while at home, specifically how to prevent distractions.

Home is where you relax and unwind, but since the pandemic, working at home has become normalized.

How can you work while nobody is watching you?

A couple tools I use are Cold Turkey and the Kitchen Safe.

I can setup blocks of time on my calendar that I want to work, and Cold Turkey will prevent me from opening any social media or video games on my PC.

The Kitchen Safe prevents me from scrolling on my phone.

But how could people reach me if they need me you might be wondering.

I have an Apple Watch.

If there’s an emergency (and there have been since I started using this system), I smash my Kitchen Safe box, grab my phone, and head out.

You might also be thinking why don’t you use your willpower?

Why do you need these tools to work?

Are you a bitch or something?

Well let me paint you a picture.

How many people do you know who are addicted to video games? To social media? To “other things” you can find on the internet?

I’d be willing to bet that most people in your life are addicted to one of these things.

There are billions of dollars that go into these industries every year to optimize how to capture your attention.

They don’t care that you have your own dreams and work you want to pursue.

All they care about is that you get to the next level on Candy Crush.

You are cattle to them.

They just want you to suck down the slop they feed you.

Fatten you up, consume their products, then instead of getting slaughtered you get diabetes, cancer, heart disease, or a neurodegenerative disease such as alzheimer’s or dementia (Dr. Peter Attia’s four horsemen of death).

Then you become the cattle of a different industry, big pharma, that will gladly help you treat the deadly disease that you’ve contracted.

How can video games or social media cause one of the four horsemen diseases?

Well because you were distracted, you didn’t go to the gym.

Because you were distracted, you sat inside all day and didn’t get any sunlight.

Because you were distracted, you didn’t meal prep and you ordered fast food.

Because you were distracted, you didn’t get as much work done as you needed to, so you get drunk again that night to help numb the pain.

Because you were distracted, your much more stressed at work, wondering if they will fire you any day now, so you start smoking again.

Because you were distracted, you didn’t work towards your dream, and this is just another day lost that you will never back.

Because you were distracted, you will die unfulfilled, just cattle.

I have a problem of staying in bed for too long, mindlessly scrolling on my phone.

In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he says in order to break a bad habit, you need to put as much friction between you and the bad habit as possible.

Meaning just make your habit really hard to do.

There’s a device called a kitchen safe.

It’s a safe with a timer originally made to help smokers quit smoking and to lock up your sweets.

I put my phone in it before I go to bed, and set it to unlock 12 hours later.

Now I wake up and I have nothing to do except go to my computer.

Problem solved, for now.

I have a productivity stack that I haven’t seen anyone else use.

I use Clickup.com to manage everything that I have to do that day.

I have several recurring tasks, such as checking the position of a certain set of keywords and for working out.

I always know what I need to do that day.

That’s not the entire battle though.

The entire battle is that I’m only accountable to myself, I don’t really have a boss (unless you count my clients as “bosses”).

To really maximize my time, I have a stack of products I use to get my day to day work done.

First is focus blocks.

Whenever you log into focus blocks, you get placed on a call with many other people from across the world who also want to focus on the job that they’re doing.

Then I also use Cold Turkey.

Cold Turkey shuts down any sort of video game, social media, or news site on my computer for the time I specify and it is very hard to shut it down.

The last thing I use to inject productivity into my veins is focus@will.

Focus@will uses binaural beats that hack your brain into a productivity mode.

I don’t want to pretend I understand all the science behind it but it works for me.

This is my productivity stack simplified:

• I know what I’m going to do that day the night before
• Focus Blocks + Cold Turkey + Focus@will

Focus.

I was on a mastermind call yesterday talking about how I’m in limbo right now.

I don’t want any new projects to start because my son can be born any day now and I have no idea what life is going to be like with him.

I was thinking about starting a newsletter, tweeting more, posting on YouTube etc.

My mastermind said don’t do any of that, and instead focus on one channel, which for me is cold email and cold calling.

I would really like to have a thriving personal brand, but the business growth for me right now is in cold email and cold calling.

This reminds me of the graph from the Book Essentialism.

If I have my attention divided across several things such as a newsletter, keeping up on Twitter, and posting on YouTube, then my cold outreach efforts will suffer.

If I just focus on cold outreach, I’ll be able to make it work.

I hate annoying people with cold outreach, but it can help me help people.

If I cold call a business, build them an amazing site that converts great, then I have helped them.

They can now buy braces for their kids, buy their dream car, or simply stay in business.

For the 100 people I annoyed by cold outreach, the 1 I help will make it worth it.