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Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

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Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#271

Post by vermarish »

banannaise wrote: post #187
istinetz wrote: post #37

I strongly disagree with the author. What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life. The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precise…

You know what's funny? DotA involves a lot of frog-eating. A lot of it is a slog, and a lot of it is really frustrating. You hadn't decreased your frog consumption. You were just eating the wrong frogs. It seems that now you're eating different frogs, and you're feeling happier and more fulfilled. You might even be eating less of them now, and that might be part of what's rewarding.

Yeah, it's tricky. Some places will just mix frogs into their burgers, so you've just gotta stop eating at the Chum Bucket and pay attention to what's in your mental diet.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#272

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

akiselev wrote: post #31

This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted…

> $5 esp32-wroom dev kits

That's an awesome price!

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#273

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

6stringmerc wrote: post #62
jongjong wrote: post #56

This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on society. I suspect it might explain why so many people are interested in engaging in politics (or company politics) and zero-sum value extraction schemes instead of just adding value... They're not interested in the process at all, only in the outcome; financi…

A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad…

> He got bullied and saw others bullied too

> I mean it’s not a bad company

These two statements cannot exist together when discussing the same organization.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#274

Post by gus_massa »

MrDresden wrote: post #250
akiselev wrote: post #31

This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted…

Love tongue. Cook it occasionally and eat with horseradish mayonnaise

Tongue (with vinegar and garlic) is one of the traditional dishes for Christmas here in Argentina (or at least in my family). I never ate it in a sandwich, anyway.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#275

Post by yohannparis »

nicbou wrote: post #196
jrochkind1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your occupation where you get paid to work only on what feels right, only when it feels right, for only as long as it feels right, with leeway to hop on your bicycle and forget about work whenever you want? Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.

allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come." Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now , unles…

What a great website, and nicely organized, and also well written. Congrats!

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#276

Post by pessimizer »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #268
brudgers wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are only two story types. + Someone goes on a journey. + A stranger comes to town.

This is only true if you define journey as basically doing anything interesting. But then you are just saying that the only story type is “someone does something”.

There's only one story type. Somebody runs into a problem and tries to solve it, but fails at the halfway mark because they didn't understand the problem well enough. They rethink the problem and try to solve it again, but fail at the 3/4 mark because they don't understand themselves. Then they defeat the problem by gaining understanding of themselves (or fail to defeat the problem because of a willful refusal to change, or have a partial/late revelation and a partial/late success.) Problem > failure of vision > failure of character > solution.

Stories are attached to particular protagonists, but you can do things like overlap the stories of multiple protagonists or give a single protagonist multiple overlapping stories in order to develop narratives of arbitrary complexity.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#277

Post by jventura »

hbosch wrote: post #192
dade_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father runs a business, one day many years ago in his shop he needed help moving a bunch of material. I explained it would be a lot faster to do it a different way, and he commented that would be the lazy way to do it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run into this thinking, though it has stuck with me ever since. I explained this isn’t about exerting less effort, but that for the same effort we get a heck of a lot mo…

The matrix for effort vs. impact is something I find myself drawing in meetings a lot. Effort Low High ┌───────────┬───────────┐ I │ │ │ m Low │ Ok │ Bad │ p │ │ │ a ├───────────┼───────────┤ c │ │ │ t High │ Perfect │ Ok │ │ │ │ └───────────┴───────────┘

So, it pays off to keep effort low most of the times, right? I agree with the matrix, so I cannot find another conclusion..

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#278

Post by the-smug-one »

MrDresden wrote: post #250
akiselev wrote: post #31

This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted…

Love tongue. Cook it occasionally and eat with horseradish mayonnaise

Beef tongue is amazing! Try out tongue tacos.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#279

Post by wbharding »

I wonder if past generations have cared as much as we do about helping people feel better about their perceived failings? This essay fits snugly into a 2020s canon of NYT Best Sellers around "work less, enjoy more." My impression had been that previous generations principally aspired to get more done to advance their lot in life. If that's true, it will be interesting to assess later how long-term happiness compares between the "try harder do more" past generations and the "you're amazing why are you working so hard?" current one.

Cal Newport is the only contemporary personality I know of that advocates for getting more done, but his method still conforms to the zeitgeist, in that his "get more done" is more precisely "get more important stuff done by doing less overall."

Perhaps this is the natural evolution that occurs when a country has reached sufficient wealth where contributing gains to per capita GDP just ain't inspiring to a comfortable generation? It's interesting to try to contextualize the current popularity of anti-productivity literature vs what has come before it.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#280

Post by travisjungroth »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #211
hbosch wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The matrix for effort vs. impact is something I find myself drawing in meetings a lot. Effort Low High ┌───────────┬───────────┐ I │ │ │ m Low │ Ok │ Bad │ p │ │ │ a ├───────────┼───────────┤ c │ │ │ t High │ Perfect │ Ok │ │ │ │ └───────────┴───────────┘

The best simple way to prioritize a backlog. Engineering team is responsible for assigning "effort" dimension; product/stakeholder team is responsible for assigning "impact" dimension. Then we see what's in high impact/low effort, and that's what we're gonna work on.

I came up with almost the same activity but didn't think of having different groups decide the dimensions. Some random stuff:

Use stack ranking. Avoids "everything is a priority" and related mistakes.

Effort and impact both have a long tail distribution, something like power law. It's probably power law because it's easy to be off by an order of magnitude. "Impact" is easier to get wrong because it's going to the high end. Don't think most impactful and second most impactful have a similar impact because they're close in rank. It's easy for #1 to be 10-100x #2.

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