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What About Learning?
Right now I’m staying up with my cousin who’s a senior in high school. It’s midnight on Sunday, and she’s busy finishing up her homework for the weekend. There’s a roll of tape on the coffee table, along with pink ribbons, a glue stick, cutout pictures from glamour magazines, and a bunch of construction paper.…
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How Can a Minimalist Buy an Island?
Considering the island story has eclipsed my next most popular story on this blog by almost 4x, maybe a follow-up is in order. At this point I should admit that I have no idea what the public likes. I wrote that last post thinking that my regular readers would really get a kick out of…
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My Friends and I Bought an Island
As long as I’ve remembered, I’ve wanted to buy a private island. Having a random patch of land somewhere holds almost no appeal, but an island is totally different. An island is like your own little country, with complete control of everything within its borders. I’d looked at getting an island before. As it turns…
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On The Importance of Facing the Truth
The list of problems that don’t have their roots in a fundamental misunderstanding of how things actually are is a short one. The other night I was playing poker, and one of the guys at the table was a really bad player who thought that he was really good. He and I played a hand…
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Broadening Your Focus to Improve Your Mood
When I renewed the registration on my motorcycle six months ago, I was asked to provide proof of insurance. I tried to do the online insurance validator, but it didn’t work, so I emailed my policy to the prescribed email address and went back on with my life. I never got confirmation back, or, more…
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How to Recalibrate Yourself To Change Habits and Reach Goals
Doing anything that’s not normal is difficult. You have to move past your automatic patterns and rely on conscious action to move forward. We’re wired to rely on our subconscious, so this is legitimately difficult. That’s why people eat crappy food, watch crappy TV, and stay in crappy relationships. Today my motorcycle got impounded (for…
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Ramblings on Narcissism
Yesterday there was a story about me, my RV, and my friends on the front page of the SF Chronicle site. The article was really nicely written and very positive about the whole RV thing. Hundreds of comments were left on the post, and 95% of them were negative. The negativity was absolutely astounding. I…
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Five Steps to Becoming a Leader
I’ve always wanted to be a leader. For the longest time I didn’t know what it actually meant to be a leader, so my aspiration was probably just because I wanted the prestige of being a leader. I guess I also didn’t like taking orders from anyone, so I figured there was no other place…
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What I Learned From Two Frustrating Days of Not Working
For two days, I didn’t do any programming for SETT. The morning of the first day I was busy with other high priority stuff. I finished that up, ate lunch, and decided to work on SETT. But then… I didn’t. I answered emails, played my violin, researched some stuff, and bought some plane tickets. I…
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Using Specific Motivation to Reach Your Goals
One of the worst pitfalls of productivity is to decide that you’re going to execute on something, work on it for some period of time, lose interest, and ultimately quit before you get meaningful results. This happens in obvious cases like writing a book or coding a project, but can also apply to things like…
