Depends on the state. You definitely shouldn&#x27;t use work computers or do it on work time.

Depends on your specific contract. Mine just bans me from machine learning related work.

I live and work in NY. It was standard in my contract with my former employer.

Copyright isnt really important here this is labor law

Depends on jurisdiction. In places with reasonable copyright laws, you&#x27;d have to do weird things to end up in the “employer takes rights” situation in the first place.

These days, many companies are cool with it as long as you use your personal machine, on your own time, avoid using any work resources, etc. Usually it&#x27;s baked into your employment contract.

Of course, what you&#x27;ve said is true as far as it goes. But, consider this: if your employer has a product with any sort of search capability, your hobby&#x2F;side project search engine then falls under the heading of things &quot;relat(ing)... to the employer&#x27;s business.&quot;If you work for a big enough tech company, like, say, Google or Facebook, it&#x27;s likely that a lot of things will &quot;relate...to their business.&quot; And, note, too, that there&#x27;s no requirement that you actually know that it relates to a part of your employer&#x27;s business.

But they are fairly wide conditions it has to be &quot;unrelated&quot; to your day job.OK if your a semi pro musician but a generic developer sie gig not so much.

This definitely depends on the employer and your geographical location; for example, in California, clauses like this are not legal except under certain conditions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&amp;sectionNum=2870" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySectio...</a>

This is just as depressing. Employers should have zero rights to code their employees write on their own time unless the employee is using employer specific IP &#x2F; resources or creating a direct competitor. Needing to get permission should not even be a thing.

Side note: It is depressing that the question winds up being asked this way (EDIT: while ignoring how depressing it is that it is an existing question in the first place) !Instead it should be: &quot;Is it generally easy for employers to get permission from their employees to be assigned all rights for code they write in private?&quot;

This is one of those times that this adage applies. In the worst case, &quot;begging for forgiveness&quot; does not mean asking your manager for an exception. It means losing an expensive court case with your former employer about who owns your IP.

I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s good advise in this case. The case where you don&#x27;t get forgiveness in this case might mean that you put a ton of work into something and now much of it is owned by someone else.

Don&#x27;t ask for permission if you can get away with begging for forgiveness ;)

Generally, your company only has rights to that if you&#x27;ve signed away your rights in your employment agreement. People have found success negotiating that out of the agreement by bringing it up.Haven&#x27;t tried it, but I&#x27;d be interested to try the argument that the company doesn&#x27;t want to own my side projects, because liability. If I infringe someone else&#x27;s copyrights on accident, but the company owns the work, then the company is liable, not me. Sweet protections of corporatization. :)Or if I make a decisions on a side project that others want to &quot;cancel&quot; on twitter - that&#x27;ll look bad to the company because legally theyre the owners, right? Wouldn&#x27;t want the company being to blame for something I did.

i&#x27;ve never had a problem. but i&#x27;m not working for huge companies where the contract change would have to go through a legal department.

I read my contract and ensure you know what you are signing. If possible make them add a line about side projects off work hours.Much harder to win in court when they knowingly added a line that lets you work on your own projects.

Code something they would have zero interest in (or would even actively avoid being associated with.)

It&#x27;s because in the US the theory is that by hiring you salaried, they hire your mind and creative output, not a set labor. This means they pay you for anything your mind produces and then try to claim ownership for anything your mind produces whether you were in-office or not.(this is usually not enforcable unless you actively build competing services)

It happens in Europe too.
The rationale is that the employer gives you a lot of knowledge and tools which you could use to your own benefit... there are clear cases of abuse, some leading to litigation. I guess the employers want to defend themselves against IP theft basically.What I normally do is ask for an agreement that projects unrelated to my employer&#x27;s business is ok for me to work on, which I have always been able to get (sometimes they ask for authorization on a case-by-case basis, but usually it&#x27;s just common sense).

Because employment laws are based on old laws relating to &quot;Masters and servants&quot;And European law is just the same.

Could you please explain to someone who is not from the US what is the justification behind this? It seems that it is not uncommon in the US that the employer has some rights to stuff you do in your free time - to me that seems as &quot;reasonable&quot; as &quot;you sold me your house so your car is also mine now&quot;. What I do in my free time is none of my employer&#x27;s business, why would they have any right to any of it?

This is dangerous advice. Depending on your contract and jurisdiction, your code could belong to your employer.

Most employers couldn&#x27;t care less whether you cease exist once you leave the company, let alone track what you&#x27;re up to.As long as you&#x27;re not competing directly with them just leave your day job just as your side project ramps up commercially, and it&#x27;ll likely never be an issue.Most are only worried you&#x27;ll leverage their IP, insider knowledge, steal employers, or somehow cause reputational damage to them - they don&#x27;t actually want your IP.

Is it generally easy for people to get permission from their day job to code on the side, without assigning all rights to the employer?

That is effective, though I found that ramping up the amount of work being done is even more effective, provided that it can be sustained.

Have you considered you might have some disorder that affects your executive function capacity like ADHD and therefore requires alternative strategies to organize and cultivate habits?

I think often it takes longer than a few weeks for it to really become automatic.

I recommend checking out Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. He runs the Stanford Behavior Design Lab (previously known as persuasive tech lab). One takeaway from that book that might be relevant to you is that we tend to repeat actions that are rewarding in some way, so if you can think of ways to engineer reward into whatever activities you want to repeat, you have a higher likelihood of doing them.

i think if you truly hate doing something, it can almost never become a habit, unless you can somehow shove tiny things you really love into it to dilute your hatred for said thing. for instance, i love the act of going outside to buy a cup of coffee. little prep rituals like that can help.but the main question is: if you truly hate something, why are you trying to make it a habit in the first place? listen to your mind&#x2F;body. i HATE working out, specifically i despise HIIT workouts like those one hour classes of nonstop go go go go go. but turns out that i love strength training (i.e lifting weights). both sort of get the job done in terms of getting your body into healthier shape, so i just choose what actually brings me more joy. no need to force yourself to go through miserable situations just because society and everyone else says &quot;you have to do this to be smart, or fit, or more productive, etc&quot;

For me, doing something literally every day (often) doesn&#x27;t seem necessary. Rather, for something like various work-related writing I do, it&#x27;s more about keeping some sort of cadence so that I don&#x27;t wake up some morning, realize it&#x27;s been a month, and go &quot;well, one more day won&#x27;t make a difference.&quot;

try something like ticking off&#x2F;writing down your successfull tries eg in a calendar or a (bullet) journal. helps to keep yourself committed to it, as you probably do not want to break your already created streak.

Another thing is to expect a mess. A weeklong streak feels good but then pressure builds up to not miss and inevitably we miss and it makes us feel terrible and we throw it all out. The streaks thing seems really popular but it amounts to negative pressure for me and it’s not sustainable.So expect a mess. It’s ok if you go off the deep end for a week so long as you try again eventually. I wouldn’t say “daily” habits so much as I’d say consistent habits. over a bigger time span, the idea is to feel better and better about more and more frequency.Virtuous cycle vs stress cycle imo

I think that just means that your subconscious cost benefit analysis concluded that it wasn&#x27;t worth it.  I think that&#x27;s normal.  You&#x27;ll probably try out a bunch of hobbies&#x2F;habits in a lifetime, and only choose to stick with a couple.

I can&#x27;t form habits of any kind either. There are days when &quot;brush teeth&quot; has to be a checklist item as I can easily go to bed without doing it. Same with eating even.

Depends what it is. If it&#x27;s something creative, this can become pretty much like writer&#x27;s block. Ie. you know there&#x27;s something you want or need to write, but it&#x27;s such a huge task, it&#x27;s hard to get down to it. This can lead to overindulgence in research and distractions.One solution is to set yourself a goal to just do this one thing, to get started, and do that thing. No matter how bad, just make that draft, POC, whatever. Start breaking up things into smaller pieces, and set yourself to accomplish one piece at the time, no matter the state of results. Iterate on this to improve quality and scope, and keep your focus on the smaller, managable things, while getting more clear about the whole over time. If something is too much, just break it up.Another take is how to manage your expectations and associations. If every time you visit the dog is to give it medicine, it&#x27;ll become suspicious of you. So every time you visit your projects, make sure to leave room for some cuddle time, while making sure it&#x27;s also supporting progress on that same thing. For very difficult goals, transform it into a spike and celebrate it no matter what the results. No matter what, you learned something new. You want to associate with progress.

Meh I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re doing anything wrong unless you suffer some kind of condition or attention deficit.One thing about these motivational speeches or techniques is that sometimes we just think we&#x27;d like doing something new, but deep inside our mind we really do not want to have that new habit. In those cases what we typically really want instead is to be the person who had already cultivated the habit for a long time. Thus if you think about your objectives and realize this description matches how you feel, that&#x27;s a signal that you don&#x27;t really want to do that, it maybe just feels cool to imagine yourself doing it.A practical example. Not sure if here on HN or where, but I heard once this principle applied to playing the guitar, which I&#x27;ve always wanted to do. After asking myself I realized that I don&#x27;t want to learn how to play the guitar... what I really want is to be the guy who already knows!! :-) And that explains why I tried learning guitar... like 5 times already in my life. And always ended up stopping practice after some time. I was just misguided by the cool imagination of me taking out a guitar and playing a song, but in the real world that takes practicing regularly, which I&#x27;m not willing to do (even though when I&#x27;m at it, it feels fun, but clearly not enough to keep me persevering).

This has literally never worked for me with any habits I&#x27;ve tried intentionally cultivating. I&#x27;ll pick something and do it every day for several weeks. Then I stop.Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can&#x27;t seem to form good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn&#x27;t remember to brush my teeth in the morning if my mouth didn&#x27;t feel so gross, and I&#x27;ve been doing that every morning for over 30 years!

This is excellent advice. Just by doing something, the habit gets created and the longer it gets, the easier it is to get started.

I take some dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the table. Then I feel compelled to take out the rest and then put them all away, so it&#x27;s easy.

I heard this advice in relation to doing chores-- don&#x27;t think about the pile of dishes you need to do, then you&#x27;ll never do the dishes. Just motivate yourself to do a single dish. Once you are in the context of doing dishes, the second dish comes much easier, then the third, and before you know it the dishes are done.

This works for me with workout. I commit to workout 10min everyday. Sometimes I and up doing more like 40m, sometimes only 10m, and it&#x27;s ok.
And of course, I reduced the start energy for it. If it&#x27;s only 10m, probably I will do it at home with some equipment.

You are referring to Fire and Motion.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;fire-and-motion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;fire-and-motion&#x2F;</a>

Joel Spolsky said something similar. Paraphrasing: You find motivation by just committing a little bit every day: 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Once you get into it, you&#x27;ll most likely do more.

I’ve lately been playing through the “real book”, sketching out each song quickly and doing a run through, maybe 8 songs per day.In just three months I’m on my third time through and have discovered probably 100 songs I just love to play that I’d never heard before (Ellington is a genius songwriter. “Cottontail” is one that I get excited to see when I flip to it, and I just have to play at least three times).Not actually a big jazz fan. I like simple consonant sounds and cute melodies, so I skip the bop, Mingus etc. My absolute favorite is when the whole song is cute and tidy except for one accentuated bit of dissonance that comes smashing in when you’re not expecting it, then waltzes right back out, transitioning perfectly into the next section and leaving you shaking your head in awe. The Beatles were masters at this.My sight chording&#x2F;inverting and rhythm reading has gone through the roof. It’s like an endless jigsaw puzzle.

To add meat to these bones, I&#x27;ve played piano on average 20 minutes a day for 22 years. That means ~2700 hours of piano practice. Probably an underestimate but it does match my intuition of thousands of hours.

20 minutes a day is over 100 hours a year. 0 minutes a day is 0 hours a year.

Why don&#x27;t you like video games or fiction anymore?

Other books in a similar vein that I liked:_One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way_ by Robert Maurer_Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results_ by Stephen GuiseBoth are short reads, and the Kaizen book is also in a nice small form factor that you can stick in your back pocket. These books emphasize the importance of making even the smallest change possible.

I don&#x27;t know about that. I have the book here in front of me (Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit), and it seems like the whole thing can be summarized as:Cue - Routine - RewardWith an additional 300 pages of weak, mostly theory-driven anecdotes about how corporations apply this at scale.I&#x27;d be really interested to know how you applied this to your personal life.

If you liked that book, Power of Habits is the 10x better version.It&#x27;s less of a 20 year olds book of lifehacks and more of a science based approach.Power of Habit book changed my life, quit all drugs and video games. Now I just read nonfiction books.

Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the compounding gains of small wins.

I don&#x27;t have a side project, but this is basically the approach I take at work. Try to do one useful thing each day. Doesn&#x27;t even have to be a big useful thing. It adds up.I guess that&#x27;s really the whole point of the tortoise and the hare, now that I think of it.

Ali Abdaal&#x27;s Part Time Youtuber academy course.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academy.aliabdaal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academy.aliabdaal.com&#x2F;</a>

It can also be really hard to judge quality (or at least popularity) a priori. I write for various publications that track traffic. Invariably I&#x27;ll have posts I think are unique and interesting, which I really like. And they get middling views.So it often makes sense to not tilt too far into finely-crafting a low volume of work.
Then I&#x27;ll slap something together a &quot;5 things people get wrong when doing $X.&quot; It&#x27;s not bad but it&#x27;s pretty cookie cutter. And it will blow up.

Tom Scott&#x27;s 3-part series (on YouTube) a few years back on &quot;How to be popular on the Internet&quot;[0] has similar advice. There are higher-cost and lower-cost ideas, but given the amount of randomness inherent to getting popular, quantity tends to be the more important factor. He of course says it much better than I can.[0] URL of first part here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=h0AMaW4XRCI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=h0AMaW4XRCI</a>

&gt; &quot;just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2 years, and you&#x27;re life will change.&quot;That&#x27;s probably the best advice. These courses can&#x27;t do anything about Youtube&#x27;s algorithm changes, which is ultimately what will determine virality.If your channel is not about toys, makeup tutorials or culture war commentary, it&#x27;s unlikely your content will ever break through. So you might as well just go for a &quot;good enough&quot; video instead of a perfectly manicured one, because the algorithm doesn&#x27;t seem to care either way.

I&#x27;m taking a course on how to build and grow a YouTube channel. The main advice they give is &quot;just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2 years, and you&#x27;re life will change.&quot; It&#x27;s a tautology, no guarantees on how well your channel will do, but it&#x27;s such a simple idea, and nice motivator to build momentum and keep going.

It’s a way better mindset to just expect to work on something a few hours each day than to try to set milestones and deadlines because you won’t burn yourself out moonlighting

It&#x27;s important to self-motivation to not beat yourself up over these &quot;bad days.&quot; For example, without these bad days, you have nothing to contrast with the &quot;good days,&quot; so it&#x27;s possible it makes you appreciate those times more. It can also give you insight into what produces a good or bad day for you, personally, if you start to monitor the circumstances around good and bad days in terms of how much sleep you get, your diet, general mood&#x2F;feelings, etc.

Why is non-physical activity any different? To me 3x a week sounds like a good idea for starting mental exercise as well.

Physical exercise is an exception because the body needs rest. The &quot;just show up&quot; goal with exercise is to begin with 3x a week and then gradually increase that as your body grows stronger.

&gt; You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to perform is a given, just like eating and showering...I wish these activities were a given. It’s 5pm and I’ve not eaten since breakfast at 8am. I had to force myself to shower.Note: showering wasn’t a problem pre-pandemic and perma-WFH hermit life. Eating, however, still was difficult to remember unless food was brought to me. And even then, sometimes, it just sat going cold on my desk

You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to perform is a given, just like eating and showering... you don&#x27;t think whether you should do it, you just do it.It works for me. I can go to gym religiously 3 days a week, and been doing it for years. Sometimes there&#x27;s a company online after-hours or something... sorry, can&#x27;t go , it&#x27;s my gym day. If you start allowing certain things to stop you from doing what you want, then anything starts becoming a good excuse to not do it. Don&#x27;t let that happen.Regarding programming: I can keep up for months but sometimes I run into a problem that is really annoying to fix... I know I can fix it given enough determination, but then I think I am not getting paid for this, so what the heck... which results in me starting a new project and leaving that one aside until I actually need it (which happens every now and then).

The related alternative that has worked wonders for me is to commit to getting something done every day, that is all the way to completion.  This may be a well defined partial bit of work like defining a data structure or implementing one part of the CRUD code that will be needed.  Targeting some level of completion doesn&#x27;t always work out but has an effect on goal setting and chunk size of work parceled out which improves the hit rate for every short working session.

I found that I tend to get backlash if I start with too ambitious of a goal. Instead, I&#x27;ll aim for something stupidly easy and just focus on getting started at all. I&#x27;ve found that works much better.At first I aimed for 1 hour of exercise a day. That failed within a week. So then I aimed for 10 minutes a day, which barely felt like exercise, but it got me to the starting line consistently! The trick for me was treating anything past 10 minutes as beating expectations, rather than treating anything under 1 hour as falling short. In practice it means I&#x27;m able to get about 20 minutes per day consistently, which is still much better than 1 hour never.The key for me was making it so I could consistently feel good about a reasonable goal instead of constantly feeling like I was falling short of my own expectations.Now if only I could apply that to flossing.

I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me.I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day.Same with programming. I&#x27;ll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.

I ended up setting up a &quot;development server&quot; on a Raspberry Pi 4, and then using VS Code&#x27;s remote tools to connect to it from anywhere (you can use tailscale etc if you fancy it to make it easy to connect remotely when not at home).I&#x27;ve found this to be really convenient - even just whipping out a chromebook you can turn on the chromebook and be coding in literally seconds. Makes the barrier to entry pretty low.

This is one of the reasons why investing in learning a terminal &quot;IDE&quot; &#x2F; editor like vim &#x2F; emacs can pay off.  You can ssh from anywhere and have your development environment waiting for you.

Would a portable VR computer be useful here? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simulavr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simulavr.com&#x2F;</a>

This is great advice and has made me think how I can squeeze out 30-60 minutes every day to do something similar. I think one area might be just making my setup more portable - instead of having a fully built out development environment that is on my desktop tethered to my desk, it may make sense to move to a laptop that I can move around the house, take with me on trips, etc. so as to not break the streak. Or even using one of the browser-based code editors or IDEs so that it&#x27;s available anywhere, even from a tablet.

I love how you work, how you communicate, and I fully expect to love your product

1. Typesense is pretty stable and we are really careful about retaining backward compatibility. Our release cycles are slow (we give RC builds for people wanting a feature urgently) and we test a lot. The version number is just a number: Terraform just hit 1.0 last month :)2. We&#x27;ve a hosted cloud version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.typesense.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.typesense.org&#x2F;</a> -- and we also added a Sponsor button on Github because so many people have been asking us for it.

I&#x27;m using Typesense on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jobsort.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jobsort.com</a> and haven&#x27;t had a single crash; it&#x27;s quite stable.

2 Questions:1. I see you&#x27;re on v.0.21 - how stable is this? I know the point of the article is that you don&#x27;t set deadlines, but I&#x27;m anxious to implement something that may have breaking changes.2. How can I pay you? I&#x27;m implementing search now, considering Algolia or PG_Search. I want to give you a shot, but I also want to pay you.

One of the greatest lessons I took from formerly subscribing to a high demand religion was exactly this. &quot;By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.&quot;

Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I&#x27;d love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.

The number of domains of knowledge that are effectively infinite are compounding...this thought tends to make me hyperventilate if I think about it too much.It was very important to me to be smart so that people looked positively at me, now that I&#x27;m getting older, I&#x27;m having a hard time letting that go as I know more and more about less and less.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this.When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must&#x27;ve taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the &quot;proper&quot; way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accelerates evermore.Software is very much the same. And the cool thing about software is that the domain of knowledge is effectively infinite. No one person can ever run out of things to know in this field. You can only learn more and get even better.

Agree, this is how I somehow ended up using bash&#x2F;vim for all my needs. I realized it wasn&#x27;t &quot;normal&quot; when I saw my boss&#x27; face as he watched me typing. And it keeps compounding :)

Do you have a source for that? Would love to understand this better.

The grand canyon was likely not the result of little drops but rather huge deluges - over time.

&quot;The days are long but the years are short&quot;.Having the wisdom and patience to see something through to the completion is difficult.

Put another way, people overestimate how much they can do in one day, but underestimate how much they can do in a year.

&gt; But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?&gt; Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can seeHaving been on a journey to change the direction of my life for a few months now this perfectly sums up how I&#x27;ve been feeling about it.I&#x27;m gonna give the book a read because I think it&#x27;s what I need to hear right now. Thank you for making me aware of it.

James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, that making one small change and performing that change consistently every day is the compound interest of life. I like how James’ description and the one from your book suggestion are so similar.

The Slight Edge is an amazing book about an amazing concept. Dramatic change happens one percent at a time at a consistent cadence.Also great chapter in The Psychology of Money about Warren Buffet. He&#x27;s been investing since he was a child and is now in his 90s -- He&#x27;s been compounding returns on a longer timeframe then anyone else alive.

&gt; If you&#x27;re doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now.Like smoking pot. I love smoking pot, but wow can it cascade errors in judgment (only realized upon looking back)

Hey! I got the book after reading your comment. Great book, exactly what I was looking for.

Losing weight, there&#x27;s never been a day I felt perceptibly different from the day before, but looking back a year some things are certainly easier or more comfortable already after about 80lbs. Slow by most measures but that has its own benefits.

Scott Adams book &quot;How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big&quot; touches on a similar theme, &quot;systems vs goals&quot;. Have a system that takes willpower out of the equation - so you can do simple repetitive tasks everyday, to achieve big things over time.A goal might be - lose weight! But a system might be - batch cook steamed veg with some healthy condiments, and eat that only during the day by having it always within reach.By having a system for preparing easy, health food, you compound the effect instead of having a seemingly impossible intimidating goal that you keep putting off.Other stuff that resonated with me were doing things that keep your personal energy as high as possible, stacking skills (be in the top 25 percentile at multiple things), and the idea that your brain is a moist computer that you can actually program in a desirable direction. The book really resonated with me.

This passage strikes me as meaningless self-help dreck.

&gt; There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.There is an amazing book called The Slight Edge which is based on this very principal and it can really change your life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated with me:It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something dramatic. If you just wake up tomorrow and have it all turned around—snap your fingers and change it. That might happen, in a movie.But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can see. What happens if you keep adding one more, and one more, and one more, and one more ...
Before too long, you see the scales shift, ever so slightly. And then again. And eventually, that heavy - failure side starts to lift, and lift, and lift ... and the scales start swinging your way.No matter how much negative weight from the past is on the other side, just by adding those little grams of success, one at a time (and by not adding more weight to the failure side), you will eventually and inevitably begin to shift the scales in your favor.The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life, and learning to make them effortlessly.It&#x27;s not a question of your mood or your feelings. And it&#x27;s not a question of will power. It&#x27;s a question of simply knowing.Simple things you do every day, in fact. Or, as the case may be, don&#x27;t do every day. Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you. It&#x27;s entirely up to you.
If you&#x27;re doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If you&#x27;re doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now.

And so maybe true effectiveness would be achieved by having a torrent of work once a week instead of a few minutes a day.

Not sure about the Grand Canyon, but at least around the Alps, lots of wide, deep river valleys were carved into close to their current form at the end of the last ice age, when rivers carried hundreds of times their usual water for quite a while as the ice shield was melting away.

This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.

That&#x27;s not true. You might be thinking of the Missoula floods that carved out the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington. But the Grand Canyon&#x27;s river is generally the same size it always has been, and slow erosion forces created it.

Like every problem, it depends on the resolution of the scale you examine it! How much did you zoom? Looks like drops to me!

The deeper the canyon gets, the larger its watershed and the more likely flash floods, etc. The answer is both, and it has changed over time. Trickle and torrents.

OP&#x27;s comment is a vast simplification of what&#x27;s happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic.Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within &quot;torrents&quot; of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work.Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.

Couldn&#x27;t the boulders have come from the side walls collapsing?

As a proportion of Earth’s water it is ‘tiny drops.’As a metaphor it is reasonable as ‘tiny drops’ is not a scientific unit. And a boulder is any non-monolith greater than 256mm…seventy feet is not particularly large in a scientific sense just in an ordinary tourist talk one.

Wouldn&#x27;t the torrents be composed of drops of water, just descending in large quantities.  And would not the little drops of water evaporate at some point forming clouds that may come down in torrents at some point?

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probably erode more continually though.And in geological time, an every-10,000-year event may as well be like every day to us.

I find writing to be like this. Write something, go away for awhile and do other things. Come back and refine what you wrote. Once you do that several times, you&#x27;ll have something worth reading. But it takes time.

Isn&#x27;t there some chinese 4 character saying about water cutting stone?

ME TOO. It&#x27;s getting close but, wow, what a pile of work it&#x27;s been.

Hey munificent, big fan of your work. Eagerly waiting for the paperback version.

0.99^365 = 0.025517964451.01^365 = 37.7834343328

There might be a reverse principle that our natural tendency is to forget what a problem is or how hard it is unless we warm up back into it. Doing thing regularly gives us that.

Do you explicitly try to keep it all green, like a &quot;Don&#x27;t break the chain&quot; habit tracker?I can imagine committing code nearly every day, but what with the occasional travel day, sickness, etc, there would always be some holes, unless keeping it green and making at least one commit was explicitly important to me.

I&#x27;ve had a solid green GH activity log[0] for years. I try to write some Swift every day.Most folks seem to think it&#x27;s fake. I have learned not to give a damn.Some of the days with the fewest commits are actually the ones where I worked hardest.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff</a>

I don&#x27;t think just doing an activity is enough - there has to be conscious effort at improvement.A person doing a drunken Saturday 18 isn&#x27;t going to improve. A person going to the range and focusing on technique 20 minutes a day will improve, with far less net time spent.I think of it in terms of the &quot;10,000 hours to mastery&quot; - how many masters of driving do you see on the road? Most people are just barely not crashing from place to place, not focusing on skill.

I can think of some counter examples. Golf is a big one. I have friends that play every weekend and never get better.

I wish more employers realized this. If the contract says they own every piece of code you write, you are not likely to put your best ideas forward.

This is inspiring, thanks! I&#x27;m on a similar path and am about a year in. I now have a blog, app, and infra stack each in their own repos, each with their own deployment automations. I run a solo kanban board on Trello to help me prioritize what to work on next.I don&#x27;t know if the current project will turn into anything useful to others or not. But it feels satisfying to look at the list of little &quot;done&quot; cards and see how each of them has contributed to something tangible, while both the product and my skills are improving with each deployment.When I&#x27;m ready for the next project, this year of work is reusable to launch something new super quickly. And the infra cost is close to zero while I work on it thanks to static site hosting and serverless tech. If it ever gets enough traffic to bill me I&#x27;ll be happy to pay it because that will validate something useful is there.My next step is to make it &quot;good enough&quot; to share it in the wild. That part is still scary. I&#x27;m almost there though.

I started doing this with side projects a little while ago. The revelation for me was to create a monorepo out on GitHub and actually keep my hackaround projects under some reasonable form of source control and all in the same bucket.What I started doing was rewriting my projects over and over trying to chase down the core first principles. I would take my previous iteration - MyProject12 - and create a fresh one - MyProject13. The idea would be to use the prior copy as a reference point for the new one, and to only use it for the little nuggets of value I think I still want to carry forward. I have VS solutions with every iteration of that project in it so I can quickly do a sln-wide search for something I discovered previously.I repeated this process about 40-50 times for an application framework. Fast forward 3-4 years and we are now talking about setting up a license agreement between myself and my employer for purposes of using this IP in next generation products. It is incredibly nice to have permissive employment contracts so that I can freely explore my interests without fear of reproach. Seems this has very powerful win-win mechanics.It may sound strange that this is what someone would do in their free time after work, but I actually do derive pleasure from indulging the fantasy of being allowed to rewrite code piles. If I were to take this tendency into my professional work, everyone would have quit by now. It seems to be a good outlet for me.

There&#x27;s a Japanese term called kaizen, which perfectly describes this effect - small continual changes eventually result in huge ones over time.

For what it&#x27;s worth, Isaac Asimov&#x27;s Foundation series was written this way with the Foundation or the concept of it being an &quot;organization&quot; spanning hundreds of years. It might provide some useful ways to handle this though in general I think his solution was &quot;jump forward 20yrs and introduce a new character while brining up the former&#x27;s legacy&quot;.

I wrote a novel-shaped object (OK, it was never printed, so &quot;object&quot; is perhaps a bit bold) over about 6 months, by the simple expedient of making sure I spent at least 15 minutes every morning with the NSO editor open. Target was &quot;Minimum one word&quot;, but (apart from a long stretch in the middle), more like 500-1500 words per day.The long stretch in the middle was when I had to figure out how to deal with the main character dying half-way through, due to the logic of the story. That took a fair bit of revising previously written prose and setting things up for a sequel character, as it were (the main &quot;protagonist&quot; of what was intended as a series was an organisation, not an individual; as it turns out, there&#x27;s a reason that is not a common format).

I&#x27;ve written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I&#x27;ve learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.

Very helpful learnings, looking forward to seeing TypeSense grow!

I used to code for an hour every week day and maybe 3-4 hours on weekend. But there was also a lot of &quot;background processing&quot; of what I plan to work on next and how to implement it. The more background processing I did, the faster I was in the actual implementation. So those hours I actually spent on the keyboard were really productive.

Good stuff! How many hours per week did you put in on average?

Nit pick: I think they mean &quot;every day&quot;, not &quot;everyday&quot; which is a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against inane Coca Cola slogan :Treat The English Language Well. Everyday.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.happyrobot.net&#x2F;words&#x2F;thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.happyrobot.net&#x2F;words&#x2F;thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385</a>

I absolutely agree with this. A lot of what’s in papers is boilerplate - stuff to say “yes, I’ve read the other relevant works. Yes, I understand how qualitative research works. No, my study is not based on the opinions of my four closest friends”.  In my field I’d usually skim the abstract, and maybe from there read the description of the apparatus, conclusions, and further work if the study looked particularly interesting. But you can get 60-90% of a paper’s value from the abstract.

Honestly I don&#x27;t think I could keep up one paper a day.  I had a reading course which as 3 per week (in detail) and that was enough work for me. It could take 45 minutes to read a paper

I mostly agree with this sentiment - with the added note that there is significant value in &#x27;going deep&#x27; on a small subset of those papers. In my opinion, best bang for the buck there is to focus on the well known and impactful papers in that domain.  I think there are big benefits to really digging into what makes a particular solution work, and how the authors really &#x27;prove out&#x27; the full idea in the paper.

Agreed. The links between papers are arguably more important than the details of any given paper.Knowing the shape and direction of research into big topics is just so critical to choosing the right topics yourself.

Based on my experience reading academic papers, I would suggest that you would often be better off skimming 3 papers in a week than reading one closely.I would often do this in grad school:* Go search for papers that broadly had to do with some structure or other mathematical gadget I was interested in at the time,* Read the abstracts of those papers to find the ones that looked most interesting,* Take the most interesting papers, and read the statements of the theorems,* Finally, devote a little more attention to those papers that had interesting theorems that seemed to fall within the domain of what I was working on.I did this with math papers, but there&#x27;s no particular reason you can&#x27;t generalize this to other fields. CS in particular can use almost the exact same methods. For less mathematical fields, you&#x27;d need to make some substitutions, such as &quot;section headers and key topic sentences&quot; for &quot;statements of theorems,&quot; but you can make it work there, too.Doing this, in a decade, you end up reading 1560 abstracts, which is probably more useful in terms of &quot;Oh, wait, I&#x27;ve seen this before&quot; type insights than reading 520 entire papers.

The Usenix conference proceedings and other publications are usually very good: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;publications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;publications</a>I was an on-and-off-again ACM member for 40 years, and one of the better publications was ACM Computing Surveys: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;csur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;csur</a> -- even older issues are pretty high value, and there are tons of references to follow.[edit: update Usenix link to something much more current]

It can depend on your research interests, but Google Scholar is my go to first dip into any topic. Then its a bit of rabbit-holing by looking at cited sources and reading them or reading other papers that were a part of the same journal&#x2F;conference.

I have a few interests that I randomly search for on arXiv.org and try to stay on top of.Sometimes I will just randomly see what has been posted to one of the areas I am interested in as well on arxiv.Then often I end up just googling references in the paper to other papers.

You can go to Semantic Sanity and set up feeds of papers which you can seed with example papers. I’ve found some great (I.e. highly relevant to my projects) ML papers this way<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s2-sanity.apps.allenai.org&#x2F;cold-start" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s2-sanity.apps.allenai.org&#x2F;cold-start</a>

Whats the best place to search for and read papers?

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there&#x27;s your &quot;Oh wait, I&#x27;ve seen a solution to this problem before...&quot; superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that&#x27;s easy to acquire.

Few things are impossible to get back once you loose them: naivety is one of them.

When starting to lead a team I was shocked at the amount of times I had to redirect from overcomplicated ideas and over optimization. Even more than that, I had to constantly remind the team that we needed to get something working before we got something perfect. Pragmatism came slowly for me but learning it early would, I think, serve anyone well.

On the other side of 40 here, I definitely know what you mean, but I also think you can cultivate a beginner&#x27;s mind and openness to ambitious ideas while still leveraging your experience to see around corners and avoid dead ends. Two ideas:First, remind yourself that software is malleable. You don&#x27;t need to build it perfectly the first time, and in fact you will always need to modify it as you go, so don&#x27;t get stuck in analysis paralysis. You&#x27;re good at writing code, so leverage that skill to iterate quickly.Second, don&#x27;t equate growth with chasing more and more powerful abstractions. Remember, &quot;all abstractions are leaky&quot; in the same way that &quot;all models are wrong, but some are useful&quot;. IMHO valuable software comes from concrete use cases. So as you get more experienced you should be able to write simpler code that provides more value. Let the abstractions emerge from practice and experience rather than obsessing over them before you understand the problem.

This is a very accurate description of the situation, and with good culture it&#x27;s usually possible to coach the business folks to be a little more patient in return for a little more safety.

the industry may have changed too - in my early days I remember more fantastical failures where the whole website would be down for an evening or other tragic mistakes.As more and more ppl got involved and things started to be worth more and more money we were more or less forced to put in more safe guards as there is less tolerance for failure&#x2F;mistakes. I think the trade off between speed and safety will always be there and business folks will always want both despite them being at direct odds w&#x2F; one another.

&gt; I always overspec projects because I can easily guess what demons lie on the horizon.What opened my eyes was stories on HN about projects that were little more than a glorified webform that sent an email at first. User volume was so low that it was more cost-effective to have a form send the email and have an actual human do the task manually.When the project picked up (proving the concept had actual clients), they started automating the process at certain pain points, eventually ending in a fully automated system, which did exactly what it needed and nothing more.

Over the last 18 months I have been working to get that back. I remind myself at the end of the day that what I did was productive and useful and so far that has worked well.I realized that it is really easy to fall into the &quot;but what if...&quot; trap but doing so is not spending enough time in the present moment.

This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don&#x27;t know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress.Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it&#x27;s hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it&#x27;s hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success.This curses me in my startup attempts but it also curses me in my work. It&#x27;s hard to think like a founder anymore. I always overspec projects because I can easily guess what demons lie on the horizon.I miss my early startup days when I could just write some code every day and feel successful. I want that back.

But what to do later with that dozens of unfinished projects I dove headfirst into over the last two decades?

The trick is to aggressively dive headfirst into a project, such that it becomes unconscionable for you to give up :)

I wouldn&#x27;t call the effectiveness unreasonable. I would instead say that incorporating something into your routine is the most reliable way to make sure it gets done.

The power of consistent effort over time is staggering. Small choices compound into dramatic gains.

I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for bringing it back to me

For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)• Gnome Devhelp².• Zeal³, using up-to-date documentation dumps provided by Dash⁴.• RFC archive⁵ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁶.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;info&#x2F;</a>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Apps&#x2F;Devhelp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Apps&#x2F;Devhelp</a>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zealdocs.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zealdocs.org&#x2F;</a>4. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapeli.com&#x2F;dash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapeli.com&#x2F;dash</a>5. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;</a>6. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracker.debian.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;doc-rfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracker.debian.org&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;doc-rfc</a>

The site preferences allow you to enable tracking which is disabled by default.This checkbox is the single coolest thing I&#x27;ve ever seen on the Internet.

A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it&#x27;s off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff.I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect.This is the most productive I&#x27;ve been in my life, by quite a wide margin.

The things they point out can be useful even if you have kids.  Especially if you have kids, an extra 30-60 minutes every day is damn precious.  Could easily double the spare time you have.  Or you could spend that extra time with your family if you prefer.

If you have no energy at the end of the day, the answer is to find time in the morning. Get up earlier, go to bed earlier.If you find your time in the afternoon isn&#x27;t productive but you find it fulfilling to be around the people you love and that&#x27;s enough for you, then you don&#x27;t need productivity advice and this kind of reading isn&#x27;t for you.

If you really work hard at your day job you just don’t have enough energy at the end of the day if you have also a family to care about.
It’s a great advice for when you are young, it’s pretty much useless when you value the time that you spend with the people that you love much more than any amount of money.

Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities.Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time.I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.

True, but when we started we bet on certain trends that are just getting mainstream now. Having said that, large markets tend to have a lot of niches. You can certainly carve your own. It might not be a billion dollar niche, but that was never the point :)

Sorry to be a downer, but at this rate of speed isn&#x27;t it possible that their tech will become outdated before it becomes widely used? Maybe they&#x27;re 5-10 years away from being widely used? Machine learning is advancing rapidly.

That&#x27;s not the dichotomy though. Most businesses start with one or a few people making someting useful and building a larger business around it. Like a plumber who learns to specialize in new urban construction and makes enough connections as clients that he decides to hire two people to help with his work.

I don&#x27;t disagree with you, and which is why I qualified my thoughts with a filter of a &quot;large and growing market&quot;. Impossible to fail in such a market if your goal is not to be a billion dollar company.

I’m no business expert, but this approach seems like a huge gamble to me. Why spend years building a project before the usefulness and public reception is quantified? I’d rather spend a hard few months building something that fails rather than an easy 6 years.

As a sofware engieer I disagree: most software engineers have an edge over dumb analysts in analyzing companies, like Amazon &#x2F; Apple &#x2F; Tesla &#x2F; Google &#x2F; Walmart &#x2F; Bitcoin &#x2F; Ethereum &#x2F; Goldman Sachs. We may not have a deep understanding in the balance sheet, but being able to read the code, APIs, and protocols (SWIFT vs BIPs, lightning protocol, cryptography books, testing infrastructure for example) we can see and understand how well products will work years in advance. The trick is to go deep into technical details.

While of course doing a startup is very hard and subject to a lot of unknowable, uncontrollable factors I don’t think it’s quite as dire as a retail investor picking stocks. There’s no “efficient markets” for software products; it’s much more likely that you can spot and exploit an unmet business need near your domain expertise than that you have unique insight into Walmart’s quarterly earnings.

I think it is a great idea, but if you want to reward a more sane investing strategy (ie low-cost broad index funds) you could maybe accelerate historical or simulated data and anonymize the ticker IDs?Obviously there will probably be one lucky YOLO player but you could rank everyone and also factor in risk-adjusted returns.

My class did almost this exact exercise in junior high back in the early 90&#x27;s. Teacher gave us a menu of stock tickers of companies that have been around since 1960, complete with some rudimentary financial info as of 1960. Told us to research the companies and come up with a list of stocks to pretend we bought and held for 30 years. This was before the Internet so we couldn&#x27;t just sneak a peek at the current prices. The goal of the exercise was to learn about research and ultimately diversification, but our team &quot;won&quot; by simply guessing the stock that was most well-known today, and YOLOing the entire fake money investment into it. Taught entirely the wrong lesson.

&quot;EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays &quot;won&quot; if you are in the green, your tweet &quot;lost&quot; if you did not get effective engagement, your latest commit &quot;won&quot; if the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there are the implications in machine learning, where everything becomes a binary &quot;correct or incorrect&quot; assessment...&quot;Much of this is reinforced through perceived and real rampant income inequality. If people think they can&#x27;t advance without taking disproportionate risks - and they&#x27;re mostly correct here - you&#x27;ll start to see that action, and then it gets amplified in the social media atmosphere that we live in today.

I understand at Bloomberg they’ll do an internal “fantasy financial league”, but they rank by sharpe ratio, which adjusts based on the volatility&#x2F;risk (something like that).But that’s such a good point about stock competitions generally showing kids that the reckless gambler wins the most - never thought about that.

I really like this analogy, especially while WSB-style &quot;YOLO&quot; has become a life philosophy over the last 5 years.That said, I wonder if the &quot;fantasy financial league&quot; game can become a lesson by selectively choosing a handful of stocks over a 30 year period. Tell the kids about the economics of the period (let&#x27;s say the 1960s - 1990s) and provide a few companies with the tickers, names, and descriptions replaced. Watch as the &quot;blown up&quot; stock subsides, but the conservative investor wins in the long-run.EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays &quot;won&quot; if you are in the green, your tweet &quot;lost&quot; if you did not get effective engagement, your latest commit &quot;won&quot; if the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there are the implications in machine learning, where everything becomes a binary &quot;correct or incorrect&quot; assessment...

For those who don&#x27;t know: Druck compounded capital at over 30% for 30 years. Never had a down year.

It is the wrong lesson, but to prove that to the students, you have to rejig the experiment where their picks are compared to those of a primate picking stocks at random.

Is it necessarily the wrong lesson?Stanley Druckenmiller: my risk management strategy is to put all of my eggs into one basket and watch it very closely.

If it were so simple.A pizza place may generate more revenue than it consumes in expenses all the time, and barely provide enough for the owners to get by.A unicorn startup can have its expenses exceed revenue all the time (see Uber) and make its owners very rich in the process.

No idea what you’re trying to explain here. A business works when revenue exceeds expenses, not whatever you’re trying to talk about here.I’m pretty sure “literally everyone” understands that, and not “literally nobody.”

I don&#x27;t think that is the &quot;wrong&quot; lesson. It&#x27;s a lesson in risk. But it&#x27;s not a viable strategy long term for most. I think if you teach the concept of ruin, the chance of going bust, you can help develop a healthy relationship with the concept of risk and investing. It&#x27;s also pretty easy to show real examples of what risk can cause... &quot;guh&quot;

I actually had this exact experience in a civics class in junior high school -- in 1979! We pored through the stock listings in a physical newspaper every day for several weeks and recorded our buy and sell decisions. The &quot;winner&quot; bought a penny stock which went from 1&#x2F;8 to 1&#x2F;4 in a day (or something like that). And I did in fact learn exactly the wrong lesson from that because 20 years later I lost a fair bit of money in the dotcom boom trying to replicate that strategy.It is very hard to come up with a teaching strategy that can overcome survivorship bias.

There is a lot of luck in starting a successful company, but the ideas are NOT all equivalent and don&#x27;t have equal probability of success. One thing that may be easier than picking winners is avoiding losers. Ever read the book F&#x27;d Companies? Most of those are absurd on their face, yet people invested a lot of time and money into them.

There is an alternate strategy and it&#x27;s what V persue: rather than going all-in on single bets, they diversify their portfolios.That, combined with stop-losses and favourable terms tend to assure winning-on-average.Individual founders face vastly greater risks, and poorer average returns (in part due to those stop-losses and favourable-to-VC terms).

I think you may be over-defining what &#x27;work&#x27; means.The OP is a clear example of something that actually works, s&#x2F;he even mentions some money being made.If you set the bar for success at &#x27;only an unicorn&#x27; - I can see how these can be considered failures. But that&#x27;s a self-fulfilling prophecy by itself considering the tag unicorn :)

A lot of things work like this. Call it &quot;the lucky chancer game.&quot; The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with a side effect of survivorship bias... the &quot;wrong lesson.&quot;Two thoughts...First, it&#x27;s not necessarily the wrong lesson. It teaches a real reality, and results could be interesting... especially if real money was involved. I can see why an accelerated game of &quot;play the market&quot; isn&#x27;t what a schoolteacher wants to teach. But... if you did want to teach it, I would make the game high repetition. High risk-reward strategies and games are a real thing in the world. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s bad to learn how to play them.From the POV of playing such strategies&#x2F;games, it&#x27;s a short path to internalizing that &quot;secret sauce&quot; is generally an ingredient in a sequence, and therefore not really one thing.Second thought... One relevant way to teach kids about compound interest &amp; saving is via &quot;subsidized&quot; interest rates. You might start with 10% per week with very young kids and recalibrate before financial meltdowns happen. This might be the way of getting your teacher friend&#x27;s &quot;right lesson&quot; across.Anyway... That &quot;just showing up&quot; is surprisingly often the missing ingredient is also often true, and worth remembering. It just often isn&#x27;t the ingredient for regular work&#x2F;school life. We do &quot;show up&quot; for our school and work careers. That&#x27;s the baseline. The reason, IMO, &quot;just show up&quot; is effective, where it is effective, is that most people don&#x27;t show up. Everyone is showing up for work, for class. We do have something to show for it, it&#x27;s not something that&#x27;s an outlier.

I’ve had two bosses&#x2F;mentors who aspired to write project management books. Then they would tell me the thesis and I would think, “What? No, that’s not why we are effective.”Nobody sees the times you didn’t fall down. Someone swooped in and fixed something before it broke. Maybe just in the nick of time, maybe far ahead. The forward thinking person is important to that process. If your management skills may keep that person around or drive them away, then that’s material to your discussion. If it’s neutral, then there’s a whole lot of iceberg below the surface that you’re not seeing.People can copy your theory and totally fail because they can’t motivate the people who keep the wheels on.

The OP&#x27;s advice is reasonable for pre product-market fit startups&#x2F;businesses. You&#x27;re adding a lot of risk for very little benefit if you go all in on a product that doesn&#x27;t exist yet or that customers don&#x27;t want.Plus most people never ship anything, which this advice helps to fix.

In the statewide stock market challenge I did in HS, my team was second in state because I&#x27;m a gamer and convinced them to go all in on Nvidia right as they blew up.We would have gotten first except the person on who was supposed to sell everything in the last week shorted it instead and it went up 10 more points in that week knocking us down to 2nd.

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don&#x27;t.I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the wrong lesson. Even if you do it for an entire school year, there can be really only one type of winner: the investor that stuck all their money into a stock that happened to blow up, the opposite of a solid investment strategy.I bring up this example to point out that feedback can be a poisoned apple. Start-ups are basically this exact scenario. The only optimum strategy is to go &quot;all in&quot;. Either in the short term by quitting your job and warming up your pitch deck, or in the long term by have some multi-year side project draining all available free time.So that&#x27;s the bar, the vast majority of start-up likely had founders that went all in, it&#x27;s table stakes. So what&#x27;s the secret sauce? It is the equivalent to the fantasy financial league of picking an overperforming stock, it&#x27;s not going all in.

Depends what your goals are - but if you wanna be very capable at talking you’d be better off listening to a lot of native content intended for natives (as well as talking with live people). I recommend Language Learning with Netflix, or the more heavy duty&#x2F;Anki driven Migaku family of tools (can use with Netflix, YouTube or any video with subtitle files), for studying in that form; plus language teachers through something like iTalki (encourage the teacher to not dumb down their speaking for you even if you get lost); as well as talking with random people on services like
HelloTalk&#x2F;immersing in the place that speaks your language&#x2F;finding a native speaker to befriend and talk to in the language. Duolingo is a beginner tool in my opinion (there are far more beginners to sell to and the barrier to entry is low).

Likely what you need is an immersion experience, the best way to learn a language.

Did you complete the first level of the three, or have you got to purple status on every lesson?I find that getting all the way it purple on every lesson has been massively more effective for me than just doing the lower level lessons.

Me too, about half that. But I&#x27;m painfully aware it&#x27;s no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the &#x27;tree&#x27; hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what&#x27;s in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably helps stop me slipping backwards.

I&#x27;ve tried learning Spanish theee different times - a course at university, a course at an employer and now with Duolingo.The results I&#x27;ve got from Duolingo have been by far the best - a little very day works way better for me than a larger commitment of time in shorter bursts.I can now read tweets from Spanish language Twitter accounts and understand them 90% of the time (CNN and BBC News in Spanish are great).I took some in-person lessons via video chat to practice conversational Spanish which was also useful, and I&#x27;m hoping to spend a few months fully embedded in a Spanish speaking country some time in the future - but I don&#x27;t feel the need to rush things. I&#x27;ll be happy getting incrementally more vocabulary and grammar in 10-15 minutes a day for a long time to come.

I&#x27;m currently on 890 day streak learning Spanish, i can read tweets getting ~90% and understand slow Spanish speech.I think i can have a basic conversation with a Spanish speaker and understand him, if he&#x27;ll make some effort for us to understand each other.Duolingo gamification stopped working around day 150..200 but by that time spending 10-15 minutes per day with it became a habit. If I have to wait for someone or I&#x27;m drinking tea in an idle mood, i just pop up Duolingo and do a lesson.

What results do you find you get from using Duolingo every day for 959 days? Do you find that it&#x27;s working for you, in terms of gaining better language proficiency?I ask because I personally became disillusioned with Duolingo&#x27;s streaks and leaderboards. I found that I was forcing myself to use it every day but I lost the love of learning the language. Ultimately, I stopped using it because I had a lot of extrinsic motivation to hit targets in the app but little intrinsic motivation to keep learning.It sounds like your experiences were different from mine and I&#x27;m curious to learn what made them so.

Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day.Since then I&#x27;ve tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I&#x27;ve got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my weeknotes.

Reminds me of our attempts to get various contractors to come and do tasks.  Sometimes they keep promising to come and don&#x27;t show up repeatedly.  Other times they show up, write down our requirements, plan the work, and then vanish.  My builder friends who are actual general contractors also complain of this about their subs.  Makes me think if I wasn&#x27;t already doing well in software I would kill it in the trades just by showing up when I say I will!

I voluntarily quit my job once and had the 8 most productive months of my life working on side projects. But, I can see being laid off as doing the opposite. Depression can be a real bitch

This is my life in unemployment.I really do start doing all those things I didn&#x27;t have time for.But each day I get 1% lazier...Lesson: Never take more than 6 months off.

Yup, and the difference between putting your 401K in a fund charging 1% instead of 0.25% a year, over 30 years, is having about 20% less in retirement.

Reminds me of these equations:1.01 ^ 365 = 37.780.99 ^ 365 = 0.03

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o&#x27;clock sharp.” — W. Somerset Maugham

&gt; creativity comes in bursts and you don&#x27;t know when it&#x27;s going to show up so you need to be the one showing up every day to work on it.This comment right here adds alot of clarity for me. When worded this way, it makes total sense why this is so effective.

You have to do it every day - creativity comes in bursts and you don&#x27;t know when it&#x27;s going to show up so you need to be the one showing up every day to work on it.Hemingway would write (sober) every morning and then be drunk by lunch and for the rest of the day and early evening. But he worked every day for a few hours. People like to focus on his appetite for drinking but he got his work done first.

Do you know this to be true? Most artists that I know, which is most people I know, struggle with as many work-related distractions as I do. My sanctioned office distractions at least &quot;count&quot; to my employer (I get paid for that time).

Someone blew my mind describing why some artists are not appreciated until they are dead.The theory as it went is that most artists aren’t “ahead of their time”, it’s that they see Now in a way that nobody else will understand for years. Eventually, with the aid of the lens of nostalgia we see that they really “get us”, as we now understand ourselves.Being out in the world is how they “get” us. It’s material, not faffing about.

&gt; The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time.Artists don&#x27;t have stand ups, team meetings, planning sessions, one-on-ones, commutes and whatever other office distractions to deal with though. I suppose figuring out how to survive as an artist is distraction enough.

If you haven&#x27;t read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1]It&#x27;s a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time.This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2]In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can&#x27;t cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an &quot;unschedule&quot; where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I&#x27;ve applied this to different projects, it&#x27;s amazing how much more I&#x27;m able to accomplish.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;15799151-daily-rituals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;15799151-daily-rituals</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;95708.The_Now_Habit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;95708.The_Now_Habit</a>

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday