Frustration Driven Problem Solving

One of the greatest lessons I learned as an adult is to apologise as quickly as you can when you fuck up… and mean it.

My partner of 20 years taught me this lesson. I’m a slow learner so unfortunately it took about a decade for me to get this into my thick skull. Fighting over stupid things makes no sense when you’ve been together for 20 years but these fights can turn into a cold war of sorts when neither person wants to apologise.

Once I figured out that I was being a stubborn bastard in most fights it was easy to think the following: Is this the hill I want to die on? And if this is a hill I want to die on, I don’t apologise, I lean in and we argue unless she’s ready to apologise because it’s not a hill she wants to die on.

This further helped me clarify the true lesson in apologising; realising what matters and is worth fighting over or fighting for. Not everything is worth fighting over and there are very few things actually worth fighting for.

Something I realised once I learned how to apologise is that many of the fights I pick have little or nothing to do with my partner and the moment we are in when we’re fighting. It’s a second-order-effect of the shitty day I had, the argument with a colleague or some other random thing that happened to me that I was unable to rant about or deal with. When I don’t deal with things that irritate me those feeling spill over into my personal relationships and I shit on the only person I know can take it; my partner.

That sucks for her and isn’t fair on either of us because it means we fight.

So I built rantrobot.com.

The premise is really simple; I rant at a robot until I have unpacked where my frustration comes from. There are three modes: Someone to fight with, Someone to listen calmly and Someone to reason with.

Each one offers a slightly different train of thought and a way to deal with your rant.

Usually by the third or forth message I’m distracted enough from my initial frustration that I realise I wasn’t really that invested in my own anger and the issue fizzles out.

I have yet to find a situation where my frustration continued on so dramatically that it actually led to a real fight with an actual human.

Rant robot works to soften my anger. Maybe it’ll help you too.

Give it a try and let me know. If this gains traction I’ll turn it into a real app for iOS and Android and maybe even a Whatsapp bot that you can just send voice notes to and shout at.

Would you use that?

Anyways, that’s it for me this week.

—

Stay curious,

Nic

Side project update

I've decided that to hold myself accountable I want to share an update about my side projects every newsletter:

New

Splitville - I use this app every time I go for dinner with friends but it’s still having some text detection issues. Try it and let me know.

Flirtbot - practice your opening line before you send it to your new match. This is coming along nicely. Upload a screenshot of your potential match and Flirtbot will help you with an opening line. Still in testing though. If you want early access, reply and I’ll share the url with you!

Pixeldash - While this is still live on the domain, no progress has been made and I’ve decided game dev is fun for the weekends but I want to spend my time on solving problems.

Significant progress

Decision Tracker - 145 users, 10 likes and 3 comments! I found X.com engagement to be a useful method of marketing. Progress has slowed here. I need to shift my thinking from building a thing to marketing a thing.

Still running

Goodweeds - No change. A weed review site. Early development and currently testing out Leafy to see if it's worth me even pursuing Goodweeds.

StumbleSong - No change. Still around, still working but I haven't made any changes this month.

Deadpool

PositionMe - Moved to deadpool. I think monetising this would be too complex. An app for couples who want to try new sex positions. You both rate various positions and the app then suggests the most compatible options to you to try.

BucketListAssist - Added to the deadpool for now. Too complex for me to stay engaged.

What’s making me think

A movement I’m paying attention to

Levelsio built a flying game and within weeks was earning over $50k pm in sponsorship. That’s not the part making me think though… he’s now running a vibe-coding game-development competition:

Here are some of the games that are being built.

A phone I love

I don’t talk about hardware often because generally I don’t care too much about it, but the new Google Pixel 9 phone is simple, affordable and definitely the phone I’ll be getting next.

Tumor-to-pork cancer beating strategy

There has been a significant breakthrough in cancer treatment and if you’re vegan or don’t eat pork for religious regions this one is going to make you think:

New cancer therapy ‘disguises’ tumors as pork to trigger immune attack, 90% effective - Chinese researchers turned the immune response to organ transplant rejection to cure cancer with a 90% success rate. "Called a 'tumor-to-pork' strategy, a new study published in Cell earlier this year demonstrated immense success in engineering a virus that tricked the human body into believing that cancer cells were pig tissue, thereby triggering a hyperacute inflammatory response. The virus began attacking the tumor with a staggering 90% success rate, to the point of curing a patient with advanced cervical cancer." [source]

If you had cancer, would you turn your cells into pork if it would cure you? If you have strong opinions on this one, I’d love to hear your take on this, hit reply and tell me!