Weekly Recap, 1533: I Commit to Writing an Article a Day for the Month of April.
Read: Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts, by Ryan Holiday. Read: [The Thank You Economy, by Gary Vaynerchuk.]() Read: Life is Short, by Paul Graham. Reading: The Now Habit, by Tom Fiore. 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. Wrote: 7 article for “30 Days of Articles for April”.
30 Days of Writing: Day 8, An Inhuman Climb
Today, I rode a climb up Tagaytay, Sungay In the Philippines. It’s an inhuman climb, with gradients at 15% in the straighter sections and up to 25% in the corners. It’s a climb that is difficult to walk on, never mind riding a bike though. It’s often at the edge of our ability that every thing we put in matters. While I’ve been religiously training on the bike for the past few months, and I’ve been using a road bike for two years, the Sungay climb’s ridiculous gradients exposed me.
30 Days of Writing, Day 7: Just Have a One Percent Day
There are days where I can say that I’m really not that motivated that much. It could be something with my brain or with my sleep or with my food or with my exercise, but I don’t want anyone reading this blog to have this illusion that I don’t have bad days. I’ve had a lot of shitty days. When those days come along, I ask myself, what is the smallest unit of work that I can do to move me closer to my dreams?
30 Days of Writing, Day 6: Don't Do Things You Know You'll Regret
You choose the suffering you want to experience. “Suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret.” As I struggle (and groan at the words that I’m typing) to think and push through with this article, I know that at any time, I can just switch to a new tab and continue mindlessly browsing Twitter and Hacker News. The problem with doing that is that I know that I’ll hate myself in the morning when the feeling of having skipped a day clouds over me, and I’d rather just kludge through writing this post even if I’m really sleepy and tired.
30 Days of Writing, Day 5: Systems Instead of Discipline.
This title is very apt since I’m really tired right now (the bike just killed me), but here goes. You brain has a limited amount of willpower and decisions it can do per day. Don’t waste this on stupid shit by creating systems that will incentivize good habits while disallowing bad ones. Food system: there’s no way for my brother and I to eat bad food in the house because we only buy nutritious food.
30 Days of Writing, Day 4: Putting in Reps.
A huge life goal of mine is to create a body of work that I can ultimately look back on and be proud of. I’m hoping to build some software that helps a lot of people, or write a blog post that gets someone to take control of their life, or possibly speak at a conference and inspire someone to build their own empire. If that is to be a reality, then I’ll have to put in a certain number of repetitive deliberate practice.
30 Days of Writing, Day 3: Always try to do things faster.
Always ask yourself: is there an easier, faster, and better way of doing things? If there is, then follow up by asking, would the time spent learning that way save time in the long-term? I first came into contact with the text editor I use for writing my programs (Vim) 4 years ago, and while it was a nightmare to learn I knew that if I just buckled down and forced myself to learn it for the next 20-100 hours, it would pay off at some point.
30 Days of Writing, day 2: Base your self-worth on learning.
In my junior and senior years in college, I had absolutely nothing going for me (horrible grades, very few friends, and no money) that I based my self-worth off my greatest “strength” at the time, which was video games and Magic: The Gathering. A really low point was when I was trying to construct a resume to look for a call center job after I had been expelled from my college—asides from the schools I attended, I couldn’t write anything.
Weekly Recap, 1532: Deploying Writing Prompts app, Start Chef!
On the 1532nd week of my life, I: Read: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, by Michael E. Gerber Read: Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin. Read: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World, by Gary Vaynerchuk. Read: The Well-Grounded Rubyist, by David A. Black. Read: Full Stack React, by fullstackreact.
30 Days of Writing
There’s something seriously wrong with how I interpret myself as an aspiring writer. For someone who has the audacity to call himself that, I haven’t been doing a lot of writing. My long-standing alibi has been “I’ll write the horribleness out of my system by just writing a lot of articles”, but I seem to always conveniently forget what “a lot” means, especially when it comes to hitting “commit” on my computer.