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the biggest lie i ever told myself was that i needed to feel a certain way [ready, fearless, confident] in order to do the things i wanted to

@melodaysong

Just go for it.

If you are creating an arbitrary precursor condition to reach up and touch the sky, you will work on that pre-condition, not your dream.

You may surmount that pre-condition to your dream, but if you do, you will keep creating one arbitrary precursor condition after another until you die.

And you will never touch the sky.

There are no pre-conditions to satisfy before you are authorized to reach up and touch the sky.

Don’t make up shit.

Just reach up and touch the sky.

Meanwhile, I’m happy because I decided that it’s OK to be happy.

What do you control?

Nothing outside yourself. That’s for sure.

Within yourself? Your thoughts, your moods, your actions?

Your actions, for sure.

Your thoughts? Well, they seem to drift in and out like clouds. But by focusing thoughts you can crowd out others. “God is with me now.” That worked — and works. Focus on what you want more of.

Your moods? Unclear.

So I’m focusing on what I want more of. Happy.

people asking for advice are often looking for something like “wear mouth tape” or “use blackout blinds” or some other bandaid intervention, but the deeper, truer solution to most persistent problems is more like “reconstitute your entire life around different fundamentals”

@visakanv on Twitter

the most important thing you can do is to actively look for the people you love, and make yourself easy to find

@noampomsky on Twitter

@visakanv idea

Build one for your new idea.

The loop you’re in right now ain’t it. Here you are making big money on a big deal project and you’re dreading it.

This journal is a win_loop. It decants thoughts out of my brain so they don’t bedevil me anymore.

I’ll tell you another win_loop. Get more sleep. You woke early this morning (fucking automatic sprinklers at 6 am), fed the dog and some water, then went back to bed. That extra sleep felt great.

Do more of that. You can schedule your work anytime you want. (That’s not a privilege, bitch. I worked hard for 40 years to make that happen. Fuck you and that privilege word.)

First, sleep.

Be clever if you like.

But keep your eye first on real world constraints.

No amount of clever will help if you are sleepy. No amount of clever will help if you need four people to get something done and you are alone. No amount of clever will solve (most) money problems.

Acknowledge reality.

ps: the ultimate (and perhaps only) true constraint is time.

That was my experience: it took 10 years of work before my chosen profession started to make sense.

Peter Norvig says “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” and it rings true for me.

Ten years from now . . . what did you do with the decade? Why not get really, really good at something?

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

– Herbert Simon

Input ___, information. What is the answer?

Input ___, output attention. What is the answer?

There is an input/output chain here. If this quote is right, attention must be protected from information.

But this assumes attention is a finite resource. Is that true?

Of course, these words are weasel words. What does “information” mean? What does “attention” mean?

This may be a fatuous, midwit quote with no there there. After all, I found it on Twitter. The initial assumption must be that everything is fatuous, everything has a purpose: “Look at me! I am very smart!”

But I’m still interested in the idea that attention can get tiny and laser-focused or instantly expand to enormous with infinite capacity, can deflect or absorb at will.

Dostoevsky observing a society ball:

“Everybody is wearing new clothes and no one knows how to wear them, everybody makes merry and no one is merry, everybody is ambitious and no one knows how to make the most of himself, everybody is envious, everybody keeps silent and everybody shuns everyone else. They even do not know how to dance.”

@porkchop_EXP on Twitter

Don’t lie to yourself. Reading to get smart so you can do the work is not doing the work. Doing the work is doing the work.

Clarifying this for myself: rather than (or maybe in conjunction with?) talking to prospective customers on the phone, just talk to prospective customers on the phone.