Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

The lockpicking stuff in "Surely..." is a really fun chapter but also makes it clear that Feynman does not actually care that much about inconveniencing others. It was a fun intellectual exercise but actually harmed other people, which is pretty shitty behavior.

It is just a little hard to read a book when assholish behavior just shows up with such frequency. Feynman was a genius, a great storyteller, and a lot of the content in his books is fabulous. But some of the material sours it.

In a team of course it would be different - unless I perfectly document my own code, my colleagues would be better off with something they can actually google.

Several years ago, I started using make extensively. Not to compile, but to automate. Make understands failing and dependencies. Also, bash and zsh have wonderful completions.

I used to write a bash or python script to do this. They often turned into their own projects and were painful to document.

A great make example (thanks Aaron) is on YT: Using Terraform, Packer, and Ansible Together": https://youtu.be/pkEezNSFWtA. Aaron automated it all with make.

Ya, I know... Make was created in 1976 to compile Fortran. It's old school. I love it.

I use it to test my kubernetes CSI driver on 5 versions of k3s with a single make call. That call is the tip of a dependency tree. The leaves end up being a line or three of bash running Ansible, Go, Helm, etc, but could be anything.

Documentation is simple because the make dependencies are so easy to follow. They are much of the documentation. The docs are correct because we execute them.

For the first and a half or so we've had a difficult life with the first kid. To be honest, there is just no way around it. Especially your first kid. The SEAL-level sleep deprivation and complete lack of "me time" really takes it toll. I'm also not the type of dad to let mom handle everything. She also has a career and, to be honest, a better one too. So I was regularly up at 2AM, 4AM and 6AM. Then a workday. :) (If you have young parents around you, please try to be compassionate.)

But for some reason I'm more effective now than I ever was. I can remember "not having enough energy" to complete some project for as long as I am alive - even when I was alone. It is clear to me this had very little to do with my actual life and more with my attitude. My life is more complex and demanding than it used to be but somehow I still managed to lose 60lbs, learned to read Latin, took guitar lessons and started a business. Every single one of these items never would have left my todo list without my family. They have endowed me with a keen sense of priority which made planning my life quite easy to be honest.

I know those achievements I listed are not that hard, but for me they are significant. I've found most things in life don't require your eternal soul as a sacrifice, they just take (usually a lot of) time and so you need to be strategic about your goals. Take it slow, don't burn yourself out, but also don't stray from left to right unnecessarily. Keep your eyes on the ball. Don't shift from "write a compiler", "read latin", "write toy OS", "build cpu from nand-gates" to "learn german" and back to "learn to draw realistically" in a month. Focus. A dirty word, I know, but a powerful one.