41–50 of 247 posts
* health issue
* read a book
* break up / got into a relationship
* moved abroad
* got a new job
The easiest way is really to read a book. The problem is finding the right book and spending time reading bad books.
Once upon a time my buddy was in the data center swapping drives, so i logged onto all the servers. 8 cabinets and like ~18 or so servers in each. ~$ base64 /dev/urandom I don't know if that qualifies as 'changing my life' but when he told me he had to plug his ears and run away because it was so loud, it certainly made me want to turn this into a long-term career.
Could you explain further?
When a kid (10+ years younger) at a rave told me --being a vegetarian at the time-- that I'm not "nice to animals" and not "doing enough" and if I cared to be consistent with my beliefs I should go vegan. Also: children, DMT, studying Buddhism and a not to be named hard-core socialist music festival near Berlin.
Wow. One can never satisfy these woke little know it alls hah?
1. Reading Malcolm X's autobiography _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ in college. It transformed me such that within that one week of reading it, I developed (given my low standards) the strongest sense of orderliness in my life. Additionally, I decided for myself 'to straighten myself up' for this life.
2. Reading Dostoevsky's _Brothers Karamazov_. My 'inner' transformation (at the age of around 20.5) was so immense that it was also apparent from the outside. My transformation was 'not to be surprised by bad/evil' and seeing good in everything.
3. In programming/ computer science/ functional programming/ mathematics (I still don't fully get LISP, Haskell et. al. like other people here) but there are encounters in the field of lambda calculus, computation, cryptography that have left me totally transformed. Too many to elaborate.
We went into a discussion over some esoteric topics, and we got stuck on a definition of a word, so I asked him "but how do we know what exactly does [the word] mean?", to which in response he paused, looked me in the eye, and just said:
It means whatever the hell we agree it means.
Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively. I believe that a lot of bad things in the world happen simply because of miscommunication of ideas - more precisely, not being in agreement to what some words mean, while using them in discussions, assuming the other person has exactly the same understanding of the word as we do.
Nowdays, in discussions, when I feel that there's "something wrong" in the air, I tend to ask people "what do you mean by X" and some people get annoyed by it. But the number of times I've defused a conflict that way, by revealing it to be pure misunderstanding, makes it worth it.
When a kid (10+ years younger) at a rave told me --being a vegetarian at the time-- that I'm not "nice to animals" and not "doing enough" and if I cared to be consistent with my beliefs I should go vegan. Also: children, DMT, studying Buddhism and a not to be named hard-core socialist music festival near Berlin.
Wow. One can never satisfy these woke little know it alls hah?
Applied to FANG for an internship and 5 years later I'm still there. I'd call it life-changing as I can FIRE around 40 now (current trajectory). Planning to care for my siblings however, so realistically it's more like 45-50.