that is very ambitious if not pathologically ambitious.

> Yesterday, I finally realized ... But I suggest ...

s/he has been failing up until the previous day and is already giving public advice about how to do it better?

that's not just questionable, it also shows a lack of self-reflection and unhealthy levels of impulsiveness.

if that text wasn't 13 years old i'd suggest to the author an afternoon on /r/adhdmeme to have a good laugh before moving on with the revised plan. but back then this subreddit didn't exist yet and there was much less useful info on adhd available online or offline. so, from that angle this text might even have some historic raison d'etre.

This was my thought exactly. The internet is full of articles along those lines: I've been doing this new routine for 2 days, here are 8 pieces of advice for you.

I recognize the enthusiasm for sharing new discoveries, and it can be inspiring, I just wish those who did would be generally less prescriptive about it.

Here it's read life advice on the internet to be able to get stuff done to promote life advice on the internet.

Interestingly, it can also be right, but ‘new’ - and just caught up in the excitement of learning.

90% of what everyone says (near as I can tell) is what we’re saying to ourselves.

> that is very ambitious if not pathologically ambitious.

I guess that's what many parents are then? Meditating in the morning is one thing, for an hour, everyone can find their window. Same goes for an hour of journaling, and an hour of eating breakfast. The steps are OK, but the duration might be different for me.

I'm a life long night owl, now morning miracling. It's different, waking up that early feels like still being up before anyone is like late at night, plus a clearer head from a full sleep cycle.

Sometimes you accidentally fall asleep at 9, and wake up at 3-4 without issue.

I think I'm about to join the 5 am gym club, I don't even know who I am any more. That's the fun of continuing to discover things that weren't thought of as a possibility.

It's a "she": https://openheartproject.com/about/

> has been failing

Not so sure about that. Read the page at the link (It's the "About" page on the site).

> that is very ambitious if not pathologically ambitious.

While that was an example of trying to do too much, waking up that early isn't super uncommon - I guess that's what many parents are then?

Cultivating a healthy and positive inner dialogue is super important. No one is coming to help you to a greater degree than you picking yourself up and learning to treat yourself with care by being a friend to yourself. This is much different than being too self-involved.,

Meditating in the morning is one thing, for an hour, everyone can find their window. Same goes for an hour of journaling, and an hour of eating breakfast. The steps are OK, and leave room to add more in.

I'm a life long night owl, now morning miracling. It's different, waking up that early feels like still being up before anyone is like late at night, plus a clearer head from a full sleep cycle.

Sometimes you accidentally fall asleep at 9, and wake up at 3-4 without issue.

I think I'm about to join the 5 am gym club, I don't even know who I am any more. That's the fun of continuing to discover things that weren't thought of as a possibility.

- I read “Why we sleep”. Part of my issue was motivation. Learning more about the process of sleep and our growing understanding of how lack of sleep affects the brain later in life is eye opening.

- Around the same time, I started a morning mindfulness habit. This was really helpful for seeing how my experience shifted over time.

- I thought deeply about why I like staying up late. Realized some of this was a pattern I started as a kid, when the only time I could have alone was after everyone had gone to bed. Being a night owl helped me survive childhood. It wasn’t clear to me that any of the old reasons still applied, and there were negative effects that were impacting my life.

- I stopped consuming caffeine past 9AM. I didn’t realize how much this was affecting me, but it turns out I’m pretty sensitive to caffeine and anything later in the day will keep me awake.

- Stop using screens at least an hour before bed. This was hard until I found new outlets. Audio books and regular books have worked well for this.

- I made a simple goal combo while making the change: try to go to bed earlier than the night before, or at least no later. Try to be earlier at least once/week. Ended up trending earlier at least several days each week.

- Followed advice from the Huberman Lab sleep toolkit [0]

I shifted from an average 3AM bedtime to a 9:30 wind down and 10:30 bedtime over about 3 months, and I’ve stuck with it for about 4 months now, with very little temptation to go back because of how much better I feel. I’ve found that morning solitude can feel just as good, and that the habits I’ve built in the pursuit of shifting this schedule are paying dividends in other aspects of my life.

I had never really embraced the idea of a consistent morning routine, and when I stopped resisting that, everything else got easier.

And I’ve gotten to take photos of more sunrises which is a nice side benefit.

- [0] https://hubermanlab.com/toolkit-for-sleep/

Part of it might have been the complexity of the work I was doing at the time that benefitted from thinking during the day and minimizing keyboard time.

I had a similar realisation a few years ago. I used to try to come up with side project ideas by sitting down with a piece of paper and writing down every idea I could think of. Then, I’d decide which of these ideas seemed in the realm of possibility for me with my current skill set. Out of that whittled-down list, I’d then choose the idea that I thought would have the most chance of success.

The problem? I could never remain motivated. It turned out that I had invented a formula for choosing ideas that neither extended my skills nor spoke to my inner curiosity. Things only changed when I asked myself the question “has this ever worked for me in the past? Even once?”

I decided my new philosophy was to work on whatever I was most curious about — even if it seemed way too hard for me, or if everyone else thought it was stupid. I haven’t exactly made millions of dollars from this approach, but I’ve learned more in the past four years (and had more fun doing it) than I did in the previous 10.

It makes me wonder what other things I might be doing out of habit that have never actually worked.

Now, I'm in my 40s and I'm like "Done with work; I think I'll go for a walk and then take a nap."

I'm in my early thirties and never had any side projects. After busting my ass coding like hell for 6 years in university and after 8 hours of coding at work per day, I was always seeking to do non-coding activities in my free time: trying out new hobbies, going for a walk, having drinks with friends and going dancing, dating, witching a movie, jerking off, cooking, reading, hiking, SLEEPING! etc.

This hurt my chances of getting into flashy well paying VC funded agile scale-ups where every applicant was a 20-something with a huge GitHub portfolio, but, and I hope I don't offend anyone, life is too short to spend my free time doing things I don't enjoy, just to look good in front of $COMPANY, that will lay you off the next day if 'line goes down', so I narrow my job search at companies where coding is done for the paycheck, not for the lifestyle.

I do spend my free time sometimes tinkering with various linux distros and DEs, and sometimes reverse engineering, but moistly working on hardware projects to build to increase my comfort around the house like a tap-water to air apartment AC cooling unit for the summer. I've always been a hands-on kind of tinkerer, with physical things, not with code, since I can't touch it.

Another good option is a uni gig in their tech department. You’ll have to put up with absolutely scads of incompetence, probably a change control board, crap pay plus you’ll get pay freezes during downturns, but the lifestyle and benefits are absurdly good — I know people who show up for a couple meetings in the morning, leave for a three hour lunch and then go home every day — and you’ll usually be getting a pension. Highly recommend going this route when you’ve made your egg and are ten years out from retirement.

In which country is this? Where I live now in Europe I've never seen jobs that let you get away with that. Maybe those people you know are well connected with the bosses that they're allowed such lax work behavior.

I'm also, in a strange way, glad that I didn't discover Epicurus earlier. Choosing the more difficult path is also part of my personality - but I have found some incredible friends as a result.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

It worked, insofar as it kept me going for years, and years, and took me places - but by the end I was a husk. This path leads to burnout.

Post-burnout, the floggings continued until I finally got it through my thick skull that I was inflicting harm on those around me, as watching someone you love castigate themselves incessantly is apparently not easy.

I’ve finally just about stopped, after a few years of therapy and a lot of time in nature. Turns out that the motivation I had as a small kid, before I was taught to be cruel to myself at age seven, was still there, but had been overlain with a system of brutality that was necessary for my survival in the boarding school environment.

I once again find myself doing things with passion and joy, rather than drudgingly hauling my sorry ass through the thorns.

I contribute to OSS for problems/ideas that troubles/benefits me the most. Sometimes it's just a bit tricky thing that requires some time to do the digging (e.g. dig the library and debug issue). Sometimes it's a feature I want on something I am using.

I think much of the coding understanding learned by non-required tasks (OSS contribution included but not all) are from doing these kind of things bit by bit (some by reading, but practicing coding probably makes it much better).

But not to dream about making millions or even pennies for doing what you are interested in. It's expectation management. Money does has certain kind of value, but might not be so aligned with your other interested sectors (e.g. fun, security, control of data)

This has actually worked well for me in the past, but the trick for me was to wait at least a month after an idea was written down before starting on it.

Basically, while working on one thing, I would jot all my 'newer and better' ideas into a journal so that I could finish the current thing. After finishing the current thing I would read through my journal to decide what to start next, realizing that most of the ideas I had written down were pretty lame.

The delay in time saved me from starting work on things that I would have abandoned soon after (albeit for good reason) and I developed more confidence and determination in finishing the things I started, since those ideas had proven themselves over the others.

Another approach I take is to breakdown a large task into smaller tasks that I can complete in less than one or two hours since I deal with a lot of interruptions during the day. This allows me to recognize my progress on a task and makes it easier to remember the state of things at any particular stopping point.

There’s a saying I like that I think captures this well - “strike when the iron is hot”.

Whenever I feel that spark swell inside of me, I drop everything else and immediately follow it. It’s okay to put off the haircut or the grocery shopping or whatever other mundane day to day chore I had - this is what living is for.

Second, many people on this platform, me included, got good at the things they do for a living, because they did it for fun (and sometimes still do). Going for the fun project helps you learn faster and better. It might be "the wrong" thing to learn, but who is even able to judge that?

Also: I made that caveat and you skipped right past it. Everything is a gradient of course. I am not suggesting you have to never follow some discipline and always go for the fun route.

One day I was making nasty fun of myself for being really good at starting things, and something clicked. "Sticking to" something is functionally same as starting it over and over again. Which I'm good at. Am I ever going to stop starting to work out? No. My only problem is that sometimes there's a significant interval between "stopping" and "starting." What am I doing during those intervals? Hating myself on one hand and also trying to whip up irrational confidence that the next time I start will be the time I actually stick with a schedule. I could dispense with those things and reduce the interval.

It turns out I can reduce the interval between starting and stopping to basically nothing.

This approach isn't systematic enough to produce amazing results, but I'm happy to now be working out 3-4 times per week, and more importantly, I'm happy that if I miss a few workouts, I'm back to normal right away instead of spending weeks or months licking my wounds.

Later I made a connection to how people say that great athletes have short memories, in the sense that success and failure don't leave a lasting emotional mark on them. When a great athlete completes a difficult pass or gets it slightly wrong, strikes out or hits a home run, hits a shot or misses it, they process the information, but any sense of triumph or failure has to be gone in seconds by necessity because it can't be allowed to affect the next shot they take.

I apply that attitude to a lot of my daily life. I'll have time to feel proud or downcast after the game is over. Right now I have to take my next shot.

For me, I feel like that's a better emotional cadence. I don't instantly drop the judgment hammer on myself for a mistake. Not only does that stop knee-jerk emotions from wrecking my subsequent decisions, but my reactions at the end of the day are usually more moderate, thoughtful, and productive.

We don‘t get how our culture is making us sick, how we try harder and harder to get to the point of happiness and satisfaction, and never realize that this path doesn‘t work.

Alan Watts said that meditation shouldn't be a grim duty, it should be done for the fun of it, it should be a 'grooving with the eternal now'. "Getting meditation done" makes as much sense as "getting dancing done" or "getting music listened to" - the goal isn't to hurry up and finish playing music or dancing, it's to enjoy doing it for its own sake.

If meditation can help someone get to that place, that’s a good thing.

But I still disagree; meditation being to do with noticing where your thoughts arise, who watches the watcher, who is "I", it's fundamentally at odds with the hustle culture of productivity and economic return on investment and "it's critical that I meditate to keep up my image of being someone who meditates so I can maintain my suitably high status to impress my readers". It's the kind of thing Buddha stepped away from his wealthy upbringing to realise, the kind of thing Zen Monks go to monasteries to get away from, the kind of thing rich people take meditative sabatticals to observe and introspect.

Desire causes suffering; I forget what book I read it in but it was a normal person asking a guru about their office job, lots of phones ringing, lots of urgency, lots of stress, how can she meditate to be at peace in that kind of environment when she's so stressed she can't get in a peaceful mood to meditate at all? And the author's answer was not to stop all the phones ringing, to get into a peaceful mood first, but to notice that her desire to be at peace was at odds with her life, said desire was where her suffering was arising - if she revelled in the activity, in feeling wanted and useful and never bored, she could end the day tired but satisfied believing she'd helped as much as she could, instead of worn out and stressed believing she'd failed the workload. Meditation might be to notice that the phones ringing is stressing her and it needn't be a judgement about her not being good enough when she can't answer all of them, rather than meditation being about going to a quiet room to get some peace.

Similar to the story of the guy rowing a boat accross a river and bumps into another boat and calls out swearing at the other boater for not paying attention and being careless and then looks over his shoulder and sees the other boat is empty and drifting and there's nobody to be angry at, the answer is not to go find the boat owner to be angry at the right person, it's to wonder why you are angry at all.

I'm not claiming to be an authority, but a meditative state is more "laughing at yourself for wanting to be that important" than it is "improving writing productivity and readership by 15%". Like the fat man who is desperate to keep making vegetable soup recipes for YouTube so people accept he is an authority on dieting, the recipes aren't the diet, the finger isn't the moon, the point of meditation[2] is to notice your desperate desire to be a spiritual authority and your suffering when you feel you aren't good enough, rather than to turn you into a spiritual authority. Like the people who say they want to be musicians who are mixing up "being on stage and famous with a cheering crowd" with "playing instruments eight hours a day".

[1] (everything everyone says ever is their opinion! Every internet comment is someone's opinion, not a peer reviewed study - even then, peer reviewed study comments are the reviewer's opinion! Even measured experiments are someone's opinion that those are good measurements, that they were taken properly, recorded well, used in an appropriate model with appropriate assumptions! "That's just someone's opinion" - you should assume ALL internet comments, all articles, all books, have a honking great "IMO" on the front, or if you respect the author, make it "IMHO").

[2] if there is any such thing

It can lead to excessive sprinting and over work trying to get something ‘fixed’ which is fundamentally unstable.

Life happens.

Looking at it as a constant process of seeking balance, and getting to that state - then having it swept away - then repeating, can be healthier.

Like a sand mandala, but our lives.

If the pain of not being where you want to be is greater than the pain of remaining where you are, you’ll take action.

It’s great if you enjoy what you’re doing. But often we enjoy where we want to go more than what we have to do to get there. I want a clean house more than I want to clean it, which is why I take action to clean it every day.

The problem comes when we aren’t in tune with what we really want, and we can’t make the choice about what’s required of us. It’s okay to accept that you don’t want to be someone who meditates every day. Or that you want to eat and drink more than you want six pack abs. Be honest about what you want, without influence from the expectations of other people, culture, or tradition.

Not necessarily. Some people don’t feel deserving so they stay where they are. A victim of their own torturous mind.

Also learned helplessness is a real thing.

I've been thinking of catching up. To start an Excel sheet, with years in the left column, and then start filling in events that I can remember or verify with certainty (marriage, births of kids, buying the house, jobs, projects, travels). Hopefully this would trigger more and more memories that I can then fit into that context, until I get to a somewhat complete and coherent story of what's been going on until now.

I think this might also make starting journaling easier because I would be continuing a story, instead of starting to write one at a random point in time.

I've been journaling for over ten years.

However, the last two years are MUCH more active than the first eight.

Why?

I _insisted_ on having my journals be digitally handwritten instead of just typing them.

I spent years looking for the perfect digital notebook. It started with this absolute unit of a convertible tablet that was really crappy but had a Wacom digitizer built into the screen. I got a Surface almost immediately on release, then did the same when the big iPad Pro dropped.

Yet I hardly wrote on them.

Why?

After a long day of working, the last thing I wanted to do was spend thirty minutes writing.

Two years ago, a mildly traumatic event happened to me. Nothing devastating, but it was enough for me to do _anything_ to track my mood.

I found an app that did this perfectly. As a result, Ive been contributing an entry to it every day since.

Sometimes I even record my entry with Voice Memos. (AMAZING built-in app. Works flawlessly and syncs via iCloud with zero thought.)

I remember much more of my life because of this. It is awesome getting a pop-up on my phone about something awesome that happened six months ago.

As it happens, getting it down, no matter how, is much more important than getting it down fancily.

I mostly started journaling to analyse my own thought process in a later stage. I am now 27, started my own company last year and hope that my desendends one day can use my journal to see what things worked and which didn't - that way they may have it easier in their own life as they will know what to avoid and what can lead to success.

I see it as a way to accelerate the trial-and-error process and this thought that it can be helpful for future generations of my family is something which motivates me more than anything else.

There is a lot of information that can be captured in a one second video of your life every day for 25 years.

That's where I'm struggling recently.

I barely find anything joyful lately. I tried many many "discipline" frameworks, I can commit more than 1 week.

Two years ago by painting that picture I realized I need a fundamental change if I want to make it happen.

I said, if you're consistent in wasting your time like that, let's see what will happen if you are consistent with not wasting your time.

I identified a couple of priorities for myself. One of them is "income". If I need to do a task that might take me an hour to finish, but a week to start, I say to myself: that's part of your income. You need it, cut the emotions, drop the ego and do it.

Surprisingly, it works for me not that bad.

On the side projects, I recently counted the folders I did in 2023 - more than 40. Nothing live, but I keep on going because the picture I painted for myself is that these projects are the beginning of something great.

I can totally relate to the author. I dropped all routine and started compare how my day evolves according to my fundamental priorities right now: health, income, hobby.

All is about the motivation. People talk about goals and outcomes, but rarely I see someone truly questioning what they really want and more important - what they really don't want. That for me is the driver behind motivation.

All this can be avoided by seeking to audit one's own self conversation. If this sounds reasonable to you, I suggest you do a web search or ask ChatGPT about Dr. David Burns, the School Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and the checklist of common Cognitive Distortions (common self lies). In little more than a half hour of research you can begin your own self honesty revolution. It is HUGE and it is PERSONAL REVOLUTION that will remake you entirely as a significantly more rational, adept and capable individual.

Nobody wants to wash the dishes, do maintenance or clean up, but it has to be done.

The question is how does this work for things you want to get done, but it's hard.

Say I want to make some form of rubber duck app, but with an AI voice. The idea is great, I talk my programming ideas and she'd respond back, giving an illusion of listening. However, it's way more work and less immediately enjoyable than a game of Dota 2.

The feeling of warm water running over your hands, the immediate change, the purity that you create, the complex pattern of light reflecting in the water drops, the sound of it…

To me, this is an immensely pleasant activity.

Sure, if I’m in a rush, I just load the dishwasher and jump to other things, but otherwise this is a great time to relax and meditate.

Compare that to waiting while the CI pipeline is chugging through over and over, only to end up with frustrating disappointment that another test started to fail, or that something has stuck in the cloud house-of-cards again

Doing something out of passion is a value in itself that should not be ignored. In music this is what often differenciates the true geniuses from those who are just very good: passion. If you have to sit down and practise an instruments for hours a day it totally helps if you are passionate about the instrument. It helps when you care about the music you are playing and how you are playing it. All of that can be reached via discipline as well, but there might be something lacking in the end.

What is the difference between someone playing the same thing for 8 hours out of passion and another one playing the same thing for 8 hours out of discipline? It doesn't feel like work to the former, while it might drain everything out of the latter.

At the very high end it’s talent, recognisable brand, and having something to say to the world.

At the very top, everybody works hard, but only a few are selected to have solo careers.

(Incidentally a decent into to ACT)

I also wrote about the subject:

https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/

and

https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

I don’t think I’m “good” at dealing with these sorts of problems but with the help of therapy I’ve developed tools to get gradually better.

The first link deals with reframing judgements we make in a more productive way.

The second article is a concrete case study.

I hate productivity porn so I’m trying to leave the reader with concrete actions and sometimes more questions rather than answers.

The outcome may seem similar but it is not. The writer does mention that the effort is light, and that realization is monumental, but it also means that the writer is now infinitely flexible to spend their time effectively based on what is going on in the present moment. This opens up new possibilities and allows the subconscious to come up with ideas that the conscious mind and ego could never dream up when they focus so hard on a rigid approach to life. Concluding there is a right and wrong way of doing things crystallizes your life and not only is such an approach is limiting and restricting, but such control over a schedule is an illusion and makes you focus on the future. It constantly makes you play catch up and is never fun, leading to self inflicted misery and depression that you’re not good enough based on some non realistic ideal.

It is more effective to see yourself as multiple parts, or a “We”. In this case, the conscious and the subconscious. Whether you like it or not, the subconscious is actually the one doing things and the conscious mind (ego) is the feedback loop. It is helpful to see the two as a coach and its players. The coach (ego)’s job is to be used as a focusing tool and feedback loop. The players (subconscious)’s job is to do the work and let the coach know what it notices. Such a metaphor helps you understand how your self talk should sound. Coaches are not on the playing field but guide the players towards a goal without trying to control the game or action in this case. But once the game starts, the coach is hands off. Self talk should be positive and accepting. Life is life and there are many things out of your control like interruptions and tasks taking more time and resources than originally anticipated. Simply observe and adjust your actions, put in the work, and you will eventually arrive at your goal or at least be at peace knowing you did everything you could. Such is life that it has an uncountable number of variables that are out of your control and accepting that helps ground you in reality.

The problem arises when the coach (ego) wants to control the outcome of the game and be a player. I call this the ego trying to be general manager of the universe. It tries to control things it cannot control and thus is frustrated that the outcome does not go in its favor a majority of the time. It also puts in an immense amount of strain and wastes a ton of energy trying to do something it cannot. Thus the coach suffers greatly and still gets no closer to playing on the field instead of the players.

Instead, run the subconscious program (complete the task) and get out of the way by keeping your self talk quiet. Don’t waste energy talking to yourself while you perform the task. Then afterwards, reflect upon what happened and let the conscious tell the subconscious how it can do better next time. To let it sink in, visualize the outcome in your minds eye, then trust that your subconscious will do better next time.

This is what being in the present moment is all about.

I've recently learned this lesson: prevent my thoughts from going wild while I'm trying to focus (putting my psychic effort) onto something. By this way, I can stay with the "flow" longer. I coalesce all of my worries, ideas and judges to the end of the day and decide what to improve. Life feels much lighter instead of constantly judging myself.