Marking the Wins
The idea comes from Lara Hogan’s donut manifesto: if you don’t deliberately mark the wins, you blow right past them on the way to the next milestone. I wanted to do the same for both my hobby wins (volleyball) and career wins. I wanted to document these wins somewhere but never had a good platform to do so. Until building this site. There is now an Albums section to “shelve” the items I will mark my wins with.
The hats
My hats live on rotation. I grab one at random to play in, and whichever one I happen to be wearing when I win a tournament gets retired: off the sand, onto the shelf, never played in again. Lose, and the hat goes back in the rotation to wait for its shot.
The problem was that hats started piling up but the record lived in my head, and my head is bad at dates. Most of my tournaments run through 512 Beach, and their results have been posted to Instagram since I started. The history existed. Somebody just had to go read it.
Reading 1,279 Instagram posts
That somebody was Claude Cowork, running my browser, paging through every post on the account and reading captions for my name. A total of 1,279 posts from 2015 to the start of 2026 (no wins this year… yet). It came back with 15 first-place finishes and a screenshot of each winner’s photo. I combined these with other assorted wins to make up the final list.
The result is Volleyball Wins: a card for every first place with the retired hat, the date, the division, who I played with, and a link to the original post. A few hats (especially the older ones) are gone, but I did my best to match the hats I have with those from the photos. Twenty wins so far, 2018 to now, from a Men’s Unrated/B- (my first one with my long-time teammate, Bruno) to last December’s ladder league.
The sparkling water
Work wins go in Career Wins, and those get marked with a can of sparkling water instead of a hat. Same rule, different shelf. The first entry is a lychee QDOL (the Charmander can) for shipping Compass V2 this month. Promotions, launches, projects that survive contact with their users: each one gets a can.
Both albums grow from here. The hats slower than the cans, I hope…