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Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
- tehrealjames 9y agoI can guess the responses. Exercising, learning something, saving money.
- kelukelugames 9y agoGetting professional help for everything. Speaking, singing, powerlifting, acting, etc. I enjoy learning on my own but having a good coach can accelerate my progress and catch bad habits.
- dylanlacom 9y agoCool. Where have you found good coaches for these activities?
- Balgair 9y agoTim Ferris talks about this problem. His solution was to look up the 'Silver/Bronze' people, not just the 'Gold' people, in an event and just email them. I think he went to a 'silver medalist' in some surfing competition for lessons and claimed that 3 hours skype sessions were only $120. Ferris' reasoning was that the silver person was only 0.1% 'less' than the gold, so the price differential is totally worth it for private lessons. Also that most 'silver' people have never done private lessons in their expertise so they are very willing to help. It takes like 5 minutes of googling for this and writing some emails, maybe 30 minutes in total including negotiations for payment.
- kelukelugames 9y agoAsking friends, yelp, try them out. If the coach is bad then I just never see them again.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoApplying project management tools to manage everything in my life. For example: getting a mortgage or paying taxes are relatively complex processes with alot of moving parts: tasks, documents, deadlines, etc. You make a Kanban and divide it up into tasks and a pipeline and notes for each tasks status. Trello is what I use but there's other tools as well. Holy crap it makes your life easier.
- aaronpk 9y agoSpending less and saving more.
- Waterluvian 9y agoSpending more and saving less. To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.
- aaronpk 9y agoThat makes sense. Until I started tracking it, I was surprised at how much I was spending that I really didn't need to be. That's more the kind of spending I was talking about.
- Waterluvian 9y agoYeah for sure! I'm in favour of your approach too. I think maybe there's a magical answer of, "all things in balance!"
- mox1 9y agoFor me, it was using version control on my code. I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error message. Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated before I found the problem. It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo version. After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no matter how small) inside some type of version control system.
- Avshalom 9y agoJune 30 2016: counseling, with the corollary--August 19: 30 mg citalopram
- locusofself 9y ago+1 citalopram. only downside is a bit of jaw tightness
- mooreds 9y agoAccepting that I was an introvert. I remember the exact moment: I was traveling, had just settled down with a good book at a hostel, and then heard some folks heading to the bar. I remember thinking "gosh, I should be social," and then "nah, I'd rather be here." Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.
- gt_ 9y agoI was going to add almost the exact same experience. Congrats to us both!
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoY'all should go have a drink and be social! Oh, wait... I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an extrovert[0]. [0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.
- owebmaster 9y agoI was going to add exactly the opposite experience. Why didn't I start approaching people just for fun sooner? :)
- goldenkey 9y agoA thing I've learned on top of that is that people can interpret the lack of care about social functions to be lazyness or harshness. Even introverts can enjoy certain social functions if they become more accustomed to take the edge off. I say this myself as an introvert - staying home all the time and fulfilling ones' comforts often makes one their own worst enemy when it comes to fulfillment. Comfort makes one weak. I should know, I regret being my own best servant of solitude. Be better than me. Push yourself outside of the meager boundaries of who we think we are. Or we can never be great, legendary.
- personlurking 9y ago
- stephanos2k 9y agoBlogging. EDIT: It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc. Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).
- kelukelugames 9y agoStory? :)
- danielecook 9y agoTurning off email notifications on my phone. Finally pulled the trigger when I was relaxing on a Friday night and getting work emails. It’s usually more efficient to deal with email only once per day anyways.
- ditn 9y agoI've started doing this recently and it's improved my quality of life outside work enormously.
- nawtacawp 9y agoSolid advice. So glad I did this a few years ago. I was spending way too much fragmented time pulling my phone out every time I got an e-mail. Then if it wasn't something I needed to deal with right now, I often forgot about it (and never responded). Now I only use e-mail on my laptop. I do have it installed on my phone, but it is only used when a real priority comes up.
- marssaxman 9y agoI've never understood why people started subscribing to work email on their personal phones to begin with. Why would you want to get work mail when you're not at work, and why would you want to use your own hardware to do it? I've never done that and nobody I've worked for has ever asked me to do that; my personal phone is for my personal communication.
- infinii 9y agoI had similar feelings until I realized that work would pay for my monthly cellular bill (including data roaming while abroad).
- 0898 9y agoAutomating cold outreach emails. I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event. It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket. Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.
- Festro 9y agoWow, illegal marketing. Go you. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electroni...
- 0898 9y ago"You can send marketing emails or texts to companies." Am I missing something?
- dphassler 9y agoFor me, it was budgeting my money with intention. YNAB happened to be the tool that worked for me, after many failed attempts with other products. I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.
- anyfoo 9y agoSame here. I thought budgeting was only for when money is tight, but it is amazing how much clarity and overview a budget gives you over your financial situation, and how it helps in attaining even larger goals. It’s just a shame that desktop YNAB isn’t developed anymore. I will hold onto YNAB4 until it falls apart.
- iffycan 9y agoYou might be interested in this: https://www.bucketsisbetter.com https://www.bucketsisbetter.com
- m_t 9y ago> Buckets gives you an untimed, free trial for as long as you need to decide if it works for you. Why yes that is how you can make me try it out!
- lzy 9y agoMay I ask if there are any limitations for the untimed, free trial as provided on your site? If none, what is stopping from any of your users from using the trial indefinitely? But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me to want to try using it with my SO.
- iffycan 9y agoNo limitations. After a few months, you'll get nagged a bit, but the trial version has every feature the full version has. There's nothing but your penchant for honesty stopping you from using it indefinitely :)
- LeoPanthera 9y agoWearing earplugs at night. Vastly improved my quality of sleep. I use a vibrating watch to wake me in the morning.
- manmal 9y agoIs your environment noisy, or does this help you even in a quiet room?
- LeoPanthera 9y agoIt's not especially noisy, but it helps me sleep anywhere. It's a godsend in hotels. I don't know why I never considered them before.
- yedpodtrzitko 9y agoThis. And occasionally also Melatonin (see https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin )
- LeoPanthera 9y agoI tried Melatonin and it gave me weird vivid dreams. I didn't sleep as well - or as long. But it's still useful against jet lag.
- Tharkun 9y agoI get those from antihistamines. The brain is weird.
- stephanos2k 9y agoSeconded. I was just constantly getting annoyed by street noise and loud neighbours. Now I just put in the earplugs and everything is well.
- exDM69 9y agoI wear earplugs when commuting in the bus. I take a city bus that drives 80 km/h on the highway and the noise is deafening. If you'd work in that environment, ear protection would be mandatory. I can't imagine how awful it feels to wear cheap earbud headphones in that noise, yet most passengers do.
- reactbro 9y agoI dropped out of the software industry and moved to Greece. Now I go fishing in the morning, read in the backyard in the afternoon and play saxophone at the local taverna at night. I make all my money committing cybercrime.
- fosco 9y agoCan you elaborate on the last sentence? Serious question, unsure of the seriousness of statement.
- Toast_25 9y agoHis other post states: > I make $3000 a month committing cybercrime EDIT: AFAIK a decent threat hunter or RE can earn about 3x that legally in the US.
- Tharkun 9y agoSure, but 3k USD/month in Greece is a fortune.
- Toast_25 9y agoYeah, but remote work is also a thing. This is why I'm planning to move to a country with a stronger currency and retire to somewhere where it's weaker. I could live a very good life with the same amount of money that would afford me an OK life in other parts of the world. Without having to fear being persecuted by LEO.
- fosco 9y agoI think I am just shocked someone is okay with saying they make a living off screwing others yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...
- x43b 9y agoStopped thinking that working harder at what others think I should be doing is the key to my success and start evaluating what should I do rather than only how do I do it better. Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.
- analogwzrd 9y agoI've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school. For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though. Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
- nickalekhine 9y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what did you end up studying at grad school to break through your career ceiling?
- jrowley 9y agoFor going back to grad school, was this a masters or phd or mba or something else?
- Balgair 9y agoI'm very interested to know the degree as well!
- analogwzrd 9y agoMasters. If I got a phd, it wouldn't be in engineering. I thought about an MBA, but I felt I needed to focus on becoming much more technical.
- analogwzrd 9y agoMy undergrad is in EE and I'm going back to grad school for embedded systems. Even as a EE, I found myself doing lots of software work - writing little C# apps, C++, data processing code in python, matlib scripts, and once in a blue moon writing firmware for microcontrollers With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to. As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoOne was when I realized I should try to do something that I can do to push my boundaries and instead do something I can right now. I'm writing down more koans like this and I might sell it as a deck of inspiration cards. Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would immediately turn it off. Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some notes are better written.
- FruityFarm 9y agoListening to podcasts or reading while commuting.
- derwiki 9y agoMore specifically for me: podcasts while I'm walking to/from transit or driving, and reading a BOOK (not HN, Reddit, etc) if I'm sitting on a bus or train.
- jimmywanger 9y agoMusic. Music has such mathematical undertones - classical music especially speaks to me. I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a tonal language at that.
- dahart 9y ago1: Kids. My wife and I waited to get married, and then were part scared after we got married, and part selfish and wanted freedom to play and travel, so we waited more. I don't regret our adventures at all, but after we had kids, I realized my fear was unfounded and we still had a lot of freedom to play and travel. 2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, before having kids, and with someone else's money. Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be only fear.
- valleyer 9y agoIs there some factor you can share that allowed you still to enjoy your “freedom” even after having kids? I share that same fear.
- jrowley 9y agoOne thing to consider is that the sooner you have kids, the longer you get to have them in your life.
- anyfoo 9y agoGiven his question, that would sound like an argument to have kids later, rather than earlier, or what exactly do you mean?
- dahart 9y agoOnly if you don't like your kids. If you like them, having them around is a lot of fun. :) Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were younger.
- stevebmark 9y agoGetting a domain expert (which I wasn't) to analyze my solution, long after launching it, and realizing it wasn't the ideal solution. And blocking the shithole site Reddit until I didn't have the urge to check it.
- jrowley 9y agoDeleting the twitter, reddit, and facebook apps from my phone. I still access FB through the browser when I want to check something, and I check strava and instagram daily, so I'm not totally free, but it feels better. I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.
- ta12111 9y agoCancer that wasn't fatal, but close. Followed by less interest in work/money, more interest in family. Money still matters, of course, but I'm much more in tune with how much I really need.
- rijoja 9y agoListening to Tchaikovsky instead of metal while working, makes the whole process feel a _lot_ more epic!
- jbuss 9y agoUsing a chrome extension[0] to block social media sites during work hours. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site/eiimnmi...
- tmikaeld 9y agoSeems this particular extension is very upfront about the fact that they gather quite a lot of data from your tab history/usage/habits and then pass that to 3rd parties. https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html
- 0x4f3759df 9y agoPlotting my escape from the corporate world
- binarymax 9y agoExercising every day as the first thing I do every day. I used to do it when I was younger, but took a break for about 6 years. A year later still trying to catch up from that lost fitness.
- csense 9y agoQuit Facebook.
- derwiki 9y agoI've been practicing yoga for about 4 years now, and I'm amazed at how positively it's impacted my other sports (climbing, snowboarding) as well as my mental well being. Also excited that this is a form of exercise I won't "age out of".
- closeparen 9y agoMoving from the suburbs to the city. Turns out that buying you way out of an hour-long 3-segment public transit odyssey is actually a great use of discretionary income. It was also basically budget-neutral when I sold my car.
- derwiki 9y agoBetter posture. It's really easy to dump all your weight into a rounded back with your head reaching super far forward. But if you are mindful about your posture, you can help prevent lower back injuries.
- projectant 9y agoHatha yoga.
- corford 9y agoLifewise: Adopting a dog (suspect next one will be quitting smoking when I finally muster the willpower to do it) Techwise: Moving away from piles of hacked up bash scripts and fully embracing an 'infrastructure as code' mindset (and the associated tools)
- Jemaclus 9y agoExercising. I run 3x/week now, and I sleep better, I feel better, I'm thinner, and I snagged a wife. Should have started running back in high school instead of spending my days playing MUDs. (Not really. I don't regret anything... but I could have made more time for exercising.) Also, playing guitar. I'm hearing impaired, and my audiologist told my parents I could never be in the band at school, so they never pressed me to take guitar or piano lessons. I wish I had learned piano as a kid, because I love music so, so much (despite my hearing loss). That said, playing guitar is one of my favorite things ever. It's so cathartic. I'm really bad at it, but just playing helps melt away the stress of my life. Also, when I was in college, I dated this gym rat for awhile. She told me one day, "On days when I don't feel like going to the gym, I tell myself to do it for five minutes. If I do it for five minutes and still am not feeling it, then I give myself permission to leave." Then a few seconds later, she said, "I never leave after five minutes." I've adopted that outlook for almost everything. I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't want to run, I can stop. I never stop and always run the whole route. If I'd rather stay home and watch TV than accept an invitation to happy hour with coworkers, I'll do happy hour for five minutes. If I don't like it, I can make up an excuse and leave. I usually wind up staying the whole time. This outlook has gotten me to do dozens of things I'd never do: get certified as a scuba diver, take a trip to Peru, run a half marathon, audition for a play, and so on. It's a game-changer, for me.
- StavrosK 9y ago> I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't want to run, I can stop. That seems like it's missing the point, though. When I don't want to go running, say, it's the actual getting ready and starting to run that I don't like. If I have gone through 95% of the effort to get ready and get into that whole headspace and started doing it, it's really easy to just keep it up. Ie it's not the "lifting weights" part of the gym that I don't want to do, it's the "getting out of bed" part.
- Jemaclus 9y agoThat actually IS the point. The point is that I convince myself to do the hassle by saying "It's only for five minutes," but obviously after five minutes, you've already done the hard part, so you might as well do the rest. It's just a psychological trick to actually start doing the thing I don't want to do.
- Posibyte 9y agoCleaning. It sounds sort of childish, I know, but cleaning was always such a secondary thing to me. I wasn't dirty, but I was messy. I would constantly buy things from Amazon, toss the box in the garage. One weekend, a friend and I flattened and recycled every box in that garage. I bagged up every messy bit of trash, bought new furniture to help organize my things, and I feel like I can relax again in my own home. It was a problem I never knew was harming me, but since that weekend, I've been happier than I have been for several years.
- dumbfounder 9y agoNot focusing on what it takes to retire from Day 1. I did several startups and always dreamed I would retire rich from those pursuits. I got close, but no cigar. I am 42, and just a few years ago turned my sights hardcore towards hitting retirement goals. It might take another 20 years. It is something I will drive into my kids once they enter college. I will still also encourage them to do startups, but I will want them to understand the impact it has on their ability to retire early. Side note: if I had held the Amazon stock I sold to start my second company and focused on retirement the past 15 years I would be (semi) retiring right about now.
- rodolphoarruda 9y agoKeeping my personal and professional projects notes in digital format. I used physical notebooks as my sole tool for project notes from 2002 to 2013, so "more than 10 years". It is very hard for me to search for things that I actually remember I took notes at the time, but can't find them quickly. Sometimes I need contact information or even addresses I made sidenotes of, but they are lost somewhere in my stack of dusty notebooks. Curiously enough I took one of them last weekend and tried to digitize it into Evernote, via a photo. But I didn't like the final format, and it felt like a ton of repetitive work to get a single notebook in. So I put this aside.
- PatientTrader 9y agoReducing sodium intake. You will instantly lose weight, feel less sluggish, have more energy etc. By simply reducing the amount of sodium in your diet you are increasing your chances of living longer. Over 500,000 deaths each are from complications with high sodium levels causing health problems.
- astura 9y agoI don't doubt that you might have benefited from a reduction in sodium intake but most people won't. The majority of people are not hypersensitive to sodium[1]. Limiting salt to some arbitrarily low number can have negative side effects, for example, my vegetable consumption went up dramatically when I let go of my anxiety over putting salt on them. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...
- PatientTrader 9y agoKeep in mind that fast food companies and a large share of food manufactures thrive on using high amounts of sodium in their processed foods to increase shelf life and improve margins (i.e. from factory until bought by consumer). I don't doubt the validity of that research, but I would be interested to see who funded it. And of course all humans need sodium to maintain a healthy balance, but many foods we eat today unexpectedly have excessive amounts of sodium in them.
- clay_to_n 9y agoBash. As an intermediate programmer, I learned it too late. Scripts were always magic to me since I was used to compiled languages. Especially useful for certain build tools and manual steps programmers are running from the command line. Personal financial tracking - budgeting and tracking everything in Mint or YNAB. Going from "I spend about this much total money per month" to "I spend this month in each of these categories" was big as far as having confidence in my finances. Similarly, setting up a retirement account. You should do this as soon as you're over 18 and have a full-time job, no matter whether your salary is low.
- bshimmin 9y agoBuying the most expensive bin bags my supermarket sells. They come with a nice drawstring and are tougher than normal ones. It's remarkable how much more pleasant the task of taking the bins out is for the sake of spending about an extra £1 every month or so. (I imagine you can probably extend the same reasoning to many things, but for me, it was bin bags.)
- StavrosK 9y agoFor me, it was brand-name socks. They just last so much longer than off-brand.
- joshaidan 9y agoStop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you feel; I'm responsible for my feelings. For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.
- sprremix 9y agoAmen to that. I still have that reflex of "blaming" others (thinking something happens because THEY believe something instead of what I am doing) and I really have to step back from the situation and think about it. Absolutely hate it when my brain does this
- forgueam 9y agoThis sounds very similar to the ideas in stoicism. Your feelings are your own creation and subsequently completely within your control. If you are feeling bad about something, it's not because of that something, but because you are -choosing- to feel bad.
- indubitable 9y agoCooking, Airbnb, Uber, working independently, pursuing physics seriously. Physics in particular has been oddly life changing. At some point I think we all look for some purpose or meaning in life. I found it in discovering how little I truly understood about our universe and how bizarre and illogical a universe we truly live in. The mystery and intrigue of our universe leaves me with that child like enthusiasm and interest for discovering ever more. I mean understanding something relatively simple like time dilation, and its implications, is something that is sufficient to upset one's entire view of the universe. Or even very simple things that we all learn in high school but mostly take for granted such as the beautiful interaction in energy conversion and conservation - and again the implications of such. On that topic the nature of energy itself. Could most people describe energy to a person with no knowledge of physics? And then you can start getting into truly bizarre things which I suppose is an appropriate synonym for quantum mechanics. And this is all just a random sampling of one specific area. Understanding things on a deeper level, and the interaction between all of our physical systems - it just creates a very interesting and exciting universe that I'm happy to simply seek to learn more of. Prior to pursuing physics more seriously, I did not have any clue how little I knew. And it's the sort of subject where the more I learn the more I understand how little I know. Fun stuff!
- michaelthiessen 9y agoHow did you go about learning this? I have had Feyman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year now, and hope it won't always be in my "someday" bucket.
- indubitable 9y agoI had the same thing in that it was always an issue of motivation. Try to find something to draws you in. For me this was special relativity and its implications. Time dilation in particular felt like something that could not be what it seemed after covering the basics using Wiki/YouTube/etc. So I picked up an introductory book on it. I'd highly recommend Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity by Taylor/Wheeler. It's extremely well written and just as importantly has plenty of problems to test your understanding. And it was even more fascinating, and bizarre, than I initially thought. From there everything becomes much easier to get into simply because of that intrinsic motivation of awe and wonder. After that I turned to more 'big picture' stuff to try to at least get a survey of the breadth of knowledge. Like you mention the Feynman Lectures are great for this. You can also find them online [1] which may be more convenient. "A Brief History of Time" is also a phenomenal big picture look at cosmology, which is my current primary interest. Perhaps the best resource of all, and what I'm currently working through, is Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretic Minimum." I first saw this as a book. It's essentially a physics overview intended for those with a solid mathematical background, but without much formal education in physics. The book is excellent, an even better resource for this is the site [2] for it. It has extensive coverage and lectures on all major topics. The only downside is the lack of questions or material to test your understanding. Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to find something that draws you in. From there everything is easy. Take a weekend sometime and really dig into something that fascinates you. Time dilation in general, the twin paradox, black holes and their funkiness at the event horizon, the two slit experiment in quantum mechanics, etc. These are all things with massive amounts of information available that can really draw you in. [1] - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ [2] - http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
- Balgair 9y agoMarriage. She is my everything, and though as a GF she was that too, marriage is just deeper. Many of my single/unmarried friends don't have the trust and support that I have. I try to tell them that 'pulling the trigger' is not with a gun aimed at your head, but more of the starter's pistol in a 3-legged-race; it's fun. Yes, we have issues, just like all humans. But as we have both grown and changed, holding each other up is something I can't believe I used to not have. Many 'millenials' seem to view marriage as a capstone to their pyramid. Get 'a degree', get 'a career', find 'the one', fall 'in love', etc. That's wrong, marriage a cornerstone you build a life together on top of. And yes, I am lucky, I know it, and I love her even more as a result. Maybe readers can extend this to any committed relationship, but I highly recommend taking the time to find that person and jumping in when you are only 70% certain of the commitment ( about 1 - 1/e, for the math folks). Don't wait, just love.
- framebit 9y agoOh man, yes. For us, and for so many of my friends, it was hard to get over whatever big life thing seemed to stand in the way of getting married. "I just want to [finish my PhD, get a promotion, start my next big project, figure my life out 100%] before getting married." My consistent advice to them is don't wait! Your partner should be there to help you in your goals, not to drag you down! It'll be so much easier to finish your thesis, advance in your career, and figure out life when you're doing together in a position of strength.
- Kevin_S 9y agoI understand your point, but I think people put too much into the actual act of getting married. For my wife and I, I realized essentially nothing changed between us. The only real change was that I was no longer "living in sin" according to my family, and people pester us more often about having kids. Also people make the mistake of thinking getting married will change things for the better. It never fixes issues.
- astura 9y agoMarriage never fixes things, agreed, nobody should expect that. However, marriage made our relationship way deeper and stronger compared to just living together. Even though we committed to being life partners before legally marrying. (I'm talking about marriage here, not having a wedding - sometimes people seem to confuse the two.)
- smoe 9y agoOnly enable desktop notifications that I actually need to respond to immediately. Since about two years I only get notified for: - Laptop about to fail (Battery less than 10min, out of disk space) - Calendar - Site reliability alerts Similarly I hide things like menu/tasks bars by default and just toggle them in for the rare cases I need some information from there. It is just such a pleasant experience to have 100% of the screen be used by stuff relevant to the task at hand and only allow very specific distractions. It is a bit less pleasant at times to make it clear to some coworkers, that just because the company uses a chat system and project management tools with live updates, that not everyone has to respond to anyone immediately.
- tabeth 9y agoPartnership. Literally everything in this world is easier with partners you can trust. Because of this I do everything with every others now. * Real Estate - Find people you want to live with and split the cost. Everyone wins. * Friendships - These are people who can emotionally support you, teach you, mentor you, etc. * Marriage - For obvious reasons. --- I'm attempting to "split everything". So far I split rent, my phone bill, all utilities, Netflix, Google Play, etc. People are rightfully concerned about the potential downside to such partnership, but I realize now, more than ever that somehow, paradoxically the more you want partners the better it will work out. The key is that you should try to make it so that all people involved have similar stake. All for one, one for all, so to speak. TLDR: Life is a multiplayer game. Find your players immediately.
- michaelthiessen 9y agoWhat areas have you found to have most impact/benefit from splitting in this way, and how have you split them?
- darioush 9y agoLeaving grad school and getting a real, balanced job. It really hit me when during an internship I asked 'is the building open on weekends', and I was told 'yes, but why would you want to be here?' A further 'reckoning' was when I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity costs. Also if you are obese, you need to fix that sooner rather than later.
- dabockster 9y ago> was when I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity costs. Money aside, the biggest opportunity cost of education is time. Looking back on my undergrad, I spent an extra year trying to edge out a BS degree when everyone around me was telling me to take the BA in CS and settle for that. In the moment, I felt that the BA would hinder my job prospects. Now that I've been out for a year and a half, I realize that I kind of wasted a year in terms of time. I probably would have been in the exact same place I am now if I had just decided to graduate with what I had at the time. And, to add further, I ended up earning a BA anyways. But that's another rant.
- darioush 9y agoThere are other opportunity costs, like losing your passion for what you're doing. After going to grad school in CS I can't do anything with computers beyond my day job. I can't even play video games anymore. There are other costs too like dealing with unnecessary mental stress of job scarcity, arbitrary deadlines, arrogant and self-absorbed people. But time is very easy to overlook as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cozuya 9y agoPrettierJS. Do you write javascript and have heard about this and thought to yourself "oh yeah sounds neat I'll look into it when I have the time" just like a ton of other things? This is the exception. Go spend 1/2 hour getting it set up now.
- jaredcwhite 9y agoVirtually every major step forward I've undertaken in life, I've had this reaction after the fact. "Why didn't I do this sooner?" It's making me a little bit quicker on the draw as time goes by. When weighing risk vs. reward, I'm more apt to lean into the reward. Risks are usually far more daunting when they're in the realm of the imagination. (And like many I suspect, I'm pretty good at imagining impending doom.)
- muzani 9y agoCutting out BS from my life. Quitting a job. Firing a client. Breaking up with a girl. Talking with recruiters I don't like. It never gets better. Just cut it when there's enough evidence to support.
- dhubris 9y agoGetting therapy. Reckon I could have saved myself ten or fifteen years of suffering.
- kamaal 9y agoEquity investments and research. You don't know how compounding works, unless you actually have some skin in the game and see it work.