100 Projects Status

Purpose Pathways is picking up. I’ve worked with multiple people to help them define a single sentence purpose for themselves, and I’ve since gotten referrals. Part one is purpose identification and part two is how to implement this new purpose. How is the world conspiring to help us accomplish this?

Simple Poetry is coming up next week - the first meeting ever of an Exist With Initiative Passion Group. The first meeting will be small, likely less than 10 people, the majority of whom have participated in a poetry group that I ran in the past. We’ll establish norms and talk about the nonprofit before reading what we’ve written and brought to share. I wonder if they remember that I’ve created the structure based on how my high school poetry teacher ran his class. Thank you Mr. Caruso.

I reconnected with somebody from that class 8 or 9 months ago - I reached out when I saw that he’d been executive director of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that he founded more than 4 years ago. Turns out we really enjoy connecting, and I’ve found great value in every conversation that we’ve shared. I give him credit for the most interesting ancient civilizations conversation I’ve had in recent memory. He’s recently taken a step back from the executive director role in his nonprofit, moving to chairman of the board, giving him more bandwidth to focus on his AI company, which works to bridge the AI trust gap. Hearing him talk about the business side of things has been incredibly valuable for me, and while he has connections at Carnegie Mellon and Cornell, I’m hoping to connect him to the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy - a network belonging to my brilliant girlfriend. How good it feels to bring people even the slightest bit closer to their dreams - not that my friend needs Hopkins. I believe in the success of what he’s doing. Anyway, our relationship feels pretty “universey” - a term I’m trying to normalize to bridge classic-life folk with the intense.

Letters to Aliens (a novel) has developed much more recently as well. Between some amazing stories that I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to and the time I spend driving where creativity bandwidth feels more accessible than bandwidth related to ingesting new information, I’ve been able to string together some important world-building and plot-related details. The next step is documenting the new characters traits and motives, and then I can get back to actually writing.

In the mean time, my friend is finishing edits for our podcast demos, and the most recent audio variation was much better. I asked him to remove a few sections, and hopefully that turns out well too. Once that happens, the next steps include (assuming I post the two demos) recording 10 more episodes that can be posted one at a time every two weeks (giving us 3ish months of lead time before needing to do more recordings), and creating an LLC to take on the liability risks of the podcast before publishing them.

My biggest worry for any of these projects is that I draw some type of attention to myself that closes the aerospace engineering door. There’s no reason this should happen - I don’t comment on the company where I’m currently employed, and I’m not polarizing. This is the reason we’re cutting a few sections from the first demo episode (even though they barely scrape eyebrow raising potential) and the reason I made my instagram account (my least favorite part of any of this) private.

Hopefully taking more of a leadership role in the ground testing of our satellites as well as becoming a mission director (all news from the last two weeks) keeps me safer than just putting in 45-50 hours a week. We’ll see how being put on-call regularly impacts everything I’ve written about here.