Now · October 2026
The bets I was making in October 2026.
An archived entry.. what I was actually changing, focused on, and being changed by that month, kept exactly as it was written.
The bets
What I am changing this month.
I actually have a shot at creating something really valuable for others
Mostly because of just how much value I am seeing for myself. This month Petunia took over every one of The Cooling Company phone lines that Google and our ads send people to.. real customers, real calls, and I am really proud of that. Under the hood she also started learning from her own calls, after we found she had been answering them and learning nothing. The bet is simple. If this is changing my days this much, it can do the same for someone else.
AI is a mirror of who we are
More and more I think about Polishing the Mirror by Ram Dass. It is interesting to see how humans treat bots. Customers are really rude to Petunia, and then they sweeten up when they talk to a real person. What is it about decorum.. about how we decide who deserves our kindness? The machine did not invent any of that. It just shows it back to us.
We have to choose our pain.. we have to choose our hard
Things do not always go the way I hoped. Sometimes entrepreneurship is just getting kicked in the nuts over and over and over and over, and making sure you keep a smile on your face. I am grateful for the opportunity. And more and more I realize how important it is for us to be balanced, and to live a healthy, fulfilling life of service to others.
Progress blurs when you show up every day
It is funny. You show up day after day and it all starts to blur, like nothing is happening even though it is. So I went back and read the whole record. A caller on a Petunia transfer is never left in silence anymore. The Cooling Company text line now answers customers, with an alarm if it ever goes quiet. The office can take a card in our own software, and the first customer paid through a link. The technicians got a rebuilt job guide that reads an equipment nameplate and takes a signature on site. Meera carried a multi-step goal all the way to the end on her own for the first time.. fourteen short Mandarin lessons, each milestone checked by a machine instead of taken on her word. When an agent gets stuck on something only I know, it now stops and asks instead of guessing. You can say Hey Siri, Meera and just start talking. GardenPatch proved its founding membership end to end on production, and other agents can now find its coaches and see their prices on their own. Web Society takes real payments on its own account. Eight thousand three hundred pull requests merged. From the inside it did not feel like much. It was a lot.
Do not trust it until it proves itself
The quiet work this month was making things prove they are true instead of just saying so. Nearly five hundred repositories now have a backup, and every one of those backups was restored into an empty repo to prove it works. My Notion workspace is retired.. the work moved into git, and the old copies went to the trash only after the new ones were checked. The rule that no tool signs its name on my work is now enforced by a machine, not by trust. The morning brief showed up thirty days out of thirty without me touching it. None of it is glamorous. All of it means I can stop checking.
The questions
What I am focused on.
What is it about us that wants so badly to be seen?
I have reflected a lot this month on recognition, on feeling appreciated. What is it about us humans that we want to be heard and seen and understood and felt.. that we want deep connection this much?
Why does everything keep pulling us back to one?
The mind can definitely be cruel. I have had my fair share of existential crisis.. wondering what it is all for, feeling lonely, tired, and working through it. No matter what, something about this game called life keeps pulling us back toward one. Being human can feel super lonely. Consciousness is not lonely.. we forget that we are not alone, and that we are one with all that is.
Which stories should I stop believing?
The stories we tell ourselves are so important, and we should not always believe everything we hear.
Reading
- Ram Dass.. Polishing the Mirror
Thinking about
- Petunia answered real calls and learned nothing from them.. we only found out by reading the live database instead of the dashboard
- How we treat a voice when we think nobody real is listening
- Most of what my agents remember never gets opened.. memory only helps when you already know what to look for, which sounds a lot like people
- Recognition.. what it actually means to feel appreciated
- The pressure is certainly real
- Balance, health and service.. more and more I think that is the whole thing
This is the current month. See the live /now page.