Category Archives: Life

Diminishing returns of worrying

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life

Writing this just because I’ve never heard anyone talk about it before:

Worrying about things has increasing, diminishing, and negative returns, just like anything else.

The increasing returns are when a bit of worrying about something causes you to prepare for a situation or otherwise act differently in a way that benefits you.

But after a point, the worrying starts to saturate. You’re already aware of the potential problem, and more worrying e.g. doesn’t necessarily help you become more prepared or choose better actions.

Lastly, worrying even more can actively harm you. Maybe it causes undue stress or prompts you to make poor investments, relative to the likelihood of the event you’re worrying about.

So worry, but just enough.

How to be consistent and achieve success

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: _Micropost 🍪, Creativity, Life, Writing

I think the most important part of achieving consistency is detaching yourself from the outcome of each individual work session, whatever that might be. Here are some example ‘work sessions’ from my life:

  • A particular workout
  • Releasing a song
  • Releasing a blog post
  • Doing a stream
  • Making a youtube video

Attaching yourself to the outcome (e.g. number of views) will only set you up for failure, since inevitably one of the work sessions will ‘flop’.

To detach yourself from individual outcomes, you have to love the long-term journey of whatever you’re doing. The absolute most important part is simply being there, day after day, week after week, over a long period of time.

This can be compressed down to “Showing Up = Winning”.

If you can reframe the requirement for “winning” from “getting a lot of views” or “breaking my personal record” to simply “I showed up”, you give yourself a massive psychological advantage.

P.S. One extra tip:

An extra tip for the creatives: Reframe each release as another piece of progress in building your large public body of work. It may not be today, but someday, your large public body of work will make it all happen for you — and every release is a step towards that, no matter how “well” it does.

P.S. another tip

Establish the habit by simply doing the activity at the same time each week/day and scheduling your life around that as much as possible. Ideally find a time slot with the least contention against other things that come up.

For streaming, I found that Sunday afternoons was usually free and didn’t compete too much against other plans.

But the “scheduling your life around it” is where the rubber really meets the road. That’s where you prove to yourself that you consider this a high priority to you by putting your time where your mouth is.

Toxic minimalism

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life

If you’ve ever had a painful move due to having too much stuff, you might have had the urge to become a minimalist to avoid an unpleasant experience like that again.

There’s a lot of good things about minimalism and the philosophy of needing less. In addition to being easier to move, it’s better for the environment, and less costly to have & maintain less things.

But watch out — it’s easy to go too far in the other direction and let the minimalism take on a toxic quality, where you don’t even acquire things that you really would find helpful, and would improve the quality of your life.

If you’re in that position, I’d just remind you that it’s ok to acquire a bunch of stuff, learn what is really valuable to you, then trim things down later. Sometimes to go narrow, you first need to go wide.

Writing is like exercise

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life, Writing

Sometimes I struggle to justify why I spend time writing for my blog. Here’s the argument I keep coming back to:

A regular writing habit is just like a regular exercise habit for your brain. Yes, it takes time, energy, and money, but it’s also good for you, and well worth it.

Writing and especially publishing it is just like going to the gym for your brain. Plus it increases your luck surface area and helps keep you young. So, well worth the investment.

WIP: We grow old because we stop making art

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: _Micropost 🍪, Creativity, Life

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

George Bernard Shaw

I’d like to offer a variation of this.

We don’t stop making art because we grow old; we grow old because we stop making art.

Children are naturally curious, creative, and artistic. They freely draw, sing, and ask questions. At the core is a youthful fearlessness. They’re not afraid — of being judged or looking stupid (yet).

We lose this as we grow older. We become concerned with appearances, and learn to avoid actions that might cause us to be judged or look stupid. We become afraid.

There is something deeply healthy about engaging in a creative practice, that connects us back to this youthful fearlessness. Just like how a personal fitness practice is essential for maintaining physical function despite the natural progression of entropy, a personal creative practice is essential for resisting the tendency to become fearful.

Where do you feel creative? At a piano? Taking photos? Writing words? Cooking? Working out? Playing sports? Dancing? Look more closely — that might be your fountain of youth.

How to learn everything

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: _Essay 📝, Creativity, Life

Some people ask how I can do many things — code, make music, make visual art, live stream, blog, podcast, indie hack.

I don’t think it’s because I’m ultra talented or special. I do believe talent is real, that people can have natural aptitudes, and that I might have some — maybe for music or code — but definitely not for all of these areas.

I think it’s simply because after a lifetime of trying things, I’ve realized that the process of learning is basically the same for everything.

And the most important part is to have confidence that you can actually do the thing. Not counting yourself out from Day 1 is half the battle. (I see this all the time — “Oh wow, I would love to learn to paint… too bad I’m not artistic.”)

Much of what makes crafts seem difficult is the unknown of what happens behind the scenes. Before you learn to produce music, or make visual art, or code, you look at the artifacts produced by those artists and your jaw drops. You have no sense of what the creative process looks like, so it’s natural for it to seem intimidating and beyond your ability.

But then you get a chance to observe the artist, and you see that they’re simply using a bunch of Ableton Live presets, or Photoshop layer effects, or a bunch of code libraries that someone else built. And you see that it’s not so hard, after all. (Usually thanks to the efforts of skilled tool-builders, behind the scenes. Giants whose shoulders you stand on.)

This is not to say that one can realistically become expert-level skilled at everything. For example, I’ve spend hundreds of hours skateboarding, and although I love the sport & art form, that is one thing I simply do not have natural ability for. That’s fine.

It’s just to say that once you start doing different things, you stop being scared at the prospect of learning something new. You learn the ways you learn things, and also have the confidence that you can do it. Your learning muscle grows stronger every time, accelerating future learning.

You also stop being scared of being a beginner and looking bad. Because once you’ve exited the beginner stage of anything once, you now know that being a beginner is actually a noble state, and nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone was a beginner once. The only people that make fun of beginners, are those perpetually on the sidelines, that have never dared to step into the arena.

In short, over time, learning gets easier because you develop familiarity with the activity of learning. The phases of learning become like old friends that you visit and catch up with after not meeting for some time. But most importantly you build significant confidence in yourself. And that’s what matters most.

You need your own workshop

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: _Micropost 🍪, Books, Creativity, Life

This is originally Derek Sivers’ idea, from his book “Anything you want”.

We all need a place to play.

Kids need playgrounds and sandboxes. Musicians need an instrument. Mad scientists need a laboratory.

Those of us with business ideas? We need a company.

Not for the money, but because it’s our place to experiment, create, and turn thoughts into reality. We need to pursue our intrinsic motivation.

We have so many interesting ideas and theories. We need to try them!

The happiest people are not lounging on beaches. They’re engaged in interesting work!

Following curiosity is much more fun than being idle. Even if you never have to work a day in your life.

That’s the best reason to have a company. It’s your playground, your instrument, your laboratory. It’s your place to play!

Get the ideas out of your head and into the world.

https://sive.rs/laboratory
  • Gardeners need a garden.
  • Car enthusiasts need a garage.
  • Entrepreneurs need a business.
  • Artists need a studio.

But what about systems programmers?

Systems programmers need a project. A place for them to explore, work, play.

Live streaming myself working on my baby operating system has felt great over the last 14 weeks. And now with Sivers’ idea in mind, I can totally see why. It’s finally my own project where I have full control, and it’s a large enough project where there is infinite potential for the things and can do and learn within it.

No matter what your craft is, if you aspire to be great at it, you need a safe, comfortable “space” to work on your craft.

If you have aspirations, but don’t have a space, you likely haven’t fully committed, or given yourself permission to publicly identify as an enthusiast of the craft. (Actions speak louder than words).

Taking action to make that space for yourself can be scary, because it exposes physical, undeniable proof of your interest, which is vulnerable. But in my experience, it can also be deeply affirming, exciting, and motivating.

Be your most authentic self (and write about whatever you want)

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: _Micropost 🍪, Blogging, Creativity, Life, Writing

I love writing about computers, but I also love writing about other topics like creativity, art, and productivity. However, many programmers out there strictly blog about technical topics, which made me feel a bit weird for posting random stuff like poems or my experience with GTD.

This led me to a dilemma: Do I blog all in one place, or do do I perhaps create a separate blog for non-technical content?

My answer is to apply my “golden piece of advice”: Do what feels most authentic to you.

For me, writing about all of my interests is the most authentic expression of myself, so when in doubt, I do this. Curbing this instinct, and making a strictly technical blog just to be like “all the other programmers” wouldn’t be.

It’s totally possible that “all the other programmers” simply don’t feel a desire to write about anything else. So making a strictly technical blog is their maximally authentic expression of themselves — which is great for them! Let’s all do what feels most authentic to us.

Hiding in this case study is a profound lesson about life. The situation applies equally to any other life situation where you feel some pull to act in one way, but feel some hesitation upon observing “everyone around you” seems to act.1

When in doubt, apply the “golden advice”: Do what feels most authentic to you.

I’m very happy with this decision. It feels great to have a single place which all of my thinking, which also has the practical benefit of making it easier for potential followers to submerge themselves in all my content.

I also believe this will win in the long run as it’s more likely to resonate with like-minded people that can respect having a myriad of interests — the kind of people I’m looking to connect with!

Lastly, there’s the non-trivial but subtle benefit that simplicity of infrastructure & accounts actually matters and translated into a lot of time saved.

WIP: Fame is a hamster wheel

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life

Different forms of capital have different benefits and drawbacks. Money has the benefit that it can grow itself over time, with the downside that it is heavily scrutinized and taxed. Fame has the benefit that it is not taxed, but has the interesting drawback in that it requires maintenance, and lessens over time.

To retain your fame, you need to continually be doing things and delivering value to your audience. Otherwise, your audience will naturally shrink as people forget about you, and their attention is diverted elsewhere by others playing the fame game.

So if you think achieving fame will make you happy, be careful. The moment you achieve the fame you’ve been seeking is not the “end” — it’s actually the beginning of a hamster wheel you’ve just stepped onto. You might stop to celebrate, but don’t stop for too long — now you need to worry about maintaining it (or even exploiting it), lest you lose it and become a “one hit wonder”. The only other alternative is to keep running.

(This post was written based on my small experiences obtaining nano-fame with my offlinemark and comfort projects).

What I learned in my 20s

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: _Essay 📝, Career, Life

I had the privilege of speaking to my friend Andre’s high school class this week about my career and path to it. I didn’t have time for all the advice I’d give, so I’m putting it here:

It’s ok to not be able to answer “So where do you see yourself in 5 years?”.

That’s a hard question, and it’s ok to not immediately know the answers to hard questions.

In my experience, most of my life was in a state of not really knowing this, with one major exception: When I realized in 2017-2018 that I really wanted to work for Ableton in Germany. Then it became startingly clear where I wanted to be, and approximately what I needed to do.

My advice would be to simply start taking actions while being observant of yourself, and your strengths, interests, and natural inclinations. At what things do you naturally work harder than other people? What things seem like play to you, but work to others? Those are hints at areas you can excel and become world class.

Eventually after enough action (and reflection), you might have an insight about something you deeply want to make happen. And then suddenly it becomes clear.

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” – Rumi

It might seem like life is a race, from start to finish, where checkpoints are things like: university, job, marriage, children. When you “graduate high school” (i.e. become an adult), the gun goes off. Everyone starts running and the first one to make it through, wins.

In my experience, the “race” is actually a custom trail for every single person. When you “graduate high school” (i.e. become an adult), the gun goes off and everyone starts running in different directions. Another person’s progress towards their endpoint has little to no relevance on your progress towards yours.

The only competition is to know yourself as fully as possible, and act with maximum authenticity towards that truth.

A simple strategy towards achieving success and fulfillment is looking for:

  1. A “vertical”: An industry which you have particular interest (e.g. music, fashion, film, journalism, activism, sports, …)
  2. A “horizontal”: A skill which you have interest in and aptitude for (e.g. technology, writing, art, photography, communication, …)

And then work at the intersection of the two. Basically every vertical needs every horizontal. Every industry needs programmers, communicators, creatives, etc.

This strategy is not foolproof, but can be a good approximate path for those without one. And it worked well for me!

Seek like-minded peers. The first time this happened to me blew my mind — I went to the National Guitar Workshop in 2010 and met a bunch of other teenagers that were interested in writing original metal compositions and recording them on computers. This was a life-changing experience and gave me friendship, motivation, and a sense of community.

Then in college, I went to NU Hacks and the same thing happened. I found a great network of aspiring hackers, and we became great friends and learned together.

In both cases, all these people are now doing amazing things in the world in their field. And these relationships have turned into the kind of life-long friendships that are one of the best things in life.

Greatness is built iteratively, over a long period of time.

Don’t be afraid to exploit your unfair advantages.