Dad, Yogi, Searching — Why the Order Matters

Dad. Yogi. Searching for what to build next. That’s the order for a reason.

I’m on day 197 of a daily meditation streak. Twenty minutes, every morning, before the kids wake up. My wife can tell when I miss one. Not because I tell her, but because the version of me that shows up without it is noticeably worse.

People ask about the search. What I’m looking at, what the thesis is, what I’m building. The agentic commerce angle, the DTC brand, the shop-cli experiment. All valid questions.

Nobody asks about the 20 minutes before all of that.

Some days the build runs long enough that I hit my AI token limit before I’m done. When that happens, I do yoga until the window resets. It’s the most honest productivity hack I have.

The search I’m doing is genuinely uncertain. I don’t know which of the things I’m building will matter. I don’t know if the timing is right or the market is there. I’m making decisions in conditions where the honest answer is “I don’t know yet.” That’s not a problem to solve. That’s just the territory when you’re lost in the idea maze.

The quality of those decisions has almost nothing to do with how much research I’ve done. It has a lot to do with whether I sat for 20 minutes before opening my laptop.

The order, dad, yogi, then the work, isn’t a productivity system. It’s just what I’ve noticed. When I get it right, the search feels like something I’m doing deliberately. When I skip the practice and go straight to the screen, it feels like I’m being carried by it.

I’d rather be the one doing the carrying.

What comes before the work for you?