I started thinking about what I wanted these weekly updates to be about. I didn’t have a plan when I started, and I’m only now thinking about what the plan should be. One idea that came to mind was “Building in Public,” which means being open about the steps I’m taking to turn Way of the 108 into a service and maybe a product. I planned on committing to that idea today, but I thought I should think about it for at least another week. The other idea I had was doing “X of the Week” where I picked my favorite photo, video, quotes, etc. from the week and shared it here. Not sure what I’m going to do yet…

Video of the Week

I just highly enjoyed this detailed breakdown of the fighting game genre.

Way of the 108 Update

I’ll go ahead and start building in public today. I thought about a lot of things this week. I started by thinking about where I would want to post videos for Way of the 108 content. I’m thinking about making short videos answering questions that I see posted on Reddit and using those videos to drive traffic to a landing page of some kind. I wasn’t sure if I should make a new YouTube channel or just start doing it on my main YouTube channel. I ultimately decided to do it on a new YouTube channel so that I can keep that brand separate from my personal account. I want to keep my personal account for doing personal stuff like these updates or, in the future, vlogs that are outside of my room.

Another thing I thought about was whether I should charge for the next cycle of the 108 or not. I’ve landed on doing a “pay what you want” model for now. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that I’m just stepping into what feels like real (calm) stability. I shouldn’t really be counting my chickens before they hatch on this. My history, for the 7 years that I’ve been tracking the 108s, is not one of calm stability. It’s the opposite of that. I would hate to charge someone money and then fall off the planet. The other reason is that I’d like to get more experience guiding someone through a 108. I have experience with friends and family, but doing it with new people from the internet will be a new experience. I’m currently working with one person from Reddit and that’s going really well, but I definitely need to work with more people.

I suppose that can roll into focusing on building community first. This is a strange one because I’m not 100% sure where to build this community and how to make the community communal. Even if I built up a large YouTube page, that’s not a real community. Building up a subreddit has community vibes, but it’s not real community. The can be Facebook groups. Discord is an option (that I’m not super familiar with). None of these really feel like community. Typing this out… I suppose they could all be community. It’s how they’re utilized that makes it a community or not.

The last thing I’ll mention is the scale of the project and the speed I need to operate at. I started this project with the goal of doing 108 108-day cycles. That’s 36 years in total. I’m currently at Cycle 18, which is the end of year 6. I want to impact as many people as possible with this system. The way I want to do it is slowly and exponentially. Right now I’m in the slowly phase. I could be here for another 12 years and that’d be fine. I’m just telling myself this because old me would want to see exponential growth… tomorrow!