It’s whimsical, delightful, and explains memory & how to work with it beautifully as you read the funny, pithy explorable.
Definitely worth your time & attention.

I’m a big fan of Shane Parrish’s, The Knowledge Project.
Last night, I finished Episode 35, with Robert Green.

If you have trouble figuring out how to read, or take notes, and synthesize what you learn, go listen to how a master does it. (Spoiler, it’s pretty low tech)
Take what he teaches and adapt it digitally if you want.

Robert taught it to my favorite Stoic author, Ryan Holiday who’s given a good description of it, here in his Medium post.
And if you really want to get into the weeds, Ryan breaks it all down here, in along post replete with photos

You’ll find the shownotes with links here. Give it a listen.

All of this to say, Read more! Write more!
After your first programming language, writing is the most important skill you’ll pick up as a programmer who wants to make a mark.
You have to write daily!

The way you train reflects the way you fight. People say I’m not going to train too hard, I’m going to do this in training, but when it’s time to fight I’m going to step up. There is no step up. You’re just going to do what you did every day.”

— Georges St. Pierre

Introduction

In The Intelligent Investor, published in 1949, Benjamin Graham¹ wrote:

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into the single phrase, “This too will pass.”

Confronted with a like challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto;

MARGIN OF SAFETY.

… the function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future.

(emphasis mine)

What does that mean to me?

That in order to do anything with my life, in any area, I should have enough to face the worst that I think, could happen to me.

I’ll simplify it further.

Margin is having enough room to breathe;
and knowing what “enough” means in every sphere of life.

It has implications throughout life and across various societal disciplines even. Ben Graham’s quote above comes from the field of finance. What about engineering?

Consider a highly-engineered jet engine part. If the part were to fail, the engine would also fail, perhaps at the worst possible moment—while in flight with passengers on board … We’ve designed the part for 10,000 hours of average flying time. That brings us to a central question: After how many hours of service do we replace this critical part? 9,999 hours? Why replace it any sooner than we have to? Why waste money?

The first problem is, we know nothing of the composition of the 10,000 hours any individual part has gone through. Were they 10,000 particularly tough hours, filled with turbulent skies? Was it all relatively smooth sailing?
And, how confident are we, that the part will really last the full 10,000 hours? What if it had a slight flaw during manufacturing? What if we made an assumption about its reliability that was not conservative enough? What if the material degraded in bad weather to a degree we didn’t foresee?

The challenge is clear, and the implication obvious: we do not wait until the part has been in service for 9,999 hours. Perhaps at 7,000 hours, we seriously consider replacing the part, and we put a hard stop at 7,500 hours.

The difference between waiting until the last minute and replacing it comfortably early gives us a margin of safety. We leave ourselves a cushion. (Ever notice how your gas tank indicator goes on long before you’re really on empty? It’s the same idea.)

Go read the whole post. It’s awesome.

So, Why Do We Need Margin?

To paraphrase Dr. Richard Swenson, who’s literally written the book on Margin (the book has a moral, Christian bent. Don’t let that bother you);

• Progress gives us more and more, which leads to
• stress, change, complexity, speed, intensity, and overload.
• which is bad, because all humans have physical, mental, emotional, and financial limits that are relatively fixed
• Thus progress is on a collision course with human limits and once we can’t take progress any more, we flame and burn out. On the unsaturated side of our limits, humans can be open and expansive. Cross them however, and the rules of life totally change.

What would you think if this page had no margins? What would you think of me if I crammed the print top to bottom and side to side so that every blank space was filled up? The result would be aesthetically displeasing and chaotic.

Like some of our lives!

Marginless, according to Swenson, is being thirty minutes late to the doctors office because you were twenty minutes late getting out of the bank because you were ten minutes late dropping the kids off at school because the car ran out of fuel two klicks from the petrol pump and you forgot your wallet. Margin, on the other hand, is having breath left at the top of the staircase, money left at the end of the month, and sanity left at the end of adolescence.

No Margin, causes hyperstress and overload. (terms that to folks like us, need no definition)

Here’s Dr. Swenson again,

To be healthy, we require margin in at least four areas:

• emotional energy,
• physical energy,
• time,
• and finances.

Yet, right now for the most part we are emotional wrecks, stressed, alone, and so exhausted in spirit. Physically, we are overfed, underactive, and sleep-deprived. We have no time, at all. And when it comes to finances, our bank balances look as barren as the surface of Mars.

What Can We Do about It?

Thank Pareto, grab the low hanging fruit and do the twenty percent of the work that’ll yield the most margin in your life.

Remember, we live lives, full of intention now :)

Let’s intentionally tackle each domain and see what we can do.

Emotional:

• Bond with your family
• Make time for friends
• Switch off the TV! … and your other screens
• Get a pet or go play with doggies in the park
• Pray, meditate.

Physical:

• Eat less, move more
• Walk, Run!
• Cut out sugar
• Drink water.
• Have the discipline (or build it up) to keep at it.
  (I didn’t have any and I’m paying the price!)
• Most importantly, get enough sleep.

Time:

• You’ll never “find time”. Be intentional. Make time!
• Learn to plan your day and your week.
• Plan your day with plenty of spaces in the middle
• Did you cut out FB? Twitter? TV? :P
• Learn to say No. No is a complete sentence.

Financial:

• Stop eating out! Learn to make do.
• The only debt you have should be your home. (and no more than 40% of income at that)
• Have 6 months living expenses in the bank.
• Spend way less than you make. (The bigger the buffer, the more chaos you can handle.)
• Be comfortable with charity and giving now, when it’s hard to do. Like Dave Ramsey says, “If you will live like no one else, later you can live and give like no one else.”

And finally here’s James Clear, echoing Taleb Leave Room for the Unexpected!

If your life is designed only to handle the expected challenges, then it will fall apart as soon as something unexpected happens to you.
Always be stronger than you need to be.
Always leave room for the unexpected.

Thank you for reading. Here’s a puppy.

This is the bonus section

Want to hear from an actual practitioner?

So what is the lesson?
Save your current income, even as you build complementary skills like frugality, adaptability, and the ability to earn money in more than one way.
Then you’ll be ready to retire much earlier, because the sum of your safety margins will be enough to make you feel comfortable taking the leap.
And most importantly, stop worrying!

That’s Mr. Money Mustache (real name, Pete Adeney), software developer who retired at age 30! (watch the video)

Resources:
(in the grand tradition of @mbuf feeding us well with knowledge)

• The eponymous book on the topic, by Dr. Richard Swenson
• Shane Parrish - A Margin of Safety
• Shawn Blanc’s Margin Series
• Be Strong - James Clear
• MMM - Levels of Safety
• How to be Rich, Happy & Save the World!

P.S. This post is part of the Life Outside Code series.

OK, I’ve changed my mind.

Before, I talk tactics, let me tell you something about intention.

All intention means to me is, “I, Decide!”

I decide how to feel. I decide how to invest my money. I decide if I want to be fit or not. I decide whether to pursue that career or that degree. Or not. I decide whether I want to jump on the bed, every morning or not.

Also, not making a choice, not deciding, is a decision.

And then, be willing to face the consequences of your decisions.

Leo Babauta has a wonderful quote at the start of his post, Wake Up.

A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action.
A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.
– Neale Donald Walsch

In fact, that post, cuts the length of mine by half. Go read, Wake Up, right now.
I’ll wait.

Back? Good! So why do this? Because, time. Time is the most precious resource you have. And while you’re young and you feel like there’s lots of it left, fact is you don’t quite have as much as you think you do.

If I gave you a bottle of fine vintage port, and told you that was all you got for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you be really intentional with how you drank it and on what occasions? No matter what folks and friends said?

How much more so then should you be intentional with your time? And your life?

Yes, you cannot make all the decisions on your own.
Your spouse, your parents, your family do have a say in the big decisions that involve them all.

But mostly, that is not the case. We’re lazy or unwilling to do the work. Daddy handles the money.
My wife / mother takes care of the house.
God will take care of us, if someone falls sick.

As Seth Godin says,

Sometimes, we willingly sacrifice our freedom because it creates an other, someone to blame. It gives us hard boundaries and eliminates potential choices. And mostly, it lets us off the hook, because someone else is driving the bus.

Intention puts your life in perspective.

I chose not to pursue career opportunities abroad (forgoing income), because I choose to stay near my parents. Family is more important to me.

But, I also chose not to learn about money, burying my head in the sand. That led not just to lost income, but crazy amounts of foolish debt. That set my career back by years. I couldn’t risk taking chances with my career, because I had dumb loans to pay.

You’re young. But you don’t have to be foolish. Take the time out to decide and be intentional about your life.

Here’s Seth again,

Trying to drive from the back of the bus might feel less risky, but it rarely leads to much agency, influence or control as to where the bus actually goes.

Careful what you do with the keys.

P.S. This post is part of the Life Outside Code series

Update: The planet strips video embeds.
So, please read it on the blog to get the right flow.
Links to the videos also at end of post if you do not wish to leave the planet window

Mamata Venkat¹ set out to be a doctor (her passion; or so she thought), started out as pre-med and got halfway through her freshman year (first year) of college before she realised medicine wasn’t for her. She went on to switch majors about four times before finally landing on international studies and eventually choosing public health.

She’d struggle with self-confidence, set high standards for herself and then be crushed when she failed to reach them. She felt like she wasn’t doing what she was supposed to be, with her life.

Daily life was a blur, an unfocused haze. In her words …

I would get to class and it’d be fine and then about halfway through class, I’d keep thinking about the video I watched that morning.

And there’d be so much chaos coming around me, and in me because of my thoughts and all these distractions, that I’d come home and feel frustrated and let out that frustration of my family members.
Because I didn’t know what to do with it.

I start my homework and feel frustrated because i wasn’t understanding the concepts …

So how did she turn it all around? What did she do?

Exactly, what I’m about to tell you to do, right now.

• Take a few quick, but deep breaths. (deeeeep … from your tummy)

• Count to 5.

• Take a few more deep ones. (Breathe. Really breathe.)
  

• Now, start counting your breaths.

• Breathe in (1)

• Breathe out (2)

• Breathe in (3)

• Are you thinking of food? or what to do next?
  Just come back to the breath.

• Breathe out (4)

• Breathe in (5)

• Breathe out (6)

• Mind flitting somewhere?
  Gently, back to the breath.

• Breathe in (7)

• Breathe out (8)

• Breathe in (9)

• Breathe out (10)

There you go.
You just meditated! So did Mamata.

This is all you do. This, in effect, is the practice.

• Focus on your breath.
  Focus only on your breath.
• Bring your mind back gently if your attention drifts.

Stick with it daily. Increase your mental endurance slowly, a minute, two minutes, five minutes at a time, until you can do ten comfortably, twice a day.

Andy Puddicombe has a marvelous video on the whys and the wherefores of meditation. Give it a look see, and I’ll meet you below the video.

I’ve been reading Tools of Titans, where Tim Ferriss distills knowledge & tactics from his various two–three hour long podcast episodes with achievers.

The number one tool or life habit they use? – Meditation

• Arnold Schwarzenegger, action star, meditates.
• Tony Robbins, self help guru par excellence, meditates.
• Chase Jarvis, ace photograpger, meditates.
• Ed Catmull, animation genius, President of Pixar, meditates.
• John Favreau, Monica’s boyfriend, Iron Man director, meditates.
• Heck, even Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, meditates.

So I got you convinced? Are you raring to go? How do you meditate? Need help? The simplest thing to do, would be to get the Headspace or Calm apps and just use their free packs. Or do what Maria Popova does and just stick to one guided meditation daily.

And what happened to Mamata? A look at her AngelList bio, speaks volumes.

Here’s Mamata again

… to me true success is being able to learn about myself more and more every single day with my meditation practice and using that and expressing it in any situation that I’m put in.

Thank you

I leave you with Mamata, expressing her journey with meditation in her own words.

I hope, this post inspires you to, too!

• Andy Puddicombe’s video.
• Mamata Venkat’s video.

Started: 2018-01-27 Finished: 2018-01-28

I started my modern non-fiction journey only a couple of years back, with Antifragile and Thinking Fast & Slow. (I’d only read older, motivational self help before then, Ziglar, Carnegie etc) I made the mistake of thinking everything was as wonderfully dense, yet rambling and well written.

I was sadly mistaken. I realised that just like fiction, most non-fiction wasn’t worth my time and that just like most fiction, non-fiction followed a beat; a predictable path.

• You present the lay of the land
• The problem with the way things are
• Present your hypothesis for a solution
• Support your hypothesis with your findings and supported studies and articles
• Exposition (or you’d how to apply the solution in your life or to your problem)
• Expand it across domains if possible
• Optional, an upsell if possible to talks or events.
• The End

This has made it so easy for so many to fit so much drivel into the standard 300 pages. Yet it is now just as easy for me (like someone lifting off a veil,) to skim books and junk the ones I don’t like.

And further yet, when well done, this same pattern allows for such amazing exposition of knowledge. Seth Godin and Cal Newport are masters at the game. And so is Angela Duckworth, author of Grit. I’ve marked the book blue, so I can’t hope to even summarise it here. Just a few inspirational notes follow. I’ll leave the entire exposition for the book.

“With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.” ²

As did I. I see people writing prodigious pieces of software, figure out how to move mountains of data, keep hundreds of machines in sync and am filled with awe. I see Ansel Adams’ photos and despair of ever being even a tenth as good as he was. I watch Ian Ethan do what I can only describe as crazy making with polyphonic tones and God knows what else on a guitar with two fretboards while I struggle to play a single scale on one. Scott H. Young self-learns a 4 year MIT CS degree in a single year, goes on to learn four languages in a year and then just for kicks, learns to draw portraits in a month, while I struggle with to pick up programming and cannot draw to save my life.

So, how do I get to be that good? Or at least part way competent? The answer lies in being gritty.

First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction. It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

Talent however, is no guarantee of grit. (Or I’d be destined to forever be at the bottom of the totem pole :) )

Which is why I loved it when Angela held up Charles Darwin as a shining example of grit.

Darwin’s biographers don’t claim he possessed supernatural intelligence. He was certainly intelligent, but insights didn’t come to him in lightning flashes He was, in a sense, a plodder. Darwin’s own autobiography corroborates this view: “I have no great quickness of apprehension [that] is so remarkable in some clever men,” he admits. “My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited.” He would not have made a very good mathematician, he thinks, nor a philosopher, and his memory was subpar, too: “So poor in one sense is my memory that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.”

So how then did Darwin, get to be … well, Darwin?

Darwin’s (less famous, yet arguably more talented, more genius) cousin, Francis Galton, provides us with the answer

Outliers are remarkable in three ways: they demonstrate unusual “ability” in combination with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.”

Here’s Darwin, himself …

“I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.”

One biographer describes Darwin as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to different—and no doubt easier—problems

Gritty folks, in Angela’s words, were constantly driven to improve … and were paragons of perseverance.

The focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice. The main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable. A high level of performance is, in fact, an accretion of mundane acts.

More words on perseverance …

The bigger impediment to progress is that sometimes we stop working out altogether. … Consistency of effort over the long run is everything. Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going. If the quality and quantity of those pots, books, movies, and concerts are what count, then the striver who equals the person who is a natural in skill by working harder will, in the long run, accomplish more.

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare. Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time.

How do you figure which pursuit of yours is worth following?
Have a few, big overarching goals and let the rest of your actions and smaller goals drive you to that big one. You can drop, change, blow up the small things, but keep your eye on the prize.

Here’s Warren Buffett and Angela, explaining this a lot more clearly,

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals. Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five. Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.

To Buffett’s three-step exercise in prioritizing, I would add an additional step: Ask yourself, To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose? The more they’re part of the same goal hierarchy—important because they then serve the same ultimate concern—the more focused your passion. If you follow this method of prioritization, … you’ll stand a better chance of getting somewhere you care about—a better chance of moving closer to where you want to be.

And the way to get better at grit and perseverance and getting slowly better by the day is through Deliberate Practice. Angela has a chapter dedicated to it. But Cal Newport has a written about this at length, showcases process and success stories and even has a whole book dedicated to Deep Work & Deliberate practice. So go, read.

She goes on to write at length on the mindsets you’d need, which you could develop both intrinsically and extrinsically, finding purpose, having hope, and how to develop grit personally and as parents and leaders in society. You really ought to read the book cover to cover.

I’ll close with Nietzsche’s plea to peek behind the curtain and appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making magic …

Nietzsche implored us to consider exemplars to be, above all else, craftsmen: “Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it) … They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well, than in the effect of a dazzling whole. ”

Started: 2018-01-24 Finished: 2018-01-24

The book had so many parallels to what I’ve learnt at DGPLUG that I decided to do this book’s notes here, instead of over at the home blog.

I want to grow and become known enough to find my thousand true fans. I was lucky then, to find this book that has the exact same premise.

You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.

Talk about finding water in the desert!

And then on it’s an awesome, rollicking, unputdownable ride across Austin’s ten rules of putting your work out there.

One of the best parts, when starting out was finding a Scenius.

If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures—mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses.

You know where this is going, right? DGPLUG is my scenius :)

As a shot of courage, the advantage us amateur punks have, over the likes of Kushal, Sayan & Shakthi (I kid guys, I kid :) )

We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims.

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.

“I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. “They were terrible. . . . I wanted to get up and be terrible with them.” Raw enthusiasm is contagious.

He speaks about the process of creation being messy, but there’s still incredible value in letting people see how it’s done, to let folks have a connection and an ongoing conversation with us, the creators.

And echoing Shakthi, here’s Austin on breaking down goals to the day.

Overnight success is a myth. Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance. Building a substantial body of work takes a long time—a lifetime, really—but thankfully, you don’t need that time all in one big chunk. So forget about decades, forget about years, and forget about months. Focus on days. Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The sun goes up; the sun goes down.

While you might think, that you’ll make a better mouse trap and the world’ll beat a path to your door (or in programmarese, build it and they will come), you couldn’t be more wrong. You need to tell people your story. And if you aren’t already, you need to become a good storyteller.

The truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it. “‘The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.” —John le Carre

Obviously stealing what Kushal has been yammering on about for years, “শেখ এবং শেখাও”¹

Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.

Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return. Author Christopher Hitchens said having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

There’s a shit ton of advice in this small volume

• The importance of owning your own domain, your own blog.
• Crediting people you steal from
• Being someone worth following
• Being just selfish enough to protect your time and your work
• Learning how to deal with life’s punches
• on the importance of “selling out” to earn your daily bread and feed your soul
• and the importance of paying it forward

“Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.” —Michael Lewis

“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.” — Dan Harmon

It’s lovely. It’s concise. It’s full of practical wisdom. It’s definitely worth many reads.

Kushal Das, wrote a lovely piece on inclusivity and generosity of spirit. What hit me though, (ergo this note to myself), was his thundering twist of a climax

He goes through the post talking about how his life’s been one roller coaster of highs and lows and people pulling him down like crabs in a barrel, yet other mentors pushing him hard to do his best.

And then he ends with

You don’t have to bow down in front of anyone, you can do things you love in your life without asking for others permissions.

Like Steven Pressfield, tells Jeff Goins

At what point can someone who writes call himself a writer?

When he turns pro in his head. You are a writer when you tell yourself you are. No one else’s opinion matters. Screw them. You are when you say you are.

I wish I had learnt this so much earlier in life. In a strange fit of domain blindness I somehow translated “Carpe Diem!” as seizing the day, doing my best work, but for others!

I spent close to ten years of my life learning skills, getting better yet lacking the courage to do what I wanted to do. Maybe if I wasn’t so chicken or worked extra hard for myself, things might have turned out differently for me too, instead of me being here, all of thirty-nine, wondering where the years went.

But thanks to the wife and her courage, I was inspired too!

I realised that I could not wait for life to hand me opportunities on a platter. I could not wait for all my problems to go away, before I could make a risk free change. I have only one life to live, and I don’t want to see myself ten, twenty, fifty years down the road, once again ruing the choices I made and the chances I did not take.

And the other related thing / flaw / weakness that I got over last year, was that I stopped waiting for people to give me permission. I used to think, that if people were older, more experienced, they would automatically be more wise, in all domains of life.

Now I know through bitter experience that, that is simply not true. I am smarter, much smarter than most folks in some areas and dumber in most others. The same holds true for other folk!

So it’s all up to me, to build myself up, to learn more, put myself out there and make something of myself, trusting in myself and amor fati.¹

Like Horace wrote over two thousand years ago …

dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away. Seize the present; trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may.

And to wrap it up even more succinctly, here’s Steve Jobs², driving the point home (transcript below) …

So, the thing I would say is … When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your … your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

But life … That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is …

Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Kushal Das, on developing his writing chops …

It boiled down to one thing. One has to write more. This is no short cut. So, I tried to do that throughout 2017. If I just look at the numbers, I wrote 60 blog posts in 2017, which is only 7 more than 2016.

Austin Kleon, on trying to get his son to draw …

Several times a day since October, ever since the Halloween decorations went up, my two-year-old son Jules has asked my wife or me to draw him an “x-ray.” (That’s his word for skeleton.) … We’ve drawn hundreds of skeletons for him, over and over and over again. He flat-out refuses to attempt drawing one for himself.

Seth Godin, on doing the work

Slow and steady The hard part is “steady.” Anyone can go slow. It takes a special kind of commitment to do it steadily, drip after drip, until you get to where you’re going.

Several times, during my programming journey, I tear my hair out over things I just do not understand. I fall off the wagon due to ill health. I’m old; no match for today’s young, smart, kids I feel so dumb, like I’m not cut out for this.

Yet, I have dreams. I have ambition. I’ve loved the way software has changed my life and I’d love to solve people’s problems by doing the same thing I have my back against the wall, literally, in terms of the risk, this current change entails. I want, nay, yearn to do this.

And the three wise men above, give me hope.

Here’s Kushal, on the results of his year long writing journey

Did your writing skill improve a lot?

The answer is no. But, now, writing is much more easier than ever. I can sit down with any of my mechanical keyboards, and just typing out the things on my mind.

If I just look at the numbers, I wrote 60 blog posts in 2017, which is only 7 more than 2016. But, the number of views of the HTML pages, more than doubled.

And Austin, on when his little one, started to draw

What happened? What convinced him it was time? The construction paper and the markers have been there at his disposal for months. Was it that we had visitors in the house for Christmas? I can’t come up with any convincing external factor that might have caused him to finally pick up the marker. He just decided he was ready.

As is so often the case with parenting, you do the same Sisyphean, seemingly meaningless task over and over again, wondering when the heck it will add up to anything.

And then, one day, often without warning or fanfare, the meaning arrives, and you still can’t believe it.

After all, you don’t get to blog post 7000, in a day. You do it one day at a time, drip after drip after drip.

The secret to writing a daily blog is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.

And so, I grind away, filled with hope.