Robin Sharma — 51 Ways Ordinary People Reached World-Class

Following is an article by Robin Sharma. I am copying it here for the sake of preservation. Original article was published here.

Hope you’re in hot pursuit of excellence on this gift of a day (you’ll only get this day once in your entire lifetime so I encourage you to use it well).

The reality is the great achievers + game-changers just did DIFFERENT (and seemingly strange) things.

So in my ongoing devotion to help you create a life you adore and reach rare-air success, I’ve distilled the unusual things the best performers do into this quick list. Read it now:

51 Ways Ordinary People Reached World-Class

1. Know what you want. Clarity is power. And vague goals promote vague results.
2. Remember that every problem has a solution. Maybe you just can’t see it. Yet.
3. In this Age of Dramatic Distraction, the performer who focuses the best wins the most.
4. Before someone will help you, you need to help them.
5. Become the most passionate person you know. It’ll be contagious.
6. Know more about your craft/the work you do than anyone who has ever done the work you do…in the history of the world.
7. Join The 5 am Club. Your most valuable hours are 5am-8 am. They have the least interruptions.
8. Devote yourself to learning something new about your field of mastery every day. Success belongs to the relentless learners. Because as you know more, you can achieve more.
9. Remember that when you transform your fitness, you’ll transform your business.
10. Don’t check your mobile when you’re meeting with another person. It’s rude. And rude people don’t reach world-class.
11. Every time you do what scares you, you take back the power that you gave to the thing that scared you. And so you become more powerful.
12. A problem is only a problem if you make the choice to see it as a problem.
13. Stop being a victim. Your business and personal life was made by you. No one else is responsible. To make it better, make better choices. And new decisions.
14. You can lead without a title. Don’t wait to get a position to stand for excellence, peak quality and overdelivery on every expectation.
15. Find your own style. Be an original. Every superstar differentiated themselves from The Herd. And marched to their own drumbeat.
16. Understand that when you play small with your success, you betray your potential. And the birthright you were born under.
17. Eat less food and you’ll get more done.
18. As you become more successful, stay really really hungry. Nothing fails like success. Because when you’re successful, it’s easy to stop outlearning+outOverDelivering+outthinking and outexecuting everyone around you. (Success is Beautiful. And dangerous).
19. If you’re not overprepared, you’re underprepared.
20. The only level of great manners to play at is “Exceedingly Polite”. In our world, this alone will make you a standout. And differentiate you in your marketplace.
21. Remember that the moment you think you’re a Master, you lose your Mastery. And the minute you think you know everything, you know nothing.
22. To double your results, double your level of execution.
23. Invest in your personal and professional development. All superstars do.
24. Get this year’s best Targets of Opportunity down onto a 1 Page Plan. Then review it every morning while the rest of the world sleeps.
25. You don’t get lucky. You create lucky.
26. When you push through a difficult project, you don’t get to the other side. You reach The Next Level.
27. Smile. And remember to inform your face.
28. Spend time in solitude every day. Your best ideas live there.
29. Debrief on how you lived out your day every night in a journal. This will not only record your personal history, it will make you uber-clear on what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved.
30. If you’re not being criticized a lot, you’re not doing very much. Ridicule is the price of ambition.
31. Develop a monomaniacal focus on just a few things. The secret to productivity is simplicity.
32. To get the results very few people have, be strong enough to do what very few people are willing to do.
33. Rest. Recover. It’ll make you stronger.
34. Buy a smaller TV and build a larger library.
35. Remember that the bigger the goal, the stronger a person you must become to achieve that goal. So goal-achieving is a superb practice for character-building.
36. Food fuels your body. Learning feeds your mind.
37. Don’t ask for respect. Earn it.
38. Finish what you start. And always end strong.
39. Breathe.
40. In business, don’t play to survive. Play to win.
41. Protect your good name. It’s your best asset.
42. Remember that words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.
43. Give more than you take. The marketplace rewards generosity.
44. Know that if it’s not messy, you’re not making progress.
45. Be a hero to a kid.
46. In business, aim for iconic. Go for legendary. Make history by how awesome you are at what you do.
47. Please don’t confuse activity with productivity. Many many people are simply busy being busy.
48. Your doubts are liars. Your fears are traitors. Stop buying the goods they are attempting to sell you.
49. The best anti-aging remedy in the world is working really hard.
50. World-Class performers have no plan B. Failure just isn’t an option.
51. You have the power to change the world–one brave act and one person at a time. Please use it.

Wishing you all success and epic performance.

Copied: Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper

Article from: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5



For the past two decades, Cormac McCarthy — whose ten novels include The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian — has provided extensive editing to numerous faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. He has helped to edit works by scientists such as Harvard University’s first tenured female theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, and physicist Geoffrey West, who authored the popular-science book Scale.

Van Savage, a theoretical biologist and ecologist, first met McCarthy in 2000, and they overlapped at the SFI for about four years while Savage was a graduate student and then a postdoc. Savage has received invaluable editing advice from McCarthy on several science papers published over the past 20 years. While on sabbatical at the SFI during the winter of 2018, Savage had lively weekly lunches with McCarthy. They worked to condense McCarthy’s advice to its most essential points so that it could be shared with everyone. These pieces of advice were combined with thoughts from evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh and are presented here. McCarthy’s most important tip is to keep it simple while telling a coherent, compelling story. The following are more of McCarthy’s words of wisdom, as told by Savage and Yeh.

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.

• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.

• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.

• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.

• Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up.

• And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.

• With regard to grammar, spoken language and common sense are generally better guides for a first draft than rule books. It’s more important to be understood than it is to form a grammatically perfect sentence.

• Commas denote a pause in speaking. The phrase “In contrast” at the start of a sentence needs a comma to emphasize that the sentence is distinguished from the previous one, not to distinguish the first two words of the sentence from the rest of the sentence. Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

• Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms. (Parentheses can present clauses more quietly and gently than commas.) Don’t lean on semicolons as a crutch to join loosely linked ideas. This only encourages bad writing. You can occasionally use contractions such as isn’t, don’t, it’s and shouldn’t. Don’t be overly formal. And don’t use exclamation marks to call attention to the significance of a point. You could say ‘surprisingly’ or ‘intriguingly’ instead, but don’t overdo it. Use these words only once or twice per paper.

• Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”

• Choose concrete language and examples. If you must talk about arbitrary colours of an abstract sphere, it’s more gripping to speak of this sphere as a red balloon or a blue billiard ball.

• Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. To separate equations from text, you can use line breaks, white space, supplementary sections, intuitive notation and clear explanations of how to translate from assumptions to equations and back to results.

• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Try to make life as easy as possible for your editing friends. Number pages and double space.

• After all this, send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation.

• And don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.

• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

When you make your writing more lively and easier to understand, people will want to invest their time in reading your work. And whether we are junior scientists or world-famous novelists, that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at naturecareerseditor@nature.com.

Quora: Learning how to Learn

What are the most effective learning techniques you have experienced so far?

Barbara Oakley, Co-Instructor, Learning How to Learn, the world's largest online course

Answered Jun 3, 2016 · Featured on Forbes and 3 more

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that “chunking” is the mother of all learning—or at least the fairy godmother. Chunking is what happens when you know something so well, like a song, or a scientific formula, or a verb conjugation,or a dance routine, that it is basically a snap to call it to mind and do it or use it. Creating neural patterns—“neural chunks”—underpins the development of all expertise. We can use metaphors (another powerful learning technique!) to help us understand these ideas.

If you look at the above image, you can see that when you’re trying to figure out something new and difficult, it’s like a puzzle. As shown on the left, the roughly four “slots” of working memory go into a tizzy in your prefrontal cortex trying to figure things out. But once you have something figured out, (shown on the right), that understanding consolidates into a smoothly connected neural pattern. The pattern is like a ribbon you can draw easily to mind in one of the slots of working memory. Notice—the three other slots of working memory are left free!

When you are problem-solving or taking a test, if you have “chunked” the material well during your preliminary studies, you can easily draw a neural chunk—that is, a procedure or concept—to mind. Once you’ve got that chunk in mind, you can then draw up other chunks you’ve mastered, so you can put concepts together to solve even complicated problems that you haven’t seen before. (Here’s a video from Learning How to Learn that explains the concept of chunks in more depth.)

If you haven’t put enough of the right kind of effort into your studies, come test time, your little prefrontal cortex is like that of the lower left drawing—it’s going crazy still trying to figure out the basics. Sometimes people think they suffer from test anxiety when they perform poorly on test, but surprisingly often, they don’t. They’re simply experiencing panic as they suddenly realize they don’t know the material as well as they thought they did. They haven’t created neural chunks.

As a young person, I excelled when I used the Defense Language Institute’s approaches to learning language, which emphasized the development of well-practiced chunks that built gradually upon one another. Words became sentences became whole conversations. This helped me to learn Russian. At age 26, when I got out of the military and began studying the remedial high school algebra that led to my engineering degrees, I used the same “chunking” approach with studying math that had helped me be effective in language study.

For example, I didn’t just do a math homework problem and turn it in. Instead, particularly if it was an important homework problem, I would work it and rework it fresh, spacing the practice out over several days. I wouldn’t peek at the answer unless I absolutely had to. That ensured I really could solve the problem myself—that I wasn’t just fooling myself that I knew it. After I was comfortable that I could really solve the problem by myself on paper, I then “went mental,” practicing the steps in my mind until the solution could flow like a sort of mental song. I could perform this kind of mental practice at times people often don’t think to use for studying—like in the shower, or when I was walking to class. I found that this attention to chunking eventually gave me sort of magic powers—I could glance at many problems, even ones I’d never seen before, and know virtually instantly how to solve them.

Interleaving, deliberate practice, spaced repetition—all of these important learning techniques are important primarily because they help with the development of neural chunks. As “expert on experts” Anders Ericsson has pointed out, you learn faster through deliberate practice—the special focus on what you find most difficult.

See also What is the best approach for learning new things? What resources should I use? How should I retain the info that I have just learned? Should I use this info to write an essay or something similar as part of a long-term project?and What is the fastest and most effective learning process? Additionally, there’s lots more in our course Learning How to Learn, and in my New York Times best-selling science book A Mind for Numbers (which is actually a general book on learning, with plenty of metaphors—one of my favorite learning techniques!).

Most favorite fat-loss resources on the internet

http://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/

We value your privacy. The people we sell it to, value it even more.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."

Sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But one thing he did say was:

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground."

That's what we're seeing now.

The secret to all success

Learn to front-load your pain.

That's it.

If you procrastinate, you're putting off more than your work. You're putting off the pain. Right?

But doesn't it always catch up to you?
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/4xwrut/advice_this_is_the_real_secret_to_successa/


What you have to do is front-load all those yucky crappy feelings. Go ahead and feel it now so you don't have to feel it later. And guess what? If you put it off, it gets amplified. Right now you're dreading doing your homework or writing an article or w/e, but what if you don't do it? And worse, what if you put that stuff off consistently?

That thing you feel crappy about? That thing you're dreading? That is exactly the thing you need to do in order to improve your life.

It's a sign post.

Instead of dreading it, go ahead and embrace it. Embrace the yucky feeling and all. If you can do this for three weeks consistently, you will change your life forever.

If you embrace all that yucky stuff with gusto, your brain will take notice. Your brain is not static. it changes depending on what you focus on. The circuitry in your brain literally changes over time.

Finally, think of your actions as alchemy. You are taking time and adding energy to it to create a result. If you take action haphazardly, you will have a meh kind of life.

You know you're going to end up feeling like shit if you procrastinate anyway, so go ahead and do the thing you're afraid to do. If you're going to feel bad either way, you might as well take the action that will improve your life.

Sex Drive: How Do Men and Women Compare?

Experts say men score higher in libido, while women's sex drive is more "fluid."

By Richard Sine
FROM THE WEBMD ARCHIVES

Birds do it, bees do it, and men do it any old time. But women will only do it if the candles are scented just right -- and their partner has done the dishes first. A stereotype, sure, but is it true? Do men really have stronger sex drives than women?

Well, yes, they do. Study after study shows that men's sex drives are not only stronger than women's, but much more straightforward. The sources of women's libidos, by contrast, are much harder to pin down.

It's common wisdom that women place more value on emotional connection as a spark of sexual desire. But women also appear to be heavily influenced by social and cultural factors as well.

"Sexual desire in women is extremely sensitive to environment and context," says Edward O. Laumann, PhD. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and lead author of a major survey of sexual practices, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States.

Here are seven patterns of men's and women's sex drives that researchers have found. Bear in mind that people may vary from these norms.

1. Men think more about sex.
The majority of adult men under 60 think about sex at least once a day, reports Laumann. Only about one-quarter of women say they think about it that frequently. As men and women age, each fantasize less, but men still fantasize about twice as often.

In a survey of studies comparing male and female sex drives, Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, found that men reported more spontaneous sexual arousal and had more frequent and varied fantasies.

2. Men seek sex more avidly.
"Men want sex more often than women at the start of a relationship, in the middle of it, and after many years of it," Baumeister concludes after reviewing several surveys of men and women. This isn't just true of heterosexuals, he says; gay men also have sex more often than lesbians at all stages of the relationship. Men also say they want more sex partners in their lifetime, and are more interested in casual sex.

Men are more likely to seek sex even when it's frowned upon or even outlawed:

About two-thirds say they masturbate, even though about half also say they feel guilty about it, Laumann says. By contrast, about 40% of women say they masturbate, and the frequency of masturbation is smaller among women.
Prostitution is still mostly a phenomenon of men seeking sex with women, rather than the other way around.
Nuns do a better job of fulfilling their vows of chastity than priests. Baumeister cites a survey of several hundred clergy in which 62% of priests admitted to sexual activity, compared to 49% of nuns. The men reported more partners on average than the women.
3. Women's sexual turn-ons are more complicated than men's.
What turns women on? Not even women always seem to know. Northwestern University researcher Meredith Chivers and colleagues showed erotic films to gay and straight men and women. They asked them about their level of sexual arousal, and also measured their actual level of arousal through devices attached to their genitals.

For men, the results were predictable: Straight men said they were more turned on by depictions of male-female sex and female-female sex, and the measuring devices backed up their claims. Gay men said they were turned on by male-male sex, and again the devices backed them up. For women, the results were more surprising. Straight women, for example, said they were more turned on by male-female sex. But genitally they showed about the same reaction to male-female, male-male, and female-female sex.

"Men are very rigid and specific about who they become aroused by, who they want to have sex with, who they fall in love with," says J. Michael Bailey. He is a Northwestern University sex researcher and co-author with Chivers on the study.

By contrast, women may be more open to same-sex relationships thanks to their less-directed sex drives, Bailey says. "Women probably have the capacity to become sexually interested in and fall in love with their own sex more than men do," Bailey says. "They won't necessarily do it, but they have the capacity."

Bailey's idea is backed up by studies showing that homosexuality is a more fluid state among women than men. In another broad review of studies, Baumeister found many more lesbians reported recent sex with men, when compared to gay men's reports of sex with women. Women were also more likely than men to call themselves bisexual, and to report their sexual orientation as a matter of choice.

4. Women's sex drives are more influenced by social and cultural factors.
In his review, Baumeister found studies showing many ways in which women's sexual attitudes, practices, and desires were more influenced by their environment than men:

Women's attitudes toward (and willingness to perform) various sexual practices are more likely than men's to change over time.
Women who regularly attend church are less likely to have permissive attitudes about sex. Men do not show this connection between church attendance and sex attitudes.
Women are more influenced by the attitudes of their peer group in their decisions about sex.
Women with higher education levels were more likely to have performed a wider variety of sexual practices (such as oral sex); education made less of a difference with men.
Women were more likely than men to show inconsistency between their expressed values about sexual activities such as premarital sex and their actual behavior.
Why are women's sex drives seemingly weaker and more vulnerable to influence? Some have theorized it's related to the greater power of men in society, or differing sexual expectations of men when compared to women. Laumann prefers an explanation more closely tied to the world of sociobiology.

Men have every incentive to have sex to pass along their genetic material, Laumann says. By contrast, women may be hard-wired to choose their partners carefully, because they are the ones who can get pregnant and wind up taking care of the baby. They are likely to be more attuned to relationship quality because they want a partner who will stay around to help take care of the child. They're also more likely to choose a man with resources because of his greater ability to support a child.

5. Women take a less direct route to sexual satisfaction.
Men and women travel slightly different paths to arrive at sexual desire. "I hear women say in my office that desire originates much more between the ears than between the legs," says Esther Perel, a New York City psychotherapist. "For women there is a need for a plot -- hence the romance novel. It is more about the anticipation, how you get there; it is the longing that is the fuel for desire," Perel says.

Women's desire "is more contextual, more subjective, more layered on a lattice of emotion," Perel adds. Men, by contrast, don't need to have nearly as much imagination, Perel says, since sex is simpler and more straightforward for them.

That doesn't mean men don't seek intimacy, love, and connection in a relationship, just as women do. They just view the role of sex differently. "Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex," Perel explains. "For men, sex is the connection. Sex is the language men use to express their tender loving vulnerable side," Perel says. "It is their language of intimacy."

6. Women experience orgasms differently than men.
Men, on average, take 4 minutes from the point of entry until ejaculation, according to Laumann. Women usually take around 10 to 11 minutes to reach orgasm -- if they do.

That's another difference between the sexes: how often they have an orgasm during sex. Among men who are part of a couple, 75% say they always have an orgasm, as opposed to 26% of the women. And not only is there a difference in reality, there's one in perception, too. While the men's female partners reported their rate of orgasm accurately, the women's male partners said they believed their female partners had orgasms 45% of the time.

7. Women's libidos seem to be less responsive to drugs.
With men's sex drives seemingly more directly tied to biology when compared to women, it may be no surprise that low desire may be more easily treated through medication in men. Men have embraced drugs as a cure not only for erectile dysfunction but also for a shrinking libido. With women, though, the search for a drug to boost sex drive has proved more elusive.

Testosterone has been linked to sex drive in both men and women. But testosterone works much faster in men with low libidos than women, says Glenn Braunstein, MD. He is past-chair of the department of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a leading researcher on testosterone treatments in women. While the treatments are effective, they're not as effective in women as in men. "There is a hormonal factor in [sex drive], but it is much more important in men than women," Braunstein says.

A testosterone patch for women called Intrinsa has been approved in Europe but was rejected by the FDA due to concerns about long-term safety. But the drug has sparked a backlash from some medical and psychiatric professionals who question whether low sex drive in women should even be considered a condition best treated with drugs. They point to the results of a large survey in which about 40% of women reported some sort of sexual problem -- most commonly low sexual desire -- but only 12% said they felt distressed about it. With all the factors that go into the stew that piques sexual desire in women, some doctors say a drug should be the last ingredient to consider, rather than the first.

Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard

From: http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard






Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard




What every beginner absolutely needs to know about the journey ahead


Erik Trautman wrote this on Feb 4, 2015 | 170 Comments




Quincy Larson was just a "guy in a suit in an office" and decided he wanted to learn how to code. So he asked around. He started by picking up a bit of Ruby then found himself skimming through other languages like Scala, Clojure and Go. He learned Emacs then Vim and even the Dvorak keyboard layout. He picked up Linux, dabbled in Lisp and coded in Python while living on the command line for more than half a year.


Like a leaf in a tornado, the advice Quincy received jerked him first one way and then another and then another until he'd finally taken "every online course program imaginable". By the end of it all, despite having ultimately landed a software development job, Quincy:


... was convinced that the seemingly normal programmers I ran into were actually sociopaths who had experienced, then repressed, the trauma of learning to code.


Ouch. Does that sound familiar?
Phase I: The Hand-Holding Honeymoon


It's really hard to blame anyone for coming into the programming industry with outrageous expectations.


On the one hand, you've heard rumors of how difficult programming is since you were young, like old wives tales meant to scare children into studying social sciences instead.


On the other, the "Learn to Code" movement has done a fantastic job of breaking down barriers and showing people that code is actually quite harmless. Tools like Codecademy and Treehouseand Code School reach out with the gentlest of touches to assure you that you too (nay, anyone!) can not just learn to code but become a full-fledged developer as well.


Suddenly the problem isn't fear, it's an overabundance of hopes and high expectations.


And, for the most part, these introductory tools do a great job of guiding you like a child in a crosswalk past the big scary variables and conditional statements and through the early phases of programming syntax. As you conquer one after another of their gamified challenges, your confidence rises. Maybe you can do this after all! How hard can it be? You're basically a developer already!




The Hand-Holding Honeymoon





Here's the problem -- you're in what I like to call the "Hand Holding Honeymoon" phase. Though you may feel like the end is around the corner, you're only a fraction of the way there. This is just the beginning...
Charting The Path Ahead


Before we dive into Phase II, let's look at the bigger picture.


In this post, I'll walk you through the four phases of the typical journey into coding and what you'll need to do to survive each of them. You'll also see how two key factors -- the density of resources and scope of required knowledge -- define this journey.


The trek towards job-readiness can be plotted in terms of how your confidence level changes as your capability increases:




The Learn-to-Code Journey -- Click to Enlarge





This is a relevant relationship because your confidence is highly correlated with your happiness and because the point where your confidence and capabilities match is the best proxy I have for the sweet spot when you're officially "job ready".


We'll look into the unique challenges of the remaining 3 phases in a moment, but this is what each of them essentially involves:
The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it's a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can't actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you're frequently going in circles and you're starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the "Mirages of Mania", like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
The Upswing of Awesome is when you've finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you've mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you're terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don't know how to get to "production ready" code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?


I've interviewed hundreds of aspiring developers over the past several years and heard echoes of the same story again and again. My goal for this post is that you approach the learner's journey with both eyes open and enough of a plan that you can avoid the common pitfalls of those who have come before you.


Let's get back into Phase II...
Phase II: The Cliff of Confusion


So, you're in Phase I -- the "Hand-Holding Honeymoon" -- checking off badges and completing coding challenges while your confidence and capabilities grow. This isn't so bad... what's all the fuss about? You've arrived at the "Peak of Irrational Exuberance"...


Be careful! You’re about to overstep a precipice that’s broken many strong aspiring learners and relegated them to the “coding is too hard” camp. The precise moment this leap occurs is the first time you sit down at your keyboard, open up your text editor, and try to build a project from scratch without any of the fancy in-browser editors, scaffolded code or helpful hints.


Crap.


You might stretch this out a bit by following tutorials, but no one has ever reached the skies without leaving the ground, and, at some point, you're going to have to create magic from a blank text file. You've just entered the second phase of learning, where confidence comes crashing down to earth -- the "Cliff of Confusion":




The Cliff of Confusion





So you build. You fight and scratch your way to a barely-functional solution but there's something missing. You're at a war with bugs that makes Starship Troopers look benign. It feels like each victory was gained only by a stroke of lucky Googling and your confidence that you can ever figure this stuff out plummets.




Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuug!!!





This is a particularly frustrating phase to see as an educator and to all participants in our industry. Programming may not be perfect for everyone, but we want you to make progress because sometimes the unlikeliest of stories become the grandest successes.


When the hand-holding ends and students are pushed off the cliff and told to fly, too many potentially awesome people are spiraling onto the rocks of frustration without learning how to flap their wings.


The scary part is that you haven't even gotten to the meaty stuff yet. This second phase, the Cliff of Confusion, is still very early. Once you've finally squashed enough bugs to end the eighth plague of Egypt and actually finished a couple of projects -- thus marking the end of Phase II -- you're still just getting started.


For those who are truly ready to make a career out of this, surviving the Cliff of Confusion is often the point where you decide to go all-in with your new life. But too many are left behind. And, unfortunately, you're just about to enter the "Desert of Despair".
The Two Key Factors at Play


So what really marks the difference between one phase and the next? Why was Phase II (the Cliff of Confusion) so awful compared to Phase I (the Hand-Holding Honeymoon)? Understanding this will help you realize that it's not your fault at all if your journey looks like what we've just described.


Basically, there are two key forces at work in every phase -- Resource Density and Scope of Knowledge. Let's see what these are before exploring how they define Phase III.
Factor 1: Resource Density


As I said above, when you first start out, it feels like there are a million resources out there trying to hold your hand and pull you into coding. That's because there are!


Search for "Learn to Code" and you'll be hit with a wall of helpful and useful tools, texts, videos and tutorials. And, frankly, they're great! Never before have there been so many ways to start learning to code.





Unfortunately, in later phases the density of resources drops off fast. Anyone who's made the jump from beginner to intermediate can attest that there is a BIG difference between the amount of resources available when you first start out versus when you're first looking for help building things on your own without too much hand-holding.


This problem exacerbates as the amount of knowledge increases rapidly entering Phase III, and is one reason why we call that phase the "Desert of Despair". Once you get past this and start to become comfortable with what exactly you need to search for, the resources return and you're able to work with more technical tools like industry blogs and screencasts. Part of this is just understanding which questions to ask.


Here's what the Resource Density looks like in each phase (greater line density indicates more resources):




Density of Resources in Each Phase -- Click to Enlarge



Factor 2: Scope of Knowledge


Now let's talk about a related issue -- the Scope of Knowledge. This represents the total breadth of new topics you need to learn in each phase. Here's what it looks like:




The Scope of Knowledge that's Required in Each Phase -- Click to Enlarge





When you first start learning, the set of things you need to understand is narrow. Everyone, regardless of goals or language or background, needs to figure out what a for loop is, how to build conditional logic, and other basic structures of programming syntax. There ultimately aren't even that many of these fundamental concepts so the Scope of Knowledge during that phase is very narrow.


As soon as you get away from the basics, you see a rapid broadening of the Scope of Knowledge as you need to begin picking up things that are more difficult like understanding errors and when to use the code you know know how to use. This is different because there is no "correct" answer to a clear question... things get fuzzy.


When you progress into the third phase, the scope of knowledge balloons wider. You now need to understand what tools to use, what languages to learn, underlying CS fundamentals, how to write modular code, object-orientation, good style, and how to ask for help (to name just a few). Every trip to Google or Hacker Newstakes you down another set of rabbit holes and overwhelms you with more things you don't know but feel like you should.


You don't know what you don't know.


Only when you've finally found some traction and left the desert does the scope again begin to narrow. By that point, you've found your chosen technology and its place in the ecosystem. You finally (pretty much) know what you don't know and can plot a path through it. You will continue to increase focus as you push onward and into the beginning of your career.
Phase III: The Desert of Despair


With an understanding of these factors, you can see that the Cliff of Confusion is really just a turning point. The pain caused by the toxic combination of a rapidly increasing Scope of Knowledge and a falling Resource Density results in what I call the "Desert of Despair".


In essence, this desert is where you know there's an end somewhere but you don't know how to get there:




The Desert of Despair





The desert is long and fraught with dangers. You'll find yourself drawn to "Mirages of Mania" along the way -- dozens of tempting resources which appear to hold the solutions you're looking for but which will deposit you, once again, in a place where lonely sand extends to each horizon line.


Maybe you sign up for a couple MOOC courses from Coursera or Udacity or edX. Or you find a tutorial which purports to take you all the way. You thought you learned the lessons of the Hand Holding Honeymoon -- that there are no easy answers -- but the temptation to seek salvation is too great and you fall for the promise that this one will get you to the finish where the others did not.


You can't learn this stuff in a week or a month or a single college class no matter what anyone says so stop falling for that!


There is a LOT more to learn than you probably expected. Even if you're able to get some apps running, it's hard not to feel lost in the greater scheme of becoming a true professional. It's difficult to measure your progress. How do you know what you need to learn or if you're even learning the right things?


Even if you're pointing the right direction, it's hard to measure your progress. You might feel totally lost until the very moment when you're finally able to build something that looks and acts the way you expected it to. But, with enough perseverance and a good compass, you'll eventually get your first few "real" projects launched and you'll realize that you're finally starting to get it.


Sure it's been hard up until now, but maybe this web dev stuff isn't so bad after all... Everything's coming up Milhouse!



Phase IV: The Upswing of Awesome


You've made it through the desert and your confidence is growing. Your Google-fu is excellent and you're finally able to understand those detailed industry blog posts and screencasts. Maybe you've gone deep into a particular language or framework and you have confidence that you can build and launch a functioning application.


This is the "Upswing of Awesome":




The Upswing of Awesome





All may seem well to the outside but you know deep down that you're not there yet.


You can make that application work but what's happening beneath the surface? Your code is duct tape and string and, worst of all, you don’t even know which parts are terrible and which are actually just fine. Your periodic flashes of brilliance are countered by noob mistakes and, worse, a creeping suspicion that you still don't have a damn clue what you're doing.


This is a bipolar phase. You feel like half of you is a bulletproof developer and the other half is a thin veneer of effectiveness covering a wild-eyed newbie who is in way too deep. The further you progress, the more a gnawing sense of uncertainty grows that someone is going to "out" you as a fraud.


You feel like you should be a developer already but the distance between the code you're writing and a "professional" work environment couldn't feel further away...


Eventually, though, you'll make it. There's too much momentum not to! The Desert of Despair is behind you and the Cliff of Confusion is a distant memory. You're finally, truly, on the upswing. You're learning faster and more intelligently than ever before and, eventually, you will have absorbed enough best practices that your swiss cheese knowledge coalesces into a production-grade skill set.


The Upswing of Awesome always takes longer than you expect it to and it feels interminable because you're so close... but you will get there. If you're persistent enough in the right ways (the topic of a future post for sure), you will convince someone to pay you to keep learning. The job is yours.



What it All Looks Like


So now you've seen the road ahead and the reasons why it can be difficult. When you combine all four phases we just covered with the factors that define them, it looks something like the following chart:




The Whole Shebang -- Click to Enlarge





It's one thing to know the path and another to walk it. Let's get you started on the right foot.
How to Make it Through Alive


The journey seems intense and, frankly, it often is. It's important that you understand what you're in for, particularly if you go it alone. But you don't have to. There are ways to short-circuit most of these problems. Learning to code is rarely as easy as people make it out to be but it's also rarely as difficult as it seems in the depths of your despair.


In this section, I'll introduce the key tactics you can use to keep yourself pointed in the right direction.




Your Progression Through the Phases -- Click to Enlarge



I: Surviving the Hand-Holding Honeymoon


The plethora of available resources in the Hand-Holding Honeymoon make it a lot of fun. They do a great job easing you into the kind of logical thinking you'll need to cultivate over the coming phases. It's a great time to start learning to code so try to enjoy it and keep these two tips in mind:
Start by trying out different resources to find how you learn best and what sorts of projects are the most interesting to you. Maybe it's Khan Academy's quick challenges, Codecademy's in-browser exercises, Chris Pine's Learn to Program book or Code School's wacky try Ruby experience. Be open minded at the start and ignore anything about what you should learn... all code is the same at this phase.
Then pick one resource and stick with it once you've found your fit. Work through to the end of their introductory course arc, which should give you all the foundational knowledge you need to write basic scripts and apps. Then get ready to start building on your own.
II: Surviving the Cliff of Confusion


Almost everyone will experience the Cliff of Confusion because the only way to become a developer is to, well, develop. You can pretend to be building by signing up for tutorials (or tutorials which masquerade as "complete" courses), but you're just putting off the inevitable. Tutorials are a good way to bridge from more high-touch introductory offerings but you'll need to wean yourself off the pacifier and face the real world at some point.


Three tips for making the transition to building on your own:
Work with someone else, even another beginner. You'll be surprised how much easier it is to debug an impossible error when sharing two pairs of eyes.
Read other people's code to get comfortable with good patterns. Try to understand why the author did what they did. You wouldn't try to become a novelist without reading books as well, would you? We'll focus on this in an upcoming post but, for now, keep your eyes open for any small problems or projects that other people have written solutions for.
Start small and build constantly. You should have interesting big projects in mind for the future, but you'll need to get comfortable debugging and searching for resources with bite-sized challenges. There's really no substitute for experience.
III: Surviving the Desert of Despair


Once you've become comfortable debugging, your biggest problem becomes the fire hose of required knowledge and a total loss for how to learn it all... the Desert of Despair. In this case, what you really need is a strong path forward. The Mirages of Mania represent all the interesting side paths and rabbit holes and get-skilled-quick schemes which ultimately waste your time.


So the keys to getting out of the Desert of Despair are:
Have a strong goal for what you want to accomplish because otherwise you will end up chasing your tail learning all kinds of interesting but ultimately unproductive things. If you have the time to spare, by all means skip this...
Find a strong path which leads directly to the goal you've set and verify that it will actually get you there. This is where you need to dig deeper than the marketing slogans and smiling faces on course websites or book jackets to ask "will this help me accomplish the goal I've set or not?"
Focus and avoid distractions because, if you're the kind of person who's interested in learning to code, you're also the kind of person who gets interested by learning all kinds of other awesome things. When coding gets difficult, you need to be able to push forward instead of just trying out the next cool-looking thing.


If you're able to identify a path and stick with it, you'll eventually push forward to the next phase instead of spending months or years chasing mirages across the shifting sands of the this desert.
IV: Surviving the Upswing of Awesome


The Upswing of Awesome is one of the trickiest transitions. You can develop applications but you really want to become a web developer. Getting past this phase and into a job requires you to do three things:
Seek and follow best practices for programming. You need to understand the difference between a solution and the best solution. Best practices are a major difference between hacking on your own and building production quality code in a real job setting.
Check your assumptions because you've probably skated by with some gaping holes in your knowledge that you didn't even know you had. You need to diagnose and fix these holes.
Tackle the unsexy skills that are rarely addressed but highly important for transitioning into a professional setting. This includes things like testing, data modeling, architecture and deployment which are really easy to breeze past but which are totally fundamental to good development.


The key to accomplishing these things and pushing through the Upswing of Awesome is to get feedback. Students who have learned entirely on their own may be productive but rarely have the kind of legible, modular, and maintainable code that makes them attractive in a professional setting. You need to work with other humans who will challenge your assumptions, ask piercing followup questions, and force you to fix the leaks in your bucket of knowledge.
So... Can it be Done?


This all may sound overwhelming but I promise that many others have persevered and survived this journey before you. By understanding the road ahead, you're already in a good spot to take it on with a focused plan and access to the right kind of help.


Obviously there isn't space in this particular post to dig as deeply into each phase of the journey as we'd like or to provide the kind of granular how-to advice you deserve. That said, this is a journey with which we're quite familiar and about which we're highly passionate so we want to help in any way we can.


Our core program is specifically designed to bridge this whole process but, if you're interested in following along on your own, we'll be addressing it publicly and in depth during future blog posts as well.


Sign up below if you'd like to come along for the ride as we dig deeper into everything here -- from finding a mentor to bridging the gap to a fulltime job in web development. Because, though it's a challenging road ahead, you don't have to walk it alone.

Intermittent Fasting for women

https://www.marksdailyapple.com/women-and-intermittent-fasting/

Imam Ghazali on time management

"Your time should not be without any structure, such that you occupy yourself arbitrarily with whatever comes along.
Rather, you must take account of yourself and order your worship during the day and the night, assigning to each period of time an activity that must not be neglected nor replaced by another activity.
By this ordering of time, the blessing in time will show itself. A person who leaves himself without a plan as animals do, not knowing what he is to do at any given moment, will spend most of his time fruitlessly.
Your time is your life, and your life is your capital: by it you make your trade, and by it you will reach the eternal bounties in the proximity of Allah.
Every single breath of yours is a priceless jewel, because it is irreplaceable; once it is gone, there is no return for it.
So do not be like fools who rejoice each day as their wealth increases while their lives decrease. What good is there in wealth that increases while one’s lifespan decreases?
Do not rejoice except in an increase of knowledge or an increase of good works. Truly they are your two friends who will accompany you in your grave, when your spouse, your wealth, your children, and your friends will remain behind.”
— Imam al-Ghazali

Bad Big Wolf

From here: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/05/25/fire-and-fog/

When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his first story, at age 7, “my mother … pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon,’ but had to say ‘a great green dragon.’ I wondered why, and still do.” It turns out that there’s an unwritten rule in English that governs the order in which we string our adjectives together:

opinion
size
age
shape
color
origin
material
type
purpose

In The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth writes, “So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

Another unwritten rule concerns ablaut reduplication: In terms such as chit-chat or dilly-dally, in which a word is repeated with an altered vowel, the vowels will follow the pattern I-A-O if there are three words and I-A or I-O if there are two. So:

tip-top
clip-clop
King Kong
flip-flop
sing-song
shilly-shally

And so on. Interestingly, these rules about precedence seem to follow a precedence rule of their own: The “royal order of adjectives” would require Red Riding Hood to meet the “Bad Big Wolf” (opinion before size). But the rule of ablaut reduplication apparently trumps this, making him the Big Bad Wolf.

“Why this should be is a subject of endless debate among linguists,” Forsyth writes. “It might be to do with the movement of your tongue or an ancient language of the Caucasus. It doesn’t matter. It’s the law, and, as with the adjectives, you knew it even if you didn’t know you knew it. And the law is so important that you just can’t have a Bad Big Wolf.”

I don’t know how this applies to dragons.

(Thanks, Nick and Armin.)

source: http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction

Long paragraphs, like long sentences, can confuse the reader. “The paragraph”, according to Fowler, “is essentially a unit of thought, not of length; it must be homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment.” One-sentence paragraphs should be used only occasionally.

Clear thinking is the key to clear writing. “A scrupulous writer”, observed Orwell, “in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

Message/Words/Idioms/Freshness

Want Clear Thinking? Relax

source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/want-clear-thinking-relax/

Dozing or being lazy for those 20 minutes is not the answer, however, in part because these states dull one's mental edge. Active relaxation relieves stress better yet keeps the mind primed.

The best active relaxation is a short mental vacation. Find a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Breathe calmly and regularly. In your mind, picture a particularly relaxing moment. Choose any scene you want, such as a quiet afternoon walk on a beach. During this imagined trip, think of as many sensations as possible—feel the soft sand between your toes, smell the salty air, hear the surf, enjoy the warmth of the sun on your face.

With only a modicum of practice, you will find that these “mental movies” can quickly lead to moments of deep relaxation.

To make your mental movies most effective, when you close your eyes think of a phrase to initiate the exercise each time, such as “I'm now going on vacation.” Then focus all your attention on your breathing. When you begin to breathe in and out, fully expand and contract your lungs: inhale slowly for six seconds, hold the air for three seconds and exhale for six seconds. To help control your breathing, imagine there is a candle in front of you; you are not trying to blow it out but simply to make the flame flicker. Do this exercise a second time and take note of the letting go you begin to feel.

If you can repeat this cycle numerous times, your epinephrine levels will subside and feelings of stress and anxiety should taper off. Then you can really enjoy your mental vacation, whether you are at the beach or on a mountaintop. When you want to end the exercise, be sure to return to your surroundings as gently as possible. Try mildly contracting all your body muscles while slowly opening your eyes.

Younger children may find such guided relaxation too restrictive. Instead of focusing on breathing, it may be easier for them to think of “quiet time.” Renowned Italian educator Maria Montessori discovered that most children love the quiet (which may seem unbelievable to many stressed-out parents) and respond well to the following instruction: “Close your eyes. Be completely quiet. Don't move. Hear the silence and listen to your body.” And if young people find it difficult at first to develop a soothing mental image like a beach, read them a story, and they will readily transport themselves to an imaginary world, which is the real goal.

If a child has great difficulty keeping still and silent, calm background music can provide an ideal bridge. The same applies to adults who have trouble relaxing. Listen to melodic, instrumental music, allowing your thoughts to flow freely. For a short break at the workplace, imagining such music is enough—close your eyes and turn on your mental CD player.

Seven things you should always keep secret

Copied verbatim from here


There are a few things which are always worth keeping to yourself. Telling the world about them — however much you want to — just won’t bring you anything good. Here are seven of the most crucial things we think you should always keep secret.

1. Don’t reveal your most ambitious plans. Keep silent about these until you’ve actually managed to fulfill them. Such plans often have weak spots and ill-thought out parts which you haven’t noticed; therefore, the chances are that someone could pick them apart quite easily, leading you to become too disheartened to even try to overcome them.
   
2. Don’t deliberately share information about any good or generous deeds or charitable work that you’ve done. The greatest virtue lies in doing something good without hope of recognition. Boasting about such things can quickly lead to arrogance. If you feel the need to, perhaps you should evaluate why it is that you’re really doing these things — is out of altruism, or the desire to be praised?
   
3. Never reveal the secrets of your lifestyle. It’s not worth bragging about how you’ve gone on a diet, or overcome your habit of sleeping too much in the morning, or stopped indulging your appetite for sex. If you’ve given up on worldly pleasures for the sake of spiritual goals, then it makes no sense to talk about this — your emotional condition needs to be harmonious, and such a desire to impress others and receive praise is a sign that it is not.
   
4. Another thing it is always worth keeping silent about are those moments when you’ve shown courage or heroism. We all come up against various challenges every day — both in the external world and on the inside, in our own minds. Your achievements in dealing with both, should they become known, will be rewarded appropriately. It’s not for you to decide whether they are worthy of recognition — therein lies the lesson.
   
5. Never share your thoughts on what you consider to be your enlightened knowledge of the universe and on questions of life and death. It’s only your interpretation, rather than objective truth, and the chances are you will only seem condescending to others when you try to convince them that they’re mistaken.Only in very rare cases will someone benefit from your thoughts on this subject.
   
6. It’s never worth revealing any conflicts or problems in your family life to others. Always bear in mind: the less you divulge such secrets about your family to others, the stronger it will be. Such things can only ever be resolved within the privacy of your own home, between loved ones. The more you complain to others about them the harder they will be to overcome.
   
7. Don’t talk about all the unpleasant things you’ve heard people say or do. Just as it’s possible to get your clothes dirty, you can also soil your mind. And the person who recounts all the foolish and awful things he hears and sees going on in the world as soon as he gets home is no different from the one who forgets to take of his shoes when he walks through the door.

Reading List - 10

Ancient Greeks

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
Tragedies of Aeschylus
Tragedies of Sophocles
Tragedies of Euripides
Histories by Herodotus
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Dialogues by Plato
Works by Aristotle
Letter to Herodotus and Letter to Menoecus by Epicurus
Ancient Romans

Treatises of Cicero

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Aeneid by Virgil
Works of Horace
History of Rome by Livy
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Parallel Lives and Moralia by Plutarch
Germania and Dialogue on Oratory by Tacitus
Enchiridion and Discourses by Epictetus
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Letters From a Stoic by Seneca

If you’re looking for a big picture tour of classical culture, I highly recommend two lecture series from my favorite college professor, Dr. J. Rufus Fears: Famous Greeks and Famous Romans.

How to be a programmer in 10 years

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

The most important question of your life

source: http://markmanson.net/question

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship — but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?

Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.

At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”

Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”

Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.

If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.

Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?

That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.

For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find time. Then… and then nothing.

Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.

I was in love with the result — the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing — but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.

The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.

Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser. Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.

But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.