Ask HN: What are some of your recent successes?
For a break from some of the more negative content recently, let's hear what you have succeeded at.
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. :)
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.
I would define 'parasitic' as anyone who takes up my time, energy, money, or well-being without giving much or anything to my life. I believe reciprocation and symbiosis are important to being healthy, balanced, and connected to nature.
I do my best to give more than expected to all my clients, friends, family, lovers. It's just my nature, I realized some people prey on people like me and it's my job to create boundaries if I am to be happy.
> 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 ?
I did this to fund my travels while I did a lot of inner work. I am now equally focused on my own projects as I am on my contracts.
It's not for everyone, this is the only way I knew to maintain my course towards my highest aspirations.
No family responsibilities I take it? (As in you don’t have any kids). I think, off everything you listed if you were to do a 80/20 what’s the 20% here - eliminating parasitic relationships and having healthy habits ? Something different? You put out a long list but I think what the community is most interested is in understanding how they can make their (version of) big changes in their unfulfilled lives and what could they learn from your success. To that effect what’s the cornerstone or foundational things on which everything else was built in your case?
I'm only 29 so this is all revolutionary for me, feels like I am hitting my full stride as I go into my 30's.
All of this happened in the last year, so it was just a perfect storm of things at one time.
I'm living in a new paradigm I feel as I go into my 30's.
> spending a lot of time out in the National Parks
If you don’t mind me asking, which are your favorites?
An ex of one of my relatives loves going off on Yosemite hikes like the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne.
They are all pretty special but I really enjoyed Glacier National Park for the wildness, the bears, Going-To-The-Sun road.
I lived in Utah for a year and would highly recommend going there at least once to explore Moab and Zion areas. Grand Canyon is not far from Zion, it definitely lives up to it's name.
Honestly, I just realized that life is short and most people go to their death beds without realizing their full potential because they are occupied with social concerns. Many people drop the quality of their life by living an unhealthy lifestyle that is disconnected from nature.
This all really set in for me after my grandmother, who I was very close to, passed away in December after having a stroke in November. I helped take care of her because she took care of me when I was a boy. Also, my 43-year-old cousin passed away from ovarian cancer in July. Got news of a kid I met only once being murdered during a robbery, he was only 24.
These realizations are put into practice with each breath, thought, word, and deed with the Eightfold Path that Buddha laid out 2,500 years ago. It's as relevant today as it was back then.
When those you love are gone, the emptiness is so obvious. Even though the trauma and grief gradually heal, any sense of purpose seems like an empty, made up story. You know you'll die at some point too, everything you do will be undone, and the world probably isn't real anyway. Why even live?
It doesn't stop me working on projects. But they do seem relatively pointless in the end.
The one thing that seems to give things I do value, is when others value them. I'm never sure if that's because they see something I don't, or if they are deeper into self-made illusions.
I don't mean trivia like clothes, status, social media. I mean things others really value, like time together, listening, caring, assisting, relief from poverty, their health, happy times, friendship, that sort of thing.
So from that point of view, I think social concerns of a certain variety are to be prized. Maybe they are the only thing that has meaning.
This can be seen however a person wants to see it. I am ennobled and encouraged by it, I value life more having seen death up close.
There is a balance and everything is interdependent, so nothing exists in isolation. I do my best work and thinking when alone at my desk or out in nature. Time away from society makes me value time with my family more.
I serve others and create value for them through my agency and I serve society at large with the things I am developing, maybe attending YC for. I have always strived to be of value to society, to make something of lasting value. Now I am.
Instead of living from the mind, I now live from the heart. It looks 'dumb' to the intellectuals but the 'simple people' of the world know this to be wisdom.
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...
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 :)
I am not a believer in external entities or anything of that kind as I believe all these psychedelics do is show how powerful our brains are in constructing and reconstructing the raw input of the world. It's just so bizarre though that's all even possible.
Some interesting threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Salvia/comments/avc7yc/i_cannot_str...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/ctwh0r/how_has_dmt_aff...
And this GIF is quite accurate in how salvia feels like if you can even describe it.
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!
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.
Edit: Also, congrats!
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 switched to software engineering because there was I good strong likelihood I have a knack for it (turns out I do), that I was going to really enjoy it (turns out I love it deeply), and that there's good money in it (confirmed).
It was a calculated decision, though not a difficult one, and maybe the best I've made in my life so far.
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.
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!
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.
For the first time in my career I have a low stress job. I feel like a totally different person.
I big difference I've noticed is that I watch a lot less TV now. I used come home burned out and would just crash in front of the TV.
Physical illnesses, even if only mildly disabling, do affect your day-to-day mood very negatively.
- Myofascial release of pec minor/major with theracane (generic one bought in a well-known chinese webshop).
- Doorway stretches.
- A physical device that's rock-shaped on which you lay down and safely stretches the sternum/ribs area.
- I avoid smartphone use whenever possible, and try to use the mouse with the left hand (or no mouse at all if possible).
I might be forgetting something but that's more or less what helped me.
It's sometimes challenging to find where you need to work on since many times treating the location where the pain is originating may not be the real source. For example: pec minor may be totally tight, which causes pain when breathing in the shoulder blades/sternum/ribs, you go to the PT and PT massages for example the shoulder blades but in reality that'll do nothing since it's just the end of the chain.
But on a positive note, you get to learn a lot about anatomy :)
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!
Most USB interfaces can do class compliant audio, you can thank the popularity of the ipad for that one.
>DAW
Libre: LMMS, Ardour
Proprietary: Bitwig Studio, Harrison Mixbus
2. I didn't have any experience with DSP programming before this project. I mostly just wrapped an existing library, but I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of delving more into the algorithms now.
If you're interested in trying something, a colleague and I are considering modernizing Rakarrack (an aging guitar effects bundle), you could jump in before we get started developing it. Here's our fledgling github repo:
https://github.com/rkrv2/rkrv2
Edit: Also check out the forum at https://linuxmusicians.com if you want to discuss Linux audio/music production.
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!
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!
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).
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.
What industry? How long you worked on it, etc?
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!
I’ll keep HN posted with the details, but so far I’m making a lot of progress on the company’s tech!
I'm still down around 1900 on support, though.
Right click orbs only and use your ult on cooldown. Good luck!
I set this one month fitness goal because I thought it would be immediately achievable and healthy.
A recent success has been getting more video content out around my niche (developing a product): https://youtube.com/cleverbeagle
How about you OP?
Nice job on running :) Do you have a specific routine or goals you try to hit?
Self: I just completed my third year of walking 7 miles every day. I feel strong, sleep well and I'm way more productive both at home and at work.
> Coures Page: http://lucylabs.gatech.edu/kbai/summer-2019/
> Project Overview: http://lucylabs.gatech.edu/kbai/summer-2019/project-overview...
> RPMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
Day: Got our static map server (mapnik-based) to generate x/y/z tiles properly so we can use it with leaflet.js for interactive maps.
2) I managed to pay off my college debt to external services (I still owe money to my parents, but it's interest free)
3) I got promoted to a senior level at work, got rotated to a different team, and put on a high visibility project.
4) I started doing improv comedy on the side! It was something I'd flirted with in college but didn't really take `seriously`
Not everything is perfect, and I have some bad days, but my life between the start of this year and now has drastically changed and in a lot of ways for the better.
I would banter with the best of them. This is something that I still dream of doing well in real life situations like parties but it is easy in a virtual medium for me. I would also share, read way too many, and regurgitate interesting articles that were of interest to the people there and get a dopamine hit if it was liked.
After an initial one week period of really wanting to pop in to see what was “going on” and later to see “what I missed”, I don’t think I miss it. Yes, I may miss some very interesting intellectual and not so intellectual banter and even “under the radar” articles to post here, and I think the trade benefit of less distraction and more focus is well, well worth it.
To generalize, if you say that X is a distraction to you, get X off your phone. It is much, much harder to be sucked in with the mobile web experience than with their mobile apps. For Slack, it was sufficient to remove them as “teams”, and I dislike their pushing of a frictionless (re)team add. I can manage that though, especially since my desire to “pop in” to those water cooler Slacks decreased exponentially.
Made Support Lead of an important assignment, leading a team of 7 Engineers.
If anyone would like to advise me on how to be a good Support Lead, I am eager to hear and act.
PS - Support Lead is also Operations Lead
https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...
I would never have imagined to pick up another spoken language to learn. I am enjoying the process of language learning though sometime struggle with it. Even wife has been surprised how seriously I have taken to learning Japanese. The only drawback is that I haven't done anything technology related for a while.
> The only drawback is that I haven't done anything technology related for a while.
While the vast majority of technology content is in English, consider seeking out to read/listen or even starting a podcast, blog, meetup in Japanese around your technology interests.
Pushed out an app today that makes it significantly easier to do a part of my job.
Two academic papers in the pipeline.
- Proposed to my girlfriend. Getting married next year.
Not my success, but my future wife's; She got a job as head of QC for a large company.
Life is pretty sweet right now :-)
Signed a contract for a first-hand apartment rental (relatively tough to get here, I got lucky).
Partaking in a very interesting sponsorship program at work.
Got promoted this year.
Met an amazing person that I'm having fun exploring and experimenting with.
Visited a new, interesting country twice and am about to visit another one soon.
Maintained my workout routine.
Maintained my intermittent fasting routine in a surprisingly easy and consistent way.
Their feedback was nice to hear, and I’m glad to have finally shown them my work.
My next goal is to drop 45 lbs and get to a deadlift of 500, so that I can lift twice my weight.