Wesley Phillips

I was at the gym this morning, earbuds in, and I put on music instead of a podcast. Nothing special about the song. But somewhere in the first minute I felt this ache in my chest, not pain exactly, more like something that had been compressed for a long time finally getting a little room to breathe. I almost didn't let it happen. There's a version of me that would have opened YouTube Music, seen the music playlist, and switched to an audiobook because at least that would be doing something. I caught myself about to make that swap. And then I didn't.

That small non-decision turned into an hour of thinking about what I've been doing to myself.

Over a year ago I started working with N8N, a self-hosted automation platform similar to Zapier that connects to basically any service you can imagine. They had a built-in AI agent builder that let me wire up my own bot using the OpenRouter API. This was before tools were a thing, before ChatGPT could search the web, before any of the major AI products had live internet access. My little bot could search the web. I remember showing that off to friends and feeling like I'd built something genuinely ahead of the curve.

Every draft of this post came back flat.

I'd describe the idea to Claude, get something back that was structured and coherent and said all the right things, and then I'd sit there trying to figure out why it didn't feel like mine. The arguments were sound. The flow was fine. But it read like a blog post about taste written by a system that doesn't have any. I kept editing, pushing it away from the centre, trying to find the version that actually sounded like me thinking out loud rather than an AI summarizing a concept.

That editing process is the whole point of this post.

In Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, there's an idea that caught my attention and stuck with me.

When musicians record a demo, they often fall in love with it. The specific sounds, the particular arrangement, all the little details that made it feel alive in that moment. But those details can become a cage. You can't expand a completed version when there's no room to grow.

So what do some of the best do? They write the demo out as sheet music. Strip it to the skeleton: just the melody, the chords, the structure. Destroy everything that isn't essential. Then hand it to the band and rebuild from the bones.

The result isn't a polished version of the original. It's something new, something with room to breathe.

I've had this vision in my head for years. The perfect note-taking app. Voice capture that transcribes instantly. AI that condenses my rambling into something useful. A fluid interface where I could zoom in and out of my thoughts like a map of my own mind.

I'd cobbled together something close using Obsidian and various plugins, but it never felt quite right. Then I discovered Claude Code, an AI that could actually write production software, and something clicked. I'd gotten pretty skilled at prompting. Maybe I could finally build the real thing, the app that matched my vision exactly.

So I started building.

My wife is Korean, and she has this way of teasing me that always lands harder than she thinks. She calls me 잔망 (janmang), which is a Korean word for someone who's mischievous, playfully silly, always clowning around. And honestly, she's not wrong. I've always been reactive, excitable, quick to jump into whatever energy is in the room. I get distracted easily, I talk too much, and I've always worn my emotions on the outside.

Then she'll say it: "You should be more like a tree."

In Korean culture, there's an adage about the ideal man. A man like a tree is someone who doesn't sway with every wind. He grows slowly, steadily, rooted in place, strong enough to shelter the people around him. He's not cold or rigid, just unmoved by the things that don't matter so he can show up fully for the things that do.

I used to brush this off. That's not me, I'm the fun one. Trees are boring. But then I became a father, and I started to understand what she meant.

I've been using a budget for over 15 years now. Even before I had a real job, before university, before any high-paying position, I started with You Need a Budget (YNAB). YNAB is an amazing tool that helps you create a budget. They offer classes on managing your budget and have principles like rolling with the punches, which means being flexible and adapting to changes. I loved this approach because it allowed me to give every dollar a job.

I just finished The Old Man and the Sea. It's a short book, maybe two hours of reading, but I found myself almost moved to tears at several points. Not because Hemingway told me to feel something, but because he left space for me to bring my own feelings to it.

I wanted to learn trading like a professional, not from YouTube personalities pushing their strategies, but from foundational knowledge drawn from the best traders and theory. No academy I know of offers this, but I knew the knowledge existed, it was just scattered and gated. So I overengineered the problem and built a system that could teach me.

Here's the first principle that changed how I think about money: money shouldn't be the goal. Money is meant to be used, or burned, to be effective. Think of it as gasoline or fuel. It must be used to create value, to transfer, or to make something out of it.

Traditionally, money was seen merely as a medium for exchange, but in today's world, it's much more than that. You don't just let it sit there. You can invest it, save it, change it, and make it work for you. When it's working for you, in essence, it's being burned to earn more. The idea isn't to hoard money but to create a feedback loop that gains you more.