This week, I’m going to circle back to a concept I mentioned in How I’m Making My Learning Actually Useful, and that’s the concept of 12 Favorite Questions. I had mentioned that Richard Feynman liked to have a written list of his 12 favorite problems, so he’d always be on the...
Everyone’s talking about goal setting. You see it in books, podcasts, and blog posts. Everyone has a method. Most of them sound good on paper but fall apart in real life. I’ve tried all of them. SMART goals, GTD, vision boards, you name it. Some made me feel busy. Others made...
At 43, I’m not scared of dying. I’m scared of wasting time. Neil deGrasse Tyson says mortality gives life meaning. I think it robs us of ambition. As I get older, I have less time left, and because of that, I can’t take the wild swings I would have when I was younger. What I...
I bought a course to improve my study skills and time management. I block time on my calendar to work on the course, but I keep missing my study sessions. The irony? The first module of the course talks specifically about urgency trapping, which is exactly why I kept missing...
Curiosity is desirable and powerful, but when fragmented, it becomes a liability. Every time you mindlessly consume content without context or an objective, you’re building a mental bottleneck. However, you want to make room for serendipity and be able to follow rabbit holes...
I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading books and taking courses, hoping they would help me grow. But most of the time, I finish and can’t remember a single thing that matters. There are no big ideas, no change, just a hollow, frustrating feeling that I wasted my time. I knew...
The trail was covered in ice. Where people had walked, the snow was compacted and slick, and I was heading downhill over a lot of rocks. It’s easier to be present when you’re just trying not to slip and crack your head open. This weekend, I conducted an experiment. I headed to...
I’m overwhelmed, tired, and not getting anything done. I know I want to focus on foundational skills and habits to help improve my day-to-day, but there are so many different things I could work on. Do I improve my software development skills? If I need to switch jobs, I should...
In September, I stepped on the scale, and I felt like I would puke. I clocked in at 307.1 lbs, an all-time high. All year, I had been hovering around 300, which was frustrating because I was trying to lose weight. In May, I walked 6,500 steps every day, and in August, I had a...
I've taken on the challenge of resurrecting a website that's been offline for more than a decade. It had a very expansive and well-normalized database using MySQL. I've been out of the SQL game for about six years, as all my recent projects have used MongoDB. It's been fun...