By Colby Kultgen
How to Enter Side Doors, The Ultimate Longevity Checklist, and Your AI Slop Bores Me
Read online / Read time: 4 minutes
Hello friends!
Here is your weekly dose of 1% Better.
The newsletter where I share my 5 favorite ideas, lessons, and discoveries of the week.
1. I'm back from Peru!!
I just took my first real break from work in 5 years.
Yes, you read that right, 5 years.
Sure, I've taken other trips during that time. But my laptop always came with me. Which meant despite my best efforts to unplug, I would inevitably end up sneaking away at some point to "just check one thing".
This time was different.
17 days in Peru. No Laptop. No email. No work.
To be honest, I was inspired by this advice from writer Scott Clary:
Schedule your fun first. The vacation. The dinner. The concert. The weekend trip. Put joy on the calendar before work fills it. Most people work first, play with what's left. There's never anything left. Book fun like meetings. Treat joy like obligation. Happiness needs planning too.
Work has always gotten first dibs on my schedule. So this time, I flipped the order. I booked Peru first and built everything else around it.
A few things I noticed:
- Parkinson's Law immediately came into effect and the weeks leading up to the trip were some of the most productive I've had in years.
- It was a good stress test for my business. Being gone for 17 days showed me exactly which parts run fine without me, and which parts only held together because I was always around to catch them.
2. An article I've been sharing with everyone - how to enter side doors
This should be mandatory reading for anyone in the job market.
The author describes it as "a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people".
But in my opinion, this is really about agency.
What happens when you stop treating the job market as something that happens to you and start treating it as terrain you can move through on purpose.
Here are a few of my favorite takeaways (but you should really read the full thing):
- Reframe what a job is. A job is not an object that exists on a board waiting to be found. It is a bundle of problems a group of people wants solved. Once you see companies as people with bottlenecks rather than logos with careers pages, the question shifts from "what's available" to "who is stuck, and can I help."
- The front door is broken, and not because you're unqualified. Job boards are saturated. Companies get hundreds of applications, increasingly AI-polished into the same language pulled from the job description. The channel itself is bad at detecting human signal, so competing only there means competing on the worst possible terrain.
- Side doors come in two shapes. Outbound is going directly to people and companies with a specific, useful offering. Inbound is making your thinking findable through public artifacts so the right people come to you. Strong careers usually run both at once.
3. A website where people pretend to be AI - your AI slop bores me
This is the most fun I've had on the internet in a while.
your ai slop bores me is a site that hands the chatbot's job back to real humans.
You type in a question, hit send, and instead of an AI answering, a random human somewhere on the internet does. You can earn more credits by answering other people's prompts.
4. A list of longevity hacks worth bookmarking
Some people think Bryan Johnson is a lunatic.
Personally, I find his maniacal quest to become immortal quite admirable.
The world needs guinea pigs willing to swap blood with their teenage son and swallow a hundred pills a day so the rest of us can just skim the results.
Anyway, he recently compiled everything he's learned into this list of (surprisingly simple) tips.
I'll be keeping it handy.
5. 😂
A few more things I'm into this week:
📝 Digital diary I've been playing around with: Digital Diary
🖍️ Article I read twice: The Mathematical Reason Most People Never "Make It"
📰 Quote that's living rent-free in my head:
"The art of good conversation is genuine curiosity." – Bella Dane
P.S. I got so many amazing responses to last week's prompt asking for your favorite discovery of 2026 so far. I'm still going through them all, but expect a "best of" edition within the next week or two.
— Colby
