Michael Shoe

Personal Growth

  • Why Being Neutral Backfires When You’re Building Something of Your Own

    For most of my career, I’ve been proud of being unemotional and analytical. It’s served me well as an operator in a 9-to-5 job. I don’t get rattled easily. I don’t get caught up in drama. And more often than not, I don’t have to take a strong stance on things.

    But building my own projects has shown me the downside of this mindset. Suddenly, I have to have opinions.

    • Do I like this UI or not?
    • Is this registration process intuitive or not?
    • Should I keep this button here or move it?

    These are decisions only I can make. And yet, because I’m not an expert in design or UX, I’m tempted to delay them. To wait until I feel more certain.

    But here’s the truth: delaying decisions is the worst decision of all. Projects stall. Momentum dies.

    What I’ve learned is that building isn’t about always being “right.” It’s about being willing to decide, move forward, and adjust later if needed.

    The neutrality that helped me succeed in my career doesn’t serve me here. In building, indecision is more dangerous than being wrong.

  • Be Careful What You Wish For

    As a 9-to-5er, I used to dream about being my own boss. No one telling me what to do, full freedom, working on my own ideas. It sounded perfect.

    Then I actually started building a side project.

    And here’s what I didn’t expect: without a boss, I often didn’t know what to do. Figuring out what to work on, before even doing the work, became a whole job by itself. It was exhausting in a way I never imagined.

    This wasn’t what I signed up for. Not at all.

    It feels like fighting a war with yourself. On one side, there’s the boss version of me—ambitious, focused, wanting results. On the other side, there’s the staff version of me—lazy, easily distracted, always looking for the path of least resistance.

    And if I’m not careful, the staff wins. Every time. Because that’s human nature: we want to do as little as possible, whether we’re working for ourselves or for someone else.

    So what’s the solution? I think it’s about turning that nature into an advantage. Instead of fighting it, I try to use it as a filter. I ask: What are the few tasks that will actually make the biggest difference?

    Then I write them down. I make them non-negotiable.

    Because if I don’t, the “lazy staff” in me will always find a way to avoid them.

    Being your own boss isn’t about freedom—it’s about discipline. The discipline to make the hard choices, stick to them, and hold yourself accountable when no one else will.

  • The Paradox of Parenting: How Kids Steal Your Time and Give You Perspective

    Having kids is a funny thing. On one hand, they eat up every ounce of time you think you have. It’s the easiest excuse in the world—“I didn’t get this done because the kids kept me busy.” And to be honest, it’s not even a bad excuse, because it’s true.

    But just like anything else in life, parenting has two sides. If you only look at the side that drains you, you’ll never get anywhere. The trick is finding the positive.

    For me, I’ve noticed two big things that stand out.

    1. Kids Force Me to Be Strategic With Time

    I didn’t realize this until my kids went away to summer camp. Suddenly, I had all this free time. My first thought was, “Finally! I’ll use this time to dive into my projects and catch up on everything I’ve been putting off.”

    But that’s not what happened. Instead, I found myself watching movies. Doing random stuff. Basically, wasting the time I thought I needed so badly.

    It hit me: it’s not the kids that stop me from working long hours. It’s me. Humans just aren’t built to grind endlessly. If it’s not kids eating my time, it’ll be something else. The only difference is how I feel afterward.

    With kids around, I may not have unlimited time, but my days feel full. Without them, I had all the time in the world and ended up feeling empty. That was a wake-up call.

    2. Kids Change the Way I Make Decisions

    Making decisions is hard. There are always too many angles, and it’s easy to overcomplicate things.

    What I’ve started doing is asking myself one simple question: “What do I want my kids to be like when they grow up?”

    Do I want them to be disciplined? Curious? Resilient? Skilled in certain areas?

    Once I answer that, I try to live it out myself. Because they shouldn’t carry the weight of my unfinished dreams—that’s my job. If I want them to read, I should be reading. If I want them to be disciplined, I should practice discipline. It’s not about telling them what to do, but showing them.

    Wrapping It Up

    So yeah—having kids takes your time, no question. But it also gives you a perspective you can’t get any other way. They make you treat time with more intention, and they give you a simple filter for making decisions that actually matter.

    In a way, parenting doesn’t just shape your kids. It reshapes you.

  • Always Remember: Life (and almost everything in it) isn’t supposed to be linear

    The most immature type of thinking is that life is linear.

    You put in X amount of work and you get Y amount of results.

    Just like in school.

    But you are not.

    You are in this imperfect society where no one thing determines the result, but a thousand of things. Any one thing has correlation with the final result, but no causation. 

    And above all, it is okay to zigzag. Don’t get impatient. 

    I personally have to remind myself on this a lot. 

    Additionally, results don’t come in fixed time slots periodically. They come in unexpectedly, more often than not. Having expectations will throw you off balance.

    The last thing I want to put it out there – something controversial to an extent – is that you should NOT give your 100%, or what them boys like to say, going ALL-IN. 

    Because the other side of the “ALL-IN” coin is expecting great things to happen. But life doesn’t care if you’ve given 100% or 5%; it’s not about you.

    So always give 70%, and expect 5%. This is the only way to keep you going for a long time, even without any visible result.

    Nothing makes sense, for a long time, until it does. 

    Until then, keep at it. 

  • How Do You Change Your Life? Start by Playing Like a Kid

    2024 has been passing fast. 

    In 2023, I was still busy with my business school application, writing essays and preparing for interviews, but that part of my life is now behind me. Since then I entered the field of solopreneurship by reading the book Doing Content Right by Steph Smith, a field entirely new to me. It’s been a process, and I want to share my learnings along the way.

    The importance of having clear directions, not goals

    Having clear goals is important. With it you will be able to move in a focused direction with your limited resources. Lots of people have stressed the importance of having and setting clear goals. 

    If you don’t know where you want to go, you are not going to get there.

    Having said that, sometimes it is okay not knowing where you want to go, especially at the beginning of your journey.

    Goal-setting itself could be ambiguous. If you think about it, are you making your goal for the long-term, mid-term, or short-term? These goals could be drastically different, sometimes even in conflict. If you drill further down you could go to the place of the meaning of life. Even one step shallower, the meaning of the cause you want to dedicate your life for. You can get paralyzed just by thinking about how to set your goals. 

    Goals are important. However, don’t let your goal setting stop you from taking actions.

    I’d argue that goals are overrated. Instead, having a clear direction is enough. For example, my direction is moving toward having freedom, and achieving financial freedom is the first step. Anything I do will be judged against 1) freedom and 2) financial freedom, and if it’s in direct conflict with any of them, I will move away from it.

    You should be clear about where you want to end up in five years, and it’s okay to be ambiguous with where you want to be next year.

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    function ml_webform_success_14362371() { var $ = ml_jQuery || jQuery; $(‘.ml-subscribe-form-14362371 .row-success’).show(); $(‘.ml-subscribe-form-14362371 .row-form’).hide(); } fetch(“https://assets.mailerlite.com/jsonp/918262/forms/119754241083442421/takel”)

    Trade your goal setting with system building

    Your goals actually change over time, so it’s not the end of the world if you don’t know exactly what you want to accomplish, especially in the beginning. For example, I could have set a clear goal of achieving 5,000 subscribers and making my first 1,000 dollars by mid-2024, but I know that might intimidate me from taking actions. In the beginning, I know very little about newsletter, blogging, SEO, hosting, and everything that’s a little bit technical. The learning curve is simply too deep. Besides, as a perfectionist I could fall into the old trap of trying to learn everything first before taking any action, which in return would be detrimental to the whole learning process. 

    “I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.”

    System building, while sounding complex and enterprise, actually can mean very simple things. For example, at its minimal it just means writing down the three things you do first thing in the morning. You wake up, grab some coffee, and check your emails. That’s it. The second day, you repeat the same process. Then the day after. That’s your morning system.

    The beauty of a system-building mindset is that you can slowly optimize on your system, step by step. For example, if you are a morning person and find yourself at your peak creativity in the morning, you soon will realize that you’d be better off dropping the email-checking routine in your system and replace it with a 90-minute coding/writing/anything, etc. You do this automatically because you know exactly where you want to end up five years from now, even though your immediate goal for the day is unclear. As you move foward your goal will surface almost automatically.

    But before you get to the system building phase, give yourself permission to “just play”

    All human beings were born with the skill to explore and play. When we were kids, we all had this innate curiosity to try things out and ask questions. This was evident in my children who are asking questions and poking around the apartment ALL THE TIME (I try not to lose it). 

    Why is it important to “just play”? Well as adults our lives are very much organized around our work. You’ve already created your “system”, aka. your routines. Doing anything outside of your existing routine will take conscious energy, and it doesn’t feel good.

    You feel like a child again. 

    I actually only come to realize this while writing this post. A child doesn’t have any skill other than the God-given crying, eating, drinking, etc. As she grows up, she will encounter numerous first occasions. Sometimes she gets frustrated, crying for your attention or throwing things all over the place; other times she solves it by sheer curiosity and intuition, or the ability to play. Playing is actually a low-cost way for children to figure out this complex world.

    As adults, we no longer have our parents attending to our emotions, and because we want to avoid the frustration and all the negative emotions, we gradually lose the ability to play. This can be very harmful to entrepreneurs, who encounter new problems, concepts, and information all the time.

    Why is “playing” important?

    At the beginning of anything new, you will not be able to know all the required elements of all the different pieces involved. For me while trying to build an online business, I didn’t know what I was facing. I have a habit of getting in this perpetual learning stage and all I do by then will be reading books and watching videos, and I didn’t want to repeat this mistake. 

    Understanding that it’s important to first build the habit of creating stuff online, I’ve decided to follow this mindset of just playing with it, even though I wasn’t sure about what to accomplish. Rest assured, I know my final destination, which is to build an online business that will help me achieve freedom eventually. 

    My goal, at this point, was to just get a sense of the different pieces involved in creating an online presence.

    I followed the steps illustrated in the Doing Content Right book and first invested in a domain name. Without spending too much time on it, I simply picked my own name – Michael Shoe – and used it. Then it was Ghost, Google Analytics, etc., as well as a bunch of other platforms. 

    None of these was easy for me at the time. My strength is in understanding and learning about concepts, i.e. structures about a new industry, concepts on why somethings happens, etc. I’m quite slow, on the other hand, on learning tools, or any skill-based information.

    However, it turns out that playing around is learning on steroids. I could have easily dwelled in Youtube watching about Google Analytics for hours before even typing it in my browser. That, looking back, would have been much slower. Playing is exploring disguised under the cover of adulthood so you don’t stop in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

    The next steps

    To be honest I haven’t had much success in my online initiative. I have yet gained any new subscriber since I’ve started, and made zero dollars. However, I’m no longer afraid of the technical aspects of things and are much more willing to explore. The biggest job for me right now is to find my niche that resonates with 1,000 people.