3 ms·

Side note: I have a lot of respect for you and your work. My comment above is in no way an attempt to disrespect you or your work ethic. Reocities is an awesome

by chime 17y ago

Side note: I have a lot of respect for you and your work. My comment above is in no way an attempt to disrespect you or your work ethic. Reocities is an awesome project and how you managed to do it was even better. You're right about different strokes. I don't expect everyone to do what I do in the same way. However, I question the underlying premise behind having to do things you REALLY don't want to do. My comment was really about making sure you don't have too many of those. > I've always worked with lists and commitments... > I've rebuilt a house, without the lists to keep me going I would have surely given up. Talking about lists, I live by them. I even wrote my own todo-list app (like every run-of-the-mill hacker) called http://untodos.com http://untodos.com that works with my personality. I put things in Today / Soon / Whenever buckets and move them around depending on real-life situations. If something has been in the soon list for too long, I'll revisit it and either drag it up to Today or down to Whenever. I guess it is a very personal list and unlike you, I don't want to tell people publicly about what I intend to do, willingly or not. > When faced with a thousand choices and many of those are more interesting... Not to judge you for being so enterprising, but do you feel having a thousand choices is actually a good thing? I've worked in many interesting projects and a couple of startups over the last decade and found that individuals with too many interesting projects rarely brought a project to fruition. On the other hand, those with just a handful of interesting projects successfully completed most of them. It's the old "too many eggs in a basket" issue. Lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of putting all their eggs in a basket so they begin to get more baskets till there's too many baskets and too few eggs. If you feel compelled to do something instead of what you really want to do, is it because you have too many interesting baskets? Again, this is a personal preference and the # of baskets you are comfortable with will be different from mine. > I'd rather be washing your dishes... Is that a public admission of a task you will eventually get around to doing? If so, you're always welcome to St. Petersburg, Florida. We live 5mins from the beautiful Gulf of Mexico.

jacquesm 17y ago
Having too many choices is a mixed blessing. I think that the number of choices we have in life are a measure of our welfare, if you are near starvation you have 0 choices, you need to get some water&food, and you need to get it now. As you go up on the welfare ladder you get more and more options on how to spend your time and your choices seem to multiply. To quote Joe Jackson ( http://lirama.net/song/226232 http://lirama.net/song/226232 ) "They say that choice is freedom, I'm so free I'm stuck in therapy", too much choice is definitely not a good thing. I try to find a good mix between the stuff that I like to do and the stuff that I have to do. What I have to do is mostly driven by the need to stay afloat and to stay 'current', what I like to do is usually somewhere off on the fringe, learning languages just for the heck of it (human languages and programming languages) simply because it interests me. I like to work on stuff that has a clear beginning, a middle and an end, open ended things are less of an attraction to me. Probably because I can never 'check them off' one of my lists :) As for the many eggs theory, I think you need at least 6, 3 that you currently depend on (less than 3 sources of income for a business and you're fragile, it's like a chair, it needs three legs to be stable), and 3 waiting in the wings as 'plan b' in case one of the other ones fails so you can get back to 3 legs relatively quickly. If you try to do much more than that it is my experience that the quality will start to suffer. Re. washing your dishes, that's a really nice thing of you, to invite me! I'm no longer traveling to the US like I used to, I think your immigration department & TSA have become too much of a nuisance to be dealt with. If I were I'd definitely take you up on it. I've had to give them my fingerprints, a photograph and my boots on my last tour to the US and I ended up late for a meeting on the west coast because I had to go buy new shoes... Since then I've avoided the US completely on my travels. (the boots were confiscated because they had steel toes and plates in them, they were supposed to be handed back to me on landing but they forgot to put them on the plane...) Should you make it to this end of the world then please know that you're invited as well, I'm about 2 hours away from Amsterdam. j.

by chime 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Having too many choices is a mixed blessing. I think that the number of choices we have in life are a measure of our welfare, if you are near starvation you have 0 choices, you need to get some water&food, and you need to get it now. As you go up on the welfare ladder you get more and more options on how to spend your time and your choices seem to multiply. To quote Joe Jackson ( http://lirama.net/song/226232 http://lirama.net/song/226232 ) "They say that choice is freedom, I'm so free I'm stuck in therapy", too much choice is definitely not a good thing. I try to find a good mix between the stuff that I like to do and the stuff that I have to do. What I have to do is mostly driven by the need to stay afloat and to stay 'current', what I like to do is usually somewhere off on the fringe, learning languages just for the heck of it (human languages and programming languages) simply because it interests me. I like to work on stuff that has a clear beginning, a middle and an end, open ended things are less of an attraction to me. Probably because I can never 'check them off' one of my lists :) As for the many eggs theory, I think you need at least 6, 3 that you currently depend on (less than 3 sources of income for a business and you're fragile, it's like a chair, it needs three legs to be stable), and 3 waiting in the wings as 'plan b' in case one of the other ones fails so you can get back to 3 legs relatively quickly. If you try to do much more than that it is my experience that the quality will start to suffer. Re. washing your dishes, that's a really nice thing of you, to invite me! I'm no longer traveling to the US like I used to, I think your immigration department & TSA have become too much of a nuisance to be dealt with. If I were I'd definitely take you up on it. I've had to give them my fingerprints, a photograph and my boots on my last tour to the US and I ended up late for a meeting on the west coast because I had to go buy new shoes... Since then I've avoided the US completely on my travels. (the boots were confiscated because they had steel toes and plates in them, they were supposed to be handed back to me on landing but they forgot to put them on the plane...) Should you make it to this end of the world then please know that you're invited as well, I'm about 2 hours away from Amsterdam. j.