Year: 2014
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What’s Available
I’m in New York right now visiting my family. I love spending time here. Today I taught my cousin some programming, she actually did some real work for Cruise Sheet, and we only took a break to do our language tapes. As we drank tea together, she did my Chinese flashcards with me. I tend…
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The Simple Problems Found on the Island
It’s midnight and I’m on my cot in a tent on the island. It’s quiet now, just small waves slapping the rocks and jokes between me, my cousins, and my friend Nick, When we wake up, it will be very windy and possibly rainy. There’s a hurricane en-route, which is expected to weaken to some…
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Leveraging the Impossible
In each of our minds is a gradient of activities, ranging from things we definitely won’t do (finance a Ferrari), things we’ll definitely do (drink water today), and everything else in between. There’s something special about those things at the extremes, the things we will and won’t definitely do. It’s nearly impossible that theey won’t…
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The Hustler’s Trap
I was talking with a really accomplished photographer the other day. The guy is an immense talent, has been hired by all sorts of celebrities and productions, and has a very impressive body of work. And he was thinking about quitting photography. He was also incredibly humble and open to advice, which I have to…
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Willing Things into Existence
When I was really young, I would occasionally take over my friend’s paper route when he was busy. Not being much of an early riser, I never got to eat breakfast on mornings where I delivered the paper. That, of course, was a problem that could easily be solved, if I just had a toaster…
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Setting a Lower Bound
Variance is a natural part of life, and it’s not a battle that can ever be won. Some days you’ll perform amazingly, and others you’ll be a lot worse. We’d all like to have as many amazing days as possible, but focusing on those days too much can end up doing more harm than good.…
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Love Work II
Work is almost synonymous with stress in our culture. If you’re working hard, you’re exhausted, stressed, and stretched thin. So you only work a fixed amount of hours per day if you can manage, you get weekends off, and then once in a while when you need to restore what work has taken from you,…
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The Battles Within
A wild horse is a beautiful thing on its own, but isn’t very useful to a person. To create a symbiotic relationship with the horse, the owner must break the horse, training it to give up some of its wild instincts and replace them with conditioned responses. I rode a horse a few weeks ago…
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No Such Thing as Not Sticking to It
A while back I wrote about how I was going to be neat and tidy henceforth. I’d clean my RV twice a day, keep my travel stuff organized while on the road, and basically be the opposite of what I was before. I stuck with it for a few weeks, but then, in a hurry…
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Free Improvement
Right after I write this, I’m going to go eat at Chipotle. On the train ride over there, I’ll be doing Mandarin flashcards on my phone. The ride is less than ten minutes, but I usually have to wait five minutes for the train back, so that’s twenty five minutes of flashcards. It’s usually cold…