* Strategy #1: Charge more. patio11 has been shouting this from the rooftops for years, but it didn't sink in until after I started Indie Hackers[0]. If you charge something like $300/customer instead of $5/customer, you can get to profitability with something like 50 phone calls rather than years of slogging. It's still hard, but it's way faster.

* Strategy #2: Brian Balfour's four fits model[1]. It's not enough to think about the product. You also need to think about the market, distribution channels, and pricing, and how each of these four things fit together. I imagine them as four wheels on a car. It's better to have 4 mediocre wheels than 3 great ones and a flat.

* Book: The Mom Test.[2] Amazing book about how to talk to customers to research your ideas without being misled, which is a step I've stumbled on before.

* Tool: Notion. I just discovered it recently. I use it for all my docs and planning.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com - my latest business, and the one that actually worked

[1] https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth-framework

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

How do you find ideas in this category? Simple: Just look at what people are already paying lots of money for.

Off the top of my head, consumers spend lots of money on education (courses, seminars, books, classes, workshops), events and experiences, travel and vehicles, rent and housing, clothing and accessories, food, hobbies, etc. Businesses spend lots of money on recruiting and hiring, hosting, advertising, marketing tools, analytics tools, productivity, real estate, etc.

I know tons of indie hackers building businesses that help others learn to code, for example.

But perhaps it's easier selling 300/mo to X businesses than selling to 5/mo to 60X consumers? You decide.

B2C products live and die by viral growth and word-of-mouth, because margins are not usually enough to support a consultative sales process or any sort of intensive advertising. That requires a founder that's really good at reading the zeitgeist and identifying needs that customers never knew they had, and that understands human psychology on an unconscious level. Often technical skills (on the founding team) matter more for B2C markets as well, because it's more critical to stand out from the competition.

Timing also matters more with B2C. There are some time periods (now, dot-com bust, or the late 80s & early 90s) where there are basically no viable B2C ideas available. There are also time periods (early 80s, dot-com boom, 2009-2013) where they are abundant. Unfortunately you often don't realize this until hindsight reveals all the people who kept working on their B2C ideas throughout the bust.

What leads you to believe that? I know plenty of people with healthy B2C businesses started recently. Heck, my business is B2C and while niche, it's viable for me.

Also related: highly recommend Anki. It feels like magic when the spaced repetition works!

Thank you for the recommendation! I am looking forward to reading the book. It is good know that someone who started off their education assuming they cannot do well in STEM subjects, can actually pick up the skills much later in their carrier, is refreshing. I belong to the camp that I did well in STEM subjects through formal education but then lost touch with math later on. Am looking forward to regaining this skill.

We have a whole field of science that deals with human behavior, wouldn't it be useful if we had that as a basic part of school?

* Diffuse mode vs. focus mode. After focusing hard on a problem, letting your brain wander can do wonders for coming up with insights and ideas. The classic example is coming up with something in the shower after working on it throughout the day. I've focused much more on giving myself some of the non-focused time after focused periods (ex. going for a walk/run/swim, taking a nap or shower, etc). I've started doing this more for work, as well.

* How memory works (short-term vs. long-term) and along those lines, spaced repetition. All through undergrad I would cram, but spacing it out (with the help of Anki for flashcard-focused topics) really does wonders.

* Importance of actively quizzing yourself, practice, and working through problems as you're learning something.

Tim Ferris still promotes a “life hack” of paying other people to read books for you and provide a summary. Of course, this entirely detracts from the entire reason to read a book or any complex piece of information that might affect people differently depending on biases and past experience (so anyone who’s interested enough to read said information / content).

With the birth of my son, daycare, and a new job, I was finally forced to actually plan out a morning and evening routine. I wish I had done this in university.

Every day for the last 6 months, I have now a routine I don't have to think twice about:

* Woke up at 5 AM,

* Exercise hard, take a shower and have breakfast,

* Get to work before 7:30 AM with my day's tasks already in mind.

Similar for the evening preparing my breakfast, lunch and clothes. It's liberating to do these now without thinking. It took about a month, and my brain is now free to plan out the day or listen to an audiobook.

I struggle to get my kids up, fed, clothed and in kidnergarten before 8:30 myself (which means I can be at work around 9).

I don’t think the actual hours at which you start your day matter much, though. I find the value is in being constant at it.

- TypeScript : Absolute game changer for JS. I can't imagine programming regular ES. Sort of hoping TypeScript becomes the next ES.

- Desktops : Desktop processors and video cards are insanely powerful compared to laptops. If you're doing any sort of compilation (even if it's webpack / frontend) this stuff helps a ton. A project that takes 90s to build on a mbp is 30s on a desktop.

- Windows 10 + WSL

- Attachment Theory: https://www.behaviorology.org/oldsite/pdf/AttachmentTheoryBe..., https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d36/ac75d7081fcd86d467f6d2... (The stuff by Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver are very relevant for adults)

- Schema Therapy: https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf

Look up Psychology in Seattle on Patreon and download the deep dives for Attachment Theory and Schema Therapy. After that it's easier to grok the research papers/books.

Are you to open to viewing things in a different perspective? First you'd get a gist of the theory/framework/model/whatever. Then you'd need to understand what thing/person/system it's being used on. Without that, it'd be making too many assumptions to explain to others without context. The perspective is subjective to the one applying it, a blend of art and science.

I grew up in a family / circle where as an adolescent, nobody gave me advice or cared about my emotions. Worse, my parents dumped their emotions on me. Despite being a child and having my own stuff on my plate, I was recipient to persistent, intense emotional outpourings of neediness, anxiety and anger. Day in and out, for years. I looked up papers as a survival tool. Various other stuff that messed up me having needs met.

What do people need anyway? Does everybody have them? Do people need to be loved, how is it defined? Does society ignore, shame, or belittle our basic needs?

Sometimes, I think so. This means people are suffering and they can't even articulate why.

What if more people could simply be cognizant of these needs? Could/would we be happier? I don't know. I'm still digging into it.

Managing your investments

Eating right and exercise

Risk Taking - take big risks early in your life, ones which have the biggest upside. The terror of the unknown and leaping into it and coming out at the other end multiple times makes you fearless. The journey is all that matters, the destination is not in your hand. But the journey teaches a lot.

Some of the above, I was fortunate to learn early on from good mentors, and I've reaped big rewards, the rest I only wish someone had told me earlier.

There have been plenty of times in my life I was 'cash rich' but I left my money in the bank, as I didn't know what to do with it. I used to then over pay my mortgage, which was crazy as I had a 1% interest rate and the stock market would have been a better place to put my cash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a 'rich' man - but I've always put money aside (out of a fear/memory of being broke) I just could have worked that cash harder - and that was money that I could have taken some risk with.

My undergrad GPA would’ve been higher and i’d have gotten fit earlier in life.

I kept having customers sign up for rsync.net citing "Hacker News" in the "where you found out about us" but I assumed it was the old hacker news that was run by a certain defcon/cdc personality and was sort of a clone of attrition.org ... it had been around since 99/00/01 or so ...

It took me several years to figure out there was a new hacker news out there ...

There are rarely true "irrational" decisions. If a decision looks irrational to you, it's most likely because you don't truly understand the incentives driving that person.

Well, for him that was too good a deal, so now he's working 60 hours for half the salary.

Specifically, even if you get the startup to match the base salary of the big company (which is almost always not true and comes at a 20-30% discount, but I'm willing to assume that it can be done), the equity that the startup will give you is effectively $0, whereas the public RSU the big company will give you are basically cash-equivalent (if you are really conservative you can adjust them by 20-30%?).

This last point is the major one for me: at least in the Bay Area, senior software engineers are offered equity grants that are effectively the same size of their salary every year, so by going to a startup you are immediately being paid at least half.

#2 The power of compound interest. I was lucky to learn this one early, but I think a lot of others weren't so lucky. More than any other single thing, any skill, any stroke of luck, this is why I now feel comfortable about my financial future into retirement.

I don't think that's a sustainable or worthwhile approach. Exercise and training can be found in many forms and countless different activities - pick those you actually enjoy.

I have several thousand miles of evidence to the contrary. There's a lot of "exercise" not worthy of the name. For many people, especially at my age, the very heart/lung exertion that characterizes true exercise is at least mildly unpleasant regardless of how it's attained. Fortunately, one can harness competitive or goal-oriented impulses to make up for it. I count miles, I track my pace, I compare myself to other runners my age, I look at the scale, etc. Thinking about these results helps me keep going when I exercise just like it does when I'm hacking on some grotty piece of code at work, and I've been doing that continuously for longer than most here have been alive.

If I only ever did things that were fun in the moment, I'd be a bit of a failure, so I suppose learning the value of deferred gratification is another potential answer to the original question.

I can also recommend team sports - for me it's football (as in soccer), but specific sports are beside the point as those are very subjective. I'm just trying to say that I see no point in engaging in a sport I don't enjoy when there are so many options available that offer rewarding goals and provide enjoyment while you get there.

If I lived near a body of water, kayaking would be a good alternative in summer (or more if I move to a different part of the country). That could still happen some day, but not now. Cross-country skiing is an alternative, and one I intend to pursue more this winter since I now live near some good places for it, but of course that's only in winter.

Cycling is the kind of obvious alternative, but I'm not really sure I'd enjoy it any more at the same intensity. As I said, it's the intensity itself that creates discomfort, and I've seen too much mayhem involving intense cyclists too. Seems like that focus on results can have pretty serious consequences at bike speeds.

It's great that you feel like you have tons of options that both meet your goals and provide enjoyment at the time. Consider that it might not be the case for everyone, and some might still put the goals first.

Through training I repeatedly tell myself (and believe), 'it is the hard that makes it good.' Not everything worthwhile is going to feel like sunshine and rainbows all the time.

I can provide a good guided breathing meditation on request.

Meditation will help you be calm and focused. It will help you recognize and work through emotions with a minimum of harm to yourself or others.

I'm definitely not advocating self-immolation, but the same training that let monks sit calmly as they burned to death in the 60s (in an attempt to call attention to the horrifying war in Vietnam) will definitely help you deal with your breakup, illness, work troubles, or loss of a loved one.

After only 10 minutes of meditation you feel a lot better than before. I can not recommend it enough to try it.

I use the Headspace App for the guided meditations and it's free to learn the basics in 10 sessions/days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_protests_by_Ti...

I sometimes wonder if Buddhist monks are powered by lithium batteries.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stopbreath...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stop-breathe-think/id778848692

My diagnosis of depression and ADD inattentive-type (my parents were great, but denied that mental health was a factor until I decided to at age 22). I don't fault them, but I know for a fact my years in highschool and college struggling to learn / focus but knowing I had cognitive ability will irk me until the day that I die.

Edit: Saw your response below.

Like you, I don't blame my parents. But I do wonder what I would've been able to accomplish academically when I was in high school and a majority of college if I'd had my diagnosis. Many of my friends in college (both ADD and non-ADD) assumed I had a diagnosis and was just distracted by personal projects to perform academically.

How'd you make up for lost time / improve your work habits after your diagnosis?

Worked to find the right stimulants and antidepressants (fortunately I no longer take antidepressants) and most importantly focus on what I really valued in life which oddly made understanding how to learn more effectively much easier.

I understand there are arguments against ADD / ADHD being "real" ailments, but I can personally attest to being at least 50-70% more creative / productive as an engineer when I'm using stimulants in low-doses and eating right.

I'm not saying that ADD/ADHD aren't a thing (as it happens, I'm pretty on the fence about that), but I just wanted to point out that pretty much everyone will be more productive/creative when using stimulants and eating right.

So fast-forward to my 20's and I pretty much had ignored that speed makes me clear, when I have some issues and the doc tells me I have ADD, and wants to put me on meds. I opted to not do it, and just kept on abusing nicotine.

Anyways, in my late 20's I have kids and decide they are not going to have a smoker for a dad, and quit cold turkey and that is where things went to crap. I could not focus on work, could not get stuff done around the house and the worse it got, the further behind I fell and it started to look like depression which is what can happen with ADD when you get overwhelmed by not being able to get started on anything. I went back to the doc, they put me on a low dose Meth Amphetamine and it's night and day. I don't think I could have ever quit nicotine if it where not for ADD meds.

Funny part is, I am not really into speed, the few I took in my 20's I never really liked, I don't do drugs but I am pretty sure if I did, I would be a heroin junkie as the few times I have had to have morphine or other opiates (medically) where quite pleasant. Point being the lack of desire for speed seems to be a common sentiment among those with ADD/ADHD

I can also relate to having to nearly abuse caffeine and energy drinks just to reach a point of relative mental clarity for difficult problem sets or serious programming work before I was able to be professionally diagnosed.

I've found personally that switching between the two every 5-6 months seems to be a productive course of action. I have not encountered any need to increase my dose due to building up a dependency.

Keep in mind that if you are taking ADD meds and looking to switch meds, some doctors can be pretty funny about Desoxyn, it's an old drug, not many know about it, and some docs see Meth and freak out. That being said, it's no more dangerous of a drug than Adderall is.

Most people don't know this, in the US, a doctor can only prescribe medication for therapeutic use. A doctor can't prescribe someone a low dose of stimulants because that person genuinely enjoys using them, but has no medical need.

Thus, I suspect that some doctors will just write down ADD as a diagnosis because someone wants legal access to amphetamines.

If it can keep the airforce flying planes for 40hours straight it can probably help people learn more and be better educated.

Whether there would be benefit in allowing access to amphetamines is an interesting question, but there are definitely stimulants available.

The importance of keeping a clean sleeping environment.

* The power of routine: I never liked routine and thought it stifles creativity. In some ways it actually might, but creaitivity without productivity isn't worth that much.

* To not take myself so seriously: Life is so much easier and more fun if you can laugh about yourself, if you don't try to uphold a self-imposed picture towards others, and if you can accept that sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes it's your fault. - Not only am I happier now, I think it also made me a better person.

Holy crap it just overdelivers. In addition to entertainment, a way to take my mind off things, it also delivers context to daily life and keeps me focussed on trying to deliver something truly worthwhile.

Andy Weir - Artemis. Weir managed to figure out a way for a city on the moon to make economic sense, while physics makes it almost impossible.

Neal Stephenson - Seveneves. First sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." What follows is the brutally, unforgivingly hard consequences.

The Reality Dysfunction by Pete F. Hamilton (and the rest of the series). If you want something a bit more traditional in form. More sex, violence and so on.

Ach, loads of others. Roadside Picnic really stuck with me too. Though might not be what most people would call 'hard sci-fi', not sure.

Our universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not possible -- until the discovery of The Flow, an extra-dimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transport us to other worlds, around other stars.

Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.

Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and Issac Asimov are some other heavy hitters in this space.

The "culture" series of books was the first coherent portrayal of a non-dystopian advanced society with AIs that I encountered. It’s a reasonable “good” future.

Don't be that person. Learn to type and invest in your hardware early on.

I'm wondering if there are keyboard set-ups people really like? I'm enjoying my Gigabyte mechanical keyboard, but would be willing to give it up for something that'll let me get more mileage out of my hands/arms.

The only downsides were some initial soreness (I think my shoulders were used to being hunched/turned in), some initially missed keys (it turns out I used to type the letter y with my left index finger, which isn't possible with the split), and more difficulty typing one handed.

Side benefit is that I have a good place to put my coffee and snacks.

Related to shoulders, I found that raising my monitors with arms (budget option: programming books) greatly help reduce the natural leaned-over hunch I'd get from looking down at my monitor. These two in combination have greatly helped my default posture.

I also recently learned about proper desk posture - I now sit with my stomach just touching the desk, and my keyboard is way further forward. My forearms rest on the desk almost all the way to my elbows, and my wrists rest on the keyboards wrist pads. I find that this greatly reduces the strain on my arms and wrists.

So, for all these, I think the natural solution is to use a split mechanical keyboard with extra/configurable keys. The position of the hands seems to be more natural with these,

https://ergodox-ez.com/

https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

https://www.dygma.com/product/dygma-raise/

http://www.mistelkeyboard.com/barocco-series/

I haven't tried any of those since I can't seem to decide on one of them yet, but the hand pain is real after years of heavy use, so better try and become familiar with other layouts and find out what works best for your hands. The sad part is that you might not know that something doesn't work until it's too late.

As for the mouse, switching hands helps. So try learning how to use the mouse with the other hand.

That said, there are people who use affirmations successfully to get out their misery. I dunno what to believe anymore

Doesn't help me feel better in that particular moment, but does let me know that later it will get better and there some context and comfort in that.

The Dalai Lama makes this point.

Also, how do you thaw it?

But like a month or two in the chiller? All good. Had great results with homemade pain de mie that was sliced and frozen and eaten over 30 days.

It’s probably better than what you get at most fast food restaurants though.

Get good sleep. At least 8 hours everyday. Get a good mattress.

A good sleep makes a happy life.

This might be signs of treatable pathological conditions that if not treated can (and most likely will be) detrimental to your health, quality of life and productivity.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...

[0]: https://github.com/donatj/sqlread

It wasn't an easy mid-career move, but it's greatly improved my life options and can only imagine where I'd be now if I'd spent my 20s learning computer languages instead of human ones.

Curiosity and aptitude for math. I've found this about 25 years too late for it to make much of a difference.

My personal model is mind / body / spirit (or mental / physical / artistic). I've learned through failure that high and exceptional performance in one direction draws fuel from the other(s).

If my performance is out of balance for a long enough period, I seem to accrue a kind of debt repaid over periods of burnout and depression.

To learn form of complex lifts of squats or deadlifts, check out “So you think you can deadlift/squat” on YouTube.

If you insist you can find places that are not free, but generally loans are taken to finance housing and living

2. That a fixed sleeping schedule with at least 8 hours of sleep does wonders to my thought process and has a calming effect.

3. That my thoughts, especially under tough circumstances, are not really a true picture of reality. This one is tough and is still under discovery mode.

4. That I should never compare myself with others. The only thing I should rely on others should be for inspiration. The comparison part I knew my whole life but, like all simple things, it took a while for me to actually immerse in the depth of it.

Probably not what OP was specifically looking for, but this single discovery has been the most profound in my life.

* how DNS works and how to configure common record types

* regular expressions - specifically for URL rewriting

* setting up good logging and monitoring

* asking for help earlier

Source: peak traffic event... person who did back of the envelope math based on p99 request size forgot about logs and specifically the increased log event volume.

Machines were about to tip over. I recall having to ssh to hosts to manually kill the log agent process because the logging ingestion service was shitting itself (not properly throttling either) and we had no other levers in place. Lolz did I mention deleting logs on live hosts because logs were just accumulating and not getting cleared off? Now imagine this across 20,000 hosts. Teehee.

A DNS haiku:

It's not DNS There's no way it's DNS It was DNS

-Meditation

-Reading consistently

-Importance of sleep (fixed my sleeping issues with CBT-I [cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia])

-Value of joining a leadership/self development group like Toastmasters

-Accepting you for who you are, and work with your strengths

-Stop listening to what people say/advice about your life, most of the time they're wrong and you know better.

Yes, it will also reduce your stress levels. But it's easier said then done.

I've been doing it for the last year, and it's helped me figure out much better solutions to so many issues in my life, than I would have without the calm, reflective thinking that writing for 30 minutes each morning brings.

Can't recommend it enough.

https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

Also, ycombinator/pg essays. Before that I got my business advice from “the apprentice”.

The Pattern on the Stone.

I didn't come from a top-tier school, didn't work for name companies, and had a zig-zag middle manager career. instead of a meteoric rise through the ranks. Multiple layoffs too. I'll never see my name lauded in a press release.

I've discovered that self-worth is just that - it comes from within.

Then, the one time I wrote an ebook, I blogged each of those twenty titles. I set up a mailing list. I participated in forums on the topic, with my signature linking to the blog posts/email signup form.

Then, after I'd written the blog posts, I used leanpub to pull in the RSS for them. Then I edited them and expanded where needed.

That worked for me once, that's the path I'd take in the future.

Things to realize:

* writing a book is hard. I remember spending an hour on one sentence of my book (just testing to make sure I was correct about a statement).

* technical books have short lives. Tech moves on. That said, people are willing to spend money to save time.

* marketing is at least as hard as writing the book. Prepare to spend time doing this.

* If you aren't using the tech in your work (or won't be in the future) you better love the tech or your book will need changes and you won't want to put in the time.

Here's more about my book launch: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1339

* Sites like HackerRank, Codility, etc. So fun.

* https://teachyourselfcs.com/

* Loop Habit Tracker (Android app)

* raylib

* Anki (thanks, HN)

* Queal

* Virtual desktops, took me way too long to start using them, lolsob

* The secret clouds area in 6-2

- Budget/money planning.

- The power of writing things done to make them happen.

Can you explain your process?

It is so simple that it's hard to believe how much impact it has.

I believe it takes away all the mental energy you have to put to process things in your mind. And somehow it gives some sort of value and priority to your plan when you write it down. It quickly becomes a discipline and works against procrastination.

One of those things that you always hear it, yet you can't believe it until you try it.

Yoga. Another thing that I always assumed was for rich suburban moms and I didn't need to bother with. In my youth that might have been true, but the body ages poorly if you don't take care of it. Yoga is a fantastic way to be mindful/meditate and stretch/exercise.

TL;DR - Don't be so quick to judge that which you have not tried.

I wonder how many other things I have ignored throughout my life because I associated them with some preconvieved belief or stereotype.

books: thinking fast and slow, black swan/antifragile, why we sleep, the organize mind

How is this helpful?

And the absolute joy than can come from having children.

- Living in an apartment/condo; instead of owning a big, stupid house.

During my 20's & early 30's i had always had a well paid job but nothing to show for it. I also had big overdraft which I'd never done anything about. About 6 years ago I picked up a copy of YNAB 4 for about £8 of Steam. Within 3 months I'd completely changed my spending habits. Roll on a year or two and I'd paid off all my debts. And this program has allowed me to save for some big life events and trips - things I'd have probably borrowed money for in the past. Last year I bought my first car in full without the aid of a loan. The program also helped me when I went self empoyed a few years ago. Both mine and my long term partners finances go thought the program and we know exactly how little money we can live on - this is valuable info if times get hard. The program is basically a spreadsheet with a nice GUI but the methodology behind it work for me. If I'd have found something like this in my early 20's I'd be a lot better of than I am now. But hey, better late than never.

I do Yoga every day. Prior to me getting into Yoga I thought the only real way to exercise was to join a gym. I live in a rural part of the UK, so for me travelling to the gym is timeconsuming. A few years back I'd been suffering back pain due to long stints sitting at a desk all day. I'd also started to put on weight due to inactivity. Anyway, during one painful day I decided to Google "Yoga for back pain". I tried it and I was hooked. Not only did it fix my back pain, it eased it for around 3 days. Since then I've really got into Yoga and try to do at least 20-60 mins a day. Sometimes I might do it twice a day if I know I'm going to be sat down a lot. Like everyone else I have days when I'm worn out - for these days I have a couple of 10 min routines which I try to do. I'm a firm believer of trying to exercise every day, even if it's just for 10 minutes. It's a good habit to have and doing it daily reinforces the habit. Since doing regular practice I don't really get any achy joints. I also do HIT style Yoga 3 times a week which helps with body tone, strengh, and cardio. When you really get into Yoga you realise they're many different styles which can help different aspects of your health. For me, my main driving force was back pain - I've never done any exercise which fixed my back as well as certain Yoga exercises. For me Yoga is great because it's easy and free. You only need a Yoga mat (a beach towel can suffice at the beginning) and Youtube to get started. I keep myself in reasonable shape without having to travel or pay any gym fees. I never knew exercise could be so easy and cheap. I wish I'd known this in my late 20's, when I put on a lot of weight, and was suffering with back pain and other achy bits.

Daily journaling.

That I needed glasses.

* Scikit-learn

* Road bikes

If you're trying to reply to a comment, click "reply" right below it.

For the rest the timing was not that bad

Even in my own adolescence I watched the most 'gifted' child eat batteries and jump off the roof of the school.

Sadly later on I was stripped of my potential by math teacher in primary school. I solved all exercises by writing the result outright, and she forced me to write down every. single. step.

I got so used to that over course of 3 years, that now I'm slower than average at mental calculations. i cannot do algebra efficiently without a piece of paper anymore.

That teacher is probably the only person in my life i genuinely hate.

Maths ability varies widely, and I don't think being able to do things a couple of years earlier than your peers is that uncommon or really predicts your later achievements, except for the encouragement of early praise pushing you in that direction.

If you really want to be good at mental calculations, practice that. You haven't lost anything you can't regain. However, pen and paper is more accurate, more permanent, and can often be faster, though it feels slower because you're physically moving a lot. Your hatred is beyond futile, achieving nothing but hurting you and holding you back.

I love solving problems and am very good at it but writing things down makes me hate maths, the act of moving the pen is much more effort than the problem itself. I used to stump my professors by solving the problems they were explaining in my head long before they would have gotten to a solution. But then I got diagnosed with ADD after I completed my masters, I can write down things no problem when I'm on medication, but if people forced me to write down everything in school when I were undiagnosed I likely would have dropped out of middle-school and maybe even committed suicide. Several of my siblings dropped out of middle school so that is not an exaggeration.

I don't think that not writing things down held me back, I think it forced me to become creative and learn things properly since I couldn't just follow algorithms blindly like my classmates. So maybe I should be grateful that I was diagnosed late and thus forced to invent my own maths throughout college. I likely would have gotten perfect grades with medication, but I'm pretty sure the things I learned and the intuition I built are way more valuable than grades.

But if someone like you came around and thought I did things wrong then you would have ruined my life. Please don't force that on someone else and when they inevitably fail you just say something like "I guess he wasn't that good after all, nothing I could've done!".

I also have to work with a database schema designed by someone mentally handicapped - i know for fact that it was designed in early 90s by someone self taught.. and it never had a single refactor. They just migrated their own file-based 'database' to firebird. Sadly this piece of shit software is used very commonly in my field.

Merge statements make complicated updates blazing fast compared to any other way.

That my engineering field is basically dead and i should've changed to software development sooner.