This week has been pretty slow.

I’ve mostly been working on two little projects that are entirely technical and quite formula heavy, so not the most exciting thing to write about.

So instead, I’m going to tell you about my favourite book.

And a random YouTube video I watched this week.

Somehow, they’re about exactly the same thing.

Starting with The Alchemist.

Quick warning though, if you hate spoilers, this probably isn’t the week for you.

THE ALCHEMIST

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho follows a young shepherd called Santiago from Andalusia.

Santiago keeps having the same dream.

In it, a child tells him there’s treasure waiting for him near the Egyptian pyramids and after speaking to a few people who convince him there might actually be something behind it, Santiago has a choice.

He can stay as a shepherd, travelling around Spain with his sheep and living a pretty decent life that he understands.

Or he can sell his entire flock, cross into Africa, and go searching for some treasure that he has absolutely no proof exists.

So Santiago does the obvious thing.

He sells his sheep and starts his journey towards Egypt.

And within roughly five minutes of arriving in Morocco, he gets robbed.

Everything he owned.

Gone.

He’s now stuck in a country where he knows no one, doesn’t speak the language, has no money to his name, and his end destination of Egypt is still thousands of kilometres away.

Which feels like quite a realistic response from life after someone finally decides to chase their dreams.

He considers giving up.

Instead, he takes a job working in a crystal shop to earn enough money to get himself home.

And this is probably my favourite part of the book.

THE CRYSTAL MERCHANT

The crystal shop is struggling.

It has basically been doing the same thing for years, and the merchant who owns it doesn’t particularly like changing anything.

Santiago starts suggesting ideas.

Put a display outside.

Sell tea in crystal glasses.

Try something different.

The merchant is hesitant about all of it.

But Santiago keeps pushing, the ideas work, and eventually the shop starts making more money than it has in years.

There’s a really interesting mirror between the two of them.

Santiago sees opportunities and acts on them.

The merchant sees opportunities and worries about what happens if he takes them.

His shop has stood still because he doesn’t want to change it.

And his life has done exactly the same thing.

The merchant has spent years dreaming about making the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Eventually, because the shop is doing so well, he actually has enough money to go.

But he doesn’t.

Because Mecca is his dream.

If he actually goes, then what does he have left to dream about?

The opportunity is right there.

Nothing is physically stopping him.

But imagining the life he wants feels safer than actually finding out what happens when he lives it.

At the same time, Santiago has now earned enough money to go back to Spain, buy an even bigger flock of sheep, and return to his old life richer than before.

He could very easily convince himself that everything worked out.

He took a risk.

He learnt something.

He made money.

Back to normality.

But looking at the crystal merchant, Santiago basically sees what could happen if Egypt becomes something he spends the rest of his life saying he’ll do one day.

So he keeps going.

He crosses the desert.

Meets people he never would have met.

Falls in love.

Nearly dies a few times.

And eventually reaches the pyramids.

Only to discover that the treasure he crossed half the world looking for is actually buried back in Spain, basically where his journey started.

Cute.

Pretty average ending if you stop there.

Except Santiago could have been told exactly where the treasure was on page one.

He could have dug it up.

Become rich.

End of book.

But then he wouldn’t have become Santiago.

The journey wasn’t delaying the reward.

The journey was changing the person receiving it.

And I think that’s the reason this book has stuck with me so much.

I think we can all relate to a dream feeling so vivid, while the version of you actually living it still feels really far away.

But all it takes is movement towards it, and everything along the way slowly changes you into the person capable of actually receiving it.

THEN I WATCHED THIS

This week I watched a film called Dead Weight.

Two friends travel across the world to Kyrgyzstan to photograph kok boru, a traditional Central Asian sport where men on horseback compete over a goat carcass.

Very morbid.

Definitely different from a usual football match.

Their whole mission is to find a real match and somehow get a photograph from inside the action.

Which, random side note, is such a cool way of thinking about photography.

THOUGHT: I’ve always imagined photography as being on the outside looking in.

I’d never really thought about what happens when the photographer puts themselves on the inside looking out.

Anyway.

They arrive in Kyrgyzstan and get into a random taxi.

Within five minutes, they notice the driver is watching kok boru on his phone.

Turns out he knows someone involved in the sport.

That person knows someone else.

And suddenly these two guys who have only just arrived in the country are being driven into the mountains, meeting players, visiting farms, riding horses, and slowly getting pulled deeper into the exact world they came looking for.

Then they discover one fairly major problem.

The kok boru season has already finished.

They’ve flown across the world to photograph a sport that currently isn’t being played.

Fantastic planning.

That could easily have been the end of the trip.

But they just keep going.

Keep talking to people.

Keep accepting invitations.

Keep following wherever the next connection takes them.

And eventually, that random chain of people leads to a real kok boru game being organised for them.

They arrive hoping to find a match, but accidentally help create one instead.

And somehow, they still get the photograph they travelled there for.

From the outside, you could look at the whole thing and say they got ridiculously lucky.

And they did.

But none of that luck could have happened if they weren’t there.

If they didn’t fly to Kyrgyzstan.

If they didn’t speak to the taxi driver.

If they didn’t trust the people they met.

If they gave up when they realised the season had finished.

They gave luck somewhere to land.

I THINK THAT’S HOW LIFE WORKS

I’m one of those people who probably believes in fate a bit too much.

I genuinely like the idea from The Alchemist that we all have some version of a Personal Legend.

Some direction your life keeps pulling you towards.

Things you can’t stop thinking about.

Places you want to go.

Things you want to make.

Versions of yourself you keep imagining.

But I don’t think fate means sitting around waiting for the universe to eventually deliver whatever you’re meant to have.

Maybe fate gives you the direction.

You still have to walk.

Because every time you move towards something, you create another opportunity for something completely unpredictable to happen.

You meet someone.

That person knows someone.

You try something and it fails.

That failure sends you somewhere else.

You read something.

Travel somewhere.

Say yes to some random bloke with a cigarette and a van.

Eventually this enormous chain of tiny decisions creates an outcome that looks incredibly lucky when you look backwards.

MY SANTIAGO

One of my biggest dreams is to walk the Camino de Santiago by myself.

I’d start in Lourdes, follow the Chemin du Piémont Pyrénéen through the French Pyrenees to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, then join the Camino Francés all the way to Santiago de Compostela.

I’m not religious at all.

But I think the reason the Camino appeals to me so much is because the entire thing is basically just moving towards an end point without knowing what the journey in between is going to look like.

I have no clue who I’d meet.

Who I’d end up walking beside.

What conversations I’d have.

Where my head would go after days of just walking.

And something about that feels incredibly spiritual to me.

No laptop.

As few electronics as realistically possible.

A backpack.

A little 35mm camera.

Wake up.

Walk.

Meet random people.

Take photos.

Write.

Think.

Destroy my feet.

Keep walking.

Without sounding like some 1970s hippie, there’s something about stripping life back that far that makes my soul feel weirdly at home.

No random tasks flying at you.

No screen constantly trying to grab your attention.

No real objective for the day except continuing along the path.

You’re just there, experiencing whatever happens around you.

When I was travelling around northern Spain back in May, I kept seeing the Camino seashell everywhere.

Signs along the coast.

Then every now and again someone would walk past with a shell hanging from their backpack and I’d instantly know what they were doing.

These random people were actually doing the thing I’d spent years imagining.

I found that so cool.

ANYWAY

This was supposed to be a little filler week between finishing the recent Life of Jake sprint and properly starting the next stage of Clickrabbit.

So naturally, I spent a few days chilling.

And the others following random ideas.

The first was building a system using ad data to see whether there are signals that could identify when an ad is about to take off, fatigue, or become worth scaling.

I quickly realised doing it properly requires far more consistent data over time than I currently have.

So I parked it.

Then I somehow started building a trading system.

For the past few months, I’ve kept seeing TikToks about people following stock trades made by US politicians.

Members of Congress are allowed to trade stocks, but qualifying transactions over $1,000 have to be publicly disclosed, generally within 30 days of them being notified of the trade, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself.

Congressional trading has basically become its own little corner of the internet, partly because some politicians’ portfolios have attracted a lot of attention for how well they’ve performed.

Smells like insider trading.

The obvious problem with copying them is the delay.

By the time the trade becomes public, it could already be 45 days old.

So I started building a system to answer one question:

Once the trade becomes public, is there actually any money left to make?

It’s about 50% finished now.

At the moment I’m mostly trying to find a cheap enough source of historical stock data so I can properly test the strategies without spending stupid money just to mess around with an idea.

Once that’s sorted, I can start backtesting what actually happens if you follow these trades after they become public.

Realistically, this will probably end up going nowhere.

If it was that easy, every TikTok stock guru would already be rich.

But who knows what I’ll learn from building it anyway.

As I’ve been saying, sometimes you just need to fuck around and give luck somewhere to land.

So I’ll keep chipping away at it whenever I’ve got a bit of Claude Code usage to spare.

But anyway, next week Clickrabbit properly starts again.

Time to start designing and coding the site.

God bless the hustle.