I had been hit with one reschedule after another.
Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered me much. But for some reason, that day I felt a slight irritation building somewhere inside.
Most of my work is client work, so—putting it rather bluntly—I thought I was used to being pulled around by other people’s schedules.
But that day, it got to me.
It wasn’t that I wanted to be the one pulling someone else around. I simply wanted “a place where no one could pull me around.”
A place where I could slowly and carefully collect the things I love.
That was the thought.
I’ve never had much of a desire to put myself out there. I manage plenty of social media accounts for work, but almost none for myself. “Almost,” because I do have one Instagram account where I occasionally post photos of my pet—but only when I happen to feel like it.
And yet, on this particular day, an idea came to me:
“Maybe I should start a new Instagram.”
What Would I Even Do on Instagram?
Lately, I’ve found myself bringing more things into my life that I genuinely love.
A hat. A shirt. Sunglasses. A wallet.
A little while ago, an acoustic guitar. A small ambient lamp.
They’re things I chose because I truly liked them.
It may sound like a cliché, but they’ve brought a little more color into my everyday life.
I thought it might be interesting to have “a place where I could simply collect the things I love.”
And yet, as I write this, I still haven’t posted a single thing.
If I had to make an excuse, there was just one thing I wanted to do first.
Somehow, I Ended Up Building a Website.
Most of my work is related to the web, so I’ve benefited enormously from AI over the past few years.
Even so, there is still so much I don’t know, and the speed at which it continues to evolve never stops surprising me.
There are risks involved in going all-in on AI when working on client projects. So I decided to build a personal website instead and use it as an experiment:
How much of the work can I actually hand over to AI now?
This website became the testing ground.
This time, I used Codex and let it handle a surprisingly large part of the actual production work.
There were still moments when doing something myself would have been faster. But overall, things that would once have taken me several days were suddenly getting done in a matter of minutes.
That genuinely surprised me.
I knew this was happening, of course.
But this was the first time I had really felt it for myself.
And then I thought:
Why not use that power to help build the world around that “place where I could collect the things I love”?
So, for Now, I’ll Just Begin.
I tried not to make this into something bigger than it needs to be.
Even so, part of me still thinks, Did I really have to go this far and build a whole thing around it?
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Perhaps putting a little pressure on myself will help—in a good way.
What that means, I think, is this:
Don’t compromise on the things I genuinely love.
And don’t be afraid to simply say that I love them.
Maybe, little by little, that will turn this into “a place where no one can pull me around.”
Not a place made for someone else.
A place where I can look back at the trail I’ve left behind, and enjoy it for myself.
A place for a little self-indulgence.
How’s that for a prologue?
