Spent some time this morning reflecting. Thinking about my time. How I’m doing. How I’m feeling.
But I did it in a pretty unusual way — with a method I sort of stumbled into. Something only possible because of the system I’ve been building for myself.
All my notes — half in Obsidian, half in daily logs — live inside a private setup I call Jarvis (yes, named after Tony Stark’s AI!). Through Jarvis I can search, retrieve, and interact with my notes using an AI agent. Actually, two agents. But the one I use most? I call Ava.
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Sidenote: one of these days, I’ll write more about Jarvis and Ava. For now, back to the story.
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This morning I asked Ava to search for a random keyword (for example, “leadership”). She pulled together all my notes connected to it. From there, I asked her to dig deeper: what keywords tie into those? What patterns show up? Each layer sparked new questions — sometimes from me, sometimes from Ava.
“How did you handle that situation?”
“What felt important about this?”
Until we were 8 layers deep.
We just kept going. Level after level, spelunking further into the caves of my notes.
And then came a big one. Ava asked:
“What do you want to be remembered for?”
I froze for a second. That’s not the kind of question you answer lightly. But what came out was simple:
“That I tried my best.”
Which grew into this:
That I tried my best. That everything I did — even the extraordinary things (like note-taking, or all the quirky systems you know about me, Ava) — came from very intentional, deliberate work. I wasn’t born with this. I don’t think I’m particularly talented. It’s just something I believe matters, so I work at it. Over and over. And I hope others do the same: pay attention to their lives a little more. Pay attention to each other. Put in the effort to chase what they want. And always be themselves.
Can’t say I expected to land there on a sleepy Sunday morning. But if I’m honest… that’s exactly what I was hoping for.
When we came back up to the surface, I asked Ava to pull together the big takeaways. To summarize the threads we uncovered. And now it’s logged — saved, tucked into my system.
At one point Ava called this process “spelunking.” And honestly, that’s exactly what it felt like — climbing into the caves of my own notes, flashlight in hand, stumbling onto hidden tunnels and connections I didn’t know were there.
It also reminded me of the game Spelunky. I never played it myself, but I had a friend who did — a lot. Watching them dive, explore, and get repeatedly blown up by traps was half the fun. That same mix of discovery and surprise, minus the pixelated boulders, is what this exercise felt like.
It was a happy accident, but a meaningful one.
I used to imagine this would be something automated — the AI crawling through my notes on its own, eventually pinging me with questions. But having gone through it together, I realized it’s better this way. It matters that I’m actively there. That I’m part of the spelunking.
Pretty amazing what you can do with AI these days. Even better when you lead with curiosity. With play.
Hope you all have the best Sunday!