An idea: instead of just keeping old blog posts lying around, why not print them and turn them into a self published book? Then you can store them in a bookshelf at home.
This idea was somewhat inspired by this post by Kin Lane.
For this journal entry, I'm not going to reorder my thoughts/notes like I normally do. These were basically copied off my journal and pasted here in the order that they were written down. I think it's as close as you can get to actually reading my journal. But the main reason I'm doing this, is to lessen the amount of time it takes for me to publish a journal entry. So here goes...
“We lost!”, my son said as he finished 10th place in a Mario Kart race. He said this happily by the way, in a way that only a child could ever do. This is what we lost when we grew up. We lost that childlike innocence. We lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of a child. We lost the ability to be happy in any given moment like a child could.
I noticed that I write down notes with the expectation that I'll be publishing them in the future. This causes me to write longer, fuller sentences in an unconscious attempt to make my notes ready to be published with minimal editing.
I think this bogs down my note taking process. Instead of writing down notes for the purpose of referencing them in the future, I write down notes with the purpose of stringing them all together into a future blog post. I think that if I stop writing “ready to be published” notes and instead go back to writing notes just for myself, that will make my digital garden a lot easier and less exhausting to maintain.
The Three-City Problem of Modern Life — interesting read and social commentary about the lives we live today. We either live in the city of reason, of faith, or of technology. Living in one city isolates us from the rest of the world and that makes us feel incomplete.
^ This is probably only applicable to US readers, as a ROTH IRA is a specific tax-advantaged account offered by the government. But if your country has a similar offering, then some of the info might still be useful.
On Social Media
Social media is like a sandbox where you can observe mimetic theory and mimetic desires in full display.
So, how long does it take to form a new habit? Apparently, it takes an average of around 66 days, or 2 months, to form a new habit. That is way longer than what is normally mentioned in articles or magazines I’ve read. That means if you want to build a habit of doing pull-ups right after waking up, you need to consistently do it for 2 months straight.
After reading this essay, Peter Thiel's Religion, and finding out about the idea of mimetic theory, of us imitating others, my mind was opened up. I'm starting to see it around me. Most of everything we do is imitation. I don't quite know yet what to do with this new found information, but I'm excited to find out more about it.
Personal Publishing Principles — this is a great read for someone interested in creating/maintaining a personal website or a personal blog.
One good tip that was shared in that post is that a personal website/blog is the perfect place for you to experiment with your own ideas. Not everything will work out of course, but keep trying and some will.
This also tells me that if your personal website won't allow you to do that, then you probably have a professional website as opposed to a personal one.
This was supposed to be a part of a bigger journal entry, but I found that I had more things to say on this topic, so it gets its own dedicated entry.
Blog Posts vs Notes on a Digital Garden
An interesting observation I've made is that I bookmark blog posts, but I do not bookmark notes from digital gardens.
Does this mean that blog posts provide more valuable information? Not necessarily, but they have their advantages from a reader's perspective.
I think it's just easier to settle on a blog post I want to read, than to pick notes to read from a huge digital garden. It kinda relates to the article I read about Overchoice. It is hard to make a choice, when there's too many choices to make. And that's usually the situation with notes on a digital garden. The chronological or reverse chronological order of blog posts, which is looked at as a bad thing nowadays, is what makes it easier for me to pick something to read.
Would you look at that. I managed to crank out a second journal entry in less than a year. With how things were going, I was certain I would only be able to write one per year. It actually took me months to write this single post. I spent maybe 10 minutes every week or so, adding stuff to this post as I go about processing my daily notes. Every little bit adds up. Similar to how reading for only fifteen minutes a day helped me finish books, working on this bit by bit every month, while really slow, was still enough to get another entry done. Anyway, here goes.
“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
Here we go again with an example of the same problem — distraction — but just in a different form back then.
There will always be distractions in life, especially when you’re working on something important. The question is, do you let yourself get distracted or do you get your work done?
It's the end of the year and for some reason I'm itching to start writing journal entries again. I considered just turning this into another Weeknotes post, but I don't think I can keep up with that schedule. So, this will be the start of a new journal entry series.
I say new because I've had a journal entry series before. If you are a returning reader, you've most likely even read them. If you are a new reader, then you missed out on a number of cringe-worthy personal posts. And that's part of the reason that series came to an end. I somehow outgrew that phase and no longer wanted to write about overtly personal stuff.
So, for this new series, one of the things I want to focus on is just sharing what I've learned. Instead of this journal/series being about “What's been going on with my life?”, I want it to be more about “What have I learned today?”
Also, I won't commit to a schedule for posting. It could be once a month, once every 4 months, or even just once a year. Whatever it will turn out to be, I'll write one when I feel like writing. So before that urge to write fades, here goes.