Advice

catch-all page for advice from different sources.

Entreprenuership

Self-Starting

True Fans: Making Money from Internet Content

true fans: becoming popular on the internet

• To be a successful creator, all you need are a few thousand true fans.
• These fans will buy anything you produce and will support you directly.
• Aiming for 1,000 customers is much easier than aiming for a million passive fans!
• The most obscure node on the internet is only one click away from the next popular node; take advantage of this placement and make a living in obscurity.
• Now, small towns have the internet: a way to satiate the interests of those who would otherwise be isolated from their interests!
• Big corporations cannot deliver to these niche audiences and consumers! The creator has this unique market of niche fans who are willing to do a lot to enjoy their specific subculture.
• This path is another path to success: carve a niche, assemble a small community of fans, and continue to profit from the fans who are very passionate about your content and your niche as well.

true fans response: making something of yourself

• 1,000 true fans are too many! Really, you only need 100 true fans, each paying $1,000, rather than the 1,000 true fans as previously thought, as this is asserting for a future of the passion economy.
• Cultivating a large, free audience, then converting some of those users to paying subscribers, and a subset of those to high-value purchases, will successfully cultivate a living wage.
• We are driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The 100 true fans model feeds all of these for both consumers and producers – by appeasing the ability for consumers to choose who to support and what to enjoy, enabling both consumers and producers to grow together, and giving both a niche purpose in which they can feel that they matter.
• Earning $1,000 per fan takes premium content with no substitutes, delivering tangible value, accountability, and status: progressing with further money.
• This essay asserts that fewer, truer fans are the key to successfully achieving financial stability.

Motivation

read this! on motivation!

Dealing with Motivation: Jon Blow

maanaging your own psychology, a potential barrier!

A variety of techniques for dealing with motivational issues! We're likely unhappy for the majority of the time that we are unhappy in front of the computer.

Be impervious as to whether ideas are true or false.

You are not your thoughts: Physical States

We think of our personalities as being composed of our thoughts. However, this is a very small part of what it is like to be me. Can be trapped in thoughts: these thoughts feel hard to get away from. Before this, stand apart from your thoughts; distance yourself from them. Focus on what you see. Have some simple, sentence-style thoughts. Think of things that are completely emotionally uncharged; thoughts that do not connect to strong ideas. Do not sink completely into the thought. Realize that your thoughts change as you take in different parts of your environment. Most of your experience is not comprised by this thought.

Step back from the thoughts that are happening. Do not be so enraptured by them.

Prod some of these thoughts: how long does it take for the thoughts to go by? How heavy is the thought?

Can you stop that thought and let it go or is there something that happens when you try to do that?

Focus your attention on a single thought. Close your eyes. What do you feel about it? Is this a solid object or ethereal? Is it well-defined or is it indistinct?

By dropping your intention in, you are able to feel past your layer of intention and analyze what has not been processed.

Do not have an agenda when inquiring about this sensation. Learn more about the sensation.

The actual sensation is neutral; it is your interpretation of the situation that is making it negative. It's very important to realize this.

Blow evaluates a particularly painful experience – food poisoning – and how he can separate his understanding of the pain and their reaction to it.

We know this about pain! When we are cut, the nerve receives an impulse and this impulse is recieved by the brain, which assigns negative sentiment to these things.

Look at the sensations that help you generate this negative state.

There is probably some legitimage precedence for having developed a habit, or a response; at some point, though, we must acknowledge that these processes are not inherently necessary! We can then properly evaluate and control whether we make decisions based on this state.

Always pinpoint the source of your emotions, whether positive or negative. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are very small. Step back. Sensations are neutral. Your mind amplifies the sensations. Try evaluating negative exercises as neutral experiences.

The Good Life

Finding Motivation

The Lesson TO Unlearn

paul graham The most damaging thing you learned in school was to get good grades. Do not mistake genuine interest for proficiency and measurement of learning. You should not have to prepare for a test; they should reflect your knowledge.

Tests are hackable!

It isn't that complicated! There is no complex game. Identify a need, make your product very good, and it'll be popular.

Getting lots of users! People will recommend the product to their friends!

The way to win is not to hack the test. Don't face an artificial test! Make people want to use your product!

He avoided working for big companies because you win at these big companies for hacking bad tests.

Tests that aren't imposed by authourities, after all, are unhackable! There is no trick or mindset behind taking advantage of them; they're moving targets with lo clear answers.

You don't have to play the game! You can make it by doing good work.

Do Things That Don't Scale

article Startups don't take off by themselves – the founders make them take off.

By yourself:

1. Recruit users manually. To grow your business naturally, you need to recruit! Aggresively! Shyness and laziness prevent people from doing this; wanting to write code and seeing the small numbers of users. Those initial users are necessary for exponential growth!
2. Get used to fragility. It's hard to balance a successful business, and squeezing the margins will make hte difference between success and failure. All startups are fragile! New startups can't be judged by the standards of successful ones. It's okay to get things wrong. It's okay to fix things. It's hard to see where you're coming from.
3. Delight. Don't just get users, make them happy! Make users know that signing up with you is the best thing they could have done. Try too hard to make your customers happy.
4. Experience. The user experience and quality of execution should be incredible. The product doesn't have to be great, but the experience of being a user does. Over-engage with initial users, listen to them carefully and pay close attention to their opinions.
5. Fire. Focus on a deliberately narrow market at first, then widen your breadth. Start with a subset of the market then quickly expand.
6. Consult. Pick a single, initial user and use them as a mold for a user to please. Recruit initial lukewarm users by using your software on their behalf and perfect the user experience and theri end.
7. Manual. You are your software. Do everything manually, then automate it later! This enables a faster launch, and automating out of this loop becomes trivial.
8. Big. Don't do the big launch! Nobody remembers it! Need something unscalably laborious.

Satisfaction in Work

1. Deep Work: Jon Blow

   talk Though all software feels different, at the root of it all this all feels the same. The ideas you initially have will not be that deep; as such, the exciting things are at the surface level. First, understand the single exciting idea and explore it. Initial actions primarily focus on working with the surface-level code; determine how to navigate the code, working with code at a top level. We need to focus on learning how to communicate to the computer!

   Experienced programmers do not think about text; text is the application of a drawn-out idea and a developed solution. A problem is decomposed into smaller, tractale problems, then these tractable problems can be translated into code that has been approached before.

   The shape doesn't start anywhere! After having an idea, yo also need to locate this starting point; from this starting point, you must then locate a way from which you can navigate through the idea from this point. Not finding the starting point is bad, worse than choosing the wrong starting point!

   Some moments of programming involve internalizing a task so far that it's been practiced; after performing this task so many times, you become accustomed to translating this task into code without thinking about it! This experience is incredibly powerful!

   This is more like an art than an engineering – you are following an intuition, and this intuition carries you somewhere good!

   Often, we get trapped by our attention: if we are deeply focused on a single way of thinking and operating at a level of abstraction, we are unable to switch contexts to another layer of abstraction very easily! Often it's best to back up and reevaluate the big picture.

   Getting to the deep work comes from experience. You'll follow many misguided paths and many ill-guided directions, but at the end of the day you will reach a deeper understanding of the topic at hand.

Philosophy in Life

finding the good life According to stoicism, the good life is:

1. The Good Life

   • Virtuous: depending on how well one can perform the function for which they are dedicated
   • Negative visualization: the fear that bad things will eventually happy isn't healthy! Forestall the adaptation process; stop taking things for granted and desire what we already have, craving to make the most of our crrent system, our current time and our current situation. It would be best to take advantage of opportunities for moving forward, but before making these decisions it is most important to establish contentedness.

2. Taking Control

   • We have control over our goals, but do not have complete or any control over many events. We must learn to welcome what happens to us and trust that this occurs for the best.
   • Willpower is like muscle power. The more we exercise our willpower, the more self-control we have over ourselves; the more self-control we have, the better we are able to direct our lives.
   • It's important to reflect on your process. What are you spending time on? How did we feel over the course of the day? Did something disrupt our tranquility? Did we experience adverse feelings? Is there something I could avoid? Is there some action I could take to become more productive?

3. Daily Living

   • We are rewarded for working and interacting with other people in ways that are advantageous.
   • We must operate on teh assumption that annoying people are fated to behave this way, and that this behavior is inevitable.
   • Insult: The things themselves do not upset us, but rather our judgements about these things.
     • When insulted, evaluate the insult rather than the individual and reserve a judgement made about this thing.

The Happiness Hypothesis

article

• Happiness is a combination of biological initial happiness, life conditions and voluntary activities. The challenge here is to understand your initial happiness, pushing the life conditions and the voluntary activities to make the most enjoyment of the happiness.
• To love well is to develop good relationships with others.
• Once basic needs are met, money cannot buy additional happiness.
• Luxuries adapt to what we require for ourselves; impure luxuries can enable us to spend more time with family, reduce commute and take longer vacations; these are the luxuries we should strive for.
• Things we choose to do should be things that fall to our strength.
• Progress principle: pleasure comes from making progress towards a goal rather than achieving it.

1. Unlimited Memory

   article Concentrate. Do one thing at a time! Exceptional work is associated with periods of deep concentration and focus. Always have a clear purpose. Why does it matter? How is it applicabl to my life? How can it help me achieve my goals? Apply creativity to everything you learn! Make learning more fun, engage more senses, and grant actions to images. Long-term memory can trap short-term information:

   • Car method: use the car and store new information in parts of the car
   • Peg method: use rhyming words to store ordered information
   • Developing a storyline: create a relationship between the known and the unknown, raising the memory capacity!

   Continuous use. continue to review, have a clear purpose, and make this a part of your daily routine!

Learning to Think Better

src We are most well set up for learning to fit into our cultures and navigate them socially. We are often not able to think well enough to see that we are not thinking well enough! This is the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's known that we can only deal with a small number of things at once; we must limit the input we receive and focus only on the core idea at hand.

"You can't thinking about thinking without thinking about something." - Seymour Papert. It will help to have issues and ideas, things to learn about that require better procedures; then, navigating those procedures assist you in developing better thinking procedures!

being human by being animal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG058g3f8Ik&app=desktop removing animals of nay dignified cuteness; bojack horseman is pretty close to this uncanny valley of creepy absurdism. the desire is not to make the animals cute so much as lifelike and uncomfortable.

bojack as a horse: horse, long face, depression, juxtaposition of a majestic animal as an alcoholic, etc. horse bredfor transportation but the role no longer fulfulls the animal; could come from some broader interest in horses

the main characters are drawn from domestic animals !

four legs good. two legs better. the control we have over domestic animals is associated with the characters chosen for the show.

pushing the potential of animation to allow emotional states to hae an impact on the world through cartoon absurdism ! the animalism enables them to reveal the primal instincts of humans

blind recreation to create images that are readable. diane. sometimes, life is a bitch; then, you keep living.

Do the real thing

Do the Real Thing - Scott H Young It's really difficult to estimate how applicable the knowledge from some task A will be to some task B. Don't try to develop some proxy for B. Set up an environment in which you can do B, precisely, then do it. Use the real tools and do the real things.

(Racket heads would say that this isn't important; that to teach programming petagogically, you should be kept in a little safe box before being exposed to 'real' languages in the real world. This is fine for computer science education, but when considering software engineering education, this just doesn't cut it. You have to build real products frequently to actually learn, rather than reading lots of internet articles or something.)

How can we develop an instructional environment that also allows us to "do the real thing" from the bottom-up?

Doing nothing is more restorative than doing the wrong thing; the wrong thing is satisfying, but nothing makes you hungry for more. Doing the real thing matters. Keeping busy doesn't.

Naval Advice

no skill called business study micro, game theory, psych, persuasion, ethics, math and computers reading is faster than listening, doing is faster than watching too busy to do coffee but uncluttered calendar enforce aspirational hourly rate, outsource if it makes sense work as hard as you can. even though who you work with and what you work on are more important become the best at what you do. keep redefining what you do until this is true. there are no grq schemes apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve

take a couple of notes – write a couple of sentences – about the small things every day. money exchanged? what happened?

hacking signs :: access panel protected by small lock. keyboard attached by curly cord with keyboard. programming is scrolling to instant text, then typing what you want to display and clicking run without save or adding pages to it. hacket tips :: DOTS is the default password. if password changed, hold control and shift, and enter DIPY while holding, then resets the password to DOTS

teaching a child

• writing
• reading
• basic maths
• critical analysis
• building your own idea
• defend verbal, mental, physical
• expressing yourself
• choosing ingredients and prep food
• life hygiene
• society, media, pol system
• learning second language

programming comes later. lessons, then foster them.