May 31, 2026

Each weekend, I like to pause, reflect, and look back on the past week. This isn't meant to be a deep dive or sweeping life philosophy—just a collection of things that caught my attention, made me think, brought me joy, or stayed with me in some way.

Music

I love the sound of an electric guitar. It is one of the primary reasons I listen to the type of music that I listen to. As a teenager, I fell in love with instrumental guitar music. Joe Satriani was one of my favorites for many, many years.

But lately I've drifted away from that, at least until this weekend. I Built The Sky released his latest album, Promise Me You'll Thrive, and it is brilliant. It is a joyful, exuberant, beautiful, and at times very heavy work of brilliant guitar music.

Seriously, I just keep listening. It is so, so good.

Games

The next few will be short and sweet.

Yes, I am still playing Forza Horizon 6. Yes, I earned my legend wristband. And no, I haven't completed the 53.1-mile race around the island yet.

It is a ton of fun. I am loving it.

Books

I'm getting close to finishing Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 8. And I'm very, very excited to be done now. I don't know if reading a whole eight books in a row the way I did was the best way to go about it because, honestly, I'm pretty tired and burnt out right now.

There are not many, if any, series where I've read that many books pretty much straight in a row. So it will be a good time to take a break and move on to something different. And most importantly, something lighter.

Refinement

Honestly, I think this refinement may have been my biggest success yet.

Over the course of the month, I have developed a fairly comprehensive daily note system that integrates nicely with the task management system that I find myself using, engaging with, and actually being pretty excited to incorporate. Honestly, it's the best I've felt about my task management in maybe my entire life.

Stay tuned. The end-of-month write-up will be coming in the next day or two.

Quote of the Week

This week was an interesting one, with feeling under the weather taking a lot out of me. At the same time, I don't think any thought was more present in my mind throughout the course of the week than this idea from Aristotle.

In fact, it's been so present on my mind that working a number of things that I do to be sure. There's a purpose behind them. That I'm not just doing things to be productive, but that I am doing things with the purpose of becoming the version of myself that I aspire to be.

Sometimes that's difficult to do. Sometimes it is dramatically easier to sort of move on autopilot. And that can be helpful if that can be helpful if autopilot is helping us get to the place we want to go. But we have to make sure that we're taking time to stop and to assess, to look at the course we're on, and if necessary, make some minor adjustments. That's what we have to do for any of the things we're doing to make sense.

This week on Generations, Aubrey and I talked about systems building in our lives. And an article I read this week really stood out because it emphasized the importance of making sure that our systems have soul.

Let's make sure our actions have purpose.

And that purpose should be to get us closer to that ideal, to reaching a state of eudaimonia, of thriving.

Area for Improvement

It sounds a bit like a cheat, but given I felt pretty sick most of the week, and I still managed to get quite a few things done, I'm just gonna give myself a big old W here.

Looking Ahead

The biggest thing I want to mention is that I am currently working on an entire site redesign for Imperfect Practice. I don't know how many people see it that way, but I hope that it will make the site more engaging and will hopefully encourage people to sign up so that we can grow this little community. Stay tuned. It will be coming soon. But I want to make sure that it is well tested before I roll it out.

Wrapping Up

It feels like there's a lot going on. It feels like there's always a lot going on. I keep coming back to the idea of making sure to dial back at times. It's hard. But that's because it's so important.