Chappy Asel

@divvsaxena It's from a Mark Twain quote – "eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." Basically: tackle your hardest, most important task before anything else. Once it's done, everything else feels easy!

@chappyasel What does eat the frog means?

I wake up at 3:45am every single day. It sounds crazy, I know! But it's honestly the best thing I've ever done for my productivity and here's the whole morning routine 👇 🌅 The Morning 3:45am – Wake up (Apple Watch alarm, smart lights auto-on) 4:30am – Pre-workout + eat the frog 5:30am – Move to desk, make my bed 6:00am – Lift 🏋️ 7:15am – Deep work 7:45am – Shower 8:30am – Protein shake 8:45am – Prep tomorrow's AM (The evening wind-down is its own whole system – I'll break that down in a future post.) "Eat the frog" = tackle the single hardest, most important task of the day first, before the flood of meetings and messages hits. This one habit alone has been a game-changer. People always ask me why so early. Honestly? 1️⃣ It's easier than you think! I sleep the same hours as everyone else – I just shifted the window. Commit for two weeks and your body adjusts. 2️⃣ I get 3+ hours before anyone can reach me. No Slack pings. No meetings. Just deep, uninterrupted work on whatever matters most. 3️⃣ My workout is locked in before 7am. There's zero room for "I'll go after work" negotiations 😅 4️⃣ I only have to shower once – post-workout and pre-meetings line up perfectly. One less decision. 5️⃣ My rule: at least 4 hours between alarm and first meeting. Enough to fit the full routine without rushing. 6️⃣ By the time most people's day starts at 9am, I've already been at it for 5 hours. That compounding over months and years is wild. The backstory: I was a total night owl growing up. Then I started cutting for a natural bodybuilding competition, my hormones shifted, and I started waking up at 4am, 3am, sometimes 2am – completely wired. Instead of fighting it, I built a system around it! Haven't looked back since 2022. This is the first in a series where I'll break down every piece of this system – alertness engineering, caffeine protocol, sleep optimization, evening routine, and recovery strategy. Follow along if you want the full playbook! 🚀

I used to think luck was random. After reading The Luck Factor, I’m convinced it’s a skill. Looking back, a lot of the best things in my life trace back to what felt like luck at the time – my first app taking off, landing at Apple, a few texts to friends turning into a 200,000-person community. But after reading this book, I think most of it was actually patterns I didn’t have language for yet. Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying consistently lucky vs unlucky people. Lucky people aren’t winning more lotteries – they’re living differently. He distilled it into 4 principles: 1️⃣ Maximize chance opportunities Build a broad network. Break routines. Talk to strangers. Anxiety narrows your field of vision – relaxation widens it. The broader your surface area, the more "luck" finds you. I saw this firsthand – I sent a few texts when ChatGPT launched, started a small weekly meetup, and that single decision led to co-founders, investors, and eventually The AI Collective. Every "lucky break" traced back to showing up. 2️⃣ Trust your intuition 90% of lucky people trust gut feelings in relationships. 80% trust intuition for career decisions. Your unconscious processes far more than your conscious mind. Lucky people listen to those signals instead of rationalizing them away. 3️⃣ Expect good fortune Optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lucky people attempt things even when odds are slim and persevere through failure. They expect interactions to go well – and that warmth changes how people respond to them. 4️⃣ Turn bad luck into good See the upside in every setback. Don’t dwell – take constructive action. Lucky people are convinced misfortune works out long-term, and they actively prevent the same bad luck from recurring. Honest take: the principles aren’t groundbreaking individually. What’s valuable is the research. Wiseman ran experiments, tracked hundreds of people, and showed these behaviors are genuinely teachable. Unlucky people who adopted them reported better luck within months. The one thing I keep coming back to: luck isn’t something that happens to you. It’s a skill you can practice. What’s the "luckiest" thing that’s ever happened to you? I bet if you trace it back, there’s a decision or a behavior that made it possible! 🍀

Full routine with supplements, rationale, and all the details: chappyasel.com/routine

🧑‍💻 Apply to pitch here 👇 aic.so/demo

🎟️ See you there 🫡 luma.com/sfp

$2.5M raised by last SF Pitch Night’s winning startup, $5.6M the event before that. Who’s next?? ANNOUNCING OUR ESTEEMED JUDGES: ⭐ @marianebekker, @foundersbay ⭐ Leonardo Rocchetti, Plug and Play Tech Center ⭐ Jason Nyeh, Roundtable Ventures ⭐ Ellen Damaso, Plus Ultra Capital Partners ⭐ Mohak Saxena, Race Capital Excited to take the stage with them. And yes, we’ll be donning the infamous BUILDER VESTS!! 👷 See you there! Links to apply to pitch and RSVP in the comments 👇

7 weeks into the cut and making consistent progress! A tad behind where I want to be but definitely closing the gap. Including a few clips from recent workouts! 💪

@Scobleizer @AICollectiveCo Ofc!

@chappyasel @AICollectiveCo That is useful, thanks!

1,034 AI events are happening around the world right now. Here's where to find every single one of them! 🌍 We built the @AICollectiveCo events page into a global events hub now aggregates from our friends at Luma, Meetup, AI Tinkerers, Cerebral Valley, and so many more in one page. Interactive map. Personalized alerts. One-click event submission. This is a massive step forward in our mission to make AI accessible, social, and local – everywhere. Whether you're in SF, London, or Tokyo, you can now find your community in seconds. 🚀 We want this to be the front page of AI events globally. And we're just getting started!!

@taheerBuilds @Scobleizer @AICollectiveCo Thanks man! 🙏

@chappyasel @Scobleizer @AICollectiveCo Yo, this looks so cool, bro like honestly, amazing. Love the interface.

📆 Check it out! 👇 aicollective.com/events

@dgrreen HAHA

@chappyasel 🤣

As seen on the streets of SF this morning:

The whole thing is open source if you want to do the same with your Weightlifting App data! github.com/chappyasel/Per…

Check out the full visualization here 👇 weightlifting.chappyasel.com

I put 8.5 years of training data into one chart. Every workout. Every set. 45,000+ data points – all from an app I originally built in high school. Then I put it on my website. I'm a competitive natural bodybuilder and I've been tracking every session on Weightlifting App since 2017. So this past week I took all that data and built a site to visualize it. My favorite part: I track PRs across 13 featured lifts spanning every muscle group, plot them over time, and fit an asymptotic curve to see where I'm converging. Right now I'm at ~94% of my estimated ceiling, gaining roughly 70 lbs/year across those lifts. The diminishing returns are real, but they're also what makes it fun! You can also see every single workout I've ever done in a yearly heatmap and click into any of them. The whole thing is open source – both the site and the data analysis pipeline. If you use Weightlifting App and want to do the same, the code is all there! Massive props to Claude Code for being an incredible pair-programming partner on this 🤓 Share more of what you're working on. Building in public – whether it's code, fitness, writing, whatever – is one of the best accountability mechanisms out there. And you never know who it resonates with!

Thanks Yi!

Still a WIP (always will be), but here it is! manual.chappyasel.com

I can be hard to work with. I wake up at 3:45am, I'm juggling 100+ conversations at once, and I might take over a week to respond to your message. (working on it, I promise!) I've known this about myself for a while. Over the past few years I've tried to get better – personality assessments, asking for honest feedback, and reading everything I could find on how to actually work well with people. At some point I realized I should just write it all down. My strengths, my blind spots, how I communicate, how I want to receive feedback, what I'm like at my best and worst. A personal operating manual. The thinking was simple: if you're going to work with me, you deserve a user guide. An honest document that says here's how I'm wired, here's where I fall short, and here's how to call me on it. Some of it was pretty hard to write: → My blind spots section is basically a list of ways I've let people down → I straight up say my trust in you is proportional to your agency, accountability, and candor – which is a high bar and I know it → I admit I might take 7+ days to respond to non-urgent messages (and yes, I know that's too long) I'm sharing this because I think it's something more people should try. The people around you can't read your mind, and "figure out my preferences through trial and error" is a rough onboarding experience. Writing it down felt like the least I could do 🙂

@amitc @AICollectiveCo I agree… I need a suit that fits! 😅

@chappyasel @AICollectiveCo First thought, better wardrobe sir.

Last week, @AICollectiveCo took the stage on Capitol Hill. Nine AI startups demoed their work to a room full of policymakers, builders, and community members — in a space where conversations about AI usually happen behind closed doors.