For two years, my life had exactly one objective…
Grow Cal AI.
Every hour, every decision, and every bit of energy pointed at one thing.
There's a strange clarity when you put the blinders on and sprint towards one goal…
You never wonder what to do with your day because the work is already decided for you.
Then we sold to MyFitnessPal, and the one thing all my time was going towards changed overnight.
I expected to feel nothing but relief.
What I didn't expect was the question right behind it: “okay, now what do I actually do with my time?”
Here's what I landed on since I started side-quest maxxing:
Teaching myself how to play guitar…badly, 30 minutes a day.
Grinding my chess rating from 1500 towards 1800 (1500 is around the top 25% of players, 1800 is closer to top 1%, so I probably don't have time to close that gap anytime soon, but I want to anyway).
Built a soccer tennis court in my backyard and play my friends on it every week.
None of these will ever make me a dollar, and that's the point.
For most of my life, every hour had to justify itself financially. If something didn't move me closer to not being broke, it felt like a waste.
I convinced myself that hobbies were for people who'd already made it.
So the side quests aren't really about guitar or chess.
They're me slowly proving to myself that my time is allowed to be spent on things that don't pay the bills.
And that's a lot harder to internalize and put into practice when you spent 30 years grinding to just get by.
If you're deep in your own main quest right now, head down and no time for anything else, I'm not going to tell you to stop.
But the main quest will end one day.
And when it does, the skill you'll need is remembering how to do things for no reason other than you like doing them.
Start a list of the side quests you'd want to do if you had the time.
You're going to need it sooner than you think.
- Jake
