“Anxiety is thought without control.
Flow is control without thought.”
(by James Clear)
“Anxiety is thought without control.
Flow is control without thought.”
(by James Clear)
The library is one of the last places where you can exist without the expectation of buying something
Quote by James Clear:
“What appears to be a rapid shift is often preceded by a gradual process. Our results gradually explode or vanish thanks to the small habits we repeat each day.
What radical change are you slowly marching toward? An incremental explosion or an incremental vanishing?”
Wisdom from Kourosh Dini:
Any creative act is, by definition, one in which we don’t know what the thing will look like in the end.
Instead, we discover what we are making in the act of its creation.
There’s even a parallel in our relationships. With another person, we can regularly have breakdowns. There is a break in empathy. One party loses an understanding of the other.
But by working to return, to find a genuine re-attunement that works for both parties, one that often involves finding a new understanding, we create a new relationship.
If we hold onto a vision too tightly, it grows brittle and shatters. It is here that we might feel “failure”.
The work is to realize the feeling of failure as a step of creativity. We can then deliberately engage the fuzzy confusion, the unclear vision, and take some next step forward.
Quote from James Clear:
Simple mindset shifts:
I’m not hurt, I’m healing.
I’m not losing, I’m learning.
I was not rejected, I was redirected.
Negative things happen. Negative mindsets make them harder.”
A quote from this HN post
Programming has turned into gluing together mystery meat. You can’t make a business case for essentially writing every library you need. It would take too long to have anything like modern stuff. So you always deal with a huge pile of unknowns all of the time. The job consists more of the meta-skill of navigating unchartered waters intelligently, but you get dinged for doing the real job and people doing a terrible job get the rewards. The bad people glue the stuff together without trying to understand it, don’t document stuff, pull in any dependency that gets them closer to their goal, and put up a victory flag when the thing does what they want it to do. Then the war goes on day by day dealing with under-documented stuff and a giant pile of dependencies with no internal logic. The hero goes on to do it again, and a team of saps tries to make sense of a Gordian knot for the rest of the product’s lifetime.
Wise words from this thread
I work with a lot of technical founders who struggle to accept the inevitable truth that taking the time to specify, coordinate, and resource what they want to do leaves no time to be the one doing any of those things. They eventually solve this problem by hiring other engineers to focus on the implementation step while they keep everything on the straight and narrow. When the company grows and they run out of time to directly supervise every engineer an engineering manager is born.
Engineers who don’t appreciate the role of the product/marketing/management layers don’t seem to understand that if they had to take on those responsibilities it would leave them with no time left over to write any code. If nobody takes on those responsibilities then our company won’t make money to pay anybody to write code. It’s not chicken and egg, it’s cart and horse.
If you don’t want to become a marketing expert as well as a product design expert for the sake of doing all these things simultaneously consider being glad others are taking things off your plate and coordinating work without you so you can focus on writing code.
From Kourosh Dini:
Creating a rhythm is much easier than a habit. Do something twice, then actively decide if you want to continue. You’ll have built up the momentum to carry you forward and you maintain the agency to decide what you want to do with it.
From James Clear:
“Deconstruction creates knowledge. Recombination creates value.”
1. “Many problems are minor when you solve them right away, but grow into an enormous conflict when you let them linger.
As a rule of thumb, fix it now.”
The higher your ambitions, the bolder your actions.
The lower your expectations, the greater your satisfaction.
Achieve more and be happy along the way.”
Quote by James Clear
“Formal education is not nearly as important as an unquenchable thirst to learn.”
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from such things.”
—T.S. Eliot
Paradox of speed (a quote from James Clear):
“Speed is important. Work fast and iterate. People rarely remember the first draft, but everyone remembers the final draft.
Speed is unimportant. People rarely remember how long it took you to do the job, but everyone remembers how well you did the job.”
From James Clear:
“On the ground, a rock is just a rock. But when moving at high speed through the atmosphere, a rock becomes a meteor—alive with fire and burning bright.
People are not so different. Without activity, we are lifeless and dull. When moving fast and taking action, we come alive.”
Good bit of insight:
In my opinion mixing the functions of medium of exchange and store of value has caused untold amounts of needless suffering. You see 2% inflation is the middle ground. Rich people may want to save and increase their wealth but my mom just wants a job to pay rent and buy groceries, she has no grand ambitions to become super wealthy. When you mix the two functions into cash, one of the two is going to dominate the economy and with gold it was the rich, with fiat it is mostly average people because having a job is more important than maintaining purchasing power.
From James Clear:
“The most important battles must be fought anew each day. Learn to love the endless nature of things and life gets easier.”
“If you move fast, you can try more things. And if you try more things, you’re likely to find something that works for you.”
“Are you solving problems at the branch level or the root level?”
(sadly, all very applicable to me …)
From James Clear:
“If you know where you want to go in life, people tend to help or get out of the way.
Both of those are useful.”
I need to accept this in my life :-|
From Colter Reed
It would be nice if we could do everything. All the good stuff, none of the bad. But we’re finite, and everything comes at a price.
Sometimes, that price is just the opportunity cost: what are you going to give up to get something better?
How much is what you want worth to you?
From James Clear:
“Walk slowly, but never backward.”
From James Clear:
You cannot remove struggle from life, but you can improve your ability to handle challenge.
Don’t let the excuse of searching for a better way prevent you from taking action.
From Colter Reed:
One of the greatest indicators of our future happiness and success is our willingness to be content
From James Clear:
“What starts as an excuse can easily become a habit. Don’t let a bad day become a lifestyle.”
“Awareness is often enough to motivate change. The process starts with seeing reality clearly.”
From James Clear:
“Prime your environment to make the next action easy.”
“Your entire life happens inside your body. It’s the one home you will always occupy and can never sell.
From James Clear:
“If you’d like to do something bold with your life, you will have to choose to do something bold on a specific day.
There is no perfect day. There is no right time. For the trajectory to change, there has to be one day when you simply make the choice.”
“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.” ~ Howard Thurman