* switched jobs from full time permanent to better paying less interesting contract work
* moved house to reduce expenses
* growing vegetables
* donating to crowd sourced environmental lobbying campaigns, attending the odd climate change rally
## Thinking that's influenced these actions
+ our civilisation is geared towards pursuing economic growth, that was a reasonable idea in earlier times, but is now an arguably terrible one, as we near/exceed planetary environmental boundaries. changing reality, old thinking. our goals are wrong.
+ if i learn to be more self sufficient and live modestly i can retire in a few years, and will be more resilient against things going amiss with the economy / society.
## Books I've read that have influenced my thinking:
* a stack of climate-change related books. e.g. here's a few book recommendations from a post i made earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053960
* personal finance blogs
Warning: it's probably best not to read a bunch of climate change books if you are in a place in your life where you are prone to depression.
Anyhow, I'm looking to get back into trying to make a dent on this topic. Would love to connect with others to collaborate on something. Writegreen, or otherwise. I'd like to leave this world to my children better than I found it. Right now, it's not looking that way. You can message me directly via ed dot castano at gmail.com
Other than that, your lifestyle change is something that has been on my mind for years now. Kudos for "shipping".
For me, it would be a toss-up between James Clavell's «Shogun» (but I wouldn't really be able to explain how or why), and then perhaps «Waking Up» by Sam Harris (a bit more obvious).
Bought it 1 hour ago. Great reading so far. Thanks for the pointer.
The book attempts to describe the complete process of neurotic personality development: how and why it starts, how it affects a person's behavior and life choices. It's full of references to real-life cases Horney encountered as a psychoanalyst.
Many concepts presented in this book where a revelation to me, and I believe it significantly deepened my understanding of myself and human psychology in general.
I think anyone could benefit from reading this, because even if you're not neurotic at all, you will inevitably meet someone who is.
To me personally, Horney's observations felt enough accurate and complete, so I wasn't really looking for other books on the subject.
It's a short book with a bias toward action that's changed how I interact with my work and share it with others.
Key takeaways:
- good work doesn't market or promote itself [writing a great library doesn't matter if you don't have docs and examples to make it accessible to people]
- give people a convenient way to access your work [convince yourself that having a personal mailing list does not make you too self-important]
- share your side projects to create a feedback loop early [maybe they could help solve other people's problems too] / stop telling yourself "i'll ship this after i fix one more thing"
- let good ideas bubble up from "flow" to "stock" -- for example, a few well received tweets might lead to a blog post which might lead to a whole book
- reuse the things you create across projects and mediums
- life is messy and uncertain, but you choose how you crop and present your experiences [share the interesting parts!]
My full chapter-by-chapter notes: https://github.com/tedmiston/notes/blob/master/books/Show%20...
A new 2016 resolution unlocked!
May have turned me into a workaholic though...
This is a series of detailed retelling of accidents involving nuclear power, weapons, and radioactive materials generally. It starts with some 19th century hunters wandering into a cave full of radon and ends with Fukushima. The twist here is that the author is a major proponent of nuclear energy and research. It's fascinating to see someone take an in depth look at the flaws of a cause they support, it has just the right amount of technical detail for me, and it really sheds light on how the wildest bugs get into any system.
Dept. of Speculation
A mostly unflinching look at a difficult modern relationship from a woman's perspective. There are some hard truths in it that are surprisingly easy to swallow.
Moby Dick
I read this novel in high school but it didn't have much impact on me then. It is an unbelievably rich experience now, filled with all the wonder, terror, joy, and boredom that comes from trying to find your own meaning.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman — Among lots of other ideas, he defends the thesis that /writing/ is still humankind’s greatest invention, and that our thoughtless eagerness to replace it with newer forms of media, such as television and computers—just because they're newer—is dumb and dangerous.
Another valuable read: What Is Islam? http://d1.islamhouse.com/data/en/ih_books/single/en_What_Isl... Both made it less nebulous to me of what is otherwise a largely irreconcilably contradictory narrative (http://nypost.com/2015/11/22/missing-paris-attacker-loved-ga...).
Bad Samaritans, Ha-Joon Chang : a neat illuminating read on economic development matters that are not typically articulated in discussions of relevance and dominance.
"Say this not that." by Carl Alasko
I've gone through a metric shit ton pile of self help and relationship help books in my time. But I think this one, while it repeats some well worn wisdom, it presents them in a concrete enough way that the advice is finally gaining traction in my own head. I think the key is that it presents the advice in real world vignettes as both bad and good idea formats. Like that bone guy on Animaniacs.
FINALLY! a scathing, rake-that-rich-a$$-across-thee-coals dive into our superficial obsession with the digitally privileged. Muah!Best book I've read in years + the appendix/biblio holds 20 pages or so of FURTHER awesome reading.
"Human Use of Human Beings" by: Norbert Weiner
An awesome transportation into 1950 MIT professor who calls out the problems of "progress" and explores communication in the neatest way. Everything he mentions is still a problem today! I just really dug this book.
- In the Light of What We Know
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
- Bathing the Lion
- The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
- The Tears of Dark Water
- God Is Dead
- A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
- The Water Knife
The First World War: A Complete History
Predictable Revenue
Superforecasting
The Master Algorithm
Natural Born Heroes
River Out of Eden - Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
It has the same problem as the 4hww where the name sounds very scammy, but the idea behind the book is really good.
Others that changed my way of thinking in some way or another:
Rework, Getting Real, and the recent Reconsider post - DHH & Jason Fried: I'd always considered external funding as the best way to grow things I've built in the past, and wrote off the few bad experiences with this approach as being outliers. After also reading others' bad experiences throughout the year, now I'm wondering if my experiences were perhaps representative of the industry as a whole. Confirmation bias? Maybe. I'm sure there are the rare few good angel/VC's somewhere out there (no doubt someone will reply with "YC"). However, after watching several things I'd passionately built over significant amounts of time be driven to failure by others, I'd much rather bootstrap future projects. I learned a lot from each failure, but trial and error is a shitty way to spend years of your life. Far better to learn what worked from those who succeeded.
Business Adventures - John Brooks: Until this book, reading about businesses was one of the most boring things I could imagine. Some of it is dated, but there are also many valuable gems that still hold true 50 years later. I now see that with a good storyteller, even seemingly boring subjects can be fascinating.
Freshbooks: Breaking the Time Barrier - McDerment & Cowper: This tiny book (free from their website) helped me think of new ways to improve my consulting services and emphasize value instead of focusing on hourly rates, which made it easier to make more money.
Various online sales & marketing resources: My viewpoint on the importance of sales & marketing has also completely flipped since the beginning of the year. I used to have the mental image of a used car salesman whenever I heard the word sales, and of Mad Men when I heard marketing. Now I understand that if you don't market what you build, nobody will know that it exists. If you don't experiment with different sales tactics, you'll miss out on a huge amount of users who would otherwise love using your product, but who avoid it because it's priced wrong, or you're unable to convince them of why they'd want to use it.
