What Was and What Will Be

"You are too concerned with what was and what will be. There is a saying: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present." -Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda

Previously I've mentioned that keeping up with a consistent practice of having a digital commonplace book is one of the best daily tricks that I use to keep myself in check. If I have a random thought at any point in the day - something that I want to remember, write more on, or explore down the road - it goes in there. I'm up to 6,180 entries (and a 2000+ day streak) across four journals now, with quips of wisdom going in its separate journal.

Big plug here for the app Day One, which I use across devices to store all my random musings.

Last week, I came across something that I wrote almost two years ago:

Stop and think for a minute about what was two years ago, what is now, and what will be in 2 years. It's shocking how much changes in and around you instantly and how little things add up to big things over time.

It's an important one that I keep coming back to, especially when I get into those moments when I feel overwhelmed, overtasked, stressed out, or just generally at a loss of what to work on next. I stop, breathe, and think about little things that matter most, and usually can move on.

That's where the real challenge comes in.

Where to spend those precious moments of now, versus struggling through it all. What's equally remarkable is how much 'struggle porn' (also known as 'insight porn') normalizes this whole craziness. A notion that having "a masochistic obsession with pushing yourself harder, listening to people tell you to work harder, and broadcasting how hard you're working." is for some wacko reason is an ok way to live.

I kind of like here Greg McKeown lands it:

If there's one thing I've found is that there's no "playbook" to get you through any of this stuff we all deal with daily. Only the things that work for you, the company you keep, the moments you want to value now, and how yesterday isn't tomorrow.

Namaste.

If you enjoy these posts, you can buy me a coffee ☕️, or if you'd rather keep up with my daily ramblings, follow me on Twitter or keep reading my posts on this blog.

Forward Thinking

This one is for all the engineering teams (and those working with them). Lots of geek humor in here, but in a post on Twitter, Cain Maddox has a brilliant idea for a new show:

idea: a gameshow called Imposter Syndrome where you take 10 senior developers and tell them that one of them is actually just a sales guy who's been taught to say DevOps buzzwords. to win, they have to figure out who the fake dev is. the trick: there is no sales guy

the final episode will be a google engineer, an apple engineer, and some random guy with 12,000 stackoverflow answers just whiteboard interviewing each other.

prize money will be allocated in reverse order, with the first dev eliminated getting half the payout and the last two survivors getting nothing

YES. I would watch this (if real life wasn't so close to the truth).

Thought of the week

I loved this thread from Mark Manson:

THINGS I WISH I KNEW SOONER
1. People aren't thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are.
2. Blame is a mostly useless concept
3. The quality of your relationships dictates the quality of your life
4. Nothing meaningful in life is easy; nothing easy is meaningful
5. Love occurs in proportion to one's willingness to get hurt
6. People tend to respect you in proportion to how much you respect yourself
7. Be slow to judge; everyone is doing their best with what they know

Next up, what on EARTH are they doing with all that water!?

This weeks "Deep Links"

Here are a few of the articles and videos that resonated with me over the last week:

• 100x yes, this tickles every bone of my childhood. "Please, Lego, let this engineer bring your computer brick to life" shows off the mind-blowing work of James Brown, who has embedded  a 0.42-inch OLED screen into LEGO bricks to make actual, working displays - More
• What? A Mario multi-verse? "Nintendo Reveals the Mario That Goes Into The Pipes Is Not the Same One That Comes Out." I'm super perplexed, but they state 'The Marios who leave the pipes are new creatures. We don't know what they want from us or what's happened to the old ones.' This has vibes from The Prestige and freaks me out - More
• CJ tackles some of "The Cures for Burnout" - what happens when life or career becomes void of importance. He concludes that 'we all need to be more OK with being OK' lands where my headspace is these days. - More
• OK; I didn't know this, but "The One Microwave Hack Everybody Should Know by Heart" - More
• "Laughing and learning together is always a good mix" was a refreshing read on how having fun is the key to a fantastic learning experience - More
• Similar to which The Watchmen based its story from a real-life event, "The Epidemic Mentioned At The Beginning Of Sandman Was A Real Event." I didn't know about Acute Encephalitis Lethargica prior to this - More
• I've long been a believer in trying to create an environment in which you can build trust in teams to allow risk-taking; here, "High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It," the Harvard Business Review dives deeper into it - More
• "Your Watermelon" was a fun one that explores the love of Watermelon, their history, and the 'feeling' of Watermelon can only be described as 'perfect alignment, of deep rest, of strangling love, of explosive nowness.'. I was just surprised to learn that they used to be used as a form of canteen by early explorers - More
• There is nothing that surprises me about this trust-breaking practice from several of the apps you use daily (looking at you:  TikTok, Instagram, Facebook). What? Didn't you know that "In-app browsers that act as keyloggers"? Check out your favorite application by checking out https://inappbrowser.com/ from within an app - More
• Continuing down the privacy march, "Facebook's Pervasive Pixel" dives deep into what the Facebook tracking pixel found on 30% of the top 100k websites is sending back to Meta - More

Fin

Closing out this week with some more tunes. I've been spending a lot more time of late with the headphones on, just chilling out and listening to music for some pearls of wisdom.

While I'm still making my way through The Umbrella Academy, Season 3, I appreciated their use of The House of the Rising Sun (sung by Jeremy Renner!).

Oh, mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

If you're not watching, here's the trailer for Season 3 - it's been a TON of fun:

Be well. ✌🏻