January '24

Was NJ the greatest surf spot in the world for a month!?

pjmanning

NJ winter is on fire huh 🌊🔥😳🥶

Here's what's been going on...

  • Spent some luxury time in Lombok

  • Went up to Amed for a sailing primer

  • Moved into the ol’ faithful COVID hotel 😉 

CURRENTLY IN KERAMAS 🇮🇩

Anybody else have a wild start to their new year? 😳

I had a lot of moving parts to start 2024 so new year resolutions were on hold. To start the year, I ended up staying in Lombok a bit longer than planned to figure out my new housing situation in Bali. And I’m so happy I did - Lombok is really beautiful. It had me remembering the old days of living in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica when it was just a seasonal town before it blew up. There’s no doubt that South Lombok will be there in the next 5 years. It’s sad how fast places change and get developed these days 😢

A few of my longtime friends from Bali came to Lombok in the beginning of January so we rented a dope villa and had an amazing week…

After a week of fun, I stayed behind by myself to explore and I begrudgingly got back to the day job 😡. Life hack: a nice luxury hotel helps for those brutal weeks getting back to work.

The following week, me and my fellow rugrat, Lil, settled back into our COVID-era hotel in Bali where we both feel right at home - away from the crowds and with beautiful rice terrace and volcano views.

From there on out things chilled out a bit and we started getting settled into the new year…and I started thinking about what I wanted to do this year. One thing I’ve been putting off was learning to sail - so I went up to Amed on the north of Bali to take a quick few lessons out of a jerry-rigged local fishing trimaran. The wind kind of sucked so we spent more time putting up and taking down the sails to speed away from the rainy season squalls.

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WORK

Reflecting on 2023 - I realized one major thing from working for a corporate entity…

I’ve 100% gotten dumber 🙃

Yeah hard realization, and there’s so many factors to this…the tooling used (or not used), processes undertaken, red tape to get through, etc. It may be extra intense because I work in finance which, in general, is behind technology-wise, but I also don’t think big hierarchical companies are at an advantage today when so many new tools and technologies are being created daily.

Being lean and nimble is definitely at an advantage - but for the first time in my life I understand the golden shackles of a well paying job. My soul is a bit crushed at the moment (think an indie-musician being forced to play cover pop songs), but I’m starting the new year with plans to get back to creating things I’m stoked about.

PROJECTS

No more discount - but I added another fee structure to Travel Developer. Sometimes 1 request at a time doesn’t work for people/companies that want to work fast, so there’s a new Pro plan where you can submit 2 requests at a time.

Haven’t had time to work on StayLT but you can still sign up to be notified when it launches…tbd

SURF

Waves of the month...

Where to go in February...

Kauai, Hawaii

CONTENT

Surf

Remote Work

Travel

Product of the Month

People often confuse charisma for intelligence, confidence for competence, and beauty for virtue.

-Anonymous