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Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#181
post #18

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2014/07/instant-pot-el... If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker. It greatly simplifies cooking because it's automated. Just add the ingredients, close the lid, press a button, and wait. You will get a perfectly cooked one-pot meal with minimum effort. You can even mix fresh a…

> If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker.

Oh hi there!

Do you have any recipes that you recommend? I actually bought an Instant Pot a couple months ago, and so far have found one great one pot meal that I cook in bulk on the weekend - basically tomatoes + sweet potatoes + peppers + beans + quinoa. Toss it all in and press a button, magic.

I like to eat as healthily as possible, so I'm interested to hear if you have any go-to staple recipes for the instant pot that you'd suggest :)

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#182
post #3

I don't look back on it that fondly nowadays, but it would probably be Mr Money Mustache's classic "The Simple Math of Early Retirement". I am not on a path to FIRE really, but in my early twenties it was really incredibly eye-opening. At that age, I had very much assumed that the world had to work according to "work hard for 45 years, get the biggest house you can, buy as much stuff as you can, on your 65th birthday…

Link here: Basically he talks about how when you retire depends on one number, percentage of money you can save from your pay. If you save 50% of your pay and invest it, you can retire in 16 years. Pretty eye openning https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

The other half of it is how much you spend. You also have to keep your retirement spending at the same level. i.e. if you make 100k/yr and save 90% of it, you can retire in 3 years... however, you have to keep your spending at 10k/yr. So if you can handle living that frugally, great! Otherwise you have to save a lot more before you can retire at your "current" lifestyle.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#183

https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more This article inspired me on two things : 1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they st…

If you /really/ want to make money, you don't sell. You buy and rent out.

that is not making money. It is merely taking money from others for specious reasons.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#184

https://medium.com/personal-growth/travel-is-no-cure-for-the... When I have anxiety and unhappy moments in my life, I feel stuck. My natural inclination in these moments is to run. To get away, to be somewhere new, do something new, just get the eff away from wherever I am. I frequently felt that traveling and being a digital nomad would cure this problem and I would never feel that way, but the article above outline…

It does resonate with me. Having lived in Japan for a year I got a huge amount of benefit from it. I think the author dismisses too quickly the benefits of living and being exposed to a culture different from your own, as it acts as a new reference point for the rest of your life. If you've spent all your life in one country than living in another can really open up your mind in a genuine way. Not to mention learning a new language and being exposed to new things (like my love of karaoke and baths, not to mention tons of manga I never knew about)

And personally giving up my friends and living in a new environment forced me to adapt and become more social and less anxious. It had a huge positive effect on my confidence. I made friends different to the types of friends I had before. I did things I had never done before.

So yeah, if you end up reverting your 'baseline' then it won't help, and I can definitely understand that - I'll never be an extrovert, I'll always value having a few good friends and spending a lot of time alone - but that doesn't mean it can't be profoundly helpful for getting you out of a rut.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#186
I wish I could find it.

It was a blog post about how one man's perspective on fatherhood changed after he became a father, and he realized he regretted waiting so long, because all it really ended up doing was robbing him of being able to spend more time with his children.

Before reading it, I was ambivalent about whether I wanted children. After reading it, I wasn't.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#187
Definitely The Tail End by Tim Urban

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html

``` It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. ```

^ This is the crux of it, in familial (parental) relationships, we spend most of our time with them early in life, and that we don't get nearly as much time with them after graduation.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep reading murakami and Dan brown, sure you’re just juggling words for no real benefit. But if you’re gonna read the making of the atomic bomb, or team of teams, then maybe it’s not a wasteful exercise. Definitely better than writing if you ask me.

I agree on that, I would like to add that for some of the time, consuming helps us create better. Different kind of consuming activities actually have different leverage on creating value

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

-Stephen King

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#190

I came of age before blogs and frankly, don't see any blog posts that could be life changing for an older person, so I'll add a life changing book and song. The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler, the sequel to Future Shock. I was a nuclear trained engineer in the Navy. This book convinced me not to pursue a career in nuclear power after the Navy, which was the standard career path for guys like me, because it was "Second W…

I like the idea of making a life-changing decision based on a fundamental revelation about life, and catching that "Third Wave" would certainly have been good in the general case, particular regrets about how the details played out in your situation nonwithstanding!?
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