Dropped about 25 pounds without working out much, feel great.
Eliminated anyone who is parasitic towards me, saved a lot of energy and time.
Scaled my agency/consultancy without any marketing, just referrals and word-of-mouth.
Collected a TB of nature/wildlife photos from my travels, written a lot of posts for a blog I am launching soon that covers a range of topics from minimalism, plant-based lifestyle, deep work, web development, UX design, creative service, entheogens, dhyana.
Mapped out an UX and schema for a platform that I will submit to YC. If rejected, try crowdfunding.
Consolidated my life goals and bucket list down a lot after realizing a lot of things lately.
I have never felt more whole, grounded, centered, focused, organized, stable before. :)
I would define 'parasitic' as anyone who takes up my time, energy, money, or well-being without giving much or anything to my life. I believe reciprocation and symbiosis are important to being healthy, balanced, and connected to nature.
I do my best to give more than expected to all my clients, friends, family, lovers. It's just my nature, I realized some people prey on people like me and it's my job to create boundaries if I am to be happy.
Good work speaks for itself. I always go the extra mile for my clients, I save them money, time, and effort. I am transparent with pricing and have a one-page contract that is very direct.
I did this to fund my travels while I did a lot of inner work. I am now equally focused on my own projects as I am on my contracts.
It's not for everyone, this is the only way I knew to maintain my course towards my highest aspirations.
No family responsibilities I take it? (As in you don’t have any kids). I think, off everything you listed if you were to do a 80/20 what’s the 20% here - eliminating parasitic relationships and having healthy habits ? Something different? You put out a long list but I think what the community is most interested is in understanding how they can make their (version of) big changes in their unfulfilled lives and what could they learn from your success. To that effect what’s the cornerstone or foundational things on which everything else was built in your case?
I feel a lot more clear minded, which makes deep work easier. I feel more in tune with my intuition, with drives my creativity. I don't waste time with people who have to drink/smoke to have fun. I make more time for my niece and nephew and my parents, I am a lot more patient with them.
I'm only 29 so this is all revolutionary for me, feels like I am hitting my full stride as I go into my 30's.
First let me say congratulations! I'm curious what triggered the change - I recently gave up FB and IG as well and honestly wish I had done it years ago!
Thanks! It was a number of things: knowing the emptiness of social media (for the most part), spending a lot of time out in the National Parks, taking care of my grandmother in her final month of life, dating an older woman for a few months, ayahuasca and bufo ceremonies, and knowing life is short.
All of this happened in the last year, so it was just a perfect storm of things at one time.
I'm living in a new paradigm I feel as I go into my 30's.
Thanks, I am grateful for all the time we had together. She was 86 and a widow for a long time, I am happy she isn't suffering anymore.
They are all pretty special but I really enjoyed Glacier National Park for the wildness, the bears, Going-To-The-Sun road.
I lived in Utah for a year and would highly recommend going there at least once to explore Moab and Zion areas. Grand Canyon is not far from Zion, it definitely lives up to it's name.
Honestly, I just realized that life is short and most people go to their death beds without realizing their full potential because they are occupied with social concerns. Many people drop the quality of their life by living an unhealthy lifestyle that is disconnected from nature.
This all really set in for me after my grandmother, who I was very close to, passed away in December after having a stroke in November. I helped take care of her because she took care of me when I was a boy. Also, my 43-year-old cousin passed away from ovarian cancer in July. Got news of a kid I met only once being murdered during a robbery, he was only 24.
These realizations are put into practice with each breath, thought, word, and deed with the Eightfold Path that Buddha laid out 2,500 years ago. It's as relevant today as it was back then.
People close to me have died, and I found rather than adding desire to realize full potential, it took away my enthusiasm, because it emphasised the pointlessness and futility of everything I could do and might do.
When those you love are gone, the emptiness is so obvious. Even though the trauma and grief gradually heal, any sense of purpose seems like an empty, made up story. You know you'll die at some point too, everything you do will be undone, and the world probably isn't real anyway. Why even live?
It doesn't stop me working on projects. But they do seem relatively pointless in the end.
The one thing that seems to give things I do value, is when others value them. I'm never sure if that's because they see something I don't, or if they are deeper into self-made illusions.
I don't mean trivia like clothes, status, social media. I mean things others really value, like time together, listening, caring, assisting, relief from poverty, their health, happy times, friendship, that sort of thing.
So from that point of view, I think social concerns of a certain variety are to be prized. Maybe they are the only thing that has meaning.
What you are describing is dukkha and it is something we all know deep down. Aging, sickness, and death are facts of life, this is part of samsara.
This can be seen however a person wants to see it. I am ennobled and encouraged by it, I value life more having seen death up close.
There is a balance and everything is interdependent, so nothing exists in isolation. I do my best work and thinking when alone at my desk or out in nature. Time away from society makes me value time with my family more.
I serve others and create value for them through my agency and I serve society at large with the things I am developing, maybe attending YC for. I have always strived to be of value to society, to make something of lasting value. Now I am.
Instead of living from the mind, I now live from the heart. It looks 'dumb' to the intellectuals but the 'simple people' of the world know this to be wisdom.
I am waiting to purchase this : Nokia 2720 Flip [1]. I think it would be a great replacement because it has 4G support, Google Assistant, Maps, and Whatsapp. Pretty simple but also, suffices basic needs.
Meditation is a bloated term in 2019, spiritual materialism is rampant as well. I am Indian-American and feel more connected to the Sanskrit words for things, they are simpler and more descriptive at the same time.
It includes core things like sleeping for 8 hours, exercising, eating wholefood plant based diet, drinking water, tea, focusing on one task at a time and setting and following through goals.
As for goals, I am genuinely in love with my Focus board I made a while back. Makes navigating life so much easier when you know where you want to go and can deconstruct the goals into actions.
Aside from all that I feel like the time I spent optimizing my workflow by learning great tools immensely valuable. I am now at the stage where I build my own tools to solve my own problems. And it feels great.
There is still like 2 people out 7 billion that abuse Karabiner to the extent that I do. In some ways it's sad how so many people are missing out on its power. On the other it gives me great leverage. Just need to use it wisely.
Another success has been writing in my journal openly for the last 2 years, every month. Been a huge mind cleanser. Here is most recent entry.
At the risk of being a bit off topic, it cracked me up that "DMT Breakthrough" is listed as one of your monthly goals.
Since I'm already off topic, I've always found the binary "either I broke through or I didn't" notion to fall a bit flat. I've talked to friends who described a "breakthrough" experience that to me literally sounded like a very low strength DMT trip. And people have all these weird criteria like "oh if you saw beings it was a breakthrough".
Anyway, despite disliking the arbitrarity of the term, speaking personally out of 30-40 trips I would describe about 2 of those experiences as a breakthrough. For me the biggest recurring motif is watching a new type of space being created in my mind's eye, composed of twisting/interlocking hyperdimensional fabric of sorts. Everything is made of these fibers. On another trip, I was "tapped" on the head by a floating orb that proceeded to direct my attention to a hypercube in which it felt like I could see what felt like an infinite number of lower-order spaces (but still >= 4D if I had to put a number on it).
[/off topic rambling]
To bring it back on topic, I find your 12 daily habits really inspiring and much more "focused" and actionable (yet still flexible) than some of the more "standard" list of habits I've come across. Thanks for sharing :)
That's interesting. I'm fascinated by psychedelics ever since I tried salvia, I learned just how strange consciousness is or rather our perception of reality. Salvia is so bizarre that it's impossible to put to words, the experience. It's also interesting how unlike other psychedelics it is, like LSD & tryptamines, it doesn't target the serotonin receptors but opioid.
I am not a believer in external entities or anything of that kind as I believe all these psychedelics do is show how powerful our brains are in constructing and reconstructing the raw input of the world. It's just so bizarre though that's all even possible.
Just a suggestion, but if you love creating your own tools and optimizing your workflow you might consider switching to linux with some tiling window manager and other improvements.
To be honest this might be one of the reasons not many people abuse Karabiner.
Cheers! Keep the good work but do not forget to rest as well!
Would be hard for me to move as I rely on some software that is mac only for my productivity. I use Linux as deployment environment. Trying to find time to learn Nix & NixOS. :)
Professionally, I won a poster award at a conference, mostly for my slick R ggplot visualizations analyzing delirium in elderly hospitalized patients. I've never won an award for my research or coding, so that was a joyful moment. Especially, given that 2 months earlier, I was crying under my desk on my 30th birthday due to work pressures and feeling totally lost trying to build huge datasets with SQL as a beginner.
Personally, I was asked to join two different folk bands, playing piano and singing. To any classically trained musicians, I'd recommend trying folk, there are great opportunities for your trained technical skills and playing with others (rather than solo) has been very uplifting to my musical happiness.
Self-taught, second profession, 38-years old, after just 1.5 years into my SWE career, lots of hard, deliberate work in an uncharted CI/CD space, and I've landed a role as a Site Reliability Engineer for a major player in the health insurance data domain.
105k base salary, typical benefits package, in a medium-COL US region. This puts me well-ahead of what I thought were already pretty aggressive goals I had set for myself.
The team I'm going to be working with looks like an excellent group of people, pleasant, hard-working, with an engineering-oriented mindset. I'll be working with a great set of technologies/infrastructure, applying interesting, useful techniques, and at a non-trivial scale.
I'm pretty excited to be doing what I'm doing and making good money doing it. Big change from 2 years ago, where I was not excited to be doing what I was doing, and making not great money doing it.
Quit drinking. Go to the gym. It can work wonders.
I was freelance copywriter. I decided to switch because the dynamics of the market for writers are brutal, and I didn't have the passion for it.
I switched to software engineering because there was I good strong likelihood I have a knack for it (turns out I do), that I was going to really enjoy it (turns out I love it deeply), and that there's good money in it (confirmed).
It was a calculated decision, though not a difficult one, and maybe the best I've made in my life so far.
I've succeeded in improving my health through diet and exercise.
A few months back I started weight training and I've managed to build enough discipline to become someone who works out regularly. My longer-term goal is to try and exercise at least 15 minutes every day, because currently I can only manage between 4 to 6 days out of a week. The number of health benefits I've experienced already is so crazy that I feel incredibly foolish for having waited so long to start doing this.
My dietary changes have been gradual and they generally feel sustainable. At the beginning of this year I was overweight and today I'm a normal weight. I never would've imagined this of myself, but I've learned to love salads and have started eating them regularly.
This year I finally found a flexible and comfortable job. I work only 25 hours per week (more or less). The income does not make me super rich (like FAANG engineers) but I live comfortably with the money.
I consider this situation as my recent success because I have a lot of time to work on other things (research, moonshot projects, online businesses).
I just published a book about blockchain this year. Last week I released an opensource blockchain project. Later I want to build an online educational business (something like pyimagesearch.com, egghead.io) but this time it is not about blockchain anymore. :)
In the future (maybe 2 years later) I want to do some research on drone.
Sounds wholesome, I think if you have good self motivation you can always do interesting things in your own time. Sometimes I feel like you have to make it a bit of a routine, but it pays off.
I finally found a somewhat cure for my long-time shoulder pain which also helped to develop costochondritis. After several medical tests and lots of hours invested into researching the problem myself (as doctors just provided NSAIDs and PT didn't help much) I was able to be almost pain free after such long time.
Physical illnesses, even if only mildly disabling, do affect your day-to-day mood very negatively.
Dead hangs are great but unfortunately I can't have such setup at my current location. It didn't offer any lasting fix either. What worked for me best was:
- Myofascial release of pec minor/major with theracane (generic one bought in a well-known chinese webshop).
- Doorway stretches.
- A physical device that's rock-shaped on which you lay down and safely stretches the sternum/ribs area.
- I avoid smartphone use whenever possible, and try to use the mouse with the left hand (or no mouse at all if possible).
I might be forgetting something but that's more or less what helped me.
It's sometimes challenging to find where you need to work on since many times treating the location where the pain is originating may not be the real source. For example: pec minor may be totally tight, which causes pain when breathing in the shoulder blades/sternum/ribs, you go to the PT and PT massages for example the shoulder blades but in reality that'll do nothing since it's just the end of the chain.
But on a positive note, you get to learn a lot about anatomy :)
+100 for doorway stretches and the wisdom that what hurts in our lower extremities may be because of the start of the chain (shoulders, back). Thanks for sharing this with those who may not have yet come to this important realization.
I started a very niche open source pet project to scratch an itch (I'm a musician that uses Linux, and I wanted a decent Linux native hall-style reverb plugin). Somebody from halfway around the world jumped in and built a GUI for it. Now a small handful of people from around the world rave about how much they love it.
1. Do you do your production in Linux? If so what hardware interfaces and DAW are you finding works for you?
2. Did you have audio programming experience before starting this project? I really want to learn more about audio signal processing but am not sure where to start.
1. I'm using a first-gen Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 and Ardour.
2. I didn't have any experience with DSP programming before this project. I mostly just wrapped an existing library, but I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of delving more into the algorithms now.
If you're interested in trying something, a colleague and I are considering modernizing Rakarrack (an aging guitar effects bundle), you could jump in before we get started developing it. Here's our fledgling github repo:
My wife and I recently paid off all of our credit cards and started saving up for a house. We started trying to pay off our credit cards about 4 years ago, so it feels like a big accomplishment.
It's an alternative to YouTube/Patreon for animators. It has better monetization options for them, and will have easier sorting/filtering of animations + I am working on some tools like in-browser frame editor.
No advertising, all word of mouth and about 40k people are using it each month which is cool. Our Discord should hit 1,000 animators and fans soon too!
I just passed 100 consecutive days of workouts! At least a one mile run or 20 minute Peloton ride every day. Lower impact days allow for 'active rest'.
Was a tough start, too, with a calf sprain almost right away, on Day 5. Even managed to fit in workouts on international travel days!
Congratulations. This is no easy feat. I have started and failed several times trying to work out regularly. It’s not easy to break the cycle of excuses. Any tips would you like to share ?
Lots of past failures under the belt, but I just started tasting success today only! My simple word game "Word Hookup" is showing on the US app store's Today page, in the "5 New Games We Love" category. Until last week I had a handful of downloads, and the number is now increasing exponentially. Loving it :)
https://www.wordhookup.com
After many months of working on a product, I finally managed to (soft) launch it a few days ago. It definitely took way longer and turned out to be way harder than I expected it to be (it usually does).
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed working on the static site side of things even though it is dead simple: just good ol' HTML and CSS. No frameworks, no complicated builds, no third party trackers, and almost no JS. As a result, I managed to bring down the page load time to less than 500 ms (3kb when gzipped).
The goings on with someone else's lifestyle business does not affect my own; nor does my business affect yours. I started about 2 years ago, it's the same stack I used at my job since customers don't care what stack you use as long as they get value from it. I have tried to start businesses of various kinds for several years with varying success. This is the first one that hit big and seems sustainable.
I recently published a paper (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/OrthogonalArraySampling201...). I had some serious doubts when I was starting out, and it was a pretty tough endeavor. In the end, we made it! I got to present at EGSR which was really exciting too.
Obtained industrial premises for a robotics business I conceived 4 years ago and began to invest in significant hardware for insourced manufacturing and further acceleration of future R&D. Received unprompted, personal email regarding direct corporate investment from billionaire investor chairing multibillion conglomerate. Initial hires (and one fire) toward daily operations management delegation.
YTD I've reduced the time required for a monthly reporting process by over 16 hours by making better work instructions and automation enhancements. It's still quite manual, but not as much as it used to be.
While I only found the article recently, I naturally ended up in a similar work flow to this great article on incremental improvement.
I successfully quit my job without getting a new one lined up. I wanted to have an experience similar to the Recurse center, and focus on Rust and Clojure, however I also wanted to start a company, so I made my own version of Recurse and quit my job!
I’ll keep HN posted with the details, but so far I’m making a lot of progress on the company’s tech!
Trying playing Moira -- she's broken right now. Highest I've ever been previously is just over 3k on tank and I'm sitting around 3300 right now just from playing Moira.
Right click orbs only and use your ult on cooldown. Good luck!
Work: I just completed a big project, moving platform and host for one of our e-commerce stores, without messing up. I consider this a major win because I had to do everything on my own, from re-building the old system on the new framework to converting all the data.
Self: I just completed my third year of walking 7 miles every day. I feel strong, sleep well and I'm way more productive both at home and at work.
I'm in Georgia Tech's OMSCS program: in my Knowledge-Based AI course, my final project that created an agent to solve Raven's Progressive Matrices performed in the top 10 of all submissions and hence earned bonus points for my overall grade (the performance boost was a surprise).
1) After a string of tricky life events (death of a relative, breakup of a serious relationship), I moved out of my family home closer to work.
2) I managed to pay off my college debt to external services (I still owe money to my parents, but it's interest free)
3) I got promoted to a senior level at work, got rotated to a different team, and put on a high visibility project.
4) I started doing improv comedy on the side! It was something I'd flirted with in college but didn't really take `seriously`
Not everything is perfect, and I have some bad days, but my life between the start of this year and now has drastically changed and in a lot of ways for the better.
I quit a few Slacks by removing them from my mobile devices. I never use the Desktop Electron app. None of them were work related, and I was a fairly active participant in all of them. They served as a virtual water cooler for fast-food type human interaction for times when I did not leave the house. Fast-food because it was no real substitute for real social interaction.
I would banter with the best of them. This is something that I still dream of doing well in real life situations like parties but it is easy in a virtual medium for me. I would also share, read way too many, and regurgitate interesting articles that were of interest to the people there and get a dopamine hit if it was liked.
After an initial one week period of really wanting to pop in to see what was “going on” and later to see “what I missed”, I don’t think I miss it. Yes, I may miss some very interesting intellectual and not so intellectual banter and even “under the radar” articles to post here, and I think the trade benefit of less distraction and more focus is well, well worth it.
To generalize, if you say that X is a distraction to you, get X off your phone. It is much, much harder to be sucked in with the mobile web experience than with their mobile apps. For Slack, it was sufficient to remove them as “teams”, and I dislike their pushing of a frictionless (re)team add. I can manage that though, especially since my desire to “pop in” to those water cooler Slacks decreased exponentially.
I passed N3 level of Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). Whole life I have been doing mostly technical and engineering work, even hobbies and side interests were mostly technical-oriented.
I would never have imagined to pick up another spoken language to learn. I am enjoying the process of language learning though sometime struggle with it. Even wife has been surprised how seriously I have taken to learning Japanese. The only drawback is that I haven't done anything technology related for a while.
Congratulations! As the Spanish saying goes: los idiomas se aprenden en la cuna o en la cama ("languages are learned either in the cradle or in bed"). I can only imagine it has made your relationship stronger.
> The only drawback is that I haven't done anything technology related for a while.
While the vast majority of technology content is in English, consider seeking out to read/listen or even starting a podcast, blog, meetup in Japanese around your technology interests.
Finally shipped a game project that I'd been working on for fun, last week. My son did the graphics. It was a lot of fun learning JavaScript quirks as well as some game-relevant design patterns like a staticly allocated array for particle effects.
Are you in school or publishing while in the industry? Always wondered how to do the latter without a PhD and working with a Big N in their research org.
1. My 9 year old is on track for his first ever straight A report card.
2. My wife rejoined the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom and feels supported.
3. I survived yet another Dallas, Texas Summer
I finally shared a preview of a documentary short to a friend of mine who is a feature film director. I’ve been working on this project for a couple years now, and it’s my first project for the big screen.
Their feedback was nice to hear, and I’m glad to have finally shown them my work.
I finished my masters degree. I had never thought it would happen, I was so sure I would be kicked out or commit suicide before I got to the point where I would actually finish. But I did it, I now have a degree.
Using old-school SWOT analysis to make my team understand our situation and strategy, then using strategy map to make our goal really clear, then using OKR to implement the plan.
Wake up every day around 5am and dive into deep work.
Got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a flip phone.
Deactivated Facebook, barely check Instagram anymore.
Dropped about 25 pounds without working out much, feel great.
Eliminated anyone who is parasitic towards me, saved a lot of energy and time.
Scaled my agency/consultancy without any marketing, just referrals and word-of-mouth.
Collected a TB of nature/wildlife photos from my travels, written a lot of posts for a blog I am launching soon that covers a range of topics from minimalism, plant-based lifestyle, deep work, web development, UX design, creative service, entheogens, dhyana.
Mapped out an UX and schema for a platform that I will submit to YC. If rejected, try crowdfunding.
Consolidated my life goals and bucket list down a lot after realizing a lot of things lately.
I have never felt more whole, grounded, centered, focused, organized, stable before. :)