I like goals. I like the clear sense of direction they provide, and I like the objective standard to measure whether I’m actually moving in that direction.

I’ve become a lot more structured and organized with goal-setting and habits over the last decade, but I’ve had to unlearn a lot of that as a parent. Much of being a parent has been just being attentive and responsive to the people in my family, and often being willing to let go of goals.

But two years into this journey, I think that tendency still has something to offer to parenting. Being attentive and responsive keeps you up to date on what your kids need in the moment, but doesn’t always prepare you for what’s ahead.

There are some things that I know I need to know, do, or keep up with in order to give my kids what they need. I probably won’t get any immediate feedback if I’m not doing these things, which is why it’s important to have my own objective standards. With that, here’s a list I put together of what I think a dad should know, have a vision for, and do.1

I’d love to hear what you think of this list, and more importantly, what would be on yours?

A Dad Should…

Know…

1. What likely growth milestones are coming up in the next six months to a year?

   1. And related, what does he need to do to prepare for them?

2. His kids’ teachers and his kids’ friends.

3. Which relationships are most important to his kids and where are they positive and challenging?

4. How to manage the kids alone for an appropriate amount of time (different for a breastfeeding infant than a kid who isn’t dependent on mom for all sustenance). But a good goal is that mom can take a weekend away as early as possible.2

5. His main deficiencies that impact his family relationships, and how to manage those well.

6. A variety of different parenting perspectives. Takes in wildly different parenting books, videos, podcasts, etc. to get a better sense of what he does and doesn’t agree with.

Have a Vision…

The emphasis here is a shared vision between mom and dad (if together). The standard should be, (a) how clear is this, and (b) how aligned are both of us on these for our family? Differences of opinion are ok, but what’s important is having some sameness of direction and an understanding of how to handle the differences.

Mom and dad should together have a vision for…

1. The virtues and values they want to cultivate in their kids. Ideally a list somewhere.

2. Discipline - how do the parents believe discipline plays a role in their family and how do they ideally and in practice do that with their kids?

3. Life Skills - what are the skills that mom & dad are responsible for teaching their kids (that they don’t expect to come from school). For example:

   1. Housework - putting things away, keeping a room tidy, cooking

   2. Managing your life - setting goals, organizing and managing your time.

   3. Finances - saving and investing money

   4. Interpersonal skills - talking to strangers, having healthy relationships with people.

4. Family Rituals - what things will the family do together to connect and to grow as people (traditions, family dinners, a “marriage meeting” for mom & dad to check in, church, etc.).

5. Education - what’s important for your kids to get in an education? What are the options out there for you (different school options, homeschooling, extracurriculars, etc.), and have a reasonably well thought-out plan for the education you want your kids to get.

Show Them…

1. Selfless love…for them. for his spouse. for others.

2. Self-respect. He’s not a doormat and shows them that his needs and feelings are worth expressing and advocating for (and that they deserve the same).

3. How to believe in something.

4. The same values and virtues he wants to see in his kids.

Practice…

1. Bringing his kids along for errands, projects, even work!, whenever possible.

2. A regular “learning time” habit. Picks some area of each child’s development and makes a regular practice of investing in that (practicing a sport or an instrument, learning about some subject that’s important).

3. Regular 1:1 time with each child, in a way that encourages the child to open up.

4. An objective standard of presence. It’s too easy to be on the phone or check out at the end of the day. Has some clear parameters for what his engagement with kids will look like so he can both enforce those standards and evaluate whether he’s measuring up (i.e. no phones between 5 and 7 PM, specially carved out block of time each day to just play with one child).

I’ve never been a fan of unpleasant emotions. Anger. Frustration. Disappointment.

They make life complicated, take time to deal with, force me to face difficult truths - either alone, or worse, in confronting others.

Historically, my M.O. has been to deal with them as quickly as possible, or my personal favorite, “not at all.” Whatever minimizes the amount of time and frequency I spend feeling with them (ideally zero time).

But this has often been an ineffective coping strategy - my relationships have suffered, and surprisingly, I can point to cases where my work has suffered too. I needed to grow out of this.

At the same time, I’ve noticed a pattern across people I admire most - a really healthy relationship with their feelings. They’re brave enough to acknowledge them and to have the tough conversations they require. At the same time, they’re equanimous enough not to be overwhelmed by those feelings: they bring them up respectfully and preserve a sense of stability and sturdiness even while they’re disappointed, sad, or furious.

As I’ve tried to grow a healthier relationship with my own emotions, I’ve found some easier to make progress on than others. Which brings us to today’s subject: envy. The temptation to suppress envy is super strong - I don’t like to feel it, and I really don’t like to admit I feel it.

But after some realizations tied to a recent bout of envy, I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned: both why it’s so tricky to deal with, and how to make it useful.

The Trouble with Envy: A Case

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling X while rocking my newborn and I came across this post:

Nat had been fun to follow about AI topics for a while - he was posting a lot about how he was writing with it, and now suddenly I was seeing a couple posts within a week or so where it seemed like he was ripping out these pieces of personal software using AI in record time. I was impressed, and it made me excited about getting back into coding once my daughter’s sleep schedule evens out.

Then a few days later I saw this one:

I didn’t think much of it at first. This guy was still doing cool stuff.

But then by the time my daughter got back to sleep, it popped back in my mind. How much did the course cost? And he sold how many? Within 8 hours of having the idea?

A little back of the napkin math confirmed it was a wild amount of money to make in eight hours and suddenly the seeds of envy were planted.

This one in particular brought up a few things for me. The course was dubbed “Build your own Life Coach” and it was going to walk you through how to (with no programming experience), build a goal and habit tracker with an AI “life coach” to help you better track and reach your goals. I had taught myself how to code back in 2020 and spent the better part of three years building Lattis, a goal and habit tracker focused on accountability. Not the same, but now Nat was teaching people with no coding experience how to build something similar—way, way quicker.

Why Envy Sucks

I would venture to say that envy is kind of a shameful feeling for many people. We rarely admit it, and when we do, it’s a little bit sheepishly. Even this post has a bit of a confessional nature to it. I think there are a few important things to note about why envy feels that way, and I share them because I think it robs envy of a little bit of that shameful power.

First, it’s a forked tongue - it has both an external and an internal focus, and those are upstream of two other unpleasant emotions: guilt, and embarrassment.

Externally, envy is about being resentful of someone else’s success. And if you’re anything like me, you don’t want to be troubled by someone else’s success or good fortune. You want to applaud people when they do well and celebrate them. Especially if the object of your envy is someone you respect or care about. So there’s an element of guilt for even having the feeling in the first place, like I don’t have the right posture towards someone else who did well.

Envy also has an internal focus: it spotlights an area in your life you feel inadequate about. I’ve been using AI tools in my coding and grown considerably from it, but seeing the sudden whirlwind around this course made me realize how much further ahead some people are, and it took something I felt proud of and instead pointed out the deficiencies.

Another important facet about envy is the types of sources that can provoke it.

We can be envious about known wants, or unknown wants. If I’m gunning for a promotion at work and someone else gets it instead of me, envy is an obvious reaction. But there are other times where envy comes as a shock, and these are the unknown wants.

This is exacerbated in our era of social media - oftentimes the things that spark envy are things we didn’t even know existed 10 seconds ago. Suddenly you see someone living a life you didn’t consider as a possibility, and it tugs at some latent desire in you. I’d seen Nat moving quickly with his AI tools before and it was just an inspiration, but for some reason the quick movement on the course hit me in just the right spot.

Envy’s Positive Purpose

Now the important question, what good does envy do? If we don’t have an answer to that question then there really isn’t much benefit in going through this exercise.

Envy offers two things:

First, it’s a fuel. There’s no question you feel motivated when you’re envious. It’s not a clean fuel, it’s probably the emotional version of coal. Use it in a pinch if you have to, but you really don’t want to be burning that stuff for long.

I think envy is actually a close cousin to inspiration.

Envy is the lemon of emotions, inspiration is the lemonade. Sometimes you just get a glass of ice-cold, from-scratch lemonade right at the stand, but sometimes life gives you envy and then you know what you must do (refer to the title if you forgot).

Second, envy is a sign you need to look closer. You see someone else’s success and you think, “what did I miss?” “How do I get that?” I think these question are useful, but they only encourage us to look outward. Counterintuitively, envy is also a sign that we need to look inwards, and ask the most important question it brings up: “what do I truly want?”

At its best, a bout of envy will leave you (1) motivated, and (2) clear about your own goals and priorities. It’s a great opportunity to come away with a renewed sense of what you truly want in life, and the energy to pursue it.

Once you get to this place, you’ll have made peace with the other person’s success or good fortune, and it will be a source of inspiration rather than envy.

Now, how to make that conversion?

Making Lemonade

This is basically a practice of making sense of the envy. Do this however you do your best processing: Journal it out, process it on some walks, talk it out with a friend.

It’s a three parter: First, what? Then, how? Last, integrate.

First, What?

First, what are you actually envious of? Sometimes it’s simple. Someone got a promotion you were gunning for? Straightforward.

But sometimes, and often in the social media example, there’s a cocktail of potential things that could be going on (this is part of what can make it so surprising). In my example, was it the fast money Nat was making? Was it the fact that he was building all this really cool software? I realized that what I most coveted was the speed: being able to build something really quickly and share it with others just as fast. My time is scarce since welcoming a second daughter and any coding time has basically ground to a halt.

Then, How?

Once you have clarity on that, ask yourself “what led to that result?”

My envy usually comes when someone is doing something I’m interested in, but they’re doing it better, faster, younger, or more successfully. I think it’s worth taking a little bit of time to see if there’s anything I can learn from them.

Do they just do something a little differently, or have a skill that you’ve never built up? This might be something easy to learn from.

On the other hand, maybe they have different goals in life, or different personal characteristics that make them capable of things you won’t be able to do or want to do. Maybe they can put in hours working towards a promotion that you can’t without neglecting your family. Maybe they’re seven feet tall and have a shot at being an NBA center, which will never be possible for your 5’11” self.

And as an aside, sometimes this question isn’t really meaningful at all. Allie and I struggled with infertility for a few years, and several of our friends had kids during that time. I was always excited, but the question “why not us?” would pop up in the back of my head frequently.

There wasn’t much to learn from that. Of course we wanted a kid. Didn’t do any good to focus on what someone else had, so the response I tried to cultivate was just being supportive and excited for our friends, and recognize that I was having a tough time with us not being able to conceive yet, and I probably needed to vent about that with Allie or someone.

Last, Integrate

Let’s say you thought about these first two questions and realized what you’re envious of, and realize that a similar success may be attainable for you if you just spend some more time doing X, Y, or Z.

This is actually a very precarious position to be in without the last question: “does this fit into my life?”

Without it, you run the risk of remaking yourself in the image of the person you envy. I can’t imagine a worse outcome than burning that envy fuel for a while and realizing you spent a bunch of time and energy on something to suddenly realize “this isn’t me.”

So whatever you’ve determined about what you were envious of and if there’s a reasonable way to pursue that thing, it’s important to run it through the filter of “does this fit into my life, and if so, how?”

I can’t stress enough here the power of having some regular process of reflecting on what you want in life, whether it’s concretely writing down goals or intentions, talking about your future hopes and dreams with a friend or partner, doing some kind of an annual review, or something else. The clearer those are to you, the easier it will be to compare this thing you’re envious of to where you’re trying to go in life.

Knowing what you want already mitigates some of the impact envy can have, and it gives you something concrete to compare to whatever you’re envious of. Would chasing this thing enhance an existing goal? Is it actually more important than some of the other stuff you want? Or is it just a distraction that seems interesting in the moment?

Take a little time to figure that out and then make the call on whether you should spend any more time focusing on whatever it was you were envious of.

If you do this well, much of the sting of the envy should dissipate. You will get comfortable with the other person’s success and what was envy will feel more like inspiration - a model for how to be better on your own path, not how to follow someone else’s path.

You’ll either end up changing your goals as a result, or realizing it’s not worth it to pursue whatever it was you were envious of. Either way, you’ll have a clearer sense of where you’re going in life, and this will only make things easier for you the next time envy comes around.

What about you?

This is a work in progress for me, so I’m legitimately interested in how this resonates with you, or if you have other ideas on how to deal with envy in a healthy and useful way?

In 2020, I finally had the abundant time I needed to pursue a goal I’d wanted for a long time: learning to code.

I would get up usually at 5:30 and put in a 1-2 hour block of coding time most days before starting work. It was hard work, but I’ve felt incredibly proud to have built a brand-new skill on my own, and to have created several apps now live on the App Store.

I’ve continued to work on this even after my daughter was born in 2022, but the challenge has compounded. I want to continue to pursue this skill, but ideally not at the expense of being a good parent, spouse, friend, or employee.

And so the question I’m often asking myself is, “How do I have the right level of energy for each thing that is expected of me?” To do good work, to pursue my personal projects, to be present with my wife Allie and my daughter Kennedy, with my friends, and whatever else I want to show up well in.

I’ve become more devoted to routine, and I’ve adopted a fairly transactional attitude towards my own self and body - if I’m pushing myself too far, I will scale back, but it’s often in service of asking the question, “how can I perform better?”

I’ve learned a lot about what gives me energy and what takes it away, but I often think of myself as a machine that needs to be optimized so that I can do a lot of stuff, and hopefully do it well.

As you can well imagine, this comes at a cost. There are important things in life that cannot and should not be optimized - dealing with a child’s meltdown, quality time with Allie or with friends. And though I try to get better at being spacious in these areas of life, I’ve had many situations where I don’t give the patience or the space needed for some of those less goal-oriented elements of life that just require presence, patience, and often love. And there are things that get lost in the shuffle when I live with this attitude, namely thinking of others. My focus is much more narrowed around my immediate family and my work, which leaves less time to call other people and think of others not right around me.

I haven’t always lived in this state - I feel extremely fortunate to have had three ‘sabbaticals’ - one nine-month-long, and two one-month-long - since I started my post-college working career, and they’ve provided an invaluable foil to this current way of life.

For nearly five months in 2016, Allie and I traveled through much of Western Europe on a rail pass, in what I can confidently say was the trip of a lifetime.

We weren’t sure how we would do together with the stress of such a new experience and all that extended time together, but it was an amazing season in our relationship. We had overflowing abundance of time to soak up the experience, talk nonstop about everything we were taking in together, and it was a season of really deep connection for us together.

I felt lighthearted, open, spacious, and intensely curious, and I am still incredibly grateful to have experienced such a radical shift in lifestyle together with Allie while we were in our twenties.

At the same time, as the trip went on, while my mind was plenty occupied with figuring out logistics of travel, taking in all these new experiences, and connecting with Allie as well as the locals and fellow travelers we met on the way, I felt restless at times and part of me longed to have a productive and useful cause to devote my energies to.

I was more prone to rumination (I cut my foot twice on the trip, and both times ended up quite anxious about it getting infected - this is something I would not think twice about if it happened today).

These two extremes taught me a lot about the range of my personality. I’m very different in a busy season than a light season, and it’s been eye opening to see both my strengths and weaknesses in both of those environments.

I’ve come away from this hoping more people (you included) get to experience two things in your life:

First, a season where you push yourself to your limit and come to know what you’re capable of (and get the boost of confidence that comes with going somewhere you didn’t think you could).

Second, a season where you throw away the to-do list and maybe even the calendar (ideally before retirement) to see what thoughts and curiosities emerge, and to see how different of a person you are when you experience open and abundant time and freedom.

Even if a change in seasons is not in the cards right now, I think there’s still a lot of benefit to be found by recognizing the current situation you’re in, and asking yourself: what strengths does this bring out in me? What weaknesses does it bring out? And then adjust accordingly.

Thanks for reading.

*Photo is Florence at sunset during our 2016 trips. We sat to just watch the sunset many times during the trip and it’s still one of the highlights (as well as something I almost never make time for now).

There’s something weird about the way we raise our kids.

Why do we—especially during the teenage years, a hugely transformational time in their lives—put them in a place that’s basically 95% other teenagers (school)?

And then, after deliberately putting them there, most parents spend considerable angst hoping their kids aren’t going to be too influenced by those same peers and aren’t going to make bad decisions with potentially life-altering consequences.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that “high school” isn’t a fundamental experience of human life, but something we set up that way.

There’s probably value in correcting for this, and I have some ideas, at least at the individual family level.

When I started my first job out of college, the way I learned changed. Instead of learning primarily from books and lectures, I was learning primarily from doing and observing. I took on projects I wasn’t yet qualified for and had to just figure it out. And for the first time in my life, my peer group wasn’t primarily people my age, but mostly more experienced people. I soaked up a ton just by observing how those experienced colleagues carried themselves in their work.

And I was surprised to find that I seemed to be learning more in this environment than I did in the formal school setting.

I’m dunking on school right now but the ire really belongs with adults and how we’ve set up our work lives.

From what I’ve observed, when parents or other adults interact with kids, it’s usually in one of three settings:

1. Leisure - time together in the evenings and weekends, doing something fun, usually relaxing and passive activities because people are tired after work and school.

2. Running errands together

3. Watching kids’ activities - kids are involved in a lot more extracurriculars and clubs than adults, and it’s very normal for adults to spend lots of time watching their kids’ performances and games.

There’s something conspicuously absent from this list—the opposite of #3. Kids spend very little time watching parents in their element.

Very few of us have jobs that we can just bring our kids to whenever we want.

But this is kind of an aberration in history. Apprenticeships used to be far more common.1 Many families worked on farms where kids worked from an early age. There were good reasons we moved away from that as our primary way of life, but there are at least a few distinct positives to that sort of environment:

• It’s not just an either-or between working or spending time with your kids. You legitimately could integrate the two. It’s not always a balancing act where time given to one is time taken from the other.

• Kids get to see parents where they excel, and there’s a lot of tacit learning that happens when kids get to observe adults at work, ask questions, and get direct advice as they’re working side-by-side.

• Kids get to participate in the adult world from an early age—they’re actively serving their family and/or the community. I think many kids crave more opportunities for this than they currently have available.

• The adults are the ones dictating the social norms. If you as an adult can be around kids (especially teenagers) and are showing or teaching them how to carry themselves in given situations, it’s a useful counterweight to the influence of their peers.

My kids are young right now (20 months and -5 months—due in December) so I have some time, but over the next 10 years or so, I want to build an environment where I can recapture some of those advantages for my kids.

Here are some of my current ideas:

Start a business

I’ve had a few friends whose parents owned a business, and they’re the few who seemed to have an experience more like these historical ones. Their parents would bring them to work, sometimes to sit in on meetings, sometimes to work various jobs in the business, and the family business was a common topic of conversation involving everyone.

Starting a business is a dream of mine for the future, first so I have the ability to arrange my schedule more around my family (depending on the type of business), but my hope is also that it would also be a family business—one Allie and I operate together but also involve our kids in.

It’s not about having a business they can “take over.” It’s really answering the question—how can we live less in separate spheres? It would allow us to bring them into mom and dad’s world some, and also to give them a taste of adult life while they’re young.

Volunteer or entrepreneurial projects together

When I was young I used to see these profiles on the back of cereal boxes about kids who had started some non-profit, and usually the story was they saw a problem in the world, and their mom or dad encouraged them and helped them take action.

If my daughters want to do something in their community or start some business pursuit, I want to actively help them. Few things teach you high-agency like seeing a problem and going out and doing something about it, and being able to work side-by-side with them on some business or service project seems like a great way to bond.

Get out of my comfort zone (and let them see)

A friend of mine told me that at some point he wants to do a standup comedy set. Not because he aspires to be a comedian, but because it seems like a fun thing to do, yet also scares him. And not only that, but he wants his kids to see him do it. And here’s why:

Kids are always growing and doing things outside their comfort zone but it’s much rarer for them to see adults doing the same. For all the advice we give about how they should handle uncertainty, how much louder would it speak if they could see their mom or dad actually go through something outside their comfort zones?

What’s the thing I want to do that scares me? And is there any way I can give my kids a front row seat to see how dad handles that?

Homeschooling?

There’s a spectrum for how much ownership a parent takes over the quality, pace, and direction of a kid’s education, and homeschooling is clearly one end of the spectrum. I don’t know if we’ll full-on homeschool our kids, but I hope that we end up on the higher-ownership end of that spectrum whatever form that takes.

Whatever kind of school our kids go to, I want to spend a fair amount of time making sure they’re learning in a way that’s helpful for them: are they being challenged enough? Are they struggling to keep up? Are there other subjects they’re really curious about that they don’t get to learn about in school?

And my hope is that this leads to us cultivating the kind of educational experience that’s most potent for them, whether it’s finding learning opportunities for them outside of school, extra resources to help them keep up, or other things they can do to be challenged more.

Time around other adults

I hope Allie and I introduce our kids to a lot of our friends and encourage them to actually have relationships with plenty of other adults.

At some point they will know what mom and dad are about, they’ll get tired of our influence, and they’ll be looking for new mentors to help them grow. Part of my hope is that we’ve encouraged them to have a social circle that includes other adults, and that they’ll look up to some of them as role models, instead of just having other same-aged peers to be influenced by.

At the core, what I’m hoping to do is increase the surface area of situations where both my kids and mom or dad are active and out of their comfort zone.

I don’t want my world to feel totally separate from theirs. I want them to be able to dip their toes easily in both the social world of other kids, but also to be comfortable around adults. And I want us to have plenty of opportunities to work side-by-side—it’s a great venue for teaching them directly, but I also think they’ll grow and learn significantly from just being around mom, dad, or other adults at work.

Hopefully this is something that you’re also interested in, and if so, any experience in making this work in your own life? Anything else you want to try with your own kids?

It was New Years Eve 2022, and I used whatever brainpower I could muster up to write out the problem as clearly as possible and posted it on Stack Overflow.

My daughter was just a month old at the time, so I probably read the response in a middle-of-the-night stupor after putting her back to sleep. “This seems overly complicated. This part of my argument against MVVM and anything “view model” related to Flutter…” responded someone who knew what they were talking about. I wasn’t just letting a stranger on the internet dictate whether I was building my app correctly or not, but I had been avoiding just this uncomfortable truth. I was trying to jam a round peg into a square hole and at that moment it hit me so clearly: the way I was building the app wasn’t working.

I had started on this app almost a year-and-a-half before, and sitting there exhausted, I seriously doubted whether I’d ever finish the thing.

It probably helps if I go back to the beginning. What follows is how I taught myself to code mobile apps, how I got stuck here, and how I finally got my app, Lattis, released.

I’d wanted to learn to code for years. I worked with a lot of software developers in my first job, and I envied their ability to create useful tools completely from scratch. In my early twenties, I tried several times to learn, and gave up each time.

Then once the pandemic hit, after brief forays into sourdough baking and learning the ukulele, I realized this was my golden opportunity.

I had an app idea I’d wanted to build years before learning to code. My brother and I had done weekly calls where we tried to hold each other accountable to reaching our goals, and talked about building an app that would let us track each other’s progress. And now, I was in an accountability group with three friends doing something similar: each quarter, we’d set some big goals, and had a weekly call to talk about our progress and our setbacks. The same challenge applied - it was hard to keep track of where everyone was at.

I wanted to make a tool where we could track our own goals and habits, and see how everyone else was progressing.

Learning to Code

I heard Swift and SwiftUI1 were a great language and framework for novice developers. I’m very glad I started there. Swift/SwiftUI were opinionated and had plenty of guardrails that made it easier for someone inexperienced like myself to avoid mistakes (though I still made plenty of them).

I started with a short tutorial from Apple, and then began my first project. Knowing this accountability app was going to be extremely complicated, I started with something simpler. My wife spearheaded the content and I wrote the code for a simple conversation starters app.

The days looked like this: I would wake up early, usually two hours before my workday, and spend that time coding. In the early days, it was usually about 25% coding and 75% scouring Google trying to figure out some issue I couldn’t understand. Many mornings ended with me posting a question on Stack Overflow and hoping that by the time I checked the next morning, some guardian angel would have helped me out of my jam. Some times I’d get lucky, and other times I’d end up spinning my wheels for a week or more mostly stuck on one issue.

It was slow work, but after six months, we released our first app - I’m Curious - right before Thanksgiving 2020. And then I turned my attention to my white whale.

I worked for most of 2021 at the same sluggish pace on my accountability app. But I spent probably way too much time trying to do it write. I wrote a ton of unit tests2 (I honestly may have spent more time writing unit tests than the actual code of the app). In the back of my mind though, was the Android question. Swift would only get me an iPhone app, and if this was going to work for accountability groups where people might have any kind of device, it would need to support both.

So near the end of the year, I got feedback from beta testers and realized I needed to make significant changes to the app. I decided instead to rewrite the app in a language that would let me release and Android and an iPhone version simultaneously.

Switching Languages

Flutter3 was the framework I landed on that do both with the same code. So I started almost from scratch again in early 2022, learning Flutter from a beginners course on Udemy. After about three months working through the course for an hour or two each morning, I started moving along on my Flutter version.

Flutter had a lot of similarities to what I had been doing in Swift/SwiftUI, so some of the migration came easily. I kept running into several areas, namely - how to manage app state (things like your current list of tasks and goals) - so that the data in the app would stay up-to-date. In SwiftUI, there had really been one opinionated way to accomplish this, while in Flutter, there were many.

I was trying to do it in a way that most closely mirrored what I had done in SwiftUI, but this would turn out to be a mistake.

I couldn’t find any tutorials for the issues I was running into, and very few questions when I’d search Google. Which meant I was doing something most others weren’t. Sometimes, if you’re trusting your gut instincts, that’s a good thing. If you’re a novice developer in an unfamiliar language though, it’s probably not.

So that takes us back to that New Years Eve. I rebuilt almost everything that had been in the original version, but my frustrations were slowly building as things in Flutter just wouldn’t work cleanly.

My daughter had been born at the end of November, and I’d spent all of December on paternity leave. Our schedule was completely erratic but I’d find an hour here or there to do a little work on the app. I was getting ready to go back to work in a few short days, and I remember writing up this question on Stack Overflow as a last gasp of work before the new year.

When I got the response, I knew almost immediately that the guy was right. The way I was working, wasn’t working.

After a little while, I reached back out to him and asked him what he would do instead. He had a helpful answer, but to do that was going to mean learning a lot of new things and gutting and redoing about 70% of the app.

And with just days before I went back to work, no semblance of a regular sleep schedule, I got depressed…

Here was this dream of mine I’d been working on for years, that suddenly felt so far out of my grasp. I went back to work, my wife was deep in postpartum recovery, we barely slept, and I started to think this was never going to happen.

But after about two weeks, I would have these moments in the middle of the night where my daughter would be asleep on my lap, and I’d put my earbuds in and watch some tutorials on how I might restructure the app. And at some point, I became ok with the idea of reworking it.

My time to work on this ebbed and flowed dramatically, but some days I actually had more time. My daughter would wake my up at 4, and then after getting her back to sleep, I’d be wired. So coding time it was.

It started slow but during 2023, I redid the things I needed to, and pushed the app a lot further.

And then, by the end of January 2024, I finally got the first version of Lattis released.

What I’ve Learned

This project has been over three years long. Two different coding languages, and at least two complete or near complete rewrites. I’ve gotten on Twitter, and been exposed to the “indie hacker” community of independent developers. That group has strong opinions on how other indie developers, especially those building in their spare time, should operate. This project has broken probably all of their cardinal rules:

Ship your work fast? Obviously not.

Validate your product idea before you start building? Definitely not.

Don’t waste your time on unimportant details, like unit testing an app that you don’t even know if people want yet? …ok I’m going to stop answering these now.

I’d be more effective now if I listened to those, but learning to code was tough, and having a project I was deeply excited about made the difference in being able to push through those moments.

Working smart is important, but the first thing is making sure you have what you need to keep the momentum going.

I had three goals when I started this:

1. First, to create something I was excited to see in the world.

2. Second, to learn a craft that I could keep refining, that would also give me the ability to create something (like an app) from scratch.

3. Third, to create something that people find useful.

Will this ultimately gain traction? That I don’t know. But even if not, I’m happy with accomplishing the first two, and proud of the persistence it took to get there.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve got a goal you’re working towards and you’re deep in the middle of it, drop me a line if there’s any way I can support you.

What is it?

Lattis is a self-improvement app to track your long term goals and habits, and include a small group of friends to hold you accountable to the goals you want to reach.

• It’s a to-do list: create and check off your one-time tasks.

• It’s a habit tracker: create your recurring habits and mark them off each day.

• It’s a goal tracker: track long-term goals (monthly, quarterly, or yearly), and the habits and tasks you’ll need to reach them.

• It’s an accountability tool: set up small groups to share your progress with friends, and send reminders to them to complete habits and tasks.

It’s designed especially for accountability groups: if you have a group of peers you meet with regularly about your goals and your progress on them, Lattis can be a great support tool for following each other’s progress.

But if you have any goals you’re pursuing or habits you want to track (and you don’t have a great workflow for tracking them), you might enjoy the app. Especially if you have some friends you’d like to have hold you accountable for reaching them.

If you check it out, please either share some feedback or leave a review. I’d love to hear your top 1-3 suggestions for improving the app. It’s still early so I’d like to improve it as much as possible.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned later this week for a post on the most challenging moment during the creation of this app.

TL;DR: Pay attention to the dreams that give you hope for the future, and the issues that make life grating and frustrating. Talk about them with other people now, so (1) you can fix the fixable issues, (2) be accountable to keep pursuing your dreams, and (3) let your dreams evolve as you go through life.

This will help ensure you don’t get blindsided by a sense that life didn’t deliver when you’re older, and feel some need to make a dramatic shift.

I have a perplexing fascination with mid-life crises. I’m 33 years old, and not in danger of having one (that I know of) anytime soon.

A few months back, I saw this late-seventies book shared on X and it gripped me. I just had to know what insights this lady had for the stage of life 10 years down the road.

A few days later my old, yellowed copy arrived and I read through it with the little reading time I could find during my daughter’s naps. I enjoyed it, but it also felt transgressive - like the sign of some character defect in me. “Nobody talks about this; certainly not at my age,” I thought.

Normally, that feeling would lead me to think I should keep this fascination to myself. But I’m trying to shift that default response, so I talked to my wife about it. Talked to friends about it. (And now the next logical step seems to be writing to strangers on the Internet about it.)

In most cases, it’s led to unexpectedly deep conversations. So I’d like to share what I’ve learned about mid-life crises:

What is a mid-life crisis?

My definition:

Nancy Meyer writes:

A developmental crisis is precipitated…when a man begins to feel that his old life structure no longer fits his newly evolving self—and this is exactly what happens at around forty.

— Nancy Meyer

“How then to cope with the frustrations and fears so common at mid-life? How to cope with the doubts and depression? Instead of confronting them, a man often finds it more his style, to seek an external solution: make a major move, find another job, get a younger wife, leap into an affair—all options oriented toward action.

— Nancy Meyer

Why does this matter to me?

I really don’t want to have a mid-life crisis, but had very little insight into what leads to one.

At their worst, mid-life crises can dramatically shake up or break apart families. I’ve wanted to be a husband and father since I was a kid, and it strikes me as a very crappy outcome to work hard at building a family for a couple decades, only for my marriage (and potentially my relationships with my kid(s)) to disintegrate. ESPECIALLY if it’s due to some preventable crisis of mine.

Life has felt dramatically busier since becoming a parent in the last year. I used to feel I had vast amounts of free time, but that has dwindled while at the same time my sense of responsibility has shot up.

I can see how someone (me) could land in a situation where I just stay busy for 10 or 15 years with family responsibilities and lose sight of the trajectory my life is headed in, so in reading Meyer’s book, I wanted to know - how does someone get to the point of having a mid-life crisis, and how can I prevent one?

What leads to a mid-life crisis?

Meyer’s book is written for people currently coping with such a crisis, so there isn’t preemptive advice for people in their 20s/30s. It does paint a picture of someone in that crisis state, and some of the signposts to avoid:

Signposts

• Under pressure: work is stressful (but maybe not all that rewarding), financial pressures are strong with retirement and possibly kids’ college looming larger, maybe aging parents leave you with heavy responsibility to both parents and kids.

• Lack of encouraging and dynamic primary relationships

  • If your marriage isn’t thriving, it may be more of a semi-peaceful coexistence with lots of minor squabbles and annoyances, and not something that brings a lot of life and encouragement (though I suspect fewer of these types of marriages still exist today compared to the 70’s).

  • If you have Kids in their teen years, they may be at their most unappreciative and rebellious stage. I can’t speak from experience, but based on the book, it seems like this shift can be really challenging for parents as kids focus on asserting their independence.

  • Friends - maybe you don’t have any lol? Honestly, seems like a number of people in this stage are lacking close relationships with other friends outside of their family.

• Physically depleted - simply put, the signs of old age and decline are more present, and this is tough to deal with. For example: dealing with unexplained health issues for perhaps the first time, sexual impotence, general tiredness from a busy life, and not being able to do physical things (without injury) that you used to do.

Three Ingredients

I would condense that down into three primary ingredients:

Weighed Down

The pressures of responsibility for managing a home, raising kids, and coping with work are weighing you down (and this seems to be a compounding effect - if the weight is very heavy, but short-term, this seems potentially less damaging that just long-term low grade weight).

Lethargic

There’s very little pouring into you to bring vitality and energy to your life. Perhaps your job isn’t exciting, your intimate relationship has settled into a somewhat stale “life partner” phase more focused more on responsibility than thriving connection, and (if you have teenagers) your kids are at an age where conflict and separation are more normal. Either bring vitality back to one of these things or find a hobby or community that enervates you and brings that energy back.

Emotionally Under-resourced

Many people don’t have the emotional awareness or support network to deal with the first two challenges in a nuanced way, or address them before they become big, and it’s more likely to create a kind of pressure cooker.

I’m paraphrasing here, but one of the interesting points Meyer made was that men (probably more true in 1978 than today) are used to just taking decisive action but not really working through feelings, which means a sudden crisis of meaning is more likely to result in some kind of overstated reaction rather than thoughtfully processing those feelings and letting life evolve over time in response to your changing needs.

How to prevent a mid-life crisis:

My biggest takeaway is to solve the last problem (being emotionally under-resourced) and the rest will take care of itself:

Emotional Resourcing

On my wedding day, my father-in-law finished his toast with this gem of a line:

“…and may some of your dreams come true. Reality.”

In the backdrop of the idealistic wedding day, Allie and I scoffed at the line then, but as time has gone on, I’ve come to love it more and more.

I’ve found that in adult life, dealing with life dreams changing—moving out of reach or coming into view—is a vital skill, and I think one of the most important for preventing a mid-life crisis.

Adulthood surprises us in many ways; unfortunately, many of these are not welcome surprises. Maybe you’ve had one or more of the following experiences:

• You started your career with big plans to “make a difference,” but now you’re at the bottom of the totem pole with very little influence, and the day-to-day work kind of sucks.

• You can’t wait to become a parent, but you and your partner struggle to conceive for years.

• You feel like your day-to-day is just doing adult life tasks, paying bills, and you feel stretched extremely thin financially, emotionally, and mentally.

• You developed unexplained chronic illness and it’s now a struggle to get out of bed each morning. You feel like you’re spending all your time either working or recovering enough to power through another workday.

• You’ve always wanted to travel and finally got to take that big trip you’ve always wanted to take; but you had a nightmare of a time trying to get there, got pickpocketed, and then spent half the trip recovering from food poisoning.

• You started a career that was deeply meaningful - maybe religious work or work for a non-profit, but you’ve become disillusioned, and no longer want to be there but don’t see a way out.

Definitely if you’re in your 30s or beyond, you probably have at least a few of these kinds of scars.

When I go through hard experiences like those, my initial response is just to shoulder that load, learn to accept those issues as my lot in life, and carry on.

But this is exactly why this book was so useful.

The danger of a mid-life crisis comes in because as we hit these small to large snags throughout life, the dreams that gave us hope sit in the background. They’ve given us a quiet hope, and sometimes we don’t recognize when they’re moving further out of reach. If we don’t stop to recognize that, we’re likely to lose ourselves in the day-to-day stuff of life, and the risk is greater that one day we’ll wake up and realize certain dreams that were a major source of meaning seem totally unattainable.

But, if we take the time to cope with our dreams, and give space to let go of them, allow them to change, or replace them altogether, we can preserve that sense of hope.

To do that, I’ve found two practices vital: (1) solo reflection, and (2) community support.

Solo Reflection

My experience with a young daughter is that the solo time to reflect, think, maybe read, is one of the easiest things to sacrifice completely. It’s WAY on the back burner. But back to the mid-life crisis book, Meyer highly recommends having both the physical space and time to reflect:

Have a retreat at home. Every man should have a place in his house—besides the bathroom—where he can be alone. He should have a place for privacy, a space of his own, where he can have the leisure to think and “to meet himself.”

— Nancy Meyer (emphasis mine)

If you can’t justify taking some time to sit and think, combine it with something else - go for a walk and allow your mind to wander. Or take up running for one of your workouts and forgo listening to music. Give yourself a question or two to ponder, and just see where your mind takes you. Here are some possible questions that could provide some rich exploration:

• Is there anywhere in life I’m just going through the motions? If so, why? What about that isn’t energizing?

• What in life do I dread or feel restless in? Why? Am I stuck there?

• Are there any dreams of mine that feel out of reach? Do I need to let go of them, or double down? (If you have any you need to let go of, give yourself time to grieve those. Depending on what it is, this can be a long process).

• Is there anything in life I really want but am not getting? What could I do to get more of that thing?

Make it a priority to reflect on where your life is delivering or not delivering, and what you can do to better reach those dreams of yours.

Working with Others

I’ll put this as simply as possible: have someone you can talk to about your problems!

I’m a huge proponent of accountability groups for just this reason. It’s not normal to just talk about our problems or our dreams in a meaningful way, and having a group that exists for just this purpose gives you permission to think through the things that really matter to you, and gives you the support and encouragement to take the important actions you need to reach those goals.

Look for a small group of people (or even one other person) you can talk to about the things you want out of life, and ask them to be a listening ear for you, as well as encourage you to turn those wishes into concrete goals and actively work towards them. A good accountability group should provide:

• Listening - you should be heard as you work through your issues and wishes, and your group should add to the discussion with questions and comments that help you clarify your own perspective (and you should offer the same in return)

• Inspiration - if you’re flat out stuck, the group should offer ways to go around to get unstuck.

• Accountability - if there’s something you need to work on, the group should offer healthy social pressure to make sure you’re doing the work.

If you don’t know who to ask, consider asking a family member or partner - it’s someone you already know and could open doors for a deeper connection with them.

Committing to a practice like this won’t change things overnight, but it will help build a personal culture of dealing with your dreams and setbacks head on - confronting those wishes that no longer seem feasible, adjusting where needed, and prioritizing the actions you need to realize the dreams that are attainable.

You’ll limit the likelihood that you’ll be surprised by life not meeting expectations down the road, and staying committed to this over time will help you improve your life so the other two ingredients of a mid-life crisis (weightiness and lethargy) have far less room to develop.

In Sum

My hope is that by being aware of these potential warning signs, and having some of these tips in mind, it will help you build your life and family so that it’s thriving and fulfilling for the present, but also thriving as you do cross the threshold into mid-life and beyond.

If you have thoughts on mid-life crises, or tips on how to avoid them, I’d love to hear your perspective. Drop a comment or reach out on Twitter or via email.

What comes to mind when you hear that word?

For me, at first blush, it doesn’t feel fun. It feels responsible. Weighty. Negative.

Like something companies and governments need so they stop doing bad stuff. Or something individual people need so they stop doing bad stuff.

Webster’s defines it as: (noun) an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions.

That matches the feeling I have, but that’s not the kind of accountability I’m talking about. Accountability can be a lot more than that.

We live in a society where it’s very difficult to speak into other people’s lives in an honest and powerful way.

In many forms of media (social and news), it’s commonplace to bash others who think and act differently. There might be candor, but very little change comes from this place. The battle lines of difference are already drawn, and most people don’t take feedback from someone criticizing them from a distance.

And in many relationships, we’re afraid to speak the hard truth to others, because “we don’t know the full story” or “maybe they have different (priorities/worldview/life experiences).” Personally, I’m conflict averse by nature, and many times I could have given someone some helpful, honest feedback, but didn’t because of one of the excuses above.

We often assume difference in our culture, which either empowers us to take shots from a distance, or disempowers us to be honest at all, because “we don’t know everything.”

Many religious communities have a default expectation of similar values, which makes it much easier to speak honestly into the most vulnerable and important places of one another’s lives: parenting, virtues and vices, work, finances, spiritual health, and so on.

But you might not be part of a community like that. Or even if you are, it might not exactly map onto all the values and priorities you have. Or, you might just be interested in closer relationships with a wider variety of people.

This is where accountability comes in.

Accountability is a way of relating where we come to know someone else’s values, wishes, and dreams, and expose ourselves to the same knowing. We commit to a mutual project of growing in those areas, by:

(1) encouraging each other on the journey

(2) sharing wisdom and inspiration when we see a better path, and

(3) correcting when our peers are off course.

Rather than a stodgy, and weighty thing, this is more about openness, exploration, self-discovery, and looking after others.

In some cases, this might be an especially deep set of relationships where you work through some of the most personal and intimate areas of your life, and in other cases, it might just cover a slice of your life. A running group actually contains all three of the elements mentioned above, but focused on one particular area of your life.

When you look for relationships with accountability, you’re bringing more of what matters most to you into your relationships, you’re increasing the chances that you’ll make good on your wishes and dreams, and you’re probably going to be significantly more engaged in your interactions.

Interested? But how do you do it?

More to come on that.

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