Tag: Productivity

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,…

It might surprise most readers to know that I actually had a pretty great time in school. I learned a lot, made great friends, and had some very good teachers. There are a lot of positive aspects of school that should be preserved even in alternatives. What I don’t like about school, though, is the…

Last night I played poker for the first time in four months. I play a reasonably big game, where you typically buy in for $500, and always have another $500 in reserve. When you play a couple times a week, like I was doing last year, your winnings and losses don’t mean much to you…

I woke up to a familiar sight. Outside the vehicle I had slept in was Brian, on the phone, trying to get us help with our latest predicament. And, just as last time with being stuck in mud, our unfailingly benevolent neighbors came to our rescue. “I don’t let anyone besides my dad work on…

If there’s one long-term state that I won’t tolerate for myself, it’s treading water, putting out effort just to stay where I am. I want to either expend effort to move something ahead, or triage it and let it sink. If it’s important enough to me to do, I’ll put everything into it and do…

One of the first presents I remember getting from my parents was a camera. I was about seven years old, and from the prints I still have, it seems that most of my photos were of my guineau pig, Muffin. There was a roll of film from my second grade class, and then there was…

A while back I had a friend named Andrew. The tie that bound us was our love for gambling, not as a thrill-seeking diversion, but as a practical application of statistics. We made money gambling together, exploiting any edge we could find, but we also gambled between the two of us. I forget how it…

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…

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…

My friend Ben Yu, has recently taken to rebutting all of my blog posts on his own blog. I hope to prove him wrong on the first one through action, but I’ll address the second one with words. In his post, Enjoy It Above All, he references my post about sprinting to the finish line.…