31 MAR 2025 by ideonexus
Do Not Spend Time Concerned About the Actions of Others
Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. For thou losest the opportunity of doing something else when thou hast such thoughts as these, What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. We ought then to check in the series of our thoughts...01 FEB 2025 by ideonexus
Internet as a "Playground for Losers"
Realize that the internet and social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit is mostly bullshit. These apps are used daily by losers. Even if a successful person posts on Twitter or Instagram, that’s only 5% of their life, the rest of their time spend with firends, on gym or reading productive book.
If people are truly getting things done, they’re busy and don’t have time to waste online. The internet is actually place for losers. If you can't stop doom scrolling you are addicte...Folksonomies: discipline productivity
Folksonomies: discipline productivity
Note: This is a long reddit post from someone who is clearly overly-engaged online.
26 JAN 2021 by ideonexus
Choose The Game You Want to Focus On
You should recognize the level of commitment you are willing to live with for a particular game, and be content with it. There are a few games I take very seriously, and the rest I simply enjoy as much as I can with my limited commitment. For example, I have read many books on chess and played chess occasionally over the years. On the whole though, I am a terrible player. During a game of chess, I do everything I can (within the scope of the game) to win, but I do very little to improve mysel...31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus
Insights on Being Well-Read
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i...05 MAY 2018 by ideonexus
“Judge the value of what you have by what you had to gi...
The principle of an opportunity cost does not at first glance seem hard to understand. If you spend half an hour noodling around on Twitter, when you would otherwise have been reading a book, the lost book-reading time is the opportunity cost of the tweeting. If you decide to buy a fancy belt for £100 instead of a cheaper one for £20, the opportunity cost is the £80 shirt you could otherwise have bought. Everything has a cost: whatever you were going to do instead, but couldn’t.
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...17 JAN 2018 by ideonexus
80/20 Rule for Production VS Consumption
As James explains, you can read everything you want about waking up earlier—from sleep habits to the Circadian rhythm—but when the alarm goes off, the only thing that matters are the strategies you’ve actually tried.
“The biggest issue around the myth of ‘I need to learn more’ is that somehow learning and doing are mutually exclusive. And they’re not at all. You should certainly be taking in new information and exploring continually. But you also need to be exploiting the infor...Folksonomies: productivity
Folksonomies: productivity
08 JAN 2018 by ideonexus
Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming
The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.
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But there's something else that being a producer do...29 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
Government Internet Shutdown Mobilized the Masses
The government could have been smarter. The best way to divert our youth from politics would have been to give them free, unlimited internet access a few days before the protests, and drop the price of beer and condoms – all the while playing “Be safe, live long” songs on the radios. The youngies would have been watching porn, WhatsApping and YouTubing, and would have been too distracted to think about politics.
Shutting down the internet achieved the opposite. Far from limiting youth ...17 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
The Collector’s Fallacy and Tsundoku
One of my favorite Japanese words is tsundoku (積ん読). Aside from being a fantastic pun, I think it’s captures our shared problem pretty well:
“Tsundoku” is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them.
Buying books does not equal reading books. We all know that. Yet, so many end up victims of tsundoku anyway.
Why?
One problem, I think, is that collecting feels like learning. Each time we discover a new productivi...01 JAN 2017 by ideonexus