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Rob Stickler

Things I actually do

Not a list of aspirations. These are the things I spend real hours on. Most of them are the same activity wearing different clothes: incomplete information, a decision anyway, and a scoreboard afterward. The rest are maintenance on the machine that does the deciding.

Sun burning through marine-layer fog over a harbor jetty at dawn
Red sunrise sky over Pacific Coast Highway, palms and signal lights in silhouette
Aloe and yucca on a bluff over the Pacific, red aloe bloom in the foreground

  • Chess

    Chess club as a kid, several hours a day. I came back to it this year and I am training two- and five-minute blitz. I built myself a coach for it rather than buying one.

  • Poker

    Same appeal as chess with the information removed. I care more about whether a decision was correct than whether the hand won, which is why the app I built grades the decision and not the result.

  • Football and baseball, instrumented

    I watch a lot of NFL and MLB, and I could not leave it alone. An agent pulls batter-versus-pitcher history every morning at 4:30, a live rail texts me mid-game when something worth seeing is happening, and my fantasy lineups run on a daily automation. Fandom, but with a scoreboard.

  • Detective dramas

    My fiction of choice, and it is the same shape as chess and poker: somebody with incomplete information refusing to guess before the evidence is in.

  • Cold, heat, and light

    I use them every day. Not a brand posture. It is how I know whether a protocol is something a real person will keep doing.

  • Breathwork and meditation

    Daily, and usually next to the cold. Two minutes of slow exhales changes what the plunge costs, and knowing that firsthand is worth more than citing a study about it.

  • Trails and beach walks

    The Orange County coastline, most days. It is where the hard problems get worked on without a screen in front of them.

  • Longevity, practiced

    Training, protocols, and an unreasonable number of smoothies. The goal is to still be doing everything else on this list decades from now, and I only keep the protocols I actually follow.

  • Reading, distilled

    I have run 27 books through a distillation system that maps an author's framework onto my own. The first run caught two fabricated claims in its own output on a verification pass. That result is why I trust the system a little more and the model a little less.

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