Ask HN: What have the past 12 months taught you?

You don’t need a machine you need someone to observe your feet as you run. Then based on your roll, buy shoes that support your feet. This is not rocket science, you need new running shoes every year or two. Protect your shins, get proper shoes, if it’s a minute to analyze on a treadmill (“machine”) then take the minute. If you have a friend, have them take a minute..

I have studied the Red Pill in quite detail. It is not really for me to apply (being shy is the opposite of imposing your will on others), but I think the principles are sound. At least I couldn't find any hole in this "worldview", though I would love to, since the the picture it presents is very bleak.

1. Worked on a idea it's sort personal project. Stack is Google cloud(Firebase RTDB & hosting, cloud functions, Storage, app engine, crowns, pubsub), JS, NodeJS, CSS, mySQL, Java. My day job is Db2 DBA z/OS Mainframe, so cloud is but new to me. I would say i good when compared to others on what I did. Focus was the key here, day job 8-5 all be at home 6:30 & start my programming or learning from 7 till midnight 1 or 2. This I did continuously for over a year. Before that I used to have normal life like gym or running(used to be a half marathon runner), I stopped everything to focus on the idea. To help me focus, I had to stop certain things like exercise as it takes time but I walked weekly two times for 1hr, Watching movies or TV series, getting into heated arguments with people as it takes my focus off Ruins ideas I was working on and giving unnecessary thoughts, stopped seeing people faces sometimes like walking mostly look at the ground. I decided to have two notebooks one for office and one for my project all the ideas I get I dump into these to notebooks and work on them. I like my current work as salary is ok but what's awesome is work-life balance due to that I can work on my personal project. Almost completed 80% of the project now only thing remaining shifting the batch workload from my system to Compute engine.

2. In the meantime, everybody around me is finishing cloud certs mostly AWS/Azure and me who is talking about cloud has no certs but working in them. It's sort makes me look like a guy who talks but nothing to show. So when I was confident that ok only thing remaining in my PP is shifting to compute engine. I started to prepare for Google cloud associate data Engineer certification from March 2019 and took the exam two weeks back and got certified. Yeah, I am the only Google certified person in my building there's a lot of Azure and aws. This certification wasn't an easy one, I had to study lots of products which I wasn't using, what good about it was, each time I study, I was thinking how I could this for my project. So definitely bigquery & cloudSQL I will have to check it out on migrating data from local to cloud. QWIKLABS is sort of must to get hands on GCP. Take sample tests from Google cert site itself it's free mostly you get the same questions if you take multiple times but gives you an idea of what will come in the exam.

3. Being a workaholic, I had lost focus on my personal life. Single and 33, soon 34. There is this girl who has been working in team next to me for over two years, if I had kept my head up and looked at people or tried to hear their conversations or discussions happening next to me. I could have seen this girl, but me nooo focus on the work & Personal projects. Just about time I took a break PP and started to focus on cert exam, this girl caught my eye and I was staring at her for almost a month. I had to stop it as I thought it was rude to stare. So I approached and told her that 'i like her' in May. Now July, I sort of have an idea she likes me but she didn't tell so far. No idea what's going to happen as well. So I am currently working on this project.

4. I am more of a dreamer. The guy who is 80% of the time caught up in the head or lives there. So I had to bring myself to focus on things before me, reality. So started to listening to Ted talks on mindfulness, imapct theory, Power of Now(audible), Dandapani, Earl nightingale. And in a video I was hearing about this smart drug that top University students were taking to improve their intelligence. I was a bit curious is it something like limitless. Adderall is banned in my country but modafinil was available. Tried one tablet, 4th hour heart beat increases a bit which sort of makes you to focus on what before you and you will be in that mode for 3-4hours. Side-effects if you are diabetes you are fucked. In accucheck I get normally 130 after this it was 230. Now started dieting & started walking to get it lower a week after now I am at 185. Curiosity has its price. I am going to throw away the remaining tablets. I am going to revisit power of now first 5 chapters, that's the phase I am in.

So at the moment focus will be in that GIRL, focusing on what's before me(being present), Db2(work), GCP(bigquery, kubernetes, compute engine, cloudSQL), possibly check if there is good paying job in GCP with work life balance, gradually start exercising again as I have lost all muscle and weight in last two years.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I spent the past year going out so much... Some weeks I went out every night. Clubs, parties, Toastmasters, interest groups, assorted meetups, ... to no avail. I think I'm done with that, back to square one, writing code from my "basement", talking face to face to maybe 1-2 people a week.

Absolutely!

So this really began with reading through Eliezer Yudkowsky's post series on LessWrong about Fake Beliefs [0].

In summary: start with a thought/opinion/belief (the more recurring or obvious the better; thoughts about what I should or shouldn't do, beliefs about society, economics, politics, or biology). I then try to write out my understanding of that concept and try to dig at two questions (and I find typing this stuff out is much better than doing it in thought, but talking to someone works as well):

1. Where did I obtain this understanding of the world - was it my education, something in the media, friends, coworkers, family, childhood) and is it factually accurate? Generally this involves research and attempting to see how in line this understanding of the world is with evidence-based literature or people I trust.

2. Does this belief or understanding actually allow me to make falsifiable predictions about the future or the state of the world, or does it merely give me the feeling of doing that while occupying space in my brain? [1]

Personally, this involved facing and digging into assumptions I had about the world that were given to me before I had a chance to form my own judgement of their validity. Beliefs about morality, societal expectations, and sexuality were at the top of the list but I fixed plenty of my perceptions of economic policies and government regulation. I will say this is an ongoing process, one that I think will never actually end - but it's allowed me to become much more sure of who I am and what I base my decisions on.

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re

[1] - https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/a7n8GdKiAZRX...