Goodbye, Seattle
Vol. of IV The Sunday Selects
Hi friends,
Welcome to the curatorial issue of Path Nine — content for the curious, contrarian, and creative.
This week’s curatorial issue is all about leaving the city.
Let’s get down to business.
Before we begin: If you’re reading this but haven’t joined the Path Nine community, hit the button below to join the entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, architects, psychologists, designers, and engineers that read Path Nine to learn the strategies reshaping our work and lives
Here’s a look at what we’re exploring in this issue:
Insights: Several Moves Ahead, The Secret to Better Decisions
Ideas: Goodbye, Seattle
Information: 1) What Ended Indie — by Bryce Roberts, 2) Write Simply — by Paul Graham, 3) Play to Win: Meta-Skills in High Stakes Poker — by Forcing Function
Innovations: Rize
/Insights
Articles and Essays from Path Nine - <1 min read In case you missed it…
If you’re new to Path Nine, here are some ideas you may have missed:
The Secret to Better Decisions—⚡︎ A Tool to Execute Second-Order Analysis. Tl;dr I’ve created a tool to help myself, and others like me, consistently make better, more deliberate decisions. I call it the Second-Order Decision Analysis Tool. Great decision-makers are not superheroes, they’re just top-notch scenario predictors. Our lives are made up of millions (billions?) of little decisions. One bad or good decision can alter the trajectory of our lives forever. It’s the main principle of chaos theory, which effectively states that we should expect the unexpected. We are the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world.
In a world that is increasingly complex, it’s worth investing the time required to think through how our decisions impact those around us, including our future selves.
Several Moves Ahead—★ Learning to Think Like a Chess Master. The bottom line is that if you want to become a better decision-maker, you need to go beyond tactics and learn how to analyze the impact of your decisions. Learning mental models, frameworks, and heuristics is always a great place to start. But if you don’t augment your knowledge with decision analysis for your future moves, then you’ll find yourself repeating the same patterns and missing the big opportunities.
/Ideas
Notes from Kevin Kirkpatrick - 2 min readGoodbye, Seattle
No new ideas this week, but instead, a few updates from my world.
At long last, the day has come. My partner and I are officially leaving Seattle.
After 11 years, we’re moving on.
Those of you following along at home have already heard this mentioned in past newsletters, but it’s now official that we’re moving 180 miles east to Lake Chelan, a sleepy little vacation town in central Washington.
While COVID certainly played a role in expediting our decision, it was not the driving factor. This plan has, in fact, been underway for nearly 4 years.
It all started in the winter of 2016…
My partner and I were seeking an affordable, easy getaway. One that would help us break away from the stressors of work and startup life. Chelan was a place that checked all the boxes for us:
Sunny
Accessible by car
Picturesque
Dog-friendly
Wine-centric
So we booked it and packed up for the weekend.
From the moment we left our driveway in Seattle, we felt the stress melt away. And by the time we arrived, we’d nearly forgotten any concern that plagued our thoughts only a few hours earlier.
And although we had not expected it, we quickly found ourselves right at home.
During our daily walks in the fresh snow, we fantasized about maybe someday owning a place in Chelan. A place where we could visit and escape the hassles of the city. A place that would provide reprieve during the long, dark months of the Seattle winter. Something we could hold onto for years and pass down to our children for generations.
So we casually started our search for a piece of property. We had no idea what we were getting into, but we knew it felt right.
Flash forward almost exactly 12 months and we were signing the papers for our first piece of property in Lake Chelan. After a long and somewhat painful search, we found the spot that would one day be our home and knew we had to grab it.
Since that time, we’ve dreamt of what we could do with that land. We’ve walked it over and over, sketching our future with every step. And now, with remote work finally taking hold and a much-needed change of scenery, we decided the time is right.
Why We’re Leaving
This is not one of those “the rent is too damn high” situations. For us, this move is about more. It’s a chance to build a life that we want, instead of conforming to a life designed for someone else. Our primary goals are to gain freedom and flexibility.
Freedom. To work anywhere and build the life and future we want. Living in Seattle was great when we needed to be in the office, but as someone who’s worked remotely for nearly 8 years, I’ve always seen the office as optional.
Flexibility. To live in a place that allows us to explore the environment. In Seattle, our plans always revolved around traffic and time. If we wanted to go to the park, it required planning. This no longer suits our needs.
While we’re incredibly excited, we also know that we’ll miss a lot — specifically the time with friends and family in Seattle, overt socialization, and potential future friendships. As much as we’ll miss all of that, we know it’s time to make a change. And this is the change we want, for now.
Will We Return?
Maybe. We have no idea what the future holds, but our plan is to give it at least two years. Enough time to let the change set in and also reevaluate our needs.
But for now, it’s so long, Seattle. We’ll cherish our time together, and always remember you fondly. Goodbyes are both an ending and a beginning, and we’re just getting started.
If you’re interested in hearing more about our experience moving away from the city or the process of designing and building a home on your own land, hit reply and let me know!
/Information
Information from the interwebs - <2 min readWhat Ended Indie — by Bryce Roberts
These are not slow-moving or unambitious individuals. But they are often in markets that are out of favor, or come from demographics that are wildly underrepresented in venture-backed startups, or, believe it or not, they just don’t want to build the way the startup world tells them they have to.
Write Simply — by Paul Graham
When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.
Play to Win: Meta-Skills in High Stakes Poker — by Forcing Function
Every complex system contains leverage points—places where a small shift in one component can produce big changes in the system's state. Change one piece of a complex system and you will see its other pieces begin to change and adjust. For example, when the U.S. Federal Reserve changes inflation targets, the discount rate for every corporation adjusts to match. This singular leverage point of discount rate determines thousands of future investments in new plants, product lines, or personnel.
/Innovation
Products and tools for creators - <1 min readRize is the only time tracker that improves your focus and helps you build better work habits so you can get more done.
Tracking my time is typically a huge pain for me. It’s so difficult to look back and calculate how much of my time goes to productive work vs. everything else. Rize makes it easy by automatically tracking my hours and sending me a daily report of my time.
With more and more of our day getting absorbed in screens, this app is a great way to keep your work-life balance in check.
/Inspiration
Mindful meditations - <1 min read“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”
— Earl Nightingale
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Thanks for reading, and see you next week,
— Kevin K. (@kkirkpatrick)