Weekly Recap, 1536: Antifragile and the Perils of Bike Commuting
On the 1536th week of my life, I: Read: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Reading: Reinventing Remittances with Bitcoin, by Luis Buenaventura. Reading: The Obstacle is the Way. Wrote: 3 daily articles. Programming Kafka Writing Books system. Refactoring Writing Prompts. Antifragile I’m not sure if I enjoyed Antifragile. While there are certainly a lot of good ideas in there, I don’t get why he writes in such a verbose and unintelligible way.
Weekly Recap 1534
Read: The Now Habit, by Tom Fiore. Listened to: Talks by Chamath Palihapatiya. Reading: Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Reading: Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read, by Brooks Landon. Reading: [Designing Data-Intensive Applications.]() Reading: Reliably Deploying Rails Applications, by Ben Dixon. Not much happened this week.
30 Days of Writing Day 16 Focus on the Message, Not the Messenger
You’ll meet several thousands of people in your life, and they have their own viewpoints and stories and whatever, and you’ll disagree with them a fair amount of times given a life time, but you should always remembers one thing: they’re not always wrong, and you’re not always right. You have to fight the innate human instinct to short-circuit decision making which incentivizes making a snap judgment on an idea based on its messenger.
30 Days of Writing, Day 15: How I Learn Programming Languages and Technologies
Over the past few months I’ve learned a lot of different programming languages and web development techniques: ReactJS/“modern” JavaScript, Redis, Domain-Driven Design, Elixir/Phoenix, and AWS/Chef/Docker. While I’m still at various levels from newbie to intermediate, I think I’ve gotten a better grasp of how to learn new technologies now. Here’s how I did it: Devote a few hours reading about the possible use case of that technology. For 2018, my goal was to expand to full-stack status (front-end framework to Rails to servers).
30 Days of Writing, Day 14: Ideas From Antifragile
Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb was really difficult to read: I can deal with his incessant ranting, but he really loves using complicated words and long paragraphs. Here are some things I took away from this book. On fragility: while fragile objects like porcelain cups break apart when shocked or stressed, antifragile concepts benefit from those. This probably confirms what I think about re: investing time and money on online courses, books, and studying over clothes and luxury goods, because knowledge stays with you, as long as you apply it, and material possessions can get lost, destroyed, or stolen.
30 Days of Writing, Day 13: Stop Complaining
When things don’t go our way, it’s easy to rationalize by thinking of every single excuse: “I was tired that day”, “I didn’t want to work for that company anyway”, “The system is against me”. When I was transferring colleges after flunking out of engineering, the Tourism college secretary didn’t accept my transfer request because of a low GPA. For your information Mr. Secretary, this “low” GPA was because of my (irrelevant to your course) engineering classes heavily skewed that number!
30 Days of Writing, Day 12: Chamath and 'Money as an Instrument of Change'
Get the money. Get the money, and then let’s get around a table, and let’s create new rules. It is going to be made, it is going to be allocated, and you have a moral imperative to make sure that if you have a point of view that matters, and you want to reflect it, you get it. It will be about a competition of views. Money drives the world, for better or for worse.
30 Days of Writing, Day 11: You Choose How the Story Ends
The story doesn’t end until you choose for it to end. I learned this story the hard way when I was still trying to develop my mind and my mental toughness. In order for me to become a UP mountaineer, I needed to run 15 kilometers in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Because of my lack of preparation, both physically and mentally, I struggled mightily, and at one point, I yelled out in frustration to my friends who were helping me, “You don’t know how I feel!
30 Days of Writing,Day 10: On Intermittent Fasting
I’ve been intermittent fasting over the last month or so, and the results have been dramatic: I’ve lost 10 pounds in the last 6 weeks. Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, so try this at your own risk! This is done without losing fitness as I can somehow bike faster, and I’ve been doing some core exercises: I actually feel stronger, despite the weight loss! My intermittent fasting schedule varies from day to day, but I try to keep my eating window within 6-8 hours: during most days, I start breaking my fast at 2-2:30pm, and eat my last meal at around 8-8:30 pm.
30 Days of Writing, Day 9: You Can Make Mistakes
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to write this blog post on time, as I slept before pushing this article out. I could rationalize and say that I was too tired, but I had an entire day (and to be quite honest, I only really need less than an hour) to do this, and I didn’t. And that’s okay. You can’t expect every day to go the way you want to. What’s important is you pick yourself back up and try again the next day.