Advice

catch-all page for advice from different sources.

Entreprenuership

Self-Starting

True Fans: Making Money from Internet Content

true fans: becoming popular on theinternet

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

true fans response: making something ofyourself

• 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 previouslythought, as this is asserting for a future of the passioneconomy.
• Cultivating a large, free audience, then converting some of thoseusers to paying subscribers, and a subset of those to high-valuepurchases, will successfully cultivate a living wage.
• We are driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The 100 true fansmodel feeds all of these for both consumers and producers – byappeasing the ability for consumers to choose who to support and whatto enjoy, enabling both consumers and producers to grow together, andgiving 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: progressingwith further money.
• This essay asserts that fewer, truer fans are the key to successfullyachieving financial stability.

Motivation

read this! onmotivation!

Dealing with Motivation: Jon Blow

maanaging your own psychology, a potentialbarrier!

A variety of techniques for dealing with motivational issues! We'relikely unhappy for the majority of the time that we are unhappy in frontof 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 betrapped in thoughts: these thoughts feel hard to get away from. Beforethis, stand apart from your thoughts; distance yourself from them. Focuson what you see. Have some simple, sentence-style thoughts. Think ofthings that are completely emotionally uncharged; thoughts that do notconnect to strong ideas. Do not sink completely into the thought.Realize that your thoughts change as you take in different parts of yourenvironment. Most of your experience is not comprised by this thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The actual sensation is neutral; it is your interpretation of thesituation that is making it negative. It's very important to realizethis.

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

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

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

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

Always pinpoint the source of your emotions, whether positive ornegative. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are very small. Stepback. Sensations are neutral. Your mind amplifies the sensations. Tryevaluating negative exercises as neutral experiences.

The Good Life

Finding Motivation

The Lesson TO Unlearn

paul graham The most damaging thingyou learned in school was to get good grades. Do not mistake genuineinterest for proficiency and measurement of learning. You should nothave 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 theirfriends!

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 bigcompanies 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'removing 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 bythemselves – the founders make them take off.

By yourself:

1. Recruit users manually. To grow your business naturally, you need torecruit! Aggresively! Shyness and laziness prevent people from doingthis; 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 successand failure. All startups are fragile! New startups can't be judgedby 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 thatsigning up with you is the best thing they could have done. Try toohard to make your customers happy.
4. Experience. The user experience and quality of execution should beincredible. The product doesn't have to be great, but the experienceof being a user does. Over-engage with initial users, listen to themcarefully and pay close attention to their opinions.
5. Fire. Focus on a deliberately narrow market at first, then widenyour 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 auser to please. Recruit initial lukewarm users by using yoursoftware on their behalf and perfect the user experience and theriend.
7. Manual. You are your software. Do everything manually, then automateit later! This enables a faster launch, and automating out of thisloop becomes trivial.
8. Big. Don't do the big launch! Nobody remembers it! Need somethingunscalably laborious.

Satisfaction in Work

1. Deep Work: Jon Blow

   talkThough all software feels different, at the root of it all this allfeels 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 actionsprimarily focus on working with the surface-level code; determinehow to navigate the code, working with code at a top level. We needto focus on learning how to communicate to the computer!

   Experienced programmers do not think about text; text is theapplication of a drawn-out idea and a developed solution. A problemis decomposed into smaller, tractale problems, then these tractableproblems can be translated into code that has been approachedbefore.

   The shape doesn't start anywhere! After having an idea, yo also needto locate this starting point; from this starting point, you mustthen locate a way from which you can navigate through the idea fromthis point. Not finding the starting point is bad, worse thanchoosing the wrong starting point!

   Some moments of programming involve internalizing a task so far thatit's been practiced; after performing this task so many times, youbecome accustomed to translating this task into code withoutthinking about it! This experience is incredibly powerful!

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

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

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

Philosophy in Life

finding the goodlifeAccording to stoicism, the good life is:

1. The Good Life

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

2. Taking Control

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

3. Daily Living

   • We are rewarded for working and interacting with other people inways that are advantageous.
   • We must operate on teh assumption that annoying people are fatedto behave this way, and that this behavior is inevitable.

   • Insult: The things themselves do not upset us, but rather ourjudgements about these things.

     • When insulted, evaluate the insult rather than the individualand reserve a judgement made about this thing.

The Happiness Hypothesis

article

• Happiness is a combination of biological initial happiness, lifeconditions and voluntary activities. The challenge here is tounderstand your initial happiness, pushing the life conditions and thevoluntary 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 canenable us to spend more time with family, reduce commute and takelonger 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 goalrather than achieving it.

1. Unlimited Memory

   articleConcentrate. Do one thing at a time! Exceptional work is associatedwith periods of deep concentration and focus. Always have a clearpurpose. Why does it matter? How is it applicabl to my life? How canit help me achieve my goals? Apply creativity to everything youlearn! Make learning more fun, engage more senses, and grant actionsto images. Long-term memory can trap short-term information:

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

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

Learning to Think Better

srcWe are most well set up for learning to fit into our cultures andnavigate them socially. We are often not able to think well enough tosee that we are not thinking well enough! This is the Dunning-Krugereffect. It's known that we can only deal with a small number of thingsat once; we must limit the input we receive and focus only on the coreidea at hand.

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

being human by being animal

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

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

the main characters are drawn from domestic animals !

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

pushing the potential of animation to allow emotional states to hae animpact on the world through cartoon absurdism ! the animalism enablesthem 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 HYoungIt's really difficult to estimate how applicable the knowledge from sometask 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. Usethe real tools and do the real things.

(Racket heads would say that this isn't important; that to teachprogramming petagogically, you should be kept in a little safe boxbefore being exposed to 'real' languages in the real world. This is finefor computer science education, but when considering softwareengineering education, this just doesn't cut it. You have to buildreal products frequently to actually learn, rather than reading lots ofinternet 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 wrongthing is satisfying, but nothing makes you hungry for more. Doing thereal 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 isfaster than watching too busy to do coffee but uncluttered calendarenforce aspirational hourly rate, outsource if it makes sense work ashard as you can. even though who you work with and what you work on aremore important become the best at what you do. keep redefining what youdo until this is true. there are no grq schemes apply specific knowledgewith leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve

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

hacking signs :: access panel protected by small lock. keyboard attachedby curly cord with keyboard. programming is scrolling to instant text,then typing what you want to display and clicking run without save oradding pages to it. hacket tips :: DOTS is the default password. ifpassword 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.