Dropped about 25 pounds without working out much, feel great.
Eliminated anyone who is parasitic towards me, saved a lot of energy and time.
Scaled my agency/consultancy without any marketing, just referrals and word-of-mouth.
Collected a TB of nature/wildlife photos from my travels, written a lot of posts for a blog I am launching soon that covers a range of topics from minimalism, plant-based lifestyle, deep work, web development, UX design, creative service, entheogens, dhyana.
Mapped out an UX and schema for a platform that I will submit to YC. If rejected, try crowdfunding.
Consolidated my life goals and bucket list down a lot after realizing a lot of things lately.
I have never felt more whole, grounded, centered, focused, organized, stable before. :)
First let me say congratulations! I'm curious what triggered the change - I recently gave up FB and IG as well and honestly wish I had done it years ago!
It includes core things like sleeping for 8 hours, exercising, eating wholefood plant based diet, drinking water, tea, focusing on one task at a time and setting and following through goals.
As for goals, I am genuinely in love with my Focus board I made a while back. Makes navigating life so much easier when you know where you want to go and can deconstruct the goals into actions.
Aside from all that I feel like the time I spent optimizing my workflow by learning great tools immensely valuable. I am now at the stage where I build my own tools to solve my own problems. And it feels great.
There is still like 2 people out 7 billion that abuse Karabiner to the extent that I do. In some ways it's sad how so many people are missing out on its power. On the other it gives me great leverage. Just need to use it wisely.
Another success has been writing in my journal openly for the last 2 years, every month. Been a huge mind cleanser. Here is most recent entry.
At the risk of being a bit off topic, it cracked me up that "DMT Breakthrough" is listed as one of your monthly goals.
Since I'm already off topic, I've always found the binary "either I broke through or I didn't" notion to fall a bit flat. I've talked to friends who described a "breakthrough" experience that to me literally sounded like a very low strength DMT trip. And people have all these weird criteria like "oh if you saw beings it was a breakthrough".
Anyway, despite disliking the arbitrarity of the term, speaking personally out of 30-40 trips I would describe about 2 of those experiences as a breakthrough. For me the biggest recurring motif is watching a new type of space being created in my mind's eye, composed of twisting/interlocking hyperdimensional fabric of sorts. Everything is made of these fibers. On another trip, I was "tapped" on the head by a floating orb that proceeded to direct my attention to a hypercube in which it felt like I could see what felt like an infinite number of lower-order spaces (but still >= 4D if I had to put a number on it).
[/off topic rambling]
To bring it back on topic, I find your 12 daily habits really inspiring and much more "focused" and actionable (yet still flexible) than some of the more "standard" list of habits I've come across. Thanks for sharing :)
Just a suggestion, but if you love creating your own tools and optimizing your workflow you might consider switching to linux with some tiling window manager and other improvements.
To be honest this might be one of the reasons not many people abuse Karabiner.
Cheers! Keep the good work but do not forget to rest as well!
Professionally, I won a poster award at a conference, mostly for my slick R ggplot visualizations analyzing delirium in elderly hospitalized patients. I've never won an award for my research or coding, so that was a joyful moment. Especially, given that 2 months earlier, I was crying under my desk on my 30th birthday due to work pressures and feeling totally lost trying to build huge datasets with SQL as a beginner.
Personally, I was asked to join two different folk bands, playing piano and singing. To any classically trained musicians, I'd recommend trying folk, there are great opportunities for your trained technical skills and playing with others (rather than solo) has been very uplifting to my musical happiness.
Self-taught, second profession, 38-years old, after just 1.5 years into my SWE career, lots of hard, deliberate work in an uncharted CI/CD space, and I've landed a role as a Site Reliability Engineer for a major player in the health insurance data domain.
105k base salary, typical benefits package, in a medium-COL US region. This puts me well-ahead of what I thought were already pretty aggressive goals I had set for myself.
The team I'm going to be working with looks like an excellent group of people, pleasant, hard-working, with an engineering-oriented mindset. I'll be working with a great set of technologies/infrastructure, applying interesting, useful techniques, and at a non-trivial scale.
I'm pretty excited to be doing what I'm doing and making good money doing it. Big change from 2 years ago, where I was not excited to be doing what I was doing, and making not great money doing it.
Quit drinking. Go to the gym. It can work wonders.
I've succeeded in improving my health through diet and exercise.
A few months back I started weight training and I've managed to build enough discipline to become someone who works out regularly. My longer-term goal is to try and exercise at least 15 minutes every day, because currently I can only manage between 4 to 6 days out of a week. The number of health benefits I've experienced already is so crazy that I feel incredibly foolish for having waited so long to start doing this.
My dietary changes have been gradual and they generally feel sustainable. At the beginning of this year I was overweight and today I'm a normal weight. I never would've imagined this of myself, but I've learned to love salads and have started eating them regularly.
This year I finally found a flexible and comfortable job. I work only 25 hours per week (more or less). The income does not make me super rich (like FAANG engineers) but I live comfortably with the money.
I consider this situation as my recent success because I have a lot of time to work on other things (research, moonshot projects, online businesses).
I just published a book about blockchain this year. Last week I released an opensource blockchain project. Later I want to build an online educational business (something like pyimagesearch.com, egghead.io) but this time it is not about blockchain anymore. :)
In the future (maybe 2 years later) I want to do some research on drone.
Sounds wholesome, I think if you have good self motivation you can always do interesting things in your own time. Sometimes I feel like you have to make it a bit of a routine, but it pays off.
I finally found a somewhat cure for my long-time shoulder pain which also helped to develop costochondritis. After several medical tests and lots of hours invested into researching the problem myself (as doctors just provided NSAIDs and PT didn't help much) I was able to be almost pain free after such long time.
Physical illnesses, even if only mildly disabling, do affect your day-to-day mood very negatively.
I started a very niche open source pet project to scratch an itch (I'm a musician that uses Linux, and I wanted a decent Linux native hall-style reverb plugin). Somebody from halfway around the world jumped in and built a GUI for it. Now a small handful of people from around the world rave about how much they love it.
1. Do you do your production in Linux? If so what hardware interfaces and DAW are you finding works for you?
2. Did you have audio programming experience before starting this project? I really want to learn more about audio signal processing but am not sure where to start.
My wife and I recently paid off all of our credit cards and started saving up for a house. We started trying to pay off our credit cards about 4 years ago, so it feels like a big accomplishment.
It's an alternative to YouTube/Patreon for animators. It has better monetization options for them, and will have easier sorting/filtering of animations + I am working on some tools like in-browser frame editor.
No advertising, all word of mouth and about 40k people are using it each month which is cool. Our Discord should hit 1,000 animators and fans soon too!
I just passed 100 consecutive days of workouts! At least a one mile run or 20 minute Peloton ride every day. Lower impact days allow for 'active rest'.
Was a tough start, too, with a calf sprain almost right away, on Day 5. Even managed to fit in workouts on international travel days!
Congratulations. This is no easy feat. I have started and failed several times trying to work out regularly. It’s not easy to break the cycle of excuses. Any tips would you like to share ?
Lots of past failures under the belt, but I just started tasting success today only! My simple word game "Word Hookup" is showing on the US app store's Today page, in the "5 New Games We Love" category. Until last week I had a handful of downloads, and the number is now increasing exponentially. Loving it :)
https://www.wordhookup.com
After many months of working on a product, I finally managed to (soft) launch it a few days ago. It definitely took way longer and turned out to be way harder than I expected it to be (it usually does).
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed working on the static site side of things even though it is dead simple: just good ol' HTML and CSS. No frameworks, no complicated builds, no third party trackers, and almost no JS. As a result, I managed to bring down the page load time to less than 500 ms (3kb when gzipped).
I recently published a paper (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/OrthogonalArraySampling201...). I had some serious doubts when I was starting out, and it was a pretty tough endeavor. In the end, we made it! I got to present at EGSR which was really exciting too.
Obtained industrial premises for a robotics business I conceived 4 years ago and began to invest in significant hardware for insourced manufacturing and further acceleration of future R&D. Received unprompted, personal email regarding direct corporate investment from billionaire investor chairing multibillion conglomerate. Initial hires (and one fire) toward daily operations management delegation.
YTD I've reduced the time required for a monthly reporting process by over 16 hours by making better work instructions and automation enhancements. It's still quite manual, but not as much as it used to be.
While I only found the article recently, I naturally ended up in a similar work flow to this great article on incremental improvement.
I successfully quit my job without getting a new one lined up. I wanted to have an experience similar to the Recurse center, and focus on Rust and Clojure, however I also wanted to start a company, so I made my own version of Recurse and quit my job!
I’ll keep HN posted with the details, but so far I’m making a lot of progress on the company’s tech!
[+] [-] rblion|6 years ago|reply
Wake up every day around 5am and dive into deep work.
Got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a flip phone.
Deactivated Facebook, barely check Instagram anymore.
Dropped about 25 pounds without working out much, feel great.
Eliminated anyone who is parasitic towards me, saved a lot of energy and time.
Scaled my agency/consultancy without any marketing, just referrals and word-of-mouth.
Collected a TB of nature/wildlife photos from my travels, written a lot of posts for a blog I am launching soon that covers a range of topics from minimalism, plant-based lifestyle, deep work, web development, UX design, creative service, entheogens, dhyana.
Mapped out an UX and schema for a platform that I will submit to YC. If rejected, try crowdfunding.
Consolidated my life goals and bucket list down a lot after realizing a lot of things lately.
I have never felt more whole, grounded, centered, focused, organized, stable before. :)
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
Very curious if you can expand on this one:
> Eliminated anyone who is parasitic towards me
It would be interesting for me to know how you define "parasitic", and what you did about it!
Thanks for sharing your experience.
[+] [-] thecleaner|6 years ago|reply
> Scaled my agency/consultancy without any marketing, just referrals and word-of-mouth.
Any hints what do you do ? How lucrative is contract based development / consulting in general ?
[+] [-] luisehk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkrotich|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manglav|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quasimodem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsisto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesb93|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ingend88|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zod50|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikivi|6 years ago|reply
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/focusing/habits
It includes core things like sleeping for 8 hours, exercising, eating wholefood plant based diet, drinking water, tea, focusing on one task at a time and setting and following through goals.
As for goals, I am genuinely in love with my Focus board I made a while back. Makes navigating life so much easier when you know where you want to go and can deconstruct the goals into actions.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/focusing
Aside from all that I feel like the time I spent optimizing my workflow by learning great tools immensely valuable. I am now at the stage where I build my own tools to solve my own problems. And it feels great.
There is still like 2 people out 7 billion that abuse Karabiner to the extent that I do. In some ways it's sad how so many people are missing out on its power. On the other it gives me great leverage. Just need to use it wisely.
Another success has been writing in my journal openly for the last 2 years, every month. Been a huge mind cleanser. Here is most recent entry.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/looking-back/2019/2019-augus...
[+] [-] __blockcipher__|6 years ago|reply
Since I'm already off topic, I've always found the binary "either I broke through or I didn't" notion to fall a bit flat. I've talked to friends who described a "breakthrough" experience that to me literally sounded like a very low strength DMT trip. And people have all these weird criteria like "oh if you saw beings it was a breakthrough".
Anyway, despite disliking the arbitrarity of the term, speaking personally out of 30-40 trips I would describe about 2 of those experiences as a breakthrough. For me the biggest recurring motif is watching a new type of space being created in my mind's eye, composed of twisting/interlocking hyperdimensional fabric of sorts. Everything is made of these fibers. On another trip, I was "tapped" on the head by a floating orb that proceeded to direct my attention to a hypercube in which it felt like I could see what felt like an infinite number of lower-order spaces (but still >= 4D if I had to put a number on it).
[/off topic rambling]
To bring it back on topic, I find your 12 daily habits really inspiring and much more "focused" and actionable (yet still flexible) than some of the more "standard" list of habits I've come across. Thanks for sharing :)
[+] [-] mig4ng|6 years ago|reply
Just a suggestion, but if you love creating your own tools and optimizing your workflow you might consider switching to linux with some tiling window manager and other improvements.
To be honest this might be one of the reasons not many people abuse Karabiner.
Cheers! Keep the good work but do not forget to rest as well!
[+] [-] ijustwanttovote|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|6 years ago|reply
Personally, I was asked to join two different folk bands, playing piano and singing. To any classically trained musicians, I'd recommend trying folk, there are great opportunities for your trained technical skills and playing with others (rather than solo) has been very uplifting to my musical happiness.
[+] [-] johnborkowski|6 years ago|reply
Edit: Also, congrats!
[+] [-] ryanklee|6 years ago|reply
105k base salary, typical benefits package, in a medium-COL US region. This puts me well-ahead of what I thought were already pretty aggressive goals I had set for myself.
The team I'm going to be working with looks like an excellent group of people, pleasant, hard-working, with an engineering-oriented mindset. I'll be working with a great set of technologies/infrastructure, applying interesting, useful techniques, and at a non-trivial scale.
I'm pretty excited to be doing what I'm doing and making good money doing it. Big change from 2 years ago, where I was not excited to be doing what I was doing, and making not great money doing it.
Quit drinking. Go to the gym. It can work wonders.
[+] [-] fyfy18|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|6 years ago|reply
A few months back I started weight training and I've managed to build enough discipline to become someone who works out regularly. My longer-term goal is to try and exercise at least 15 minutes every day, because currently I can only manage between 4 to 6 days out of a week. The number of health benefits I've experienced already is so crazy that I feel incredibly foolish for having waited so long to start doing this.
My dietary changes have been gradual and they generally feel sustainable. At the beginning of this year I was overweight and today I'm a normal weight. I never would've imagined this of myself, but I've learned to love salads and have started eating them regularly.
[+] [-] littleblah|6 years ago|reply
Couple of them for me
1. Professionally: Moving to an awesome core tech team (chance to work with internals of a database)
2. Personally: Wrote a blog post which received very high attention here on HN... shameless plug (sorry):
https://littleblah.com/post/2019-09-01-senior-engineer-check...
3. Health wise: Successfully used internmittent fasting to lose 8KG, and then maintain it for 9 months straight.
4. Finally, if all goes well, a baby on the way in our family!
[+] [-] ra7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mav3rick|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] langitbiru|6 years ago|reply
I consider this situation as my recent success because I have a lot of time to work on other things (research, moonshot projects, online businesses).
I just published a book about blockchain this year. Last week I released an opensource blockchain project. Later I want to build an online educational business (something like pyimagesearch.com, egghead.io) but this time it is not about blockchain anymore. :)
In the future (maybe 2 years later) I want to do some research on drone.
Edited: Add more details.
[+] [-] foxes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesb93|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outime|6 years ago|reply
Physical illnesses, even if only mildly disabling, do affect your day-to-day mood very negatively.
[+] [-] stevenmays|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] willismichael|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/michaelwillis/dragonfly-reverb
[+] [-] BookPage|6 years ago|reply
1. Do you do your production in Linux? If so what hardware interfaces and DAW are you finding works for you?
2. Did you have audio programming experience before starting this project? I really want to learn more about audio signal processing but am not sure where to start.
Thanks!
[+] [-] hnruss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CryoLogic|6 years ago|reply
It's an alternative to YouTube/Patreon for animators. It has better monetization options for them, and will have easier sorting/filtering of animations + I am working on some tools like in-browser frame editor.
No advertising, all word of mouth and about 40k people are using it each month which is cool. Our Discord should hit 1,000 animators and fans soon too!
[+] [-] dshanahan|6 years ago|reply
Was a tough start, too, with a calf sprain almost right away, on Day 5. Even managed to fit in workouts on international travel days!
[+] [-] yjv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neha_t|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jmstfv|6 years ago|reply
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed working on the static site side of things even though it is dead simple: just good ol' HTML and CSS. No frameworks, no complicated builds, no third party trackers, and almost no JS. As a result, I managed to bring down the page load time to less than 500 ms (3kb when gzipped).
https://tryhexadecimal.com
[+] [-] jyu|6 years ago|reply
Consistently sleep 7.5 to 9 hours a night, which makes meditating at least 30 minutes more fruitful.
Going mushroom foraging several times this month, which is a great excuse to go hiking outdoors.
All these changes have reduced my day to day stress and anxiety levels dramatically.
[+] [-] rosspackard|6 years ago|reply
What industry? How long you worked on it, etc?
[+] [-] affyboi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] froindt|6 years ago|reply
While I only found the article recently, I naturally ended up in a similar work flow to this great article on incremental improvement.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
It's not all beautiful - I had a lot of hiccups along the way, but I can probably get another 5-10 hour/month reduction by the end of the year.
I can use that newfound time for literally anything else!
[+] [-] elamje|6 years ago|reply
I’ll keep HN posted with the details, but so far I’m making a lot of progress on the company’s tech!
[+] [-] grumpy8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|6 years ago|reply
I'm still down around 1900 on support, though.