The project / The record
Mini-Max
Three years. One big experiment.
The big experiment
At my school, a Mini-Max Project is one big thing you stick with for three years — sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. It can change when I learn something new. It is supposed to be big enough for me to be wrong and keep going.
Mine is SAE
I’m building SAE to meet and celebrate student-athlete entrepreneurs: people who are learning, training, and building something at the same time. Think: school, sport, and making room for other people’s stories all in the same week.
Why this one?
I go to a school built around new technology. I’ve done competitive gymnastics almost as long as I can remember. My family starts companies for fun. Right now we’re starting another one as a full family team. It’s called RoutineMastery, and it’s for families like mine. If you have gymnastics in your family, you should check it out. It’s pretty cool.
Those four things don’t usually show up in the same person. I didn’t plan it that way. It means I get to learn from the middle of it instead of only reading about it.
Here’s the thing I notice: I can make something that looks finished in an afternoon. So can the kids sitting next to me. That part is normal now.
So I think the hard part is getting someone to care. If making it isn’t the hard part anymore, then the hard part is being worth listening to. I might be wrong. That is one of the things I’m testing over the next three years.
I want a place to celebrate people who are learning something hard, training for something hard, and building something at the same time. I want to ask what that is like, share what they learn, and help create opportunities for more people to try it.
I also need to learn how this works. If I’m going to build things for a long time, I have to learn how to find people, listen well, explain value, and be worth their time. This is my practice field.
The clock
Academics are in the morning. Afternoons are for this — one to two hours, five days a week. Over three years that’s somewhere between 600 and 1,200 hours.
I plan it in two-week pieces. About twenty a year, across roughly forty school weeks — so about sixty over the three years.
Competition season runs November through April, so it overlaps the school weeks. Those cycles are lighter on purpose: one conversation and one written page, not a big build. Summer is the freest stretch I have. It counts if I work then, but I don’t plan on it.
Every two weeks
The cycle
01
One skill
Level up one thing.
02
One person
Learn from somebody.
03
One finish
Complete something real.
04
One page
Write what changed.
The rule underneath everything
Does it hold?
01
Do the work
02
Measure honestly
03
Advance or find the hole
If it holds, move forward. If it breaks, find the exact place and try that part again. No dramatic reset required.
How I’ll know it’s working
I wrote these down before I started, so I can’t move them later.
Year one
I can name every part of a media company and say what each one is for. And I shipped what I said I’d ship, on the day I said it.
Year two
Someone I don’t know asks to be on it. A guest sends me another guest without me asking.
Year three
An invitation shows up that I didn’t ask for.
If those don’t happen, that’s information. It isn’t failure.
Keep the receipts
This is where I keep what happened, what I expected, what surprised me, and what I got wrong. The wrong part is on purpose. It’s the only part nobody can fake later.
No field-note index yet. This page is static. The dynamic note system, [slug] routes, and MDX pipeline wait until a first real field note exists — building the container before the content is exactly the horizontal build this project keeps failing at.
Where I am right now
It’s the summer before sixth grade. The clock hasn’t started. I haven’t recorded an interview. Nothing has been published yet.
When there is a real field note, it will be added here. Until then, the honest record is that the project is still at the beginning.