I probably won't respond to every comment but I just want you all to know that I'm happy if this helped you in anyway.

I know how frustrating, demoralizing, and even depressing one can feel when struggling to enjoy what should be a happy pass-time.

I have several good resource to recommend, if you want to get better. Some of them are books. A lot of Smashers practice and watch Smash, but don't do much else to improve their mentality.

At the end of this comment I'll paste a short list of some books that I found very help for my improvement in Smash and then a link of a list of Smash resource I've compiled.

** Please feel free to send me a Reddit Chat or PM if you wanna talk more about Smash! **

It makes me very happy to share happy vibes with fellow Smashers. Like I said, I can relate to the feelings of frustration that you've all felt but I am also very fortunate to say that I've gotten a lot from this game and the community and I wouldn't change it if I could.

------Recommended Reading Material:

Playing To Win: Becoming the Champion

by David Sirlin

Link: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

This is a book on how competition in gaming works and having a "play to win" mentality. This means taking responsibility and accountability for everything you do and not putting excuses that only hold you back. Very helpful for your mindset. You can find a free audio version that covers most of the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y6KU7ZGeMs&list=PLZbBoZgd9o1mVN2-CnS4yfbhIEbpJFrWp

------

The Will to Keep Winning

by DAIGO UMEHARA

Link: https://amzn.com/B01JOEKKWU

Written by one of the world's best Street Fighter players, Daigo, this book talks a lot about consistent growth, the benefits of staying humble, innovating, taking risks, and how to play with the mentality of learning and growing rather than focusing on just the win. Despite having the word 'Winning" right in the title, the book teaches the value of focusing less on the results and more on the process.

------

The Inner Game of Tennis

by W. Timothy Gallwey et al.

Link: https://amzn.com/0679778314

Yes this is a book on Tennis but it talks about the inner workings of your mind and how to get the best out of competitive performance and practice. Very much worth the read.

-----

The Way of the Bow

by Paulo Coelho

Link: http://a.co/iR14a9T

I haven't read this one yet. i'll be honest. But I've heard many trustworthy Smashers recommend it. It is said to be about "how to overcome difficulties, steadfastness, courage to take risky decisions."

------

My List of Smash Resources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d7Ghmr4tpAqCn4GQGYnyM4XLuWfVEcN_hAdv-QVVifc/edit?usp=sharing

​

♥

Diagnosed ADHD-PI, professional software developer here; working on an agile team building SaaS apps for large retailers.

Answers:
It's been 4 years since my bachelor's and I have no professional experience; nothing to show for that time really, except a failed grad school project. Is there anything I can do so this doesn't look so bad to recruiters?

• Start putting all the code you're most proud of on your GitHub in public repositories, and try to finish at least one open source thing.
  
  
• Start answering questions on Stack Overflow.
  
  
• Hiring managers just want to see how you solve problems and work with other developers -- so contributing to open source is a huge one.
  
  What skills could I work on now that would prepare me for professional work? I hear people gripe about recent grads having no experience with version control, continuous integration, etc. I'm familiar with most of these
  
  
• Getting really familiar with Github, and some kind of workflow like git-flow is a huge one, but also read up on Agile because many companies are using that method to organize coding tasks -- see if you can learn a tracker like Jira or Pivotal in demo mode (would be a bonus)
  
  
• Try to get really checked out and well versed in at least one framework...(Angular, React, Vue, Laravel, Rails, etc) you can kind of pick one you're already pretty familiar with and there will be jobs out there for it.
  
  
• Again look for open issues on open source projects written in langs and frameworks you're familiar with, fork them, fix them, and submit PRs -- this will give you rep on GitHub and prove you can collaborate effectively. https://github.com/trending
  
  Should I mention my ADHD diagnosis and the difficulties I had, or just say that I took a year off for personal reasons and leave it at that?
  
  
• Our team lead talked openly about his ADHD during his interview and he still got hired. I have not mentioned mine as I got my formal diagnosis after already being at this company for a while but it's pretty common in the industry
  
  Do you ever have any doubts about whether you like programming enough? Like I said, sometimes I'm super enthusiastic about my projects. Other times I can't get started, so it makes me doubt myself.
  
  
• Absolutely. It really helps to work for a company that you KNOW supports learning and doing things the right way.... and a company that is working on apps that you have some interest in. If you can drink the kool-aid so-to-speak it helps keep you interested. I've worked for companies that made me question the career altogether, and now I work at one I really love and I'm glad I didn't change course. (they fly us to conferences, we do pair programming, there's lots of time for research and refactoring etc.)
  
  Do you have a particular workflow that works well for you and the people you work with? (pomodoro, break the day into 2-hour chunks, etc)
  
  
• I use the methods in this book to the best of my ability: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692... which is essentially find the time of day (or night) that you are sharpest and go into an increasingly long period of very focused work where you've created an environment free from all distractions (no phone, no browser tabs with reddit etc..) The rest of my day I break up into 30-40 minute chunks with walks and stretching in between. Nobody can write clean code for 9 hours straight. I also use WunderList religiously. I have categories in WunderList for every aspect of my life and I organize my days from start to finish as a "Today," list. I try to follow the list. Obviously life throws you curve balls but it's been a huge help.
  
  Do you ever lack perseverance when you hit a snag? If so, what do you do about it? I like programming recreationally, because if there's a bug I can't figure out I'll step away (sometimes for hours), and then see it with fresh eyes. In a professional environment this feels like I'm goofing off.
  
  
• This is a tough one.... the answer for me is yes....but I also tend to get so frustrated that I try to push through and solve the problem for too long past my ability to be effective. I continually prove this to myself because I eventually have to step away if it's really difficult -- and when I come back refreshed the solution comes pretty quickly.. (usually)... I often quit for the day having not solved something, do my evening tasks, sleep, and then wake up immediately knowing the answer.
  
  Any other relevant/interesting details you can share about your experiences will be super-appreciated.
  
  
• Stick with it -- it is very challenging for anyone to become a good dev -- and even moreso for us... but there are some aspects of the way our brains work that makes this the perfect career. Most ADHD people love a challenge when something sparks their interest, and the hyper focus bouts allow us to often come up with very clever solutions. Let us know how it goes and good luck.
  
  edit: I am prescribed 30mg IR adderall. I don't take it every day but I do use it often
  
  

If you're really truly interested in mastering this hobby and applying yourself to learning it, here's what I would recommend:

1. Define short-term goals. Do you want to learn A, B, and C tricks? Do you want to work on body movement and dance? If you're having a hard time defining this for yourself, look to the spinners you respect and try to figure out what it is about their style you admire and would like to make a part of your own.
   
   
2. Schedule a regular practice. Make an appointment with yourself that you would keep just like an appointment at work. Remember: this is something you're doing for you? Who is more important to keep your promises to in your life than yourself? Doing this will also help keep you from the dreaded "I can't find time to practice" conundrum so many of us wind up in...make times for the things that are important to you.
   
   
3. Create a regular 20-30 minute warmup ritual before you practice. This could be your meditation or a dance warmup, a series of stretches, etc. Pick a piece of music you'll listen to whenever you sit down to do this or have a particular scent of incense you put on. For the spiritual out there, this ritual will help prepare you for the work you're about to do and focus your mind on the task at hand. For the scientific folk out there, this is classical conditioning: you're setting triggers to put your mind into a state of focus and eliminating outside distractions.
   
   
4. Structure your practice around your goals. Want to integrate gunslingers into your flow? Try for one week to get ten spirals and ten meteor weaves every single day, then next week up the ante and practice the transitions between a flower and these moves ten times. Want to work on your dance/flow? Set aside 10-20 minutes to just spin to music and explore the space around you. Some days you'll be on and make lots of progress and some days it'll feel like you're backsliding or hitting your head against the wall. Both are important to the learning process.
   
   
5. Define your overarching goals. What is it you want to do with poi? Do you want to have a fun physical hobby, perform with it, get into the tech world, etc? Figuring out what attracts you to the art will help you focus your energies on practicing those skills that are most in line with what you enjoy. Also be prepared that you may discover something in the course of your practice and experience that changes this dramatically. Reevaluate it every 4-6 months or so.
   
   
6. Learn to love the plateau. We love getting new tricks. We love the excitement of novelty--and it's really bad for us. It teaches us to value the temporary over building in the long-term. Mastery is a lifelong journey where the goal becomes subsumed more and more by the experience of getting there as time goes on. Plateaus are important because they allow you to refine the things you've just learned and polish them into a more beautiful form. It is inevitable that you will spend the majority of your time in the flow arts on a plateau of some sort or another, so the more you make your peace with it early, the easier that journey will become.
   
   
7. Become comfortable with solo practice. All the research we have on mastering skills at this point indicates that it takes thousands of hours of deliberate solo practice to become a virtuoso at a given skill. Spinning with people is fun and you will learn new things, but the majority of the progress you'll make will be on your own. This is harder for some people to adapt to than others, but it is an essential part of the journey (unless, of course, your goal is to become a virtuoso at partner poi ;)
   
   
8. If possible, find a good teacher/coach. A good teacher will push you when you need to be pushed, challenge you in ways you never thought possible, and guide you to becoming the best possible poi spinner that you can become. Sadly, this tends to be a luxury as good teachers in the flow arts world are extremely hard to find, but if you're able to find a good one make every use of their services.
   
   Good luck with your journey! It's been one of the greatest I've embarked on in my adult life :)
   
   Here are some books I would recommend on the topic:
   
   Mastery by George Leonard (talks a lot about mindset and learning to love the plateau)
   
   Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin (gives a lot of pointers when it comes to deliberate practice)
   
   So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport (lots of counterintuitive but useful info on developing skills)
   
   The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle (lots of great info about what to look for in a good coach/teacher)

Sorry for taking a bit to get back to you, had to wait out a temp suspension because apparently I'm a jerk. Never be afraid or sorry to ask a question. The worse that can happen is someone won't answer or will get upset. Neither of these are bad.

It was actually more in total to pay off but that's the high point of the debt. What changed for me was over the course of a few years I went from making ~30K/yr to making over 100K/yr and not inflating my lifestyle. Which begs the question, how did that happen right?

It's completely reproducible, believe me I am not super special, but it did require a lot of planning and working towards a goal and quite a bit of luck. Some suggestions on how to make more money.

• Move if you can to somewhere with better prospects for higher pay. The absolute best way to do this is to have a crappy commute from a low paying area to a higher paying area. It's a kind of arbitrage. Just make sure you consider your commuting time as part of your overall pay. If it doesn't make sense dollar wise, don't do it. I've got a mostly telecommuting job now.
  
  
• Make yourself invaluable to your employer or customer. If you're working for an employer and doing more than is asked, document that and bring your achievements up when it's time for a raise. If you're self employed, do not undersell your worth. Make sure you take into account the Pareto principle and focus on the customers that make you the most money for the least amount of effort. You're working to live, not living to work.
  
• Get better at finances. Since you're here, I'm going to assume you've got a handle on the software part. YNAB is great, but it's not meant to be a complete tool. You need to know how to work with spreadsheets, and learn the basic math behind compound interest, interest rates, etc so that you can make them work for you.
  
  Listen I could, and probably should, write a book on going from dirt poor to comfortable. There are a ton of excellent resources out there. I'll list them here for you. I'm pretty sure I'm done with Reddit after this suspension deal (I only came back because I wanted to answer you :)) but I'll PM you some contact details if you're really interested. You can ping me any time you've got a question or even just for moral support. :)
  
  List of (what I think are) excellent resources:
  
  ^Note: ^I ^have ^used ^all ^of ^these
  
  

  Finance
  

  Radical Personal Finance - Excellent financial information. If you're Christian you will probably really love this guy. If you're not, it comes up a lot, but the information really is just amazing.
  
  The Millionaire Fastlane - This guy comes off as such a mook or a wiseguy, especially in the audiobook, but I've never heard someone explain why passive income is so important better. This is a self made guy who lays out how he made his money.
  
  Early Retirement Extreme - It's basically just his blog in book format, but it goes into how the numbers work. Maybe you aren't as extreme, but if you want to go extreme, this is an excellent guidepost.
  
  

  Personal Improvement
  

  
  Saylor Academy - Free education with an opportunity to get an inexpensive degree, or certificates. If you're an autodidact this place goes through some great courses.
  
  Ramit Sethi - This course is more than just finance it's how to save money, negotiate better wages, get better rates, and basically how to restructure your thinking to understand your own worth.

It's a good question - a lot of people just assume they can't ever be rich.

No you don't need to get a degree. You don't need to get a high-paying job. You don't need to be Elon Musk unless we're talking billionaire rich.

Making money is about delivering value at scale. Either deliver a little bit of value to a lot of people, or deliver a lot of value to a few people. Or do both to rake it in - but this is usually harder.

The most accessible way to deliver value at scale is by building a business.

You also need to figure out why you want to be rich and what kind of rich. Do you want to build a massive empire and make hundreds of millions or does making a couple of million a year and getting to travel whenever you want sound better?

The basic steps are pretty simple. You've got to start by reprogramming your brain a fair bit. Rich people - especially entrepreneurs, don't think about the world in the same way as most people do. More on how to do this later.

After that you'll want to start exploring the opportunities open to you at the moment. There are lots of business models you can replicate and do really well with - you don't need to start completely from scratch and build something the world has never seen before. You would not believe the ridiculously niched business models people make stupid money from. Example - I know a guy who built an online health and safety testing form for oil rig workers that was making $20,000 a month.

When you're starting out it's a good idea to keep things simple and use it as a way to build your skills. You don't want to be trying to build the next Facebook while trying to learn the basics of business. You're probably not as smart as Mark Zuckerberg.

The point is you have to keep learning and learning and learning. You know the business section of the book store you've probably never looked at? Pick the right books and you can pretty much learn anything.

You've been fed a lot of bullshit your whole life - so you need to read:

BOOKS FOR REPROGRAMMING YOUR HEAD

• The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
  It's pretty incredible how many successful people I've spoken to in the last few years have said something along the lines of "well it all started when I read the 4-Hour Work Week...". This is a great book that will give you a huge mindset adjustment and also a bunch of practical ideas and case studies of what you can do.
  
  
• The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ Demarco Yeah the book title sucks. But it's gold. MJ has quite a different approach to Tim Ferriss - so that's why I put it here. It's good to get multiple perspectives. The first hundred or so pages rip traditional thinking on wealth as well as guru advice to pieces - it's pretty funny.
  
  
• The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason This is a quick and easy read but it's got some great core lessons.
  
  Those will give you a good start. Once you've picked something to work on, you'll want to start reading up on learning sales, mindset, strategy, mindset, business management, mindset and some more mindset. If you jump in you'll quickly find the hardest thing about business is usually dealing with yourself.
  
  Hit me up if you take action on this and I'll be happy to recommend where to go next :)
  
  

I'm trying to be more on the SEO/IM side of things for my own personal affiliate sites so in my opinion, the best way to learn is trial and error. I put a bunch of things online and see how they do and then test and adjust. That being said, I do use a fair few other things to try and boost my knowledge.

YouTube

Steven Bartlett
24 year old owner of a successful social media marketing company in the UK, vlogs his daily life and shares a few nuggets now and then.

Valuetainment
Based on an Iranian immigrant to the USA, not 100% on his back history but the way he talks about the immigrant fire to earn money I am pretty sure he went there with little to nothing in his pocket. Judging by his house, cars and life style he has did very well. He has kind of diluted the channel recently in my opinion though by letting other people make videos for him.

Gary Vaynerchuk
Pretty much owns the entrepreneur vlogging space right now. He seems the type of guy where you either love him or hate him. Personally, I like his no BS approach of giving people reality checks on what it really takes to be an entrepreneur rather than posting photos on Instagram of a nice life.

Podcasts

How I Built This
He basically interviews a bunch of CEO/MD types of massive successful businesses. It's not really a how to type of thing but I enjoy listening to how people got their projects off the ground and I have picked up a fair few things from it.

Indie Hackers
Only recently found thing one but so far so good.

Black Hearted
I'm a bit of a fan boy when it comes to these guys to be honest, they are US military vets who now own a number of successful businesses and they get other vets on the podcast who also own their own businesses and talk about them. Its not just focused on business though but I love the military humor and get it done attitude of them.

Reading

I update this post with all of the books I have read but here are my top picks.

Zero To One
The first book that I couldn't put down until I completed it. Picked a fair few things up from it as well as a bunch of things I hope to move forward with in the future with startups.

The 33 Strategies of War
Not a business book but definitely my style if you take the examples and strategies and turn them into business. This is the second book I have not been able to put down once picking it up.

The E-Myth Revisited
Although I had a decent understanding of how to allocate duties to people depending on their job role this helped me better understand it as well as the importance of doing it.

ReWork
Another book I loved, just introduced me to a bunch of new concepts with a fair few I hope to use in the future.

Black Box Thinking
Coming from and engineering background I was already used to being ok with my failures provided I was learning from them but this book is based around how different industries treat failure and how it is important to accept it and grow from it.

The 50th Law
Currently reading it but so far i'm loving it. Never realized how much crap 50 cent had to go through and I love Robert Greene's work so I can see my classing this as a tier one book.

Aw! <3

Like, what books I'd recommend, or just....stuff to do underway that would be in the self-improvement area? The big two that jump out as underway activities are always "save money, and work out."

What platform are you floating on?

So the first thing I do with all my proteges is I hand them the grading sheet for Sailor of the Year/Quarter and a blank evaluation, and I ask them to grade themselves. Not everyone wants to be, or needs to be, Sailor of the Year or a 5.0 sailor, but if that's the standard the Navy has set as "the best," then at least we have a guideline of what we should be working toward, right?

One thing that was pretty big at my last command was the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal. Instruction here. One thing that is a really easy way to gain community service hours while underway is to make blankets for the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society's "Budgeting For Baby" class. You can crochet (that's incredibly easy, I promise) or you can google one of the thousand DIY no-sew blanket tutorials. If you belong to a Bluejacket Association or Enlisted Association or whatever, you may be able to get them to fund the cost of buying the material...or even ask the FCPOA if they'll give $50 to the cause. You can head over to Jo-Ann's or Fabric.com and check out their discount sections too. NMCRS offers 30 hours per blanket. Taking an hour out of your Holiday Routine for the entire float.....most of the DIY no-sew blankets only take an hour or two to make, sooooo. Collect those hours. Add in a COMREL or two, and there's no reason you can't end a float with over a hundred hours of community service. This is particularly great if you have a friend or two to make blankets with you....snag one of the TVs on the messdecks and watch a movie while you crochet. You can also contact a local homeless shelter and see if they need hats and crochet hats for them. Obviously not a good suggestion if you're stuck underway on a submarine with no space, but if you're surface side--good to go.

Books I'd suggest, well, hm, this could get out of control pretty fast, but off the top of my head:

• Personality Plus by Florence Littauer or her work specific version
  
  
• Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
  
  
• It's Your Ship by Capt Abrashoff
  
  
• Starship Troopers
  
  
• Ender's Game (Ender and Starship are obviously straight scifi but there are some really awesome leadership principles/concepts/ideas that are worth mulling over. They've both been on past CNO's recommended reading lists too....and they're just fun to read.)
  
  
• For money, while, like, 99% of his stuff is "Duh!" I can't discount the practical steps he outlines, so Dave Ramsey's books, particularly Financial Peace is worth reading. His whole book is basically the wiki in r/personalfinance, but if you're wondering how to get your finances straight I recommend picking up this book. Just, in general. Good basic information and a starting point. Not saying you need it, but "saving money" just happens underway by virtue being trapped out on the ocean =)
  
  
• Leaders Eat Last

Just by making this post you have already taken the first step. I wish I could have recognized everything you posted at your age. I was pretty much the same, playing halo 3 and cod 4 and never really studying for tests. I got a decent grade on my SAT and got into an okay state school. But if I had the habits I have now when I was a sophomore I honestly could have gotten into an ivy or a top tier school. It's no use looking to the past in regret, because if I didn't do so poorly early on, I might have never decided to change my life for the better.


So you have this desire to improve yourself but you have to make this a burning desire. You have to really, really want to be the best version of yourself. Otherwise you will dabble in changing your life for a week but end up going back to your old habits. Close your eyes and visualize yourself being ranked in the top ten of your class academically. Visualize your self getting into an ivy, reading the classics, and becoming a great programmer. Really feel how good this things will be. See your parents proud of you and your friends awestruck. It's important to do this as it makes you release those feel good endorphin's. These endorphin's will override your feelings of apathy and laziness.

So now moving on to practical things in no specific order:

• Watch these series of lectures: harvard positive psychology
  
  
• Get a journal and write down your specific goals. BY HAND. Don't type this up.
  
  
• Read up on mindfulness
  
  
• Workout
  
  
• Sleep 9 hours a night. Don't be up playing video games all night, don't use your tv, laptop, or cell phone 2 hours before bed. Take this time to read. When you regularly sleep 9 hours a night your mind becomes clear and your body fresh.
  
  
• For video games, limit the time you spend on them to no more than an hour a day. If it doesn't work then try cutting them out completely. It is often easier to remove a negative habit than attempt to moderate it. When you get the urge to play them do another pleasurable activity. Workout, talk to girls, read a book.. etc
  
  *I read this article: read to lead and have devoured books ever since. I usually read a 2:1 nonfiction to fiction ratio. Start with harry potter and work your way up lol.
  
  
• School wise nothing helped more than cal new ports book
  
  
• A lot of the things in the book may seem really obvious to a person who already has good habits. But I wasn't one of those guys. Once I applied his organizational strategies, my GPA went from a 2.9 to a 3.7 a semester later.
  
  
• For programming head over to r/learnprogramming and they'll help you out. It's important not to get paralyzed with all the information. Don't get caught up with all the different options. Just pick a language (i'd go python) and start learning it.
  
  Keep in mind that all the resources are out there waiting for you to use them. This is actually the easy part. The knowledge has always been out there. Applying this knowledge daily is what will change your life. View your mind as a muscle and every time you don't play videogames, you are strengthening it. Every time you finish and entire book you are strengthening it.

>when I move onto the next chunk either the next day or the next hour as I'm learning the new content the old fades away

It's important to apply different learning techniques to different types of material. You can't effectively study literature in the same way you study math. Figuring out which strategies work best for different topics, specifically for you, is a trial-and-error process. Others might be able to provide more specific insights, but I would also suggest trying to integrate new material into your existing knowledge. Rote memorization is sometimes necessary, but you'll never retain information learned through that method unless you find a way to add significance to it.

In some subjects, this process might occur almost effortlessly. When studying history, for example, learning new information that (perhaps subtly) changes the way you view the world allows you to apply your knowledge without much conscious effort. Other subjects, like math, may require more deliberate effort (i.e. consistent practice) before new knowledge is fully integrated into your existing understanding of the subject. You'll need to figure out what specific efforts you need to make in order to successfully apply and integrate new knowledge in different subjects.

You won't remember things that aren't significant to you, for the most part, so figuring out how to make information matter, at some level, is helpful. I don't mean that everything you learn has to be life-changing, but you should try to find a way to make new material seem at least mildly interesting (this often occurs naturally as you start to really understand the material). It's even better if you can make it useful in some way. Rote memorization might work for a test the next day, but you won't remember that material in the long run unless you're able to integrate it into your existing knowledge and apply it in some way.

>And on the topic of developing my comfort of less "immediately-rewarding tasks" how would I even do that?

As someone else mentioned, part of the challenge here may be (at least superficially) dopamine-related. I'm not diagnosing you with ADHD - what I'm referring to is our modern (technological) world of instant gratification. Video games, reddit, TV (news channels, commercials, short video clips in general), and even food (fast food + pre-made microwavable meals) help to condition us away from tasks that require sustained effort (like studying) without providing immediate and rewarding feedback.

To become more comfortable performing tasks like those, you have to both make the tasks easier (i.e. take regular breaks, use the most efficient methods for each specific task, etc.) and decrease your need for instant gratification. In regard to the latter recommendation, I would suggest limiting instantly-gratifying activity, in general, and confining it to specific places and times. You need to make instant gratification the exception, not the rule. You don't need to give up video games, but plan time for playing video games like you plan study sessions. A big part of doing that successfully lies in reducing temptation, examples of which could include not studying next to where you game or keeping your phone (and reddit) out of site while studying.

Hope that helps. There's a lot of information on learning strategies out there, but it can be hard to find and dissect. I've heard good things about Cal Newport's book on studying, so that's an additional resource you could check out if it interests you.

Unpaid internships are essentially slave labor, or at least indentured servitude. That's a terrible idea.

I'm not sure what you would describe as your dreams, so I'll give you a possible alternative track for a possible set of goals that may or may not coincide with yours.

Let's say your goal is to get a well paying job and have a reasonably deep understanding of physics. Perhaps you'd also like that job to be intellectually stimulating. Here's a rough outline of what you could do to accomplish that:

-------------------------------------------
Before college

You're in 7th grade. First step, use this collection of links on efficient study habits to destroy and master your school work (check out Anki, too). At minimum, treat school like a day job. (Hopefully you'll have great teachers that teach you a love of learning and a value for a well-rounded educational base that includes the sciences, arts, and humanities.) Do all the exercises from Khan Academy from the beginning to fill any gaps in your knowledge and use sites like PatrickJMT, Paul's Online Math Notes, BetterExplained, and MIT OCW Scholar to supplement school and KA. Also, read these two books.

Once you've got school under control and are getting the most of what's available to you through that avenue, use the Art of Problem Solving Books to get a vastly deeper understanding of precollege mathematics. I'd say it should be a higher priority than learning calculus early in terms of ROI, but you can learn it if you want to.

See if you can find a group near you to train for a Math Olympiad or similar competition (like the ones listed on AoPS). Aim for the gold, but realize that it's unlikely and the real prize is how the training will bring up your mathematical maturity so you can tackle evermore challenging problems, concepts, and subjects.

Also, use sites like Coursera, edx, and Udacity to teach yourself programming. Once you've got a reasonable handle on programming, check out a site like Topcoder and maybe try to compete in the Coding Olympiad. Also, mess around with a Raspberry Pi.

You could also check out any big research universities or even decent state schools in your area. They often have youth outreach like summer camps for kids who love math to come and learn things not usually taught in schools. You could also see if there are any researchers willing to take on a hard working and science-loving high school student for a research project (this is how most of the winners of Intel science competitions get their start).

------------------------------------------------------
College (Undergrad)

If you've done the first paragraph of the previous section alone, you should be able to get into any top 20 program in the country without any trouble. Chances are you'll be competitive for most Ivies and top 10 programs. Do any of the stuff beyond the first paragraph, and you'll be a shoe-in with a huge advantage over the overwhelming majority of college applicants in the country. The link about scholarships in my earlier comment will guarantee that you get a free ride. Also, read this book.

So now you want job security and financial security. Any sort of engineering would do, but I think you'd be more interested in computer science so let's say you do that and double major in physics.

Every summer you do paid internships for CS at various software firms for work experience. This will be the best way to make sure you are extremely hireable after graduation for lucrative positions with interesting work as a software engineer. That's Plan B.

For physics, you find a lab that does interesting work and start doing undergraduate research. You might change labs a few times to find a better fit. You might stick with the first one until graduation. Doesn't really matter as long as you gain real research experience.

You also study your ass of for the Physics GRE from your first semester. A few hours per week you do problems from old tests from subjects as you learn them. As in, do mechanics problems your first semester, do mechanics and E&M problems your second semester, do mechanics and E&M and thermo and optics problems your third semester, etc. (This may be different depending on how your school organizes its physics curriculum.)

You talk to your advisors and grad students and fellow students and professors about applying to grants and graduate school. They'll be able to give you actual advice tailored to your situation.

Either in the spring of your junior year or the fall of your senior year, you take the GREs and apply to graduate programs in areas that interest you and apply to grants to fund you and wait for the offers to return. Assuming you've followed my advice, at least some of them will contain acceptance letters with details of stipends. More than likely all the acceptance letters will include stipends you can live off of.

If you just get rejected, you'll at least have a BS-worth of physics knowledge and have experienced real research and can go off and enjoy your well-paid life solving interesting problems as a software engineer.

Or you can try and get a job at a national lab somewhere putting your physics background and programming chops to work and just apply again another year while saving up more money.

And all of this was debt free because you had the forsight in high school to apply to hundreds of scholarships.

------------------------------

Also, read this thread on what it takes to kick ass at MIT. The post and the ensuing discussion should drive home what you could train yourself to become. (I think the reply by the twin is particularly enlightening.)

You can either shoot for the stars and hit the moon, or you can read magazine articles about gravity on the moon.

If you want an actual non-prax answer, Picketty's C21 is where to go. If you want to be spared 700 pages of pain, here is a toy model to explain it:

We can simplify this and say that social mobility depends on one's "rank" in an ordered list of all individuals in a given society. Of course, social rank doesn't just depend on wealth (there are other measures of influence) but wealth is a decent proxy to start.

How much income does one make in his own lifetime? That depends really on what you do to earn wealth. If you work for a wage, then you won't have much income variance, and you can expect to make anywhere between half and ~3.5x the US median income (~55k/household). If you make income from capital revenue or entrepreneurship (investing, startup) then your revenue is a function of your investment decision and your luck.

Sidebar: Luck is by far and away the bigger factor here, without question. If you need to conceive this, think about the biggest startup successes in the last few years and think where success in picture messaging or social networking apps' successes are created (the answer is luck, because of network effects). There is varying amounts of variance in investment or entrepreneurship decisions (of course a bond is going to be lower variance than a tech startup), but luck by far is the bigger factor nonetheless in any of these. Recommendations if you need additional convincing 1 2 3.

Now Picketty's whole point about r>g is that if capital revenue is greater than economic growth (which should roughly index wages as per gdp/pop) then there will be social immobility, because returns to capital will far outpace wages (and you have the conundrum of acquiring capital in the first place if you aren't born with some eg. by inheritance).

But even if r~g you would get significant immobility at the upper echelons, because getting to that place requires a significant amount of luck. You can see this in income distribution graphs which follow roughly exponential distributions. So if you let people inherit hundreds of millions or billions, then you have created an impenetrable, self sustaining, static class at the top of your income ranking for all intents and purposes, because getting to this class from below is only attainable by effectively winning the lottery regardless of your skill.

Having to win the lottery to move up is not what we would consider "social mobility". Note that I'm not making policy proposals here, just stating that if you let people inherit wealth you're going to create social immobility, and increasingly so as you move up the ordered list. Make of that what you will.

Do you have an undergraduate degree already? If not, I was under the impression that GI Bill only helps you with one degree. Considering an MBA requires you have an undergrad degree to apply and be accepted.. if you don't have that undergrad degree now, don't expect the government to pay. I could be talking out my ass on that though.


"Survive comfortable" will depend largely on the school and location. Private school vs public school, city vs college town. Further thoughts I have here... The price tag on your education does not entirely translate to value. Look at the school's brand and student/faculty base. The education is important, but you are paying largely to be a part of the 'network'. Some networks are more respected than others, and some are more helpful and readily willing to offer jobs to one another.


I don't know what your living situation has been like while you've been in but if it has been the barracks life with restrictive rules be weary of once you come out and get that freedom to do as you please back. While I don't mean you deny yourself certain pleasures, just don't go crazy. I'm sure you know how it is to be on leave with all that pay sitting in the bank... just waiting for you to get home and play with it.


What was your job in the military? What did you think of that job? Is it something you could see yourself doing for a career? You stand in a strong position if it is something more technically oriented, or science based. You've got something a lot of college students around you won't have. EXPERIENCE! If you can expand on to the educational part of the field you stand to be in a great position out of school. And on that note, look at getting a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. This as an undergrad and later augmented with an MBA would give you a strong bridge to the business side if it something you'd desire later on.


And here's a book I wish would've came out before I went college, hah. So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport TLDR - Find your passion is bad advice and potentially detrimental. People love what they do when they're good at it.


Hope this was helpful and sorry if it sounds more like a ramble. Just two cents from a 23 year old that has been out of school for a year

Edit: Continue to stay away from debt.

Before we talk about girls, let's talk about you. "Alpha" men don't exist, it's a mindset anyone can have.

"I get awkward as fuck in social gatherings and would rather just spend my time by myself." -- This indicates to me that this should be your area of focus. Force yourself into awkward situations until they aren't awkward anymore. Your emotional immune system is a muscle, you need to flex it. I argue that success is the 80/20 rule, 80% social skills, and 20% intelligence/knowledge in the field.

A book to help:
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Eat-Alone-Secrets-Relationship/dp/0385512058

Think of it has a game. You're awkward in social situations because either you're not turning it into a game and you don't know the rules, or you're too concerned about what people will think about what you say. If you're genuinely just really bad at talking to people, take the former perspective and start reading books on influencing people or becoming a good story teller: http://www.dangerandplay.com/2014/07/28/how-to-tell-interesting-stories/. Then start executing them in situations. Force yourself into meetups for things you like.

Also, RSDTyler has some really good videos recently about all of this. Check out his youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD4xqm6vJ3K4ntppsE1jL4g

Check out TRT too: http://www.dangerandplay.com/trt-testosterone-replacement-therapy/

Reminder: You have a need to be loved, for emotional connection, etc. You DON'T need this specific girl for this, but she can meet your needs IF YOU'RE SETTING EXPECTATIONS for the relationship.

Before I got into my current LTR with a really RP woman, I asked her where it was going. I expressed my needs, and got hers. I set expectations, but remained as confident as I could with "outcome independence" as some call it. This might be unattractive to some women, but REALLY attractive to some. I don't like people wasting my time, so I started doing this. I can get a random hookup if I want to get laid, I don't concern myself with what a girl thinks about how I set expectations for a LTR. They want it or they don't, period. "I'm the catch" mindset helps here.

See, love goes away. Once the initial rush of a relationship is gone, if you two cannot meet eachother's needs, than the relationship falls apart. Just like you couldn't meet your X's sexual needs while you were deployed. She had someone else meet that need.

It's hard, and you might risk losing this girl. She may say "I'm just looking for something for the next few years, then I'm planning on moving to X, etc" (filling her need for a fuck or emotional connection). Are you willing to move with her or not? Are you sure you'd like to follow and not lead? Is she willing to sacrifice her goals in life to settle down and have a family with you? If she can't meet your needs, why keep her around? There are PLENTY of other girls out there that can meet your needs.

I'd argue that girls don't realize that they aren't going to be happy pursuing their goals in life that aren't related to having kids and raising happy and healthy kids. Getting a nursing degree, sure, go for it babe. But at the end of the day, I'm going to want kids in the future and you better be ready to drop EVERYTHING for us to do that. Again, "love" is relative and meaningless in the long term. You can either show her over time by being a really confident leader (alpha), or find someone that wants to have kids and stuff right now and not waste your time. The former is in my opinion not the right option.

Write down a list of YOUR needs. Narrow them down to their root needs. For example, you don't have a need for X to love you, you have a need for LOVE (ignore the fact that love is subjective for this example). Or take it further and write you have a need for physical closeness or trust with someone instead of "love". That you consider that to be part of love as it makes you feel good. Regardless of length, get it down on paper or in Evernote. If you're not willing to confront this new girl with your list of needs and ask her for hers, than just observe her actions and figure out her needs on your own (this wastes time, and it seems like you've spent plenty of time already on girls). If she's not right, MOVE ON. It sucks, I totally get it. But at the end of the day you are still the "gorilla", just smarter and more motivated/clear with intent.

Summary: Focus on you, your needs, and stop looking for a magic pill or the right advice from other men. Figure out what YOU want in life, and be a man that sets expectations and leads the direction of his life.

TLDR: Your experience of musicians is shaped by their performance to you, which they know is necessary to get ahead. You are not truly an "insider" to their world, largely because its mostly a boys club. Rather, you are a resource who can only be utilized if musicians make you like them. This is why you are being told and shown the things you want to hear.

Having toured in many bands and occasionally rolled in some fairly high profile circles as well, this aligns a lot with my experiences. However, the key here is that I find your experience of these guys believable, but I am also aware there is a different reality you have not, will not, and are not supposed to experience. Touring music is largely a boys club, especially rock and hip hop. Even at the low level, musicians are performers, and part of that performance is appealing to the audience down to the micro level. That includes appealing to people like you, who would be appalled by a lot of the private conversations I'm sure the nice sweet alphas you meet have. The top musicians would not be where they are if they failed to follow one of the crucial 48 laws of Power: think as you like, but act like others. This book is massively popular within the hip hop community to the point where Roberte Greene even wrote a book about 50 cent. Greene's work, especially 48 laws, is the heart and soul of true redpill imo.

My point here is that a lot of what you are experiencing is a performance unto itself. As u/Atlas_B_Shruggin has said, artists and musicians are often "show ponies" lol.

>Again, this might be just my theory, but it seems like, if you don't HATE women, like TRP does, you don't feel threatened by feminity, you also don't mind women being independent and completely liberated.

No shit, who but a liberated, "independent" woman would fuck an unshowered, unshaven, broke ass dude who lives in a van 8 months out of the year, knowing full well this will only last one night because he is constantly on the road? Also, the feminism these dudes are often encountering is the "sex positive" kind that benefits them because like you said, they are attractive and cannot meaningfully offer commitment.

>All over the internet you read that "a rejection is not a rejection" and that you have to push a girl till she gives up.

Tons of band dudes have this mentality, but it doesn't mean pester an obviously uninterested girl or literally tear her clothes off. It means if you get a no, deescalate and build more comfort before trying again. Lost track of how many t imes I've had to explain this. It's really not a tough concept.

>I explained I'm not interested in sex outside of a relationship, it was met with a complete understanding (and it was one of the guys of the "smoking hot rock star" type too).

A) you got lucky, this could have gone much worse
B) this guy DGAF's because he knows there's other pussy out there, he may have even gotten laid that same day before or after you.

>Once you are really attractive, you don't have to use tricks to become a center of attention.

LOL performance is ALL tricks to become the center of attention. Great performers have simply internalized them one way or the other. You think a good puppeteer lets you see the strings?

>As for said partners, often they are really pretty girls, but - an interesting fact - some musicians pick girls/women who are by no means considered physically attractive, but have certain achievements in their (usually artistic) field.

This happens sometimes, but those girls are almost always getting cheated on with the type of girl you think they don't want for some mind blowing reason. Their gfs are often even aware of it and don't care. Some of them even have another sidepiece, often for weird reasons like not liking to have to sleep alone while their man is on the road, which he usually is. Musicians have unspoken "open" relationships sometimes, with the dude cheating for variety of ONS and the girl having one consistent back burner dude for emotional intimacy/companionship/sex while he's gone.

>I suppose once you have a confidence of a rock star, you don't feel the need to show off that you are able to get a super hot teen babe, huh?

Once again, I am truly mind blown about female projection here. Women simply cannot accept that the motivation for fucking/dating teen babes is almost purely physical pleasure and showing off is a secondary benefit if at all. Women date men to show off status, men date women to fuck a good looking body.

I've known all types of musicians. Ultimately, band dudes are the scum of the earth and should be avoided by women looking for long term commitment and a family. Yes there are exceptions, but chances are you are just enjoying the performance ;)

EDIT: One last example I'll add is the recent wave of outrage at Warped Tour pop punk bands over the last few years. A huge amount of their fan base comes from tumblr, which of course has the unspoken assumption of feminism being a part of their bands views, so of course the bands champion this cause. Then, inevitably, almost every band has a scandal of some girl leaking screen shots of some band member scamming on 15 year old smokin hot jailbait, and the scene goes berzerk as though this hasn't been par for the course on Warped Tour since its inception. The difference is the audience now has evidence of it that can spread in a viral manner, and are mad that their perception of the band was obviously inaccurate.

Don't let it loom over you.

Unless you're going to blow all the money you inherit, it probably shouldn't change your life plans much.

I'd expect you're going to finish school and maybe go to uni. You've probably always expected to get a job and, in about 10 years time, think about buying a house.

Given the value of the estate, your third is enough to buy a flat or a house, but it's not enough for you to be able to quit working (well, if you do you'll run out of money in 10 or 20 years, at most).

This money gives you a little security and flexibility, but it doesn't fundamentally change your life plans, I don't think. If you leave it invested for the next 40 years, with compounded returns, then it'll probably ensure a comfortable retirement (but you should probably still top it up, anyway, to make sure and to cultivate good financial habits).

I think you should try to be as grown up as possible about managing the probate period - a solicitor, for example, would help you ensure that your uncle and grandfather are fairly assessing the value of his share of the business. For all you know he owns a 50% share of a £10,000,000 business - how do you know they're not fobbing you off with just a fraction of it? My solicitor was a godsend - very helpful and insightful and she filled me with confidence at a very difficult time; I encourage your mum to call her if you haven't yet decided upon one.

Having got that side of things out of the way, just chill about the money and don't let it worry you too much. You can't afford to blow it, so you'll need to stick it somewhere safe and leave it for a long time.

Subscribe to /r/UKPersonalFinance and try to read a post or two there every day - ask questions there about anything you don't understand. Buy a copy of Tim Hale's Smarter Investing and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life. You don't need to read them all at once, but they're pretty easy reading and you can dip in to them from time to time.

I think you should be planning to learn more about finance over the next year or two, so that you know the best way to save (well, invest, really) this money.

Hit against the wall until you hit forearm muscle failure. Concentrate on hitting as many as you can in a row without stopping. (It's easier to do this if you go closer to the wall and hit softly). If you get bored and want to hit with your brother, play mini tennis. Try to play within the service boxes only and just rally back and forth, trying to get the longest rallies possible. Proper footwork and watching the ball are important to keep in mind.

Watch some videos on how to hit topsin and proper backhand form too. It will be hard for your body to produce it consistently before getting used to using the muscles required for tennis, so keep things slow. At the very beginning I wouldn't worry too much about hitting things with too much spin. Just try to get a feel for how the ball bounces on the court, where you need to be standing to hit it, and which way your racquet is facing when you make contact. Make small adjustments to these things until you start to feel more comfortable moving around and at least being able to rally a little.

It might also be a good idea to try practicing serving. Watch some videos on proper form, but don't try to do anything fancy. Your body hasn't really gotten the muscle memory for tennis yet.

I don't mention playing matches with your brother because I know how miserable it can be when no ones serves are going in and no rallies are happening. You're pretty much just walking around the court calling out the score. If you want to do some kind of competition with him do who can hit the ball more times in a row or who can hit a certain spot the most times, stuff like that. You could also play points in mini tennis just feeding the ball as a serve and going back and forth like that, using normal scoring or playing to 21 something like that.

If you want some reading, I'd recommend The inner game of tennis (https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314). He talks a lot about intuitive tennis. He gives examples of how he applied it to his coaching. I think it is a good resource if you are wondering how to learn. Not a lot of technical instruction, but if you want that you can get it from videos or by taking some lessons.

Another good book is Winning Ugly (https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Ugly-Mental-Warfare-Tennis-Lessons/dp/067188400X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500784652&sr=1-1&keywords=winning+ugly). I'd say save this for when you start playing matches in tournament or league play though. It doesn't really have a lot to do with learning tennis, but it is an interesting insight on what to think about when you are playing a match to increase your chances of winning.

The best thing to do for your tennis though is to make tennis friends. Everything above are things you can do on your own or with your brother. Try to find a club with weekly tennis events or just talk to people you see around the court. Some places have group lessons that aren't too expensive. Once you can serve without double faulting too much and are able to have short rallies, you can also join a 2.5 league or sign up for a tournament. Some clubs even have ball machines you can rent for free or for a small fee once you are a member. Ball machines are great for trying to practice a specific stroke or shot because you will get consistent feeds and can see where your ball is going on the other side of the court.

If you aren't being facetious... start with these books:

• The Compassionate Life, by Marc Ian Barasch
  
  
• Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi.
  
  
• Anger, by Thich Nhat Hanh.
  
  These are all easy books to blow off. You can dismiss The Compassionate Life as a guidebook for letting other people take advantage of you. You can dismiss Never Eat Alone as the egotistical scrambling of a sleazy salesman. You can dismiss Anger as a hand-wavey tome of feel good nonsense. If you're tempted to do so, I urge you to suspend your judgment and pour yourself into them. Here's why:
  
  From Anger, I learned not to let my fear of feeling and sharing emotions prevent me from opening myself up to other people. The book is about anger, but it applies to everything: jealousy, fear, anxiety, confusion, even joy. It taught me to treat my negative feelings as a part of myself that deserved compassion and nurturing just like anything or anyone else I care about.
  
  From Never Eat Alone, I learned the value of trust and openness. The point of "networking" isn't to collect business cards and shine your teeth at people; it's to establish an extended family of people who you genuinely care about, and thus, through inevitable cause and effect, who genuinely care about you. You don't have to be married to someone or see them every day to love and care about them. You just have to treat them like a human being, and not hide the truth of your human-ness out of fear of being judged.
  
  Finally, from The Compassionate Life, I learned that I'm not the only one walking this path. It gave me the determination to continue walking, even in the face of judgment, ridicule, and skepticism from many people around me. It solidified my hunch that, in the right hands, compassion is a great strength, and not a weakness. It helped me learn to forgive myself and others, even for what felt like irrecoverable wounds or betrayals. More than that, it helped me learn from those wounds, and it helped me learn from the forgiveness. It gave me strength.
  
  That's all I've got for the moment!

Do you have an edge? You mention you've been trading for 2 years, so I'll assume you do (but its ok if you haven't nailed it down).

Basically, you just take your edge, write it into python (or whichever language you want) and get it to generate a buy, sell or close signal. Once you have that down, just use an exchange's API to place your orders.

I do have a channel dedicated to this stuff, but at this point I think you're probably a bit more advanced than total beginner, it still might help you out though :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nX4YEcTJlc

>what to learn/focus on & recommended resources: math, programming, strategy creation?

For me I've found that, programming wise, its never really that complicated. Sure, if you're going to be using some ML or advanced data analysis or something you might need to sharpen your programming but at least for me, the best resources I found had to do with market psychology and understanding the broader markets and trading in general. Some books I can recommend there are:

Trading in the Zone, By Mark Douglas - https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Zone-Confidence-Discipline-Attitude/dp/0735201447

Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb - https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-Incerto/dp/0812975219/ref=sr_1_1?crid=13LH3VBFX62OH

Skin in the Game, by Nassim Taleb - https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X/

Algos to Live By, by Brian Christian - https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions/dp/1250118360/

A Short History of Financial Euphoria, by John Galbraith - https://www.amazon.com/History-Financial-Euphoria-Penguin-Business/dp/0140238565/

>process beginning to go live: collect data, write code, test code, start trading?

In simplest terms (this is how I do it), get data via websocket, feed it into your algo, have the algo generate signals, use (write) another program to use those signals to trade. I find splitting up the risk management, buy, sell and close into different parts helps. I would also back and forward test too. Essentially that's all there is to it. 99% of this stuff for me at least is optimizing my algos and trying to run them on multiple markets. The programming behind them isn't that complex, its the math and theory.

Its not terribly impressive but this is what I was able to do with some algos recently:

https://twitter.com/robswc/status/1093328001243189248
https://twitter.com/robswc/status/1082782861869109253

even today I got one in:

https://twitter.com/robswc/status/1121943953564164102

but really, there's ppl out there that can do much better. I'm pretty content with my algos performance. I thought about tweeting every position once upon a time but realized since I'm not shilling some stupid course I don't have to really prove anything other than I'm not pulling stuff out of thin air lol.

I would definitely do forward testing though, whatever you do. Perhaps even add a human element to manage the risk at first. Just get the edge down and go from there, good luck! :)

The purpose of frugality is to save money in some areas of your life so that you can live the life you want. What are your goals in life? If you want to travel, travel. If you want an iPhone, get an iPhone. If you want to learn to fly, learn to fly. If you want to buy a house in 5 years, save! I want to retire pretty early and build a house, so I am saving/investing a large portion of my income like you.

It sounds like you've got this Frugality thing down pretty well, so here are some Personal Finance basics:

1. Start an emergency fund in a new savings account with 3-12 months of expenses. Don't touch this unless there is an emergency (job loss, car repairs, etc.). This will keep you from acquiring any debt and allows you to be bold with your savings/investment and other life goals.
   
   
2. Take advantage of any/all tax-advantaged investment vehicles that Australia offers. (American equivalents would be 401Ks, Roth IRAs, etc.)
   
   
3. If you've made it this far, all you have left to do is live your life. You're making all the right decisions, so do what you want. Save for a house or a car, start a family, give to charity, take time off from work, travel, etc.
   
   
4. If you don't know what you want, continue to save, save, save so when you DO find out you can do what you want. If you can max your retirement accounts every year, you'll be well on your way to financial security. But those are your retirement savings, and you won't be able to utilize them for a while. So your best bet is to save and invest a large portion of your remaining income - this will ensure that you will not have to take on any additional debt and can save thousands if not hundreds of thousands along the way (think paying cash for a house vs. a 30 year mortgage)
   
   I would also start reading some about personal finance. It sounds like you might benefit by reading Your Money or Your Life - it's a good philosophical read for those that are thinking about a money/life balance. For a little motivation to keep up your frugality, try The Millionaire Next Door - It's pretty eye-opening and I recommend that to everyone regardless of their personal finance goals. For starters in investing, The Boglehead's Guide to Investing is great, and a lot of the information can be found free at the wiki.
   
   Good luck!

Thank you for sharing this! I mainly do it to hold myself accountable, but it is great to hear it is helping others in their projects as well. To be honest, this is the first time I have consistently worked on a project for more than a few weeks. Usually, I hit week 5 or so and stop. The thing that made me put together a good strategy for this project was reading the one thing by Gary Keller, Deep Work by Cal Newport Scott Young's Website and Scott had a top performer and rapid learning program that gave me a great roadmap for this challenge. My suggestion to you as you start your project again is to keep things as simple as possible so it will develop into an easy habit. That is why I started doing video updates, it was easier for me to do a minute video then type up an update. Do not fall victim to the rules that you create. I would also just focus on French or algorithms, evaluate which is more important to you, this was the hardest thing for me. I'm sure you have great aspirations to accomplish both, but you need to say No to everything else to successfully say yes to your #1 project. Good luck finishing :).

Here are all the books with amazon links, Alphabetical order :)

---

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591396190
  
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh et al. Link: http://amzn.com/160941280X
  
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Link: http://amzn.com/0804137382
  
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston Link: http://amzn.com/1590597141
  
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1455582344
  
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk Link: http://amzn.com/006227306X
  
• Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson Link: http://amzn.com/0307720748
  
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1400064287
  
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck Link: http://amzn.com/0345472322
  
• Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0385346654
  
• Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim S. Grover et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1476714207
  
• Rework by Jason Fried et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0307463745
  
• Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin Link: http://amzn.com/1591842948
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss Link: http://amzn.com/0307465357
  
• The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth by James Altucher Link: http://amzn.com/150100994X
  
• The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison by Mike Wilson Link: http://amzn.com/0060008768
  
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Link: http://amzn.com/0062273205
  
• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen Link: http://amzn.com/0062060244
  
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Link: http://amzn.com/0307887898
  
• The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco Link: http://amzn.com/B004BDOUAI
  
• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday Link: http://amzn.com/1591846358
  
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1885167776
  
• The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0984999302
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell Link: http://amzn.com/0316346624
  
• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591848369
  
• Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out by Marc Ecko Link: http://amzn.com/1451685319
  
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0804139296

Let's continue to refine it together. I need a few more weeks to finish a few things I'm focusing on but then we can really dive in and see how we can break it all down and make it easy to digest.

I definitely want to dive into the social community aspect more and the identity side, two components which I believe are very strong in why we play.

For Bali (or travel in general...) it's all about perspective. A villa in Bali is around $300-400/month and food is cheap (like a dollar for a bowl of Pho). It's completely realistic to live in Bali for $10/day. To live really well (like a King) it would be less than $1000/month.

So if you want to go and not work for six months all you need somewhere between $1800-$6000 + flights (one way from Vancouver to Bali is about $500).

Now the benefit I have is that I'm still able to work while I travel (I have a few streams of income:

• Coaching through Kingpin Lifestyle (been doing that for over six years)
  
• Freelance/Web design. I outsource projects I find through friends/family. I also write for addiction.com and get paid for it.
  
• I have a food blog with my mom called Wheat Free Mom. She does recipes I do everything else.
  
• A friend puts on an event called The Higher Purpose Project and I've helped him out with finding attendees for a referral fee.
  
  It all compounds. Thankfully I've been doing this for awhile so it comes more naturally now, but it's something you're definitely able to figure out if you dedicate time and effort towards it.
  
  The key is to develop different skills you can offer to people as a service. This is the difference between a friend of yours saying they need a website and you saying: "Ya... a website is something good to have." compared to you saying: "Oh ya? I could probably help you with that.." The next thing you know you've sold a website for $2000 and by outsourcing the project you end up with $1000 for sending a few emails and overseeing things. :)
  
  Here are a few good resources to start with if you're interested:
  
  
• The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.
  
• The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
  
• The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
  
• Tim Ferriss' Blog
  
• Chris Guillebeau's blog
  
• Sean Ogle's blog: Location 180
  
  

Hey. I'm Canadian so I can't comment in depth on your SAT/ACT situation, I'm sorry. BUT. I do have some words of advice for you.

Have you heard about fixed vs growth mindsets? People with fixed mindsets believe in things like innate talent and giftedness. They say things like "I'm not a math person, and I never will be." If they fail at something, it's because they aren't good enough and they won't be - so it's time to pack up and go home. On the other hand, people with growth mindsets acknowledge the value of hard work. There is no such thing as innate talent or giftedness, and you can learn anything or become good at anything if you put in enough effort. "I don't have a solid foundation in math right now, but with enough practice I can eventually learn differential equations." Here is a link for you about changing your mindset.

Here is a link I found regarding the ACT/SAT thing. You might not go to Harvard right away, but it might be in your best interests to start at a community college and transfer to a big 4 year uni after a year or two. You'll save money and probably benefit from smaller class sizes, which will help your GPA. As far as I understand, once you have so many college credits under your belt, your high school isn't taken into account anymore. I think, anyways. Do some research on that.

Ok. Look. You are very young. Your life is not over or far from salvageable. You can fix this, and achieve the things you want, but it is going to take some discipline. Pick a date when you are going to write your exams, and create a study schedule going backwards. IE. You want to write in May, you have X amount of topics to cover, figure out how long you can spend on each topic if you start next week and leave time at the end for practice exams.

First, in order to do well, you need a really good foundation. Develop good sleep hygiene, eat well, exercise once in a while, drink enough water. Meditation can help with focus. There are lots of guided meditation videos or apps available.

Other things that really helped me study are Cal Newport's blog and his red book. You want to avoid "pseudo-working" (blankly reading over your notes for long periods of time) and instead focus really, really intensely on solving problems or mapping out concepts for a short amount of time. It's hard to do which is why a lot of students shy away from it. Cal talks about this everywhere, definitely worth a read.

You're gonna be fine! Best of luck!

I'm fortunate to be in the position I'm a now. I manage a camera shop as my 9-5 and then shoot on side, both for fun and for clients. The job gives me a steady income, and some of the best networking you could ask for. It gives me access to brand reps to borrow and try out new gear, and of course employee gear purchases. Sometimes I now think I'm more into cameras than I am necessarily into photography, kind of like how people are so into cars but not necessarily like racing, or building computers but not necessarily really competitive with gaming.

I shot on the side as pretty much my sole income when I was in college (for a mostly unrelated degree). I do miss some of that lifestyle, but greatly prefer the stability and relative lack of stress I have now.

>1. A Part-Time Job Gives You a Guaranteed Regular Income

Definitely a huge thing I like.

>2. You'll Be Able to Filter the Bad Clients... 3. You'll Be Able to Demand Higher Rates of Pay

Definitely true for me, mainly because that first point. I don't have to worry about making ends meet, I can simply take on jobs that I want to, or at least are worth it financially.

>4. Having Less Time Actually Makes You More Productive

This one is totally dependent on the person. In my case, I totally agree. I've always been someone that performed better, and more focused, on a time crunch.

>5. Working in a Completely Different Industry to Photography Will Enhance Your Practice

Can't speak to this personally, but knowing how cameras / photography has changed me with respect to other hobbies / endeavors, I'd have to imagine it's certainly the case. My (limited) experience in other industries definitely does come up in photography from time to time. Being in a non-related field gives you tons of opportunities to advertise yourself as the person to go to if pictures are needed.

One of my favorite books on workplace / career happiness goes into this quite a lot (there's a lot of cool studies in it about happiness). A lot of people that make the jump to full time do so without proper experience or support and subsequently fail. It basically advocates that "follow your passion" is bad advice and that you should instead "follow what you're good at". That in many cases, you're better off doing what you're good at as a job, and keeping your passions as hobbies. But of course, once you get to the point where your skill and passion is for the same thing, do make the jump.

Your MC is at 10 Pisces, and its ruler, Neptune, is at 16 Capricorn conjunct Uranus at 13 Capricorn. Those planets are in the 7th opposite a Mars-Chiron conjunction. Pisces and Chiron both have to do with healing, and with the added involvement of both Mars (metals and surgery) and Uranus (revolutionary/alternative things, and electricity), the first thing that came to mind is... acupuncturist. Many acupuncturists also practice electroacupuncture, which is what it sounds like (mild electrical currents are run through the needles during the treatment).

That would also sit well with your 9th-house Moon, since the 9th house rules foreign countries and cultures, and if you studied Chinese medicine you would either be exploring a foreign culture (assuming you're not of Chinese origin) or bridging two different cultures (if you're Chinese and living outside of China--I can see from the chart you posted that you were born in Canada). Ninth-house moon folks LOOOOOVE expanding their horizons by learning about foreign cultures and/or foreign or alternative religions.

Psychotherapist also comes to mind, but what fits this chart is an avant garde, mystical or esoteric type of psychology rather than, say, garden-variety cognitive therapy. More like Jungian psychology, Transpersonal psychology or art therapy.

And speaking of art, Neptune is the natural ruler of film, acting, and all forms of illusion. If you're good at acting or photography and interested in the movie industry from either side of the camera, or interested in music (film scores? Neptune and Venus rule music, and I see Venus is trine your Moon), this chart would support that. And by the way, while Mercury is involved with all this in that it's square your Uranus-Neptune on the one hand and your Mars-Chiron on the other, the placement of your North Node at 21 Capricorn, conjunct Neptune and Uranus but square Mercury, suggests to me that things would flow better for you if you focused more on Neptunian things (mysticism, visual, the nonrational/right brain/intuitive side of life, beautiful illusions, things that touch the soul) rather than on Mercurial things (rational, verbal). Or at least, focus on communicating clearly and verbally (Mercury) about Neptunian things.

What are your interests? Astrology is not the be-all end-all, and I say that as someone who has been studying astrology for decades and at times has worked as a professional astrologer. Considering what your chart has to say about career is fascinating, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. Here are the top three books I would recommend reading as you look for the right career:

"So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport
https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124

"Do What You Are" by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron
https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Are-Personality/dp/031623673X

"What Color is My Parachute" by Richard Bolles
https://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2016/dp/1501274643

Thank you for sharing these thoughts; I imagine that wasn't easy.

> My parents placed an emphasis on sports, and on winning. However, I have come to realize that this mindset breeds hedonism. When my purpose in life was to win and seek the most benefits for myself, this attitude ultimately led to mental weakness and a lack of willpower when it came to pleasureful activities. In my opinion, even the goal of being happy leads to a hedonistic lifestyle.

The way I see it, feelings of happiness fall on a spectrum between pleasure (short-lived, visceral, shallow) and joy (long-lasting, subtle, deep), and while seeking pleasure is hedonism, seeking joy is not. Helping others brings (most of) us joy, and altruism is pretty near the opposite of hedonism.

The trick, I think, is balancing our desires for pleasure and joy, as each provides its own stability. Not experiencing pleasure leaves us irritable and unpleasant, while lacking joy leaves us purposeless and depressed. Neither state is ideal for accomplishing anything.

> And now, here I am. I am utterly confused now, when it comes to my life's goals. Should my goal be to make contributions in order to improve human civilization? Or something else? Idk.

One approach I suggest you try is this:

• set aside this philosophical question (for now)
  
• find something tangible that you care about doing—that is, something that brings you joy
  
• focus your time and energy on becoming better at that activity.
  
  This advice is based on the "craftsman mindset" advocated by Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, which he presents in opposition to the "passion mindset" that focuses on the question, "What should I do with my life?"
  
  While this doesn't directly address your philosophical questions, following this approach may provide you with a mental clarity that could help. Think of it as a bottom-up kind of philosophy that generalizes from your actions and experiences, rather than the top-down kind that seeks to impose abstract ideas onto concrete reality.
  
  > Apologies for the rant.
  
  No need to apologize, as this is the kind of thought we BettermentBookClub subs like to discuss. I'll tag /u/PeaceH, /u/Skaifola, and /u/TheZenMasterReturns, who may want to respond to you with their own perspectives. They know much more about Stoicism than I do, so they may even answer your questions, unlike me. :)

Passion is overrated. Instead do what you're good at and work on your passions on the side. When I was your age I was super passionate about parkour and freerunning, I wanted to open up my own parkour gym and compete on American Ninja Warrior. A couple of years later that passion died and I suddenly became passionate about writing, I wanted to write the next epic space opera. But then that died out and I became passionate about podcasting (which is still my current side-project). But all the while I was working on those passions I was majoring in mechanical engineering, because I've always love science and I knew I was good at it.

I'm not passionate about my job, it's a boring one in electrical utilities, literally the least sexiest industry, but I'm good at it and I know that my job improves the wellbeing of the people in my city. However I use the money that generates to do all sorts of things I actually want to do, like work on my podcast, or go to music fests, donating to charities I believe in, or take a big vacation with friends.

I highly recommend you check out the book So Good They Can't Ignore you by Cal Newport. The thesis of the book is that people who follow their passion, or end up on a lifelong search for their calling usually end up feeling worse off in their lives than people who build upon their existing strengths. I loved the book because it put so much into perspective for me such as my career, and my happiness. I really wish I read it at your age, and not at 24.

Education is your way out. The typical way to get out for young Indonesian is through education, but that means you need to be either rich (to pay for outrageous tuition fee / living cost abroad) or smart (to qualify for scholarships). Are you?

An alternative way out is through working on in-demands jobs. For instance, you can gain several years of working experience in IT in indo and then try to apply for openings abroad (Singapore is often the first step). However at the moment, the UK is a closed doors for non-EU people who want to come here to work in hope of a residency, so don't bother... Other countries in Europe that you can consider is Germany, where it's still possible to get a sponsored job visa if you're good.

A final point is: indo is actually isn't that bad. True there are shits going on with a small group of religious extremism, but things are actually getting better, with changes since the reformasi in 98 and people like jokowi+ahok on the lead. Indonedians are largely friendly everywhere, the society is relaxed, the weather is nice nearly everyday of the year, food is good, a lot of nature places to visit in the country alone (and can easily fly to south east Asia and the rest of Asia too), we have a decent economic growth (compared to the stagnant West) .. I guess my point is, if you fail to get out, it's actually quite a good place to be stuck in for now (especially if you can write in English and post on reddit, that usually assumes you come from middle-to-upper socioeconomic background, alongside its associated conveniences in life that you might have to give up when you get out).

Of course don't just take my words for it. For most people you actually have to get out first to realise how good we have it in Indonesia. So by all means, try to get out but don't be surprised that eventually you'd want to return. That's what I plan to do after being away for more than half of my life now. Plus maybe it's my idealism speaking but the country needs people like us, the smartest anak bangsa who leave due to the brain drain. It's only lately I'm seeing more and more people around me who reverses this trend and actually go back to indo after spending years abroad. I think it'd a positive sign that the country is doing something right.

Edit: for a more concrete advice on how to prepare to get out, basically read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124. Get really good in something that is in demands, and you can usually move anywhere you want in the world. For me, it's computer science. For you, it might be something else.

Edit2: you might also find that as you get older, you can compromise on the atheism vs religious bit. A lot of people put their religions on KTP only, but doesn't mean they actually have to practice that. Or you can simply move to the right neighbourhood in Jakarta where nobody gives a fuck what your religion is.

Degrees mean less than people think. Just ask any of the hordes of recent grads with generic liberal arts degrees about their job search. Unless you lay the groundwork in college and have a plan (e.g. doing internships to get you real world experience), or you have a very practical and technical major like engineering, a degree's not going to be much help getting you a job. Most people I know in that situation are settling for jobs that have nothing to do with their major and don't really make use of their education at all. I'm basing this on personal experience and various things I've read, but I'm sure you can find articles and evidence of this to show your detractors if you do some googling.

Why is this the case? Because in the real world, companies hire people to solve actual problems they're having - they're looking for someone with skills that will help their business. With the trend toward people changing companies (and even career paths) more and more frequently, companies are also getting less and less willing to develop people on the job, and it's more important to have useful skills you can provide out of the gate.

What does this mean? When planning your career, you need to think about what skills are valuable in the economy and develop your career capital accordingly. Some professions have strict credentialing systems, and you'll need to have the certificates to get into them (like medicine, law, and teaching). These are special cases, though - most jobs that companies are hiring for require skills and experience, not certificates.

Ok, how does this relate to OSSU? Learning software engineering and computer science is a solid career strategy that provides flexible and valuable career capital. The U.S. Bureau of Labor projects the Software Developer jobs will grow much faster than average over the next 10 years. The prevalence of coding bootcamps proves that it's possible to learn software development skills and get a high paying job with no relevant "official" certification or college degree. (I went through a coding bootcamp and went from no programming experience to a 6 figure job in Silicon Valley in less than a year).

If you're going to learn on your own without getting a degree, it's important that you have something to show for it that employers can look at to see the skills you've developed. That's why it's important to do projects and have an online portfolio where you can showcase them. If you can demonstrate that you have a useful skill, then you'll be a more attractive candidate than someone who just has some random degree.

I'd recommend the book So Good They Can't Ignore You and the website 80,000 Hours for further reading on career strategy. Hopefully some of that is helpful for you. I think you have a great plan and will be miles ahead of your peers if you follow through on it. All of that's not to say that you definitely shouldn't get a degree, but you'll probably have the luxury of passing on it if you work to develop employable skills on your own time.

First off, grade equivalent scores are crap and don't work the way most people think.

>GRADE-EQUIVALENT SCORES
>The Grade-Equivalent score compares your child’s performance on grade-level material against the average performance of students at other grade levels on that same material and is reported in terms of grade level and months. If your 5th-grade child obtains a grade-equivalent of 10.5 on a standardized math or reading test, it does not mean that your child is solving math problems or reading at the mid-10th grade level. It means that she or he can solve 5th grade math problems and read 5th grade material as well as the average 10th grade student can read and solve 5th grade math problems. Your child is performing much better than the average 5th grader but most likely would not perform as well if tested using 10th grade material as they have not yet been exposed to 10th grade material. Caution should always be used when interpreting grade equivalents, especially when attempting to use grade equivalents as the basis for a grade placement discussion.


So don't feel bad about where you are now versus where you thought you were back then.

What can you do to keep from falling behind?

1. Check to see if you might have a learning disability. Many people who are very intelligent are not diagnosed in their early school years because the work comes so easy to them. As they progress and are ask to do higher-level work, they hit a wall.
   https://childmind.org/article/twice-exceptional-kids-both-gifted-and-challenged/
   
   
2. Learn to study.
   https://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/topic/105297/entryType/2
   This site has some useful links; some of which are aimed at younger children, but if you have never learned to study there might still be useful information there.
   
   I also recommend ”How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less”
   https://www.amazon.com/dp/0767922719/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_I6bzDbZZXP07R
   
   A lot of studying comes down to being organized, efficient, knowing when and where to get help. Remember that forming new habits takes time and you have to remain persistent.
   
   If you have a friend, teacher, or parent who is willing to help, it can be useful to be accountable to another person. Have a once a week check-in on what you have done in the last week and what you need to do in the following week.
   
   
3. When you are having a problem with a concept, find online resources that can help you review. Khan Academy is a wonderful resource. Wolfram Alpha is a great way to check answers for specific Math problems.
   
   
4. Turn in all assignments! (And on time.) Zeros can quickly bring down your overall grade. A late paper that drops your score by a grade by 10 pts. each day can also hurt you.
   
   
5. Figure out why you are learning something. Sometimes its because you find the subject matter interesting. Other times, you are only doing it because it's a requirement for the next step in life. As you struggle through something, remember what the end goal is and that you are choosing to pursue it. Thinking about it as something you choose to do, instead of as something you are forced to do, can give you a sense of control in your life.
   
   
6. Remember, even if you are in the top 0.1% in intelligence, there are still approximately 327,000 people in the US who are as smart or smarter than you. If you go to a competitive college, you will most likely have to deal with becoming ”only average” in that environment.
   
   I'm sure people in this group could come up with a book full of thoughts on this topic, but hopefully, this gives you some things to think about.

Former dog trainer here. I respect that you're taking your dog through training classes and involving your son in the process, that's really important.


I grew up in the age when the 'alpha roll' was a totally legitimate tactic to ensure 'dominance' over the dog and get compliance. However, times have changed, and it turns out the alpha/beta thing is a complete myth. What works a lot better is building trust and using positive reinforcement. I'm wondering if that's where your son is getting this idea of being physical with the dog to establish dominance.


I would suggest you find a trainer that deals with balanced approach that deals with operant conditioning. I would suggest looking into Karen Pryor's work, especially her book Don't Shoot the Dog. I also highly recommend the book How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend by the Monks of New Skete.


Positive reinforcement works on kids (and people in general, and most other animals including fish!) - When you see your son doing the behavior you like to see with the dog, praise him in the moment, on the spot. Don't Shoot the Dog will cover this, by the way. Karen Pryor uses a lot of clicker training in her work, and I have had great success in using it to jump-start the positive association with treats/praise/play (whatever motivates), and pretty soon I can phase the clicker out and save it for when we move on to advanced practices or new skills.


If this were my kid, I'd ask, "Would you want to do thinks I asked you to do if I kicked you in the head and was mean to you? Would you be more willing to do the right thing if I was kind?" He may need to have the situation reframed for him to really understand the empathy that goes in to raising a dog. If you were on an alien planet and only understood 1/10th of what your new overlords were saying, wouldn't that be kind of scary, and even make you mad? Well, when dogs get scared and angry, they bite. When a dog bites a person, the dog goes away. It's up to us as people to get dogs to trust us so they don't get angry or scared.


I'm not saying your dog would ever bite your kid, so I hope you don't think that's what I'm insinuating will come from this. I have a wonderful 11 year old lab mix who, by all accounts is a fantastic and well-behaved dude. He's still a dog though, and as patient as he is, his patience has limits and we have to respect his boundaries too. My kid's only 10 months, and everyone seems to think that she'll be riding our lab like a pony, and I correct them every time.


I'd be happy to clarify any information or answer questions if you like!

First of all, for technique/practice, consistency in the woodshed is key. My daily routine is very repetitive, to the point that it is incredibly boring. But the improvement is so amazing, that I'm still excited to do it every day. I also kill the monotony with something to occupy my mind, usually either a sitcom or reading material, once I had the routine down.

[This is my daily routine], which takes about 90 minutes if you go nonstop, at the tempos marked (which will take some time to work up).

Secondly, your performance anxiety should be addressed. My professor in college had a required course for the whole tuba/euphonium studio called "Performance Anxiety: Understanding and Coping."

I had some mild anxiety then, but the class helped. The class was almost 20 years ago, but here's the largest takeaways:

• Perform as often as you can in front of an audience. If you have a weekly student recital class like larger schools of music do, sign up as often as you can prepare something. Start with easier solos, and work your way up.
  
  
• Read these books, which were the required reading of the class:
  
• • The Inner Game of Tennis (There is a music version, but consensus is that this is still far superior)
    
• • Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within
    
• • Zen in the Art of Archery (Very short read, can be done in the same day)
    
    Two of the three texts are not music books, but are read by students of just about every single discipline and apply it to their area of study. They will take years to understand on new levels, but you should be able to get some immediate results and understanding of your situation.
    
    As I got older, I've found the best way to quiet those nerves is to overprepare for anything. My teachers used to say "an amatuer practices 'til he gets it right; a professional practices 'til he can't get it wrong." When I'm in a position where I know I cannot screw something up, I actually enjoy the performance, butterflies and all. And I've been in some very high stress situations, with fewer train wrecks each year. This takes some massive time management, but it definitely helps. I usually set a goal to be "performance ready" a few weeks out, so I can do some very picky polishing of the performance.
    
    This is a lot more than I thought I'd say on the matter, but there should be a lot here to help. Happy shedding!
    
    Edit: After perusing the other comments, it looks like you might have a difficult professor. Sounds like you should sit down and decide if he's helping or hindering your progress. To be candid, I never really think of a trombone player being very good for tuba students. Maybe some pedagogy, but there's enough differences in the two instruments to warrant a specialist at the collegiate level. Great euphonium players can teach tuba, just as my best teacher was a tuba player, but they both doubled strongly on the other instrument. Unless your professor can be considered a professional tuba player to some extent, you might need to find a different school to finish your education.

Just a few random thoughts: how is your bird's cage situated? To a bird, height = safety, so some birds are more confident when they can perch up high. Along the same lines, it might help if you crouch down when you replace the food and water bowls, so you're not looming over her.

Are there places in the cage she can hide? You don't want to provide her with anything that looks like a nest cavity, but you could try surrounding one or two of her favorite perches with hanging toys, to mimic foliage on a branch.

I have a budgie who used to be very skittish, and who only calmed down after I adopted a second, well-socialized bird. (Her cagemate had died, and I wanted her to have a companion - the rest was luck.) The second budgie has become very tame, and she watches him interacting with me, perching on my fingers, preening my hair, etc. Eight months later, she is still not hand-tame, and may never be; but she accepts my presence and will eat out of my hand if she sees the male doing it. She even grudgingly puts up with me handling her when I need to take her to the vet. She continues to make progress, but she'll probably never be a cuddler, and I'm ok with that. The most important thing is that she's happy and healthy.

A book I recommend to anyone who will listen is Don't Shoot the Dog, by Karen Pryor. It's one of the bibles of positive reinforcement ("clicker") training and behavior shaping. It's also a fun read, not dry at all. If you decide to keep trying, I highly recommend checking it out.

All of that said, after 10 months there's no shame in re-homing a bird if the relationship just isn't working out. Your budgie isn't happy right now either, and it's possible she might do better in a different home, or even in a sanctuary. Best wishes, whatever you decide :)

Depends on how old you are.

• Middle school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but I don't think I can read those books now (29) without cringing a little bit. Especially, Getting Things Done because I already know how to make to do list, but I still flip through all 3 books occastionally.
  
  
• High school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but if you're a well adjusted human and responsible adult, then I don't think you'll find a lot of helpful advice from these 6 books so far because it'll be pretty basic information.
  
  
• College: I really enjoyed this, this, and started doing Malcolm Gladwell books. The checklist book helped me get more organized and So Good They Can't Ignore You was helpful starting my career path.
  
• Graduate School: I really enjoyed this, this, and this. I already stopped with most "self help" books and reading more about how to manage my money or books that looked interesting like Stiff.
  
  
• Currently: I'm working on this, this, and this. Now I'm reading mostly for fun, but all three of these books are way out of my league and I have no idea what their talking about, but they're areas of my interest. History and AI.

The two most important things to do to break into the industry is to network and to build a portfolio of tangible work. And when I say networking I don't mean sending out resumes and business cards but rather building relationships. I highly recommend reading Keith Ferrazzi's "Never Eat Alone" http://www.amazon.com/Never-Eat-Alone-Secrets-Relationship/dp/0385512058#. True relationship building is essential in such an insular industry as most opportunities are not listed publicly. It is through your relationships that you learn of most opportunities and it is through those same relationships where you can get credibility via recommendations. And whether you want to go into coaching, scouting, or even analytics you are best served by actively doing those things. Even if it is just summer basketball or middle school any coaching is experience that can help you get better. If you want to be a scout go scout the high schools and colleges near you. You will improve as a talent evaluator while simultaneously building up a portfolio of tangible proof of your knowledge, skills, and abilities. If you want to do analytics then start running studies on various things that could help a team improve. I hope this helps.

Wow, I wish I would have had your insight to ask this question 9 years ago. Spend your first week reading three books (four if you come from an upper-middle-class or wealthier family).

• How to Win Friends and Influence People
  
• How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less. (Not gonna lie, this has a lot of bull shit in it, but the good parts are really practical.)
  
• Never Eat Alone
  
• The Millionaire Next Door (optional. Read it when I was your age, and it got my ass in gear.)
  
  Once you finish Never Eat Alone, start reaching out to people. Start spending your money on having conversations over coffee. Yes, some call this "networking," but don't think of it that way. You're making friends. For the next 5 months, you don't have any needs, so now is the perfect time to put others first. My life is currently full of awesome friends, and it's all because I took the time to give a shit about them. Be sure to take notes and have some sort of contact list (highrise is free). It's not romantic, but if you genuinely want to make friends, it's the way to do it. The more people you meet, the easier time you'll have of helping them by making introductions.
  
  I've been doing this for a couple years now, and it has literally changed my life. I'm friends with people I never even dreamed of knowing. I'm a freelancer, and I literally have more work than I know what to do with. I'm throwing a big party in a couple weeks for all my friends, and I'm shocked at who all has said "yes."
  
  tl;dr Meet all the people you can, think of others first, and someday they'll likely return the favor.

That's okay, it was a formative experience. No sense beating yourself up about the past as long as you can learn from it.

It's good to keep all of these FIRE principles in mind, but don't obsess over it. Look for jobs that will help you gain new skills, specialize in something useful, and open more doors than you could have before. I recommend the book So Good They Can't Ignore You to help guide your search.

Specifically, you should sit down with every person you know who has a full-time job and ask them:

1. What is your job? What are you responsible for, and what do you do every day?
   
2. How did you get to where you are? (You can just say that question specifically--gets some interesting responses!)
   
3. What do you think I would be good at? Do I remind you of anyone you know whose job you think I could learn more about?
   
4. Can you recommend someone else with an interesting career or life that I can talk to?
   
   Rinse and repeat. There are so many millions of different jobs in the world that you can't possibly learn about just from reading. Your primary purpose here is to learn about different jobs and how people got them, but this kind of networking will also help you get a job should you decide to apply to any of the places these people work. Networking works best when you aren't asking people for anything--but there's no reason you can't go back to them weeks or months later and say, "Hey, our conversation really inspired me. I noticed department X is hiring for position Y. Do you happen to know anyone over there I could speak with to learn more about it?" etc.

Don't use your phone to browse, especially while walking.

/u/teaandtalk Gave you good advice for how to behave on campus.

Classroom: Take notes by hand. Once, I started a conversation with someone because she had a gorgeous bujo (bullet journal). Good notes make you appear competent. Competence will encourage others to approach you and form study groups, which are easy ways to create a support network on campus. When you are unique (but not distracting) you stand out. Compliments are easy ice breakers in the classroom because they're quick but let you connect over a shared interest.

Transportation/Packing: This one is a big issue for me because my school has a behemoth of a campus. :) Always wear comfortable shoes. If you need to dress up, put heels in your bag for the meeting/event. Only carry the essentials. Invest in a tablet and download electronic copies of your books. Only bring your laptop when you need to use software that's not on a smaller device. Buy a good USB stick. Carry chapstick and water, and a travel-size deodorant and sunscreen. Baby wipes and bandaids are a good idea if you have space. I love JetPens because they have a lot of organizers and cases that are handy. You don't need more than 2 pens, 2 highlighters, a pencil, an eraser, and spare lead.

General: I don't know what year you are, but I recommend Cal Newport's book How To Become A Straight A Student no matter what point of your education you're at. Learn how to save time, because having leisure time means less stress which makes you appear more feminine to men and approachable in general. Practice good self-care and take care of your appearance. Never wear revealing/provocative, dirty, or weather-inappropriate clothes to school; they make you look unprofessional.

glad you like it! ( /u/T3chnopsycho and /u/paksaochuyie too!)

I like it for developing combinations because it helps people to be able to get away from " I need to do x, in y situation" and lets them focus more on movement, both continuous striking and sidestepping / turning the opponent in a fluid manor and not freezing when something doesn't go your way. Plus you can start shadow boxing those types of combinations and work them independently. it's very clear, very fast where my weaknesses are - I hurt my knee when I was 16, so I favor my left foot forward. So any chance I get to spar lower belt students, I spar right foot forward and work the point combinations.

If you look at anyone in high level competition, across all sports ( baseball, football, golf, tennis, etc), it's clear they did something akin to a form many MANY times over, and that the "form" they did helped shape them, but the form was only part of the answer. Like a Rolodex of answers to questions you have on your journey. Baseball is a great example! If you are a professional baseball player, you stand out in the field and you play catch for hours and hours. Then you go to to the batting cages and hit thousands of balls a month and then get together and practice. Then you have people hit balls at you day in and day out in the off season ( this like sparring for us). When the players step on the field though, it looks nothing like practice because its' been refined, reworked, and perfected to a pro level that's nothing like the game kids play in the parks on the weekend.

Success is like pregnancy - everyone sees the result, they don't see the thousands of times you got screwed to get there. I think a lot of people get so caught up in ego about "my martial art is better" that they forget it's just a body mechanic exercise and lots of repetition. There's a limited amount of answers to any question in our sport. Sure there's a lot of possible strikes ( just like in chess or go, hundreds of possible moves) but only a couple of them are really viable in any situation. You can arrive at the same destination from any direction, it's all about finding the right way that suits you.

I highly recommend this book The inner game of tennis - while not directly applicable being as its' a different sport, it has many parallels and some direct comparisons.

If you ever want to chat about any of this, I've been both training and coaching a long time and love to have friendly conversations and have my opinions challenged!

Happy training!

In 2013, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg urged women to “lean in” to their power and break through that pesky glass ceiling. Predictably — and correctly — feminists argued that “leaning in” not only left male-dominated corporate culture intact but also depended on underpaid female domestic workers to clean and care for children. Both Sandberg’s book and the critiques of it left actual men out of the analysis, as if leaning in (and sorting out the limits of this proposed solution) was yet more women’s work.

I’m reminded of that omission as we head into the Democratic primary season. More women are seeking the party’s presidential nomination than ever before. And yet a few white men sit at the top of the polls and rake in big fundraising hauls. As candidates such as Sens. Kamala D. Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar lean in, maybe it’s time for some of their male competitors to find ways to lean out.

Early media coverage of the campaign demonstrates why merely leaning in can’t dismantle the double standards and deep structural misogyny women face. Studies by FiveThirtyEight and my colleagues at Northeastern University found both fewer “media mentions” of female candidates and also more negative coverage than of their male counterparts. Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke apparently merits multiple profiles, an HBO documentary about his failed Senate run and an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot in Vanity Fair — while Pete Buttigieg got a literally glowing New York magazine cover profile.

The candidates themselves do not demonstrate much more awareness of these dynamics. O’Rourke acknowledged having “privileges that others could not depend on or take for granted,” and then, well, continued to make the case for his candidacy. I suppose he deserves a tip of the hat, if only by comparison to Bernie Sanders, who, when asked if Americans really need another white man as president, replied: “Well, I think you need this one.”

A real reckoning with privilege goes beyond acknowledgment and into action. Given the unbroken record of male presidents and what we know about the double standards under which female candidates run — including obsessive attention to their voices, their bodies, their clothes — it is worth asking what steps male candidates of good faith can take to even the playing field.

First, they could do more than give the notion of privilege a cursory nod.

They could refuse to give interviews to news organizations that have practiced gender discrimination in their coverage of the campaigns and say “no thanks” to the magazine covers that curiously feature only them. They could call out the disproportionate attention they receive, as well as the presumption that they are more electable by virtue of their gender, and instead point out the fact that the women running have already won multiple races, written many books, and have deep executive and policy experience — claims that could not be universally made of their male counterparts.

Male candidates should definitely stop offering a patronizing nod to women through the “offer” of a vice presidential spot on the ticket just so they keep on benefiting from the massive affirmative action plan that is male privilege. Naming Stacey Abrams his running mate wouldn’t actually fix Joe Biden’s problems with women — especially if, as Abrams said, that’s not actually a role she wants. Telling women we can play second fiddle is not proof of a commitment to equality.

Of course, some candidates don’t even offer women that much power. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts has as his main credential an unsuccessful effort to topple Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House.

The really radical thing for a male candidate to do in 2020 would be to step down and step away, realizing that real gender equity is achieved only when men actively refuse the benefits they receive simply for being born male.

Gender and racial equity are not zero-sum games: Everyone is a winner when we have a more diverse and representative government. But we can’t achieve that vision without men taking responsibility for the inordinate space they take up in the media and the candidate field.

There’s only one president and only so many seats in Congress or on corporate boards or as chief executives or union bosses. If we want to get even a rough version of parity, men will need to take less, have less, make less and, in so doing, recognize that the more they always got was at the expense of those who got less, courtesy of sexism.

Women are leaning in like mad, leading the resistance, voting in higher numbers and signing up to be candidates for office. But men have a responsibility — if they really do want a more gender-equitable world — to lean out, work actively to disavow their privilege and pitch in to get a woman elected president.

There are several highly qualified female candidates running for president. Every single man currently running or thinking of running should drop out and support one of these women. Now that would be real leadership.

These books are more theoretical and about self growth as a well-rounded designer, if you want game theory others listed some great ones like Rules of Play and Book of Lenses. That said, here's my list:

• Level Design For Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences by Phil Co (Valve)
  
  It's more of a broad game design book since it talks about all the pipelines / processes of all departments coming together, with an emphasis on scripting / level design for crafting experiences. Portion of the book uses Unreal Engine 2 as a reference, but you can probably use UE4 or something else to follow along the actual game design lessons he's teaching and not have the take away be a technical tutorial.
  
  
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull (Pixar)
  
  I cannot describe how invaluable this book is, if you're only to get one from the list it'd be this one. While it does covers Pixar's history as a frame of reference for a lot of stuff, it's also more importantly about their ideology for fostering creativity, productivity and work/ life balance -- all of which are important and can be applied to Game Design.
  
  
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.
  
  I read this one after Gabe Newell recommended it one of his interviews and it was at a time in my career when I was working at a AAA studio struggling with the corporate forces that got in the way of creativity / productivity. It was one of those that changed me as a developer. It's more from a management point of view, but seriously applicable if you are collaborating with other people in game development, either on the same level as you or those who rely on your work to do theirs. Or if you are going to work at studio, AAA or indie, it's also an insightful book to evaluate whether the culture cultivated by management is in your best interest so that you have the tools to do your best work without burning out.
  
  
• Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp / Ruby on Rails)
  
  This one is like Peopleware but not as exhaustive, it's an easier read since it's a compilation and edit of blog posts the authors wrote on their old website 37signals. It's more or less about getting stuff done and filtering out noise, simplifying things to make results better -- this one is relatable for planning game project milestones. A lot of it will sound like common sense that a lot of people may say they already know, but it's surprising how many don't actually practice it.

> You're trying to say that having a good atmosphere is more important than playing to win

Where in the fuck are you getting this from?

> There is nothing more important in a competitive game than winning, nothing. Certainly not how cordial you are with your fucking team.

Actually that's a really myopic and simplistic approach to something that's a lot more complicated than you think. The most important thing in a competitive environment such as LoL, which is the subject of this thread, is that you enjoy it enough that you continue learning and improving. There is tons of research and literature that talks about this. I'd recommend starting with this one.

In a singular competitive setting like a tournament, then yes, you play to win. The tribunal and other community moderation initiatives however are not focused on tournaments or the LCS. The vast bulk of what they do is focused on moderating the overall community.

> If some one wants to communicate in a abrasive way i'll take that if their play is better than the nicest guy on the planet who is only ever so slightly the lesser player.

Again this is really short-sighted. You will enjoy playing more with the nicer person, and you yourself will find that you improve at a faster rate and you are less likely to go on tilt or get emotional, which is the #1 thing that interferes with the learning process.

Sorry for wall of text.

When /u/waytoomanychoices describes someone with model-level looks, who had prep school and Yale paid for by rich dad/grandparents, who dated a handsome billionaire heir seriously enough to receive a marriage proposal, as "average", you're feeding into the depression here.

The point is, the Rory character is a fairy tale fantasy that still screwed up every advantage she was given. She represents an unreasonable and unrealistic picture of life for 99% of the world, and still screws it up.

Any of us who got Yale paid in full by wealthy parents and grandparents would be in a better spot at 31 than Rory. And there are actual plot point you can point at as to why.

OP, you did not have Rory's advantages and your life is not written yet. You don't know if you'll like a job or not until you take it. Try it, and if you don't like it, look for another one.

To me, the danger in media isn't violence or sex, it's the setting of expectations of life being like TV or movies, your OP expressed it perfectly.

Number 4 is the opposite of real advice. I'm the child of immigrants in my late 30s and this attitude (it's not millennial, it's American) that some job out there can fill your soul with happiness and fulfillment... that you need to be overjoyed with your work and career... it sounds nice and that's why people keep repeating it. But it's not real life.

Seek contentment from work. Earn money to feed yourself and your family. Seek happiness in family and friends. Seeking literal joy from your job on a day to day basis is, frankly, unrealistic.

Now if you're genuinely unhappy with work, then start earnestly looking for what you can do to change your situation. In my very unpopular opinion, this does not mean quitting your job without another job/full time education lined up, nor does it mean turning down jobs you think are beneath you when you're unemployed. Working itself provides opportunities.

/u/copperboomcopperboom, you're not Rory. If you are in a rut, What Color Is My Parachute is almost a clichéd suggestion but it is a cliché for the right reasons. It's a good way to help focus you on your next steps in life.

It helped both me and my wife. Feel free to PM me.

-----

tl;dr I'm a former high school vocational teacher who gave high school kids career and educational advice all the time. I think my advice is solid: you can work a job you don't like while looking for one you do. One reason is that you're much more confident when you have a job and you're more likely to hold out for a job that's a great fit if you're not desperate. Exuding confidence at job interviews is important and that's much easier if you have a job and aren't sitting on your ass in mom's basement all day every day. If you're really unhappy with your career situation, do something about it. Buying and working through What Color Is My Parachute might be a great start. Anyone reading this can feel free to PM me.

Taking on the advice that everyone else here has shared like consolidating credit cards into a 0% one for 12 - 18 months and trying to negotiate a payment plan for your hospital bills is a good idea.

As others have mentioned, you need to have a budget and be able to stick to it. Have you taken the time to go through your last 3 months of bank statements and work out where your money is going? That's the only way to identify areas that you can cut back. I'd categories them as:

1. Must have: Without these, you really would be in a bad place... (e.g. rent, critical bills, groceries and basic clothes)
   
2. Should have: Without these, you lose some key comforts but you can get them elsewhere for free but more effort (e.g. broadband [you could go to a public library], running a car)
   
3. Nice to have: Without these, you'll sacrifice a nicer lifestyle (e.g. going out for lunch, nice clothes, new gadgets, gym membership, Spotify subscription)
   
   Then look really hard at each item in those categories, even the must-have (e.g. are you living in a bigger apartment than you need? Do you shop at a fancy grocery store as opposed to a more affordable one?) to see where you can make cutbacks. The only way to get out of debt is to spend less than you earn, use what remains to clear it.
   
   There are plenty of tools out there to help you, like Every Dollar and YNAB. Also worth checking out podcasts by the likes of The Minimalists and reading Your Money or Your Life, which offer very practical advice.
   
   In terms of tackling the debt, you have 2 options:
   
   

• The mathematically smart way: Start paying off as much as you can on the debt with the highest amount of interest
  
• The rewarding way: Pay off the smallest debt you have (e.g. your $1,000 credit card), then work on the next smallest, adding on your previous payments so they snowball into bigger ones. This is more rewarding, as you see debt disappear and you feel a sense of progress.
  
  All the best with your situation. You can do it, your debt is definitely not insurmountable, you just need to be disciplined and make some sacrifices to clear it.

I highly recommend reading two books asap:

• How to win friends and influence people
  
• 48 laws of power
  
  These two books have both shaped me tremendously in terms of how I interact with an treat people and making those changes has only changed my life for the better both in business and personally. The first one is a more positive restore your faith in humanity type and the second is a more ruthless Machiavellian type but they both take an insightful look at people and how they influence each other. They also can both help guide you in decision making in certain situations.
  
  Other than that, just relax, enjoy the ride, and do your best. Confidence is key.
  
  Bonus book (nerd alert)
  
  
• The joy of game theory

I should have mentioned that I was optimizing for environmental impact and health, not just money and time. Also, I thought I worded things with enough caveats to prevent point-by-point refutations, but since I seem to have failed, I will make some general comments about your reply.

When it comes to EA, there are two options: either work for/found an EA org, or donate money. I would consider volunteering for events to be a relatively minor activity. Most people won't have the skills to directly contribute yet, so while they're building up those skills with that "second job" I mentioned, they'll be working a normal job and donating money. In this case, it would make sense to pick the job with the highest earning potential. Assuming a suitable amount of grit, humanities majors can go to a boot-camp and go into web development and STEM majors can go through a few programming textbooks and work for a major tech company. The major bottleneck comes from being able to actually program versus being able to pass tests in a CS class. As Cal Newport says, taking the time to get good at a skill is the differentiating factor between having your pick of jobs and hoping you get a job at all. Luckily, according to the BLS, software developers and web developers will see greater than average job growth, so even if you aren't in the top 1% of your field, you will still be able to land a job. And yes, as I stated earlier, not everyone is going to become a programmer, but it's definitely worth a hard look.

I agree that getting a used car makes sense for some people, but given that most trips don't consist of a trunk full of groceries and filled passenger seats, I would seriously consider the alternative. Also, fast food and delivered food is vastly inferior to Soylent and other meal replacements, in terms of time-efficiency as well as health. Also, I'm slightly horrified that you mentioned the two options that run counter to the EA values of concern for the environment and concern for animals.

The video I linked to earlier talks about the tax benefits of real estate. Given that the real estate market is highly illiquid, this also means that it's not an efficient market at all. That's why you have house flippers and companies like Fundrise. The other main investment vehicle people think of besides real estate is stocks, but leveraged ETFs only allow you to leverage your money 2-3x , which is a far cry from the nearly 30x from real estate. Given that real estate appreciates in pace with inflation and the fact that you have greater leverage, this beats out the 7% average growth of stocks. I would argue that the reason why people choose other types of investments is a lack of knowledge. If you didn't know, for instance, that there is a process to landlording, you would deem the task of renting out and managing properties to be unfeasible. So, far from being tied down to one place, if another job opportunity comes up, you can just rent out your current residence and get a mortgage for a house in that new location. Now, I would not consider real estate to be a "hugely leveraged bet." You are buying and holding an asset that pays for itself in 30 years. That's it. Seems straightforward to me. If you're worried about illiquidity, HELOCs completely mitigate that concern. Of course, this whole real estate thing seems risky if you're bad at managing your money, but if you can do that, then the numbers check out.

Now, even though donating now has long run effects, the compounding returns of real estate dictate that it would be prudent that allocate a nonzero amount of disposable income towards real estate. Fermi estimate. How big that amount is will depend on how confident you are in the potential for future EA opportunities that have a greater impact than the options available today. Given that we have just started founding high-impact charities within the past few years, I would argue that the number of higher-impact-than-AMF charities will only grow.

Nassim Taleb wrote a book called Antifragile that gives one possible perspective on your question.

By putting yourself in a "safe" place (not 100% dependent on a job to pay bills, spending all your income, etc) you're making a small contribution to the health of the whole.

A small thought experiment: If everyone in America started saving 40% of their income tomorrow, what would happen?

Plenty of jobs would disappear, but there would be more than enough reserved to fund those who lost their jobs until something else became available.

Right now I'm planning on making significant contributions for my in-laws when they can no longer work. I'm 26, and am positive that I'll be providing a lot of care for them in less than ten years. That means that the more I can save now, the more I can care for them later, and keep them healthy and happy, while preventing them from being a drain on "the system".

Last thought - there's not a fixed dollar cost per child's life saved. If it was that simple, some huge foundation (Gates, Zuckerburg) would kick all the money needed to eliminate all malaria-related deaths ever. They could afford it. The challenges are so much more nuanced than that. So you couldn't save 30 lives a year with your $100k, even if you tried.

Great question, though. I love thinking through all of these kinds of things.

PS have you read Your Money or Your Life? I think it might help answer some of these questions.

edit: spelling

Everyone in this world can't love their work. Loving your work is a luxury that only a small fraction of our population (as in In the Name of Love by my friend Miya Tokumitsu). If you want to get a job that you love, you're going to have to work hard and develop marketable skills (think So Good They Can't Ignore You by a man that I wish were my friend, Cal Newport).

Take this valuable time to learn a new skill. An introductory programming course is seriously valuable to almost anyone. If you're majoring in a science or social science, you should take the scientific writing. It's a surprisingly challenging subject, and most people are quite bad at it. There are always more math classes too. Personally, I like statistics because those classes are a little lighter than straight math courses. If you're a humanities person, take a class that builds your writing skill in a different way. If you're used to writing about books for your English major, take a history course. Your entire frame of reference will change, and you'll be able to apply that other pattern of thinking to your work in English. If you're a history major, take some economics courses and find out how economists think.

I don't care what you do, but if you're going to do it, plan out your strategy carefully. This time is really valuable, so make the most of it. If you decide to have fun with some easy elective that you enjoy, make sure that it's not just a space-filler; make sure that the joy it brings you is worth sacrificing 1/10 of a year of your young life when you could be learning a valuable skill.

>Also just to be fair, look at where this hero-based FPS style got Quake into, there is a reason why Blizzard made the most successful game in the genre, while others suffer from lack of development and direction.

Overwatch and Quake are NOT in the same genre. AT ALL. Overwatch is just as much an arena shooter as, say, Counter-Strike or Call of Duty are; which is to say not at all. You're making the same mistake everyone else is making in starting with incredibly superficial aspects of each game, namely that they have classes, and creating "genres" based on that rather than the actually significant gameplay differences between them (And they must be based on gameplay, since none of these games have any significant story elements in their actual runtime).

Overwatch is so far removed from traditional objective shooters, namely in how efficient use of abilities plays a much larger role in success than raw shooting skill than in virtually any other first person objective game that comes to mind. A large number of the classes don't even require any "FPS" skills, and instead have analogues in asymmetric strategy games and the like.

Quake Champions may be small, yes, but it IS attracting more people than just the quake crowd. On a technical level, it's an excellent blend between an archetypal arena shooter, the sort of game design Quake invented, while reducing complexity and convolution to make it much more approachable for those with more modern shooter habits. Lawbreakers, too, hardly suffers from any "lack of direction" in the design department. It's packed to the brim with great ideas and unique takes on the "high-skill FPS" concept, and had my jaw hitting the floor with respect for its elegant gameplay several times when I started playing it.

Success has far more to do with randomness and luck than most people in this thread seem willing to admit. Quake, Overwatch, and Lawbreakers AREN'T significantly better or worse than each other. No hypothetical backfit narrative properly explains why one would have hypothetically failed or succeeded without luck. We just live in a works where the big take the whole pie and the small get nothing; in a world of bandwagoning and herd mentality caused by popularity coming from whatever just happens to gain traction early on in its lifetime.

I bought in relatively early to all of these games because I'm a shooter fan and a nut for unique game design ideas. I will admit that I like Quake the most, Lawberakers second, and Ovwerwatch third, so I do have a little voice in the back of my head that gets irritated whenever others disagree with that assessment, but we all need to learn to come away form making simple judgements between them and other games in the same boat. All of them break the mould in different and unique ways, all of them have good ideas, and all of them could have been popular, in a world where luck happened to favor someone else.

Don’t just practice and watch competitive videos. Those are both really important, but you also need to learn the core concepts of the game and how to have a mindset focused on learning/improving. Additionally, playing in your local competitive scene will help a ton (even though you will be utterly demolished at first).

You don’t have to watch/read my recommendations specifically, but you should seek out content like this.

1. Izaw’s Art of Smash video series (definitely the first four in the playlist, which are general—the rest are character-specific). Although these vids are meant for Smash 4, most of the concepts and techniques apply to Ultimate.
   
   
2. Other Smash channels that have videos about techniques and concepts. For example, Beefy Smash Doods and My Smash Corner.
   
   
3. David Sirlin’s Playing to Win. It’s free to read in your browser. It’s largely about Street Fighter, but its concepts apply to all competitive games, especially Smash.
   
   
4. Use /r/CrazyHand (subreddit focuses on improving at competitive Smash. Its resource compilation is a great place to start.
   
   
5. The Inner Game of Tennis. It’s a book about tennis, but really it’s about how a learning/competitive mindset and how to learn better. I saw it recommended on this subreddit once and I loved it.

I highly recommend reading (or listening with audible) to a couple books that I listened to when I was questioning my job and career choices earlier this year. They aren’t silver bullets, but they’ll definitely offer sound advice on how to actively work to improve your situation.

If you don’t have much free time to read, like me, try listening to the audiobook on your commute or at lunch. Just find a time and place that makes sense for you.

I hope those books help you as much as they did me.

• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
  
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
  
• Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity
  *Think and Grow Rich
  

I'm 31 and just started my own company. When I turned 16, I had a profound epiphany about what I wanted to do "when I grew up". That epiphany was I wanted to own my own business. The why, came from the experiences I had since I was 14.


I worked as a delivery guy for two guys who owned a bounce house company. At 15, I was employee 1 at an advertising company. I started in the mailroom stuffing envelopes and I continued to work for that company through college and even a few months after graduating college. I didn't stay in the mailroom though. As I taught myself programming and a little design, I was growing within the company, as they themselves grew in revenue and size. I was getting a front row seat to what it was like to be an entrepreneur and I loved every minute of it; the long hours, the struggles, the doing whatever it takes, carving your own path, etc.


Even though I knew being an entrepreneur was part of my path in life, it has taken me 16 yrs to make that a reality. I have no regrets as I've been able to gain knowledge and experience the entire time. Everything you experience in life can help you in some way on your path to becoming an entrepreneur.


Remember, you can do a lot of good by being an employee too. You have not failed if you don't start a company.

1. Get a job right now if you don't already have one. Work and understand what work is and build a work ethic. Even better, find a job at a small company, no matter what it is. At most small companies, no matter your role, you get exposed to the entire business.
   
   
2. Meet and speak with entrepreneurs. Check out Meetup.com for events which are going on. You might be limited to not attending the events that are bars, but I've seen plenty of kids your age attending events.
   
   
3. Find a skill and learn it. You might not think it now, but as /u/douglasjdarroch stated, you have a ton more free time to devote to that skill than when you get a full time job. I'm partial to it, but any amount of technology skills will help you with your pursuit.
   
   
4. Culture is huge when it comes to creating a successful company it can be a differentiator.
   
   Suggested Reading
   
   

• The Great Game of Business
  
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  
• Rework
  
• Leaders Eat Last
  
• Zingerman's Guide to Building a Great Company
  
• Zingerman's Guide to Being a Great Leader

Oh I typed all this for you my dude but these dastardly bullies caused you to delete it.

​

Hope it benefits you or another ENTP stoner:

​

What caught my eye was the Myers-Briggs test: I also (usually) test ENTP. Just wanted to say I think the Reddit subs seem to do it a serious disservice:

​

A) It is a management tool. It is not meant to enable some rando's life as a lovable eccentric. You should be shoring up the weaknesses it shows, not jerking off to how creative you think you are (not that you can stop yourself amirite? Ha!), and

B) It is not a tarot card reading of your soul. I get profiled regularly, by professionals, using whatever method is in vogue at that moment and while I absolutely see the value in the tests, it is limited, it is contextual and it will vary over time.

​

It is not so much "revealing" your personality as a prediction of how your behavior will manifest in a given context. MB being particularly general. For example, all my ENTP result tells me is that RIGHT NOW, I likely have too many projects going on and/or am managing my time poorly.

​

So based on your results, I would recommend you get out of your comfort zone and focus on active productivity exercises. Far from being something unsuited to you: they are likely just what you need. Anytime I dial this in tight, my life has a night and day improvement.

​

7 Habits is the granddaddy of course.



Unchained Man has a great time management system. Actually he refers back to Covey's 7 habits and explains why and how he updated the principle for a digital era. The rest isn't "bad" but its pretty standard 4HWW/TRP/Digital nomad type stuff. You could literally read Chapters 8-11 and get a great deal of benefit.

​

4HWW fuck I hate this book. And it's probably dangerous for lazy fucks. But Ferriss has nuggets of good advice on productivity and time management.

​

More conceptual reading:

Do the Work;

The War of Art;

The Power of Habit;

Rework;

On Form - some tips, although heavily weighted to glorify salaryman life;

One Minute Manager;

Extreme Ownership has helped a lot of dudes here. Personally I despise wading through the military waffle for two or three pages of content but the message of owning every aspect of your life and not accepting low standards from yourself or others is good (Hint: that means after you quit weed, (after a reasonable interval) you can and should expect your lazy wife to too).

​

Corporations have invested a great deal of time and money in training me but honestly most of the valuable things I implement are on that list.

​

Atomic Habits is on my current reading list. Check out this post (and comments) with some concepts from it.

As a counterpoint to the "switch majors" camp, Cal Newport wrote a great book So good they can't ignore you that I read after I got dropped and was questioning pretty much every decision I made in college, and life, thus far. Unless someone literally wrote your application and didn't tell you what your major was going to be, there has to be at least something about it you like.

Newport argues that, rather than passion or gut feeling guiding your academic and career decisions, one should simply embrace the struggle of whatever they're pursuing and endeavor to become the best they can. Through this struggle, they learn to appreciate their craft, rather than beginning with an appreciation and then balking at the inevitable wall that everyone hits when doing something worthwhile. What this all boils down to: the more you learn and expose yourself to the intricacies of your major, the better you'll do, the more you'll end up appreciating it, and the better you'll want to do as a result.

What I recommend is to take a semester to knock out a bunch of geneds (Soc 100 is great for this) and do some independent study on topics in your major to find a niche that you are somewhat interested in. Try and delve as deep as you can into this niche. If you find that you truly can't find anything interesting, then you should probably reconsider majors.

Here is a random article I found about stock simulators.

How do you like to learn things? There are tons of books, podcasts and blogs about investing. Here are some popular ones or ones that I have read and used

• Books
  
  • The intelligent Investor
    
  • A Random Walk Down Wall Street
    
  • Your Money Your Life
    
  • The Richest Man in Babylon
    
  • I Will Teach You to be Rich
    
    
• Blogs
  
  • Stock Series
    
  • Mr Money Mustache
    
  • Mad FIentist
    
  • dozens of others, Google is your friend
    
    
• Podcasts
  
  • Money Tree Podcast -- pretty poor production quality but good general stuff.
    
  • There are tons of others, Google it.
    
    Warren Buffett famously/supposedly read every book in the financial section at the library by age 12--I think the important thing to take from that is you are still young and have tons of free time and aside from starting to invest as soon as you can (you can usually start as soon as you have earned income) you should be investing in yourself...getting good grades, figuring out what you want to do after high school, trying out businesses, learning marketable skills (e.g., coding, good writing skills, good interpersonal skills, good organizational skills, etc).
    
    Good Luck!

There is a very good chance it is possible. The keys are to (a) spend very little money, and (b) make a decent bit of money.

A potential reading list includes

• https://smile.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766/
  
• https://smile.amazon.com/Jacob-Lund-Fisker/e/B0049I0MOI/
  
• http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
  
• http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
  
• /r/leanfire/
  
• /r/financialindependence/
  
  If you don't track your spending, start. Be deliberate as you change it in the future. A lot of people don't even understand where their money goes.
  
  > I am still renting my living space ($650/month)
  
  Sounds like a likely-good decision.
  
  > hope to have a family...in the future (hopefully before retirement).
  
  Raising kids has a lot of cost, but also varies a ton by how you do it.
  
  If your partner is of one mind about living frugally and retiring early, you can cut costs by sharing things and can encourage each other. Most people aren't of that mind, so this is a common struggle.
  
  > hope to...own a home in the future (hopefully before retirement).
  
  I would encourage you to rethink this as an end unto itself. Owning a home makes sense sometimes for some people in some places. Other times, renting makes more sense. To the extent that owning a home is a sign of being a responsible, stable, grownup, it's just a status symbol. Don't chase status symbols.
  
  Try to analyze the decision to buy a house rather than renting in terms of whether it actually makes sense for your situation.
  
  > My question is, how much money does someone like me need to have in order to completely retire at 40-45 and still live comfortably?
  
  The common rules of thumb range from 20x-50x your annual expenditures for whatever 'live comfortably' means to you. The online community of early retirees and (more often) hopeful early retirees tends to push 25x your annual expenditures. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ plugs in some assumptions and computes, with tons of assumptions, the target savings rate to let yourself retire by a certain age.
  
  Any such rule of thumb has tons of variability based on risk tolerance, the unpredictable future, details to tax, details to pensions, tax-deferred savings, social security, etc., but these things can be approached by some pencil-sharpening when you're closer in. The main things are (a) make a lot of money, and (b) don't spend much money.

Congratulations on your achievement! Here are my responses to your bullet points:

1. Track your expenses, if you aren't already. Use something like Quicken or Mint. This is important, because as explained by the book "Your Money Or Your Life", it will help you focus your spending on things that are truly important to you, rather than squandering your money (or life energy) on things that are of little value to you.
   
   
2. The way the power of compounding works is, the earlier you start the greater its effect will be. So yes, you absolutely want to start as early as possible and stuff away as much as you can. Those early dollars will grow far more than dollars you put in later.
   
   > It seems scary to invest all my retirement money and potentially losing it all.
   
   The risk with "safe" investments like CDs and bonds is that they probably won't keep up with inflation, and you may not end up with enough savings to live on during retirement. While the stock market can be volatile over the short term, over the long haul (30+ years) it's proven to be pretty safe and capable of generating the high returns that you'll need to support your post-retirement.
   
   Normally the advice for retirement contributions goes like this (in the following sequence):
   
   

• Contribute to your 401k up to the point of the match
  
  
• Contribute to your ROTH IRA
  
  
• Max out the remainder of your 401k contributions
  
  
• Invest in after-tax accounts (if so desidered)
  
  Given your high salary, you may fall into the ROTH IRA income phase-out range depending on what your mAGI ends up being. You can always do a backdoor ROTH IRA, but that might be too advanced for you to deal with as a new worker.
  
  What I would do in your case is probably the following (and it's basically what I'm doing since my income is similar to yours):
  
  
• Max out your 401k. You'll want to focus on index funds with low fees, and include large company (S&P 500), small/med company, and international funds in your portfolio.
  
  
• Do your taxes early next year and determine how much you are eligible to contribute to a ROTH IRA for 2013, and make that contribution prior to the IRS deadline (you can make contributions to your 2013 IRA up to the tax return deadline). If it isn't much, consider doing the backdoor ROTH IRA contribution for the remainder amount.
  
  

3. Keep 3-8 months of expenses in a liquid (cash savings) emergency fund.
   
   
4. RSU is basically your employer giving you stock over a certain period to provide incentive for you to stay with them. So every year, you'll probably receive (or become vested in) $16k worth of company stock. After 5 years, you'll own the entire $80k. At least that's the way I think it works; I've never worked for an employer that offered it. I would probably sell the stock after I receive it so as not to have too much of my portfolio in one basket, and use the proceeds to purchase index funds or invest in other financial goals.
   
   
5. If you're willing to list the funds available to you within your 401k, and their associated fees, we can help you choose the ones that we think are best fit for your retirement plan.
   
   EDIT TO ADD: Since your ability to earn an income is your biggest asset right now, be sure to protect it with appropriate short term and long term disability insurance. More young people have life insurance than disability insurance, but statistically speaking, they are more likely to become disabled than die before the age of 65.

Lots of love for you, here are some thoughts of mine...

• it is a mistake to believe that you should be asking the question "What is the purpose of my life?" it's not a question you ask, IT IS A QUESTION YOU ANSWER! and you answer it by living your life as ONLY you can, having the adventure that is your life experience, discovering the magical miracle that is ONLY YOU in all of this vast universe!
  
  
• After losing Mormonism and the understanding of the universe that goes with it, I find myself an atheist, which has made this little journey of life INFINITELY more precious to me. It's all and everything we have! (as far as we know).
  
  
• I have pulled in many helpful, empowering, peaceful ideas from Buddhism, Philosophy, Science that has helped me start to form a new, optimistic, and amazingly open minded new world-view. I no longer have to believe anything that doesn't make sense, I get to believe only sweet things now, and that is SO nice.
  
  Here are some resources that I have been really grateful for on my journey, which I am 12 months into...
  
  The Obstacle is the Way
  
  The Daily Stoic this is my new "daily bible" I read a page every morning
  
  Secular Buddhism podcast
  
  Waking Up podcast
  
  End of Faith
  
  The Demon Haunted World
  
  Philosophize This! podcast OR Partially Examined Life podcast
  
  I wish you the very best in your journey, be patient with yourself, you have EVERY reason to be! Start filling your mind with powerful positive ideas, keep the ones that help you find your way, set aside the ones that don't.
  
  And remember, you are young and free and the possibilities of what your life can become are boundless!

I’m really glad that you’re being honest with yourself, introspective and detailed with your relationship with money. There are a lot of fantastic recommendations already so I won’t belabor the point.

However I’d like to recommend two books that may be of great use for you:

1. Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robbins (https://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766/ref=nodl_). The other posts in this thread have great tactics and suggestions that I wholeheartedly agree with.
   
   In addition to implementing those tactics, I would encourage you to read this book which does a wonderful job of also adding more logic, data, perspective, “oomf” and meat to the feelings of “this has to stop” you currently have. It’ll be a book that helps your attitude stay changed if you are tempted to relapse.
   
   
2. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. The title is rather flamboyant and lame. The content is not. Ramit is a Stanford grad son of Indian immigrants who takes a no-nonsense and often hilarious attitude to writing about getting your shit together when it comes to personal finance. It has a fantastic list of tactics, strategies AND philosophical frameworks to think about money contained in it. Really worth the read. Get the 2nd edition (recently released) since it has about ~80 new pages of content that covers some of the newer fads (e.g., roboinvestors like Wealthfront and the like).

Play more in public. Volunteer to play at church, or for a nursing home. Perform for your family, your friends, your classmates.

The thing is, performance anxiety and nerves don't just go away. As you get more experience performing, you get more used to them, to the point where I've heard (and read) professionals talking about how nerves are that extra little spark that makes a performance more special than a rehearsal - in other words, their anxiety doesn't disappear, it becomes a part of how they perform.

Now, all that said, there are things you can do to help you cope with the side effects of nerves on your playing. If this is something you're serious about tackling head-on, I highly, highly recommend tracking down either Performance Success or Audition Success by Don Greene. Perhaps see if your local public or college library has a copy or can borrow one via interlibrary loan before buying either one yourself. Two other books I see recommended a lot (that might be easier to find at your local library) are Zen in the Art of Archery and The Inner Game of Tennis, both of which have valuable insights that can be applied to performing. (The is even an adaptation of the latter called The Inner Game of Music, but I don't feel it adds much to the original.)

But yeah, the best thing you can do overall is to find and create more opportunities to play for more people. Force yourself to step outside of your comfort zone often enough, and you'll find it soon becomes comfortable. We've all been there to some extent!

Honestly, when you go in for "the big talk" just keep your value and importance to your company pinned on your chest. It's a lot harder to let go of someone when they know just how much will have to be done once you're gone.

Doesn't necessarily help after the fact, but you might get some use out of the 48 Laws of Power. Great book by Robert Greene that breaks down some crucial social/professional skills that often go overlooked. I read it for the first time when I was 16 and it really changed the way I approach work relationships as a whole. It's not some kind of self help guru silliness, but rather a collection of historical instances where a small shortcoming lead to the demise of empires, businesses, and even just individual people. Why not learn from the mistakes of generals, kings, moguls, etc? :)


Law 1: Never Outshine the Master
>Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

I'm currently in Monk Mode myself. I'm probably only going for at most a 3mo. term at this (Started Dec. 1st). It sounds like you have a good plan. I'm focusing on the following things:

• Meditating: the best way to re-program your brain IMO ("Wherever you go there you are")
  
• Teaching myself Jazz piano
  
• Diet (Here's my diet)
  
• Fitness (Here's my fitness bible)
  
• Career Development (This)
  
• Productivity & Time Management (too many books to mention, OP PM me if you want this list)
  
• Not watching Porn & Masturbating less frequently (Highly recommended /r/NoFap)
  
• No Alcohol
  
  For learning to cook I highly recommend this book.
  
  For addressing approach anxiety I recommend The Rules of the Game.
  
  This is an excellent book on habit change. (OP this is how you start to break down those "masturbatory" habits)
  
  Also, Monk Mode is basically an exercise in stoicism. This book is awesome.
  
  
  Since you'll have plenty of time to read here are some other Books I recommend:
  "No More Mr. Nice Guy"
  "Models: Attracting Women Through Honesty"
  "The Talent Code"
  "Man's Search for Meaning"
  "Flow"
  
  Final thoughts OP. 6 months is definitely a worthy goal however studies show that 90 days is usually what it takes to create new habits and routines. You have to be consistent though. Just food for thought.
  
  
  (Edit: I suck at formatting)
  
  
  
  
  

Right now, you have your new monitoring system stood up. This is a great time to go deeper and integrate it with more of the systems your team manages and customise it to each systems purpose. Going through this process will help you understand how everything in the company communicates with each other and what dependencies each system has on other systems.

​

Your boss is pushing for you to be involved in a new project. He's looking to expose you to more technologies the company uses. You've mentioned nginx, MySQL, PHP and Python above. A lot of these are individual tools which can enhance one system. I would advise at this point you're better off looking at the fundamentals of how everything works in your organisation. DNS, DHCP, general server configuration, virtualisation, certificates, storage etc.

Config management is an interesting area, but if you have gaps in the fundamentals you are back to copying config files you do not understand, creating automation based on assumptions of the requirements.

​

Regarding the "always going too deep" comment, this is why it's good to have long medium and short term goals. Long term you want to have a deep understanding of x y and z for a future job role. Medium term you focus on X and have a project to implement it. Short term you have some smaller issues you want to resolve within your environment mainly relating to X with some hints of other skills you're interested in.

​

This all said, you really need to sit down and go through what you want to be doing in a number of years time. Keep an eye on what you need for other jobs in the market. Right now you may not want to move on but you should be staying at the company because you want to work there, and not get trapped there because you don't have the right skills to get a job at another company at the same or above pay. And most importantly you don't want to spend time learning a skill that will be irrelevant to your career path as you become more specialised.

I'd recommend giving "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" a read as it helped me gain focus:

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692

1st what did your read; Both manuals? I don't know what that means. Ignore everything you read on medieval swordplay, it's not relevant to sport fencing. Although, I'm sure it's very interesting.

The books you read are pretty good. Nothing to outlandish about either Czajkowski book or Epee 2.5. If you want a syllabus, try:

1. Elaine Cheris' Fencing: Steps to Success - which is a good book on basic beginner technique
   
2. Aldo Nadi's On Fencing - technical manual/autobiography; is a classic fencing read although very dated.
   
3. Sergei Golobitsky's Fencing is My Life - which like Nadi's is more autobiography but of the most winning fencer in contemporary fencing
   
   Many, many people here on reddit will also recommend, "The Inner Game of Tennis" as a good read for fencing -- it's essentially a self help book. I personally did not find it even remotely helpful but if you find yourself generally inclined towards similar self-help, pop-psychology books then you might like it.
   
   As far as workout plans go (and you'll hate to hear this): don't work on lunges and fleches and such, yet. Wait till you have a coach to correct your form. You may wind up further ingraining some bad habits which you aren't aware of by working on them alone before you start. But, kudos on trying to get ahead of the game.
   
   What I recommend is that you just work on conditioning, the longer you stay sharp at practice the faster you'll improve. Run/Cycle a bunch get your body used to the stress. Optionally do weightlifting-style lunges with some free weights and kettlebell swings (don't over do it). I think even a brisk yoga routine which is heavy on the core-strength exercises and light on the mystical-bullshit is pretty good for fencing training.

First of all, like others have said here, you're not a bad parent; yet that you aspire to be a better person and parent is amazing and unfortunately leagues past many parent I know.
Financially, life is difficult for many of us, but I have been reading this book and it really helps. Check it out if you can All Your Worth

Also I feel that I should say, I've always been a slow learner. I was convinced that I was stupid for most of my childhood. Through my mother's undying thirst for finding inspiring people to mentor me, one of them being my godparent, I was able to find ways in which I enjoyed learning and have become a life long learner.
One thing I wish I had done was to go to 'not back to school camp' it's a place for smart kids who can't learn in the industrialized schools we're shuffled through these days. It may be for later, but look up the Teenage Liberation Handbook sometime... and good luck. You're doing great, and it will only get better.

Boy... those are some big, daunting questions.

But one at a time.


For better study habits, it sounds like procrastination is the problem. Make a big event out of studying, bring whatever materials you need to work on to a little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop or library and just get that one thing done while you're there. Don't bring all of your work just the one most important thing. It may seem a bit overdramatic to make a big deal out of studying by isolating yourself in a study bunker but it makes the work you're about to do feel mission critical. Also if you can do it early in the day, because by night you're going to be tired and just want to relax with TV or hanging out with friends, and stop kidding yourself, life's about those moments not the work that you have to get done for school. So respect yourself and let yourself have some fun when everyone else is, by keeping your nights mostly open and keeping your mornings booked with work. Finally, if it's something like an essay that will take a long time, don't you dare work on it for more than an hour without taking a break.

As far as being a better person in general... I don't really know... Have you tried the golden rule? Do to others what you want them to do to you. I hear it's a good one!

If you want a fantastic book all about best study pratices check out Cal Newport's Straight A Student

I'm kinda hijacking this thread but only because it's been several hours since you originally posted and I want to make sure you get this advice.

I want you to spend some money, but not much. We're talking $15 or less, you might be able to go used. You are going to take that money and buy a book called Your Money or Your Life. I struggled in my youth as well, I read everything I could on personal finance and investing and financial planning but it never clicked for me until I came across this book. Somehow I never made enough money to have any left over to save.

I have an older edition, so some of the reviews refer to material I have never read, but this is not the main point. The book will provide a way for you to frame your relationship with money and define your approach to managing it. It is a start-to-finish roadmap for how to get from where you are today to "financial independence", whatever that may mean to you.

Just to give you a taste, your "aha" moment will likely come once you calculate your true hourly wage as instructed and begin to examine your spending in that light. Your job likely requires more time than just the time you spend on the clock: you have to get ready, commute, work, commute some more, get home and spend some time unwinding before you move on to your life. All these hours are work-related, add them all up for a week (x 52 weeks). Now add all your work-related expenses--car maintenance, gas, haircuts, any special clothes or uniforms, lunches, what have you--and subtract this from your annual wage. Divide these numbers and you'll see what I mean by true hourly wage. These are the dollars you trade an hour of your life for, and each hour you spend at your job is an hour of your life you will never get back. Is it worth it? Going forward, examine every purchase you make and any expense you have and ask yourself, is it worth x many hours of your life?

This is just a small piece of what you will take away from this book. As a former banker and licensed investment rep, I recommend it as the single most important book a person could read to learn the fundamentals of money management. I consider it required reading. Hope this helps.

Edit: I'm curious, why the downvotes?

Yes! "Well-rounded" is a great way to put it. A leader who had a favorable ("favorable" is subjective, I know) balance between certain traits. Balance is key here.. Take a trait like ruthlessness for example:

Genghis Khan killed 40 million people in his campaigns across Eurasia, right? Massacring, torturing, executing, and enslaving the whole way.

Was all that necessary? I'm actually willing to admit the possibility that it was, as a matter of strategy. Chapter 15 (Law 15) of Robert Greene's book The 48 Laws of Power is called "Crush Your Enemies Totally" and discusses just this sort of thing. So I would not necessarily begrudge a leader taking a violent approach to securing their empire.

Now take, on the other hand, a leader like Timur aka. "Tamerlane", who was sort of Genghis' successor in a way. Tamerlane's death toll was only about half that of Genghis', but ~19 million deaths is still nothing to sneeze at. Timur's conquests were also run in the same sort of ruthless fashion as Genghis' (executing 100,000 captives in the 1398 Capture of Delhi, beheading 70,000 after the Isfahan revolt, etc).

Does this make Genghis Khan twice as ruthless as Timur? And if they happened to have racked up the same death toll, would that make them equally ruthless?

I believe the thing to consider is what else each leader brought to the table for their people and the world AND if, or to what degree those merits offset their ruthlessness. Again, this gets pretty subjective and philosophical (but I am asking for opinions, after all :-)).

So, for example:

One of Genghis Khan's main motivations for his campaigns (and I do think motivations behind actions are important) was to open up trade routes for the good of his people. In fact Genghis Khan is credited with bringing the Silk Road under one cohesive political environment, and this kind of environments may have had a positive impact on other civilizations as well who collaborated in trade using the same routes. Khan also replaced cronyism with meritocracy, which was a plus.

This was decidedly not the case for Tamerlane, who seems to have had much less noble motivations. By certain accounts "Unlike Genghis Khan, however, Timur conquered not to open trade routes and protect his flanks, but to loot and pillage." Besides being a military genius, positive light in Tamerlane's corner seems to be rather sparse.

Obviously this is a comparison between two historic leaders that I don't know if anyone would have as candidates for the very best leaders of all time but my point here is that there are certainly some solid metrics by which leaders can be praised or denigrated. Was there a boom in the economy when a leader rose to power? Was that a coincidence or because of some economic reform they enacted? Was there a dramatic fall in crime? Did their rise to power result in a fertile environment of innovation and literary/artistic/philosophical/scientific achievements? and so on. We can use historical data in context along with the same metrics that we could use to judge leaders today.

Thank you for the input.

Hi there,

With a sociology degree, you can do more than just be a professor or work in social services. Check out here and here for some ideas. The good news is that a sociology degree is very flexible, and gives you good transferable skills (the ability to do research, synthesize complex ideas, write reports, etc.).

You say you're "average" at everything, but don't forget that there are many different types of strengths out there! For example, look at this list. You're probably really good at some of these things - the key is to recognize both your strengths and weaknesses. You should promote your strengths and work on your weaknesses.

I know I've mentioned it a million times on this sub, but What Color is Your Parachute is really useful - your local library will likely have a copy. Your library should also have a careers section with other useful books.

Best of luck!

No problem! You don't come off as a brat at all. You're asking for help, and that's a step most people won't even do. They just sit in their little, sad situations and struggle for no reason. You're not like that. Chin up.

College is the first time I'm getting a support group offline. My parents refuse to acknowledge any and all kind of "mental illness", as they call it. So I definitely had to deal with a lot of coping growing up.

I started scheduling because I read this book. I know it might not apply to you now, but if you're curious THAT book was the one that changed the course of my college career- mostly because of its explanation of scheduling. If I had never read it I would undoubtedly not have so much work done ahead of time. But anyway, I am currently a college student so everything here is from a college student's perspective:

I understand what it's like to not want to confine to a schedule, really. In fact, I don't think I've ever done everything I schedule in a single day. See: http://i.imgur.com/bHNx0m4.jpg

Boxed in red is my schedule for the day, circled in green is stuff I didn't finish-- and it's okay, because my life deserves some flexibility. Because sometimes, I don't want to do math at that particular moment.

So I don't do it.

ADHD doesn't always let me sit still and do work. However, I make an effort to do something else productive, like some other assignment or drawing or reading. Something that's not Reddit. My rule is that I work 5 days a week, from 8 am to 8 pm. This is how I get ahead. I know 12 hours seems like a lot but I set aside an hour for lunch usually and I try to give myself 15 minute breaks every 45 minutes of work, Pomodoro style.

Sometimes I'm not even able to make myself productive. I Reddit or navel-gaze or sleep for a couple hours. It happens. It's okay. I'm usually ahead anyway. Let myself have a break.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, scheduling doesn't have to be this completely restrictive thing. It is actually very freeing. I am much kinder to myself now than I was before without scheduling-- because back when I didn't schedule, I ended up with a lot of backlog, which meant that I often was forced to work for hours on end. It sucked.

tl;dr: Scheduling, and doing work when I feel like doing work, allows me to make free time later that I can mess around with. It's like karma! Do good now, and you can reap the benefits at a later time. And what I do:

1. Look at stuff that's due soon
   
   
2. Schedule that stuff for your day, with time ranges (2:00 - 3:30 pm - Classics reading)
   
   
3. Do stuff when it's that time.
   
   
4. If unable to do #3, do something else productive.
   
   
5. Relax if you can't finish everything because you've probably done plenty today anyway.

First and foremost, 48 Laws of Power. It will show you 100+ ways other people have tried and where they failed and succeeded. It's a great introduction. Get this first.

A lot for these are free on gutenberg.org

Meditations - On being ethical and virtuous in a position of power.


33 strategies of war - A great companion to the 48 laws.

Art of war - Ancient Chinese text on war and power. All but covered in 48 laws.

Hagakure - Japanese text on war and power. All but covered in 48 laws.

On war - Military strategy from Napoleonic era. All but covered in 48 laws.

Rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Amazing book.

Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger - Abstract thought models and logic patterns of highly successful people.

The Obstacle is the Way - Not labeled a book on power, more like thriving during struggle, which is important to a leader.

Machiavelli: The Prince - Pretty much the opposite of meditations. All but covered in 48 laws.


Also, here's a good TED talk on why power/civics is important to study: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_why_ordinary_people_need_to_understand_power?language=en


If you've gone over these and want something more specialized, I can probably help.

Are you planning on taking us over with force or charm?

I've got a few different unrelated comments.

1. I am surprised people from Austin have not mentioned this... If you have any passion for food, you could join the ranks of the gourmet food trucks that are downtown. If you've not already tried them, you need to go to the gourmet donut truck downtown. I think it was called "Gourdo's Doughnuts".
   
   
2. As others have mentioned though, successful entrepreneurs do not normally start as people who have money to burn and no ideas. Successful entrepreneurs come from people with no shortage of ideas bootstrapping themselves to success. This is what I am trying to do right now..
   
   
3. A good place to start may be to read or listen to "The $100 Startup", by Chris Guillebeau. Here. This book uses lots of examples to explain how a lot different people started different types of businesses. It also points you toward a lot of good resources.
   
   
4. It sounds like you have just enough money to file a patent.... Yes a full patent can cost about that much depending on lawyer fees. If you were working overseas, my first guess is that you were doing something engineering related... perhaps in manufacturing. Rather than trying to start a business, try to solve a problem. Have you ever wanted something that didn't exist? I found a good approach to generate products is to develop simple solutions to problems that you have. Other people have likely had the same problem and would kindly pay you for an elegant solution. File a provisional patent application (PPA), and then go look for investors. Well, build a prototype, file the PPA, and then go look for investors to get it off the ground. Your $20,000.00 should be more than enough to get through a few design-build phases, especially with resources like protomold, and protolabs
   
   
5. "The $100 Startup" denounces franchises. The short version of their explanation is that they take a lot of your $, make you work for them, and only give you a modest return on your investment.
   
   
6. Join meetup.com and go to a entrepreneur event in Austin, TX. Occasionally,they will have weekend long events where people come together with ideas and money and try to put a business plan and product together. I am yet to attend an event, but I just signed up for Orlando and look forward to my first meet up. Success as an entrepreneur is not required to attend. I think you just have to go ready to work through the night and pitch your business in the morning.
   
   
7. List at things you are remarkable at, and then look at how you can use your skills to help others.
   
   Hope this helps.
   
   FSMspeed on your journey.

I found this and this to be extremely relevant. I don't know if there is a general solution to being happy, and I'm not entirely sure how I went from depressed to reasonably happy. However, I do think some particular solutions exist.

Because of past experiences, I really don't like the medication approach and I'm glad I could avoid it. But, I'm only a sample of 1 and I can't make generalizations about whether or not professional/medical help is a good idea for someone. I tend to think it's an impermanent solution and that it's more valuable to learn how to make those internal changes on your own. Maybe though, it's more dependent on brain chemistry than I realize and I'm just lucky. It could be that my happiness is a fluke and I don't actually have very much control over how I feel.

The things you want may indeed be unattainable. Some of the things I want may be unattainable. Some of them definitely are.

This is a bit of a tangent, but it's necessary for dealing with seemingly unattainable things. It's useful to think of your self as two parts: a teller and a doer. Long story short, the teller is stupid and needs to shut its mouth. The doer can handle things just fine. This book (full pdf here) elaborates on this idea really well. It's not actually about tennis, of course. Basically, the teller is the one saying things are unattainable or that a social situation has gone to shit, and it's wrong a lot of the time. Even when it's right, stuff is meaningless anyways, so it doesn't cost much to try.

I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about work/family. That stuff might be interesting to the person doing it, but it's kind of lame to hear about. Hobbies work really well for the socialization front. Granted, getting into a hobby requires that you want to do it. I don't really have any extra advice on that. Once you have hobbies though, they're great. My main thing that I do now is really just a hobby taken to the extreme. Talking to people who share the hobby is fun because you can get that "I know, right?!" feeling.

Wanting to do stuff in the first place is the hardest part, or at least it was for me. I can't really give any concrete advice on it. One thing I did was find channels on Youtube where someone uploads on a daily or bi-daily basis and pretend they were my friend. It's kind of pitiful, but I felt better after a while. It probably won't be your cup of tea, but I really like this guy. I found web comics and blogs to also be good in that regard, but they're some special sauce to human faces and voices. The closer it is to an actual conversation the better. I think setting comically low goals and slowly working up to bigger ones also helps.

Certainly having a good professional trainer is the best (note: not everyone you could pay for training has an idea what they are doing). Without that, I'd say you should invest in some training materials. I always recommend Don't Shoot the Dog as an intro to training because it will help get you in the right perspective for various ways to train dogs. There are also various online training groups which may be able to help you. The three biggest differences between you and a professional training are 1) ability to read body language (you may be able to, idk) 2) knowledge of various training techniques (can be learned though having a teacher for some is best) 3) practice rewarding at exactly the right time and frequency (this is actually the trickiest and takes lots of practice).

For 3, I'd recommend getting a clicker (even if you don't use a clicker with your dog, this is about understanding what behaviors you are rewarding) and playing a game with your friend/family where, without saying any words, you guide them to doing something. Any progress toward the goal gets a click. Anything that is not helpful gets no response. (eg. Turning on the light. They step toward the light, click for that. Take another step closer, click for that. Touching the wall the switch is on gets a click). This exercise gets you practice to see what you are rewarding and, when your friend is trying to get you to do something, shows you how much a mistimed reinforcement screws everything up.

To address distraction issues, you'll want to put the dog in a situation where you are 95% confident it will do the right thing. Your dog likely won't react to distractions when they are 100 yards away. When they are right next to your dog, it may react. Figure out where your dog will be successful and then very very slowly (inches or a foot at a time), up the difficulty. The technique is called shaping and is a great tool for training difficult behaviors and behaviors at a distance.

What?! NOTHING IT related that you would find interesting enough to learn about on your own time?

Did you do this for the money? That's insane.

No Chef? No Puppet? No Docker? No obscure language? No embedded systems? No Nutanix? No ESXi? No nano server? Nothing IT related tickles your pickle? What about vulnhub? Red teaming? Game development? TELL ME.

/u/ProfFrnswrth -- I can't relate with the sentiment of not having energy after 8 hours. Hell, there are times we were updating systems until 1 or 2 AM and I STILL went home and dicked around in a VM. Do I have an unhealthy passion for this stuff? Probably.

As a child, very awkward, you can imagine, I had a computer and I was trying to play Deus Ex. The colors were terrible and the game stuttered and spewed, eventually freezing on that terrible sound looping: "EEHN, EEHN, EEHN, EEHN, EEHN, EEHN, EEHN" -- being borderline retarded as a child, I didn't think to turn off the speakers, I just ran and told my Dad the computer is broken.

Being a good father, he assumed what all good fathers assume: porn. I was lectured and berated about not getting caught with my weasel in my hand, my dad unplugged the computer and turned it back on. I was defeated, never again to play this game my friend told me about.

The next day, whilst at school, I told my friend, the one in which of whom recommended the game, that my computer couldn't run it, I was doomed.

"What, ho?! Nay! Bringith thine tower to my domicile once within we leavith our studies!" -- Told you, fucking awkward.

So I bring this HP wanna be Blue Bubble Macintosh computer to my friend's house. My friend and his father ripped apart the internals of that poor HP tower, and replaced what looked like the internals to the backup for Johnny Five. Some brown circuit board and a lot of fans.

I was terrified. I was instructed by my friend to take my computer back home and try Deus Ex again. So, I get home and connect everything. Fearful of being sternly spoken to about pornography again, I left the speakers unplugged.

My God, man! It's beautiful! Normal colors, smooth textures, fast movement. But there wasn't any God damn sound! Oh, the speakers, right, so I plugged the speakers back in.

From there, I said "I want to be able to fix anything". It was very humbling and earth shattering to be honest.

I mean, if you think about it, as a preteen, you don't know what a computer is. You use it and you play on it, but you don't know what it is unless you're born into a family that teaches you or you're some Matilda freak that reads CPU and motherboard manuals in your free time.

But here... My friend, my peer, my ALLY! He knew exactly what it took. He took an impossible problem (can't play a video game), and not only made it a reality, he did it with spare parts in his closet LOL!

So, because of him, I am where I am today. Do I know how to fix everything? No, of course not. Don't be silly.

But! I have taken to using scheduled, distraction free time to learn something or get better at a skill. I go into that with a furious frenzy and get shit done. An hour? Half an hour? Five hours? I don't care, I'm going to tackle the living shit out of my objective.

Scheduled, distraction free time? What in the name of Almighty Christ on his Throne is this?!

First, I recommend a very subjective and biased book:

Deep Work

The concept of "Deep Work" is not foreign, but you may not have heard it called that before. It's a great book about finding time to get work done in a world of distractions.

Second, I recommend Earl Nightingale's "The Strangest Secret". You can find the audio on Amazon or Youtube, whichever you prefer. In YouTube he sounds cooler but speaks much quicker.

Earl Nightingale, again, came up with nothing new. This is some Oprah shit before Oprah was out. This broadcast changed my life. It builds off Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and takes concepts from Philosophy and Religion. The best "Power of Positive Thinking" speech I've heard. Listen to it, and see if it vibes with you.

Anyway, get your goals down, write them. Don't put them in your God damn phone, WRITE IT DOWN. Look it everyday. If you miss a day, you have to see it, you can't just delete it from your phone (yeah, you can rip the paper out of the notebook, but I'd like to think you're not a destructive person ;) ).

You like Podcasts? Yeah? YEAH?

Check out Entrepreneur on Fire. He doesn't talk about tech, sysadmin, hacking, NOTHING. But he's super positive, he is successful, and he loves sharing his tips for success. He markets his little notebook a lot (yeah, I bought one), so take it how you will.

This last part is what no one wants to hear. Everyone knows this and rolls their eyes:

Take care of yourself. Seriously. Drink coffee, that's fine, but don't drink 6 - 10 cups a day. If you have a desert, that's fine too, but don't rely on cakes, cookies, Starbucks, Monster, Redbull, etc. as your daily driver. Eat fruits and vegetables. No, not V8/Naked/Sunny D. Eat some celery and hummus, or a salad with lettuce, kale, and olives.

Short on time? Almond Milk + 1 Orange + 1 Cup of Kale + 1 Cup of Spinach + 1 Cup of mixed berries + 1 Banana + 1 scoop Sunwarrior Protein powder. Or whatever. Don't use whey or casein. Don't buy into this hype that you need 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight or any other dumb shit bro-science that's out there.

Exercise your body: go for long walks, brisk or light jog. Calisthenics, too. Burpees, push-ups, situps, squats. Don't be one of those bench press monkeys either, do real exercises. Deadlift, Squat, Overhead Press. Don't have barbells? DON'T CARE. Goblet Squat, Farmer's Walk, Lunges, Man-Makers (Push-up + Dumbbell row), Dumbbell swings, dumbbell snatches -- Get to work. Ton of programs on the internet, and you can YouTube the exercises.

If you want to study, learn, stay abreast of tech news you can make time to do it. Schedule time, write it down, and stick to it. Don't be afraid to unplug. Leave your phone and go for a walk without headphones. Go bike riding at a park or through the woods. Go sit at a beach or pool without anything. Just listen to the birds squawking and screeching. You'll enjoy it.


Well this escalated quickly:

TL;DR

Deep Work - Book

EoF - Podcast

The Strangest Secret - Earl Nightingale broadcast

Diet and Exercise

Git Gud

First of all, love the you that you are. This is how you are currently wired, accept that and accept yourself. This doesnt mean you dont make an effort to improve, it just means dont think you are 'broken' right now. Based on your description, it sounds like you could benefit from learning and practicing Stoicism. Look at this book and read the excerpts on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Perseverance/dp/0735211736/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551078323&sr=8-1&keywords=stoicism

​

I want you to really focus on self love/self respect (the core of what it means to be confident and secure with yourself). We must understand that as humans we can NEVER be perfect, so therefore perfection should never be the benchmark for our worthiness. Learning from mistakes is the only way that we can evolve our souls. Feeling a lack of worthiness will only result in self sabotage. While feeling worthy and deserving will attract good circumstances and happiness.

You can do this because your life is sooooo with it :)

Disruptive technologies move more slowly through the government because there are no alternatives - there's no Uber that can replace city hall itself. Individual jobs and technologies can be automated, but the structure is slow to change. However, you can't rely on a government job to shield you from the consequences of automation. The economy's going to take gargantuan, disruptive hits in the near future, and government positions are affected directly by the economy.

Consider that the government accounted for one third of all job cuts in 2011. After the 2008 recession, the government cut over 750,000 jobs in 2009 alone.

If you want a great job that allows you to make an impact and have a safe income, you of course need to consider your industry. However, the only way to truly insulate yourself is to develop skills that are valuable. There will surely be economic turmoil in the future, and you need to make sure you're valuable enough to be able to navigate those choppy waters. Become an expert in doing things that people need, and you'll stay in the game far longer than people who chose simply to get into a "safe industry". Checkout Cal Newport's book "So good they can't ignore you" for more in depth advice on how to pick a career and produce immense amounts of value.

TL;DR: No industry is safe. Regardless of industry though, top experts will be the last to be automated. Get great at something and you'll be alright.

Going to attempt to fit this in one post...

1.) What are some fallacies to look out for?

List: Ad Hominem, Argument from ignorance, Argument from authority, Argument from final consequences, Appeal to Tradition, Overgeneralization, Begging the question, Correlation does not imply causation, False analogy, False dichotomy, Slippery-Slope, Straw man, Moving the Goalpost

2.) How do you recognize you are running around in circles?

Person A presents an argument, and Person B responds with a counter argument. Person A then uses either a Logical Fallacy or doesn't address any point Person B has made. If you try to get back on track, and Person A refuses to get back on topic, then you might be talking in circles.

You may simply have to leave the discussion if the other person refuses to address any point you've made.

3.) How do you recognize there is a flaw in your own premise?

See the list of Logical Fallacies, check to see if you have adequately addressed the argument at hand, and remember to not become too overly aggressive. Instead of posting immediately, check your own post and see if you can predict any counter arguments. Clean up your own argument for clarity, get rid of loopholes, and simply strengthen your point.

4.) How do you admit that you made a mistake?

If a person points it out, thank them for catching the mistake, apologize, and amend your argument accordingly.

Do not become defensive! Pride and ego have no place in an honest discussion. If you are more concerned with being right than having an open discussion where everyone learns, then you are hurting yourself and the discussion. Please, for the sake of everyone involved, come into all debates with a super humble attitude!

5.) How do you recognize when you have used a fallacy?

Check the list of Logical Fallacies, and become familiar with all fallacies. You just have to learn them, be aware that they exist, and reread before posting. If you find you've posted an argument with a fallacy, edit, declare the edit at the bottom, and say something like, "Amended argument issues".

6.) What are some common misunderstandings you see?

Very open question, but here are a few...

These aren't suppose to be arguments, which is based purely on emotion, but instead discussions. We're debating and discussing topics, but we aren't here to argue.

If you need clarification from the original poster, then ask for it instead of simply debating from miscommunication.

7.) What are some fallacies that are more grey than black or white (in your opinion)?

No True Scotsman: "The term was coined by Antony Flew, who gave an example of a Scotsman who sees a newspaper article about a series of sex crimes taking place in Brighton, and responds that "no Scotsman would do such a thing". When later confronted with evidence of another Scotsman doing even worse acts, his response is that "no true Scotsman would do such a thing", thus disavowing membership in the group "Scotsman" to the criminal on the basis that the commission of the crime is evidence for not being a Scotsman. However, this is a fallacy as there is nothing in the definition of "Scotsman" which makes such acts impossible. The term "No True Scotsman" has since expanded to refer to anyone who attempts to disown or distance themselves from wayward members of a group by excluding them from it. "

No True Scotsman is a Logical Fallacy, but a clarification exists. If I were debating religion with a Christian, I point out bad things that extremists do, and the Christian says, "I acknowledge they exist, but they're not the majority." That is not No True Scotsman. They acknowledged that those Christians exist, but are clarifying the statement by saying they are not the majority.

Tone Argument: "The tone argument is a form of derailment, or a red herring, because the tone of a statement is independent of the content of the statement in question, and calling attention to it distracts from the issue at hand. Drawing attention to the tone rather than content of a statement can allow other parties to avoid engaging with sound arguments presented in that statement, thus undermining the original party's attempt to communicate and effectively shutting them down."

A clarification can be made though. Every discussion of tone is not a tone argument. If you are being uncivil, using personal attacks, and generally making an argument so hostile and toxic that the other person has to leave, then you haven't won. If you act awful to people, then when they call you on it don't yell "Tone Argument! I win!". No, you didn't "win", you just were rude to a person before they decided to leave.

8.) How do you continue to maintain a civil discussion when name calling starts?

Calmly say, "I do not appreciate being talked to that way. We can have a discussion without going to personal attacks." If they continue you may want to message the moderators, or simply leave the discussion. If they aren't interested in a real discussion or debate, then don't waste your time.

9.) Is there an appropriate time to downvote?

In regards to /r/ChangeMyView, do not downvote for disagreement. Downvote for not adding to the conversation. If they have broken a rule message the mods, don't downvote.

10.) What are some of your pet peeves?

Please check your post before posting. Be clear, to the point, and don't assume your audience can read your mind. You have to explain yourself well, but with the fewest words possible.

If someone has made a great argument or post, please upvote them so we reward good skills!

11.) What is your biggest mistake in argumentation?

I have used logical fallacies before. Just admit it, amend your argument, and move on.

The biggest mistake is I have to be careful about topics I am emotionally involved in. Humans are emotional creatures, so it's easy to be overly emotional. I just have to take a deep breath, if I need to I'll take a bit of a break, and then come back. Don't let it get to you, and just remember you are responsible for the civility of the discussion as well.

12.) How can your argumentation be improved?

Avoid fallacies, watch debates on Youtube, or research a topic some before posting. Build up points and anticipate the counterpoints to your argument. Look through some of the best posts on /r/ChangeMyView and see common techniques used.

13.) How do you find common ground so argumentation can take place?

Treating the other person as a thinking, feeling human being. It creates common ground when you treat everyone involved as a person. If the other person makes a good point, acknowledge it and say you'll think about it. Treat the discussion as a sharing of information and ideas. If they change your view in some way though, then obviously award a Delta.

14.) What are some topics to formally study to better your experience?

That's complicated. School and college obviously always are helpful. The book Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion is a great book that I've lectured with.

15.) What are some concepts that are important to grasp?

The other person is a person, treat them as such. Base your argument around actual counterarguments, not fallacies. Don't take discussions personally, and likewise don't make them personal.

16.) What are some non intuitive logical results?

None I can think of. May edit later.

17.) How do you end a debate that you have recognized is going nowhere?

"Thank you for the discussion, but I feel we are talking past each other. I think this discussion has run its course, so I should leave." Just say something like that and leave.

I’m guessing you’ll be in the Arts block which means cavernous lecture theatres full of nervous first years. Their biggest fear is the lecturer asking them a question, so they will tend to avoid the first few rows. If you try to initiate a conversation with one of them, even if you just want to ask them what the lecturer said, they are likely to immediately internally combust. Honestly, it’s easier making friends on public transport in London.

Anyway, don’t take your classmates’ paranoia personally. It’s definitely them. People chill out when they get older. In any case, you’ll have smaller classes and tutorials where it’s easier to talk to people. You’ll naturally gravitate towards the people who have more in common with you.

For one of your electives, take a first year course in descriptive statistics. Mean, standard deviation, probability distributions etc. I'm gonna guess that this is not your cup of tea, but the ability to understand basic (but fundamental) statistics is depressingly rare. Statistics is the practice of making inferences where exact knowledge is not possible. It's a life skill. Isn't that what we do every day? It is effectively the maths of philosophy, if that's more palatable.

If you want some practical study / research tips, there’s a good book by Cal Newport that scorns the generic study advice tropes. If you like it, I recommend you read Deep Work too. https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1W2XQBJM81WEZ&keywords=cal+newport&qid=1567548493&s=gateway&sprefix=cal+newport%2Caps%2C751&sr=8-4

Finally, there’s a super (!) blog that attempts to answer your exact question. It’s aimed at finance students, but I think you’ll find it useful :)

https://leveragedcareers.com/home/2017/9/19/how-to-make-the-most-of-university-1

https://leveragedcareers.com/home/2017/9/26/how-to-make-the-most-of-university-2

Aaaaand that's enough for now!

Exercise - I was a total skeptic when it came to this one. Exercise made me feel worse, not better, and I felt as though I didn't have enough time for it. But now that I have consistently worked it into my schedule, it has done wonders to help lower stress and anxiety levels, increase my confidence, and now I actually want to jog.

Physical appearance - This is just a personal thing and varies in importance from person to person, but dressing professionally and taking some time to do hair, make up, buy a new outfit, etc. make me feel more confident when at school. So I basically never dress at school how I would at home.

Don't be too stressed if your research isn't working out, and don't be afraid to share progress - I am in the humanities, so this may be different for other fields, but I had a research paper to work on last semester and it took me nearly the whole semester to finally come up with a concise and definite argument and pull it together. But rather than compromise or give up, I have a good argument and publishable idea. I also decided to present my fairly underdeveloped paper to a conference. I told them that it was an active work in progress and that I was hoping for feedback - and I got just that!

I would also recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. I don't usually take much away from these types of books, but the tips and strategies for time management and productivity really make sense to me and I have been actively working to incorporate them into my academic life.

If possible (I know this isn't always something grad students can do), have a vacation planned far in advance, even if it is just a day or two where you plan to go get out of the house and do something fun. That way you have something to look forward to in the long-term.

Your Money or Your Life was a pretty good book that explained this well. The audiobook is narrated by the author and if given the chance, I'd hold her underwater until the bubbles stopped. She had the worst voice I've ever heard.

The Millionaire Fastlane was also a readyy good read. Highly recommended.

The Millionaire Next Door was a fantastic read and the book that got me started thinking about financial independence and the concept of FIRE. It's a bit dated (late 90s I think) but still some amazing information in there.

Check us out at /r/financialindependence and /r/leanfire. If you haven't, definitely visit /r/personalfinance and check out the sidebar and wiki - there's some AMAZING information and guides for all ages and walks of life.

I wish so hard that I found out about this stuff and had the resources available now when I was 18, and not when I turned 31. But oh well, such is life.

/u/typhuslol do feel free to PM me if you want to chat! I'm happy to share the lessons I've learned in the past few years of pursuing financial independence!

for a general training book i can not recomend anything but "Dont shoot the dog" ISBN-13: 978-0553380392

it is great for general trainingand really gets into the reasoning behind all the things it tells you to do.

as far as a boxer goes. keep that dog thinking, they are very smart and tend to get bored and when they get bored they entertain themselves.and they tend to do things that are nor welcome to entertain themselves.

they also are very enthusiastic learners, they are quick to want to please, however they can be stubborn just to see what you do. think of a smart little 4 year old. they will push your buttons.

best of luck and i hope you have a great journey with your new kid, because that's what they are kids.

Pouncey,

Sorry to hear you are stressing.. I think we have all been there. Do you know what you are good at or do you have any strengths? You seem rather articulate and have some level of awareness. The world has a way to tell you what they think we suck at, so I find it important to hold onto the things I think are my strength and value them. You have to be good at something...

I think Enictobi's rules are a good start, you have to develop some boundaries of what you will allow to affect you and what you won't. Rules are one way people on the spectrum make sense and learn to manage the world around them.

When I first went down the path, I picked up on Dr. Phil's life strategies... I am not a big fan of Dr. Phil showmanship, but the rules were pretty good. http://www.drphil.com/articles/article/44 There are a lot of good books with other good suggestions on how to cope with stress, and such... you do need a strategy for dealing with it and commit to doing it.

It sounds like you need to find some places where you can go an relax, you might try the library... University libraries are sometimes better than public libraries since they often have rooms where you can go study (or sleep). You might also consider working out or something to relieve the stress.

You also sound like you are dealing with some financial issues, you might consider reading Elizabeth Warren's book on financial planning. http://www.amazon.com/All-Your-Worth-Ultimate-Lifetime/dp/0743269888 You can probably pick up most of the tips online, or read the book at the library.

I think unmanaged stress for people on the spectrum is the root cause of depression and other mental illnesses. I pray you find some respite in the tempest that is your life right now.

Good luck!

The best route is to take up a course on Logic.

Study introductory predicate logic. Break statements into predicates - identify their antecedent and consequent. Identify the differences between a predicate's negation, inverse, converse, and contrapositive; more importantly, how they can be used to derive logical Truth. Familiarize yourself with Gödel's completeness theorem.

Next, learn to identify a fallacy; study up on logical fallacies.

Cognitive Biases are the next most important step. Being aware of your own cognitive biases will help you identify when your analyses are being skewed.

Study everything about everything. More information about your domain of concern will granter you further insight for analysis.

Lastly, take care of yourself. Get lots of sleep, eat healthy, and exercise; your judgement will be impaired if you don't.


Some books to help:

• Aristotle's Organon: Amalgamation of Aristotle's work on logic and reason. The starting point for most Logisticians.
  
• Critique of Pure Reason: Kant's works on logic and reason are pretty much mandatory - but require careful study.
  
• Critique of Practical Reason: Another of Kant's works. Read this after the critique of pure reason.
  
• Science of Logic: Hegel's work is an extension of Kant and Aristotle - also mandatory.
  
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Hume's works are a much easier read, but aren't as explicitly stated.
  
• Informal Logic a Pragmatic Approach: The best introductory logic book I've read.
  
• LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND HUMAN NATURE: Steve Pinker has an unique perspective as a psychologist, linguist, and cog. scientist. This book highlights some of his more interesting insights.
  
• Thought and Language: Offers interesting insights into some innate biases in language and culture.
  
• A Rulebook For Arguments: This provides nice introductory reference material for fallacies and argumentation.
  
• Thank you for Arguing: Exploits fallacies and cognitive biases to pursuade an audience in an argument. Witty and easy to read.
  
  Edit: Added book suggestions.

Instead of giving you advice, I have the perfect book recommendation that will come pretty close to directly answering your question. I read this years ago, but only just found it again and am giving it another read through.

The book is called 'So good they can't ignore you: why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love' by Cal Newport.

The author actually has a computer science degree funnily enough. In it he uses empirical evidence to argue that the common advice of 'follow your passion' is flawed and unrealistic, and generally bad advice. After arguing that he puts forward his arguments about what the best course of action is if you discount the passion hypothesis. Its full of examples of people he interviewed who took different approaches to end up doing what they love, why some failed at it and why some didn't. I really can't recommend this book more highly actually, I think it will be perfect for you.

Here is the amazon link
https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124

Monte Carlo can take your historical data and then use the distribution to pick out values which could have had happened in the past. Say, if the distribution shows that there was an equal chance of the price increasing 1 dollar during a minute as there was a chance of the price decreasing 1 dollar a minute, then MC can flip a coin in the past and thus create a different kind of market history. You can thus play out events which were probably going to happen, but for some reason, such as randomness, never did. You may thus find that your strategy was either over- or underperforming in the timeline which is considered the real market history -- if you let out the price history play out more enough times, you will find variations in which you had astronomical gains and ones in which you were margin called every day. The idea is to find where exactly are you sitting with it currently.

Markov Chains then improve on the Monte Carlo by creating the possibility of occurrence of values which never were in the original distribution. In other words, this lets you play out timelines which are considered impossible by the historical data. This may further help you solidify your strategy even for the unlikely.

A book which introduces you to the importance of MC using an exhaustive amount of anecdotes is for example: https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-Incerto/dp/0812975219

u/GravityTxT, geekguy has the best advice on this thread. "will, fortitude, and action".

I never earned much money and retired at 35 to travel full-time. It's not about how much you earn, but how much you spend.

If all my investments magically disappeared and I had to start again, I would get a job in rural Japan, doing something I like, where housing is essentially free, and there's a labor shortage. That's an immediate strong economic position from which to rebuild capital.

Do what you love, avoid lifestyle inflation, enjoy life.

And as a former software industry worker, I say the industry is awful for quality of living, and emotional fulfillment. IT, too.

You need to get concrete on what you want out of life. Read Your Money or your Life by Dominguez/Robin.

If you're a numbers guy read http://earlyretirementextreme.com/, if you're a heart guy read https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/. Even if you want to work to 75, these are great resources for living a examined life, rather than just floating along.

OP,
Calm down. Like you say, it was a learning experience and it seems a good one at that.
To everyone else's defence, when you can drop terms like "profit margin," "overhead" and "markup," it doesn't grant you business expertise. Or at the least, it doesn't impress this subreddit.
Instead it makes it sounds like you took a Business 101 class.
More telling was the new phone and business cards. These are, at best, things you need after a first client (proof you have a "business").
But when you started in on Class A shares and Class B non-voting shares, it made me re-read the first paragraph. I'm thinking "Is this guy doing landscaping, or is prep'ing a visit to a VC?"

You've got drive. That's great. And now you have experience -- from one try. Try again. You'll fail again, and that's cool. Especially cool if you try again.
Best to you and whoever you pair up with next. In the meantime, fill in time with a few books like Lean Startup and Rework.

I would check out most of Cal Newport's recent writings. He received his PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and is now teaching at Georgetown.

His main thesis is deliberate practice consists of lots of different facets, most of which aren't necessarily thought about. While his work focuses a lot on improving work in "knowledge fields" it is drawn mostly from creative pursuits. He argues that thinking about your habits for practicing and learning (meta-habits) are just as important as sitting down to practice or learn. For example, knowing how to build a clear path of improvement and success in learning the piano is as important as sitting down and working through the hard parts. Sometimes the hardest part is simply figuring out where it is wisest to invest your time.


His article "The Deliberate Creative" I found to be particularly enlightening, among others. He's also been published in the New York Times, The Economist, and has five bestselling books.

On a side note, I originally found him looking for ways to improve my study habits, which is what he originally wrote about as an undergraduate. Any current high school or college students would benefit GREATLY (IMO) from his blog and first three books. Seriously, the guy has some great stuff.

The better question to ask is why do you need this in the first place? If you were playing good and running good your mental game would be fine. The only thing that affecting poker player results are playing bad or running bad. Playing bad can be fixed by analyzing hands, reading good poker books and training. The effects of running bad can be lessened by understanding probability and randomness better. Running bad shouldn't really be an issue if you are bank rolled properly because if it is, then you are playing bad.

Most poker players that I know that are always frustrated or constantly tilting are almost always playing at stakes their bankroll doesn't support.
If you are using the 100 times big blind and 25 buyins recommendation, you shouldn't really have a mental game issue because you should be able to absorb the variance.

Mental Game Books

• The Mental Game of Poker
  
  
• The Poker Mindset
  
  More understanding about probability, randomness and focusing on the present can be helpful. If you understand those more it should help your mental game. I would recommend these books and at least understand their central points:
  
  
• The Power of Now - relates to poker because the hand you are playing now is the only hand you should worry about. There is no last hand. Each hand is a clean slate. Focus on the present hand.
  
  
• The Drunkard's Walk - relates to poker because whether you double up and lost two buy-ins could just be randomness.
  
  
• The 80 / 20 Principle - relates to poker because 80% of your wins or losses will most likely come from 20% of hands played. Thus making hand selection important.
  
  
• The Black Swan - one "black swan" situation could triple you up or make you lose your whole stack. Typically this means knowing when to fold big hands like AA or KK.
  
  
• Fooled By Randomness - relates to poker because you could win the main event and millions of dollars and still not be a good poker player. The poker gods and luck could have just wanted to hang out with you for a week.
  
  
  
  
  

Sorry buddy. I really feel for you. I do. If I were in your position I would feel like I had been so completely betrayed. And, you have.

Get yourself a copy of Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power so you can see firsthand how he manipulated the powers that be in to a sleepy acceptance of safety over hard fact.

Then, decide just how much of this political game you wish to play. You've been outmaneuvered. But it's not checkmate for you, no, just a check. You've learned enough IT to handle a complex task, and now you need to learn how to handle the people who might try to maneuver you out so they can take the credit.

Personally, I don't like this part of our business at all, I wish it would go away, but that expectation would require all humans to be rational. You would be wise to learn your opponent's tactics so you can employ them while simultaneously providing a value to your employer.

Sucks, but it's the reality until we have some guaranteed safety net for displaced talented workers. I encourage you to support a basic income, so that technicians wouldn't have to feel so threatened that they need to engage in political maneuvering.

This is a pretty curt way of saying it, but I agree. There's probably people here that are a lot better than me at focusing on their research or getting back on track after getting distracted, but it's something I have struggled with throughout grad school. I've recently started getting my political news from 1-2 podcasts I listen to on the weekends; if anything HUGE happens it will find its way to me - I don't need to follow the news constantly.

I'm probably not among the smartest of my peers and colleagues, so I have to stay vigilant to not fall behind.

I find the argument that news/social media/TV/etc. are training our brains to want continuous hits of dopamine pretty convincing and have recently become a convert to Cal Newport's Deep Work philosophy that getting continual streams of information out of your life is a way to be happier and more productive. He is a CS professor at Georgetown, so he's not just some self-help guru; he practices what he preaches. He has a pretty good podcast interview with Ezra Klein (former WaPo reporter and cofounder of Vox.com) on his "philosophy" that's worth a listen if you're interested.

This is a long comment, but the parent made a good point that was worth expanding upon.

EDIT: And if you're wondering "why the hell are you on Reddit then?" - I do my "browsing/social media" stuff between 5-7pm every day to try and limit my exposure.

I don't know how much you can talk to your mum about this, but I would strongly advise her to put the money in the mortgage and then "forget about it". The money will not be lost, it will mean she will be that much closer to paying off the mortgage in full, and not have to worry about a mortgage check every month anymore will be very nice. She could use that extra disposable money to support the two of you when you are studying (where-ever that will be).

Maybe reading a book called "Your money or your life" helps, too. It helped me see the value of money more clearly (i.e. you trade your time for money, your time is precious, ergo, your money is valuable, too). The book's quite old (so very cheap to get second-hand) and so some of the advice might be outdated; but it might be that it "clicks" with her as it clicked with me.

PS She won't have to pay taxes (anymore) on the money that's distributed to her? Make sure she doesn't, or else there's a sudden big bill next April which would cause a lot of troubles.

Critical thinking is something that we stomp early, and that stays pretty well stamped out without some care and attention.

In his AMA earlier today, Neil Degrasse Tyson suggested that children are born scientists, who bring a sense of curiosity and wonder to everything they do. Adults are usually the ones whose minds slam shut.

Our schools, our churches, our upbringing in general teaches us precisely how to be accepting and uncritical. Those systems simply demand belief in what is being offered as though it were indicative of some capital-T "Truth".

So, your job needs to be to start thinking like a child again. Everything you encounter needs to be questioned and interrogated. Remember: You've been raised to do precisely the opposite, so this won't be easy. You need to continually remind yourself to look for the holes, the flaws, the shortcomings in the arguments that are put forward.

I would recommend the following things:

1. Start by examining Op-Ed pieces in newspapers. Look for the biases of the author. Figure out which side they're on. I recommend the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times op-ed pages. That's a fairly easy way to start looking at the arguments offered by the political left, and the political right in the US.
   
2. Pick up the following two books: The Philosopher's Toolkit and Thank You for Arguing They're excellent books that will offer you a set of tools to evaluate arguments from a reasoned perspective. They demonstrate the tools of good argument, informal logical fallacies, and rhetorical tropes that are commonly used to persuade. They are very handy books that everybody should have on their shelf.
   
3. If something seems off, then it demands further investigation. Evaluate the source of any and all information. Figure out where the data comes from, who funded the research, whether or not the numbers being presented are legitimate, etc. How to Lie With Statistics is a great tool for learning how people commonly fudge numbers to represent their positions. Knowing how it's done can help you see where people misrepresent data, whether maliciously or not.
   
4. Recognize your own biases and preconceptions. Make sure you're clear on where your own privileges and understandings come from. Interrogate your own position thoroughly.
   
5. Remember always that this will not be easy. Sometimes you will fall victim to the same biases and shortcomings as those with whom you are engaged in debate. Go easy on yourself, but remind yourself that you do not have all of the answers.
   
   The more you practice, the easier you'll find it to keep an open mind, and be willing to entertain evidence which challenges your beliefs and opinions. You'll even welcome those challenges, because they help you advance your knowledge and understanding.
   
   Do those things, and you'll find that all of the questions you pose here become much easier to deal with over time.

Hey OP, nice name. I am going to throw a book out there for you to read instead of spending time on social media. You'll have it done in a few days and some great ideas under your belt to give you positive energy going forward. I replaced toilet/down time on my phone with the book and that helped blast through it ;)

For example I like this bit:
"you don't need a rarified job, you instead need a rarified approach to your work."

Wisdom from Mr cal Newport. Self help author who tackles the conundrum of whether passion should drive your career or not.

Just so happens that Mr cal newport is a CS Doctorate.

Excellent, excellent, knowledge lies within. First book is
"so good they can't ignore you"
Now if that title doesn't spark your interest I dunno what will.

About 15 dollars
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love https://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_FOQTzbN6B8M1N

If you can't afford it, please DM me, would happily purchase it for you.

Remember in order for good stuff to come out of you, good stuff needs to get in there. Keep on keepin on my man.

(I am a recent grad, beginner in the enterprise, very familiar with ideas like imposter syndrome and the like, but very determined to make my way in the world)

I have a bad habit of reading multiple books at once, so I'm currently on Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the US Prison System, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and one day I'll finish Rules for Radicals. Women Behind Bars is a really great, easy read that has a lot of good information in it. The other two are a bit slower, but still good and I recommend them all.

Other than these books, I read a lot about dogs....so previously I've read Don't Shoot the Dog and On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals. If anyone is interested in positive reinforcement, Don't Shoot the Dog is really applicable to every situation - you can apply it to dogs, clients, spouses, children, any relationship really. I thought it was a good read as a social worker and dog...understander.... :)

Your post is the idea behind the voluntary simplicity movement. The best book I saw about that when it first became a thing in the 1990s is

Your Money Or Your Life

The authors were high roller finance people in New York City who realized that a large chunk of their time went toward working to pay for things and a lifestyle conducive to their jobs. Paying to work. They discovered that if they saved more money and learned to live on less they could retire early and spend their time on things that made them happy.

I couldn't live like they do, but the book is a great eye opener, a philosophy of money, and time.

It gets you to ask how much happiness you are getting per a particular purchase or expense.

Having kids changes everything, but there are a lot of people who have the house in the burbs and the nice car who work like dogs who never get the time to appreciate the house or the car...........if they do, it is only for a few hours a week. Makes you question if it is worth it.

Squid and Dr. PP both recommend the art of learning, and the inner game of tennis and they're both godlike so I'd take their advice. Flow is really good too.

Something cool you could do is get into chess. I only played chess seriously for a few months really, but I feel like it gave me another angle to think about tactics and strategy in. Chess is really fun and it'll give you that same competitive brain feeling melee does without killing your hands.

/r/chess has lots of guides about how to get into the game and stuff. There's lots of cool websites now like www.chesstempo.com where you can do tons of tactics training puzzles that are really fun and make the learning curve for beginners a lot less steep than it was back in the day when chess books were the only option(which are great, but it's really hard as an absolute beginner to sit down with a chess book and actually make it through it).

If you're already like 2100 fide rated or some shit then just ignore this lol.

Right on! Glad you like it. I really enjoy Aubrey Marcus's podcast and I take away a lot of life lessons from him and his guests. I have not heard the Shane Mauss episode yet, but I have now downloaded it and will check it out tomorrow.
Knowing that you liked that podcast... I would definitely recommend his podcast(s) with Ryan Holliday. He's written such books as Ego is the Enemy and the Daily Stoic and he is a really knowledgeable guy.
You should also check out the live DTFH podcast with Aubrey and Duncan that they did in NY back in January.
Lastly, if you've never checked out Aubrey on JRE, I'd go back and listen to all of those. He's probably been on there 6 or 7 times, and 90% of those are after he's returned from Peru and is essentially giving trip reports after spending days in the jungle doing Ayahuasca, Huachuma, Ibogaine etc...
I haven't listened to the Burning Man episode since it was first released, so I'm not sure about the "wind up toy" but I was planning on re-listening to it this week. So if it rings any bells, I'll definitely let you know.
Hope these recommendations help!

I'll also suggest books on Stoicism and Philosophy. However, before you jump right into the ancient/classical wisdom I'd recommend a modern introduction to introduce and help digest the principles.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine.

Then - Move onto Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and the rest. A great way to embrace stoic ideas daily is The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Also, strong recommendations for:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People
  
• Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink

Ca să-ţi răspund la întrebare, eu aş alege informatica. Dacă te pregăteşti pentru o carieră în informatică, eu zic să te concetrezi pe ea. Înţeleg că tu vrei să fii pragmatic şi să alegi disciplina care îţi va asigura o notă mai mare fără prea mult efort, dar cred că atitudinea asta nu e întotdeauna benefică. Informatica e un domeniu dificil şi ca atare eu m-aş folosi de BAC ca de o unealtă prin care îmi pot evalua în mod onest cunoştinţele. Cine ştie, poate descoperi că informatica nu e pentru tine. Nu vreau să te descurajez, din contră eu sunt genul de om care nu crede în "talent". Cred în disciplină, sacrificiu şi efort. Ce rost are să dai BAC-ul la fizică, să intri în facultate cu o medie mare şi apoi să realizezi că nu te descurci sau că e prea greu şi nu eşti dispus să depui efortul necesar?
(side note: Învaţă algoritmică şi structuri de date, orice programator pe jumătate decent poate să înveţe un limbaj de programare)

Asta nu are legătură cu BAC-ul, dar din moment ce te pregăteşti de o carieră în IT (plec de la asumpţia ca vrei să faci programare), mă gândeam că nu ţi-ar strica câteva sfaturi:
(feel free to disregard everything I say, it's your life, don't let a guy on the Internet tell you how you should live).

• Trebuie să fii onest cu tine. De ce vrei să faci asta? Bani? Pasiune?
  
• Dacă o faci pentru bani: Eu nu sunt aici ca să te judec, e ok să o faci pentru bani. Nimeni nu lucrează pentru altcineva şi o face 100% din pasiune. Un lucru pe care ar trebui să-l ţii în minte: dacă vrei mulţi bani, va trebui să înveţi să te "vinzi bine". E trist, dar să cunoşti persoanele potrivite, să zâmbeşti frumos la interviuri şi să le spui exact ceea ce vor să audă o să-ţi aducă mai multă apreciere decât să fii cu adevărat bun la ceea ce faci. Warning: dacă nu eşti foarte pasionat de programare, o să fugi destul de repede către poziţii de management.
  
• Dacă o faci din pasiune: Când decizi că vrei să trăieşti din pasiunea ta, o să observi că totul devine mai puţin amuzant. Ca atare, pentru a fi fericit ai nevoie să simţi că deţii control asupra vieţii tale profesionale. Ai nevoie să simţi că expertiza ta e recunoscută şi respectată. Ai nevoie să simţi ca munca ta contează, că ce faci tu are efecte vizibile. Ai nevoie de o oarecare autonomie, de o oarecare libertate. Oricum, dacă vrei să obţii astea, trebuie să devii bun la ceea ce faci. You have to be so good they can't ignore you.
  
• Indiferent de ce te motivează, trebuie să fii capabil să faci sacrificii. A lucra în informatică cere dedicare. Trebuie să înveţi constant. Asta o să aibă ceva efecte asupra vieţii tale sociale. Depinde şi de tine; tu decizi cât de bun vrei să fii.
  
• Un lucru bun la meseria de programator e că spre deosebire de alte poziţii din companie, tu eşti ceva mai greu de înlocuit. Dacă o secretară pleacă din companie, ei pot să aducă o alta care va putea să-i preia responsabilităţile într-o zi sau două. Dacă un programator pleacă din companie şi ei aduc un altul, acel nou programator va avea nevoie cam de o lună până să poată aduce contribuţii reale la proiect.
  
• Legat de facultate: dacă eşti pasionat de informatică, s-ar putea să fii dezamăgit de facultate. Sfatul meu, înconjoară-te de oameni care gândesc similar cu tine (aici vorbesc de money vs passion). Ar trebui să tratezi facultatea ca pe un real life reddit. O sa vezi link-uri peste tot, urmează-le pe cele care iţi par interesante şi învaţă de unul singur. Încearcă să nu fugi de matematică. Ai nevoie de ea dacă vrei să poţi face lucruri cu adevărat interesante (dacă simţi că eşti un pic "în urmă" la matematică, o resursă pe care eu am găsit-o utilă e KhanAcademy). Warning: facultatea o să vină cu nopţi nedormite şi nervi.
  
• Ultimul lucru: în drumul tău o să ai parte de o grămada de îndoieli, poate că o să renunţi la informatică pentru o perioadă, poate o să renunţi complet. E în regulă, nu eşti obligat să faci acelaşi lucru pentru tot restul vieţii.
  
  Scuze că m-am întins atât, sper să ajute.

one of my family friends recommended this book to me after I shared that I did poorly second semester. I read it start to finish the week after the semester ended and implemented some of the time management and study techniques in the book, and did much much better the following year. I'm in my third year as well, and I sort of relapsed after becoming too comfortable with my classes this semester, so I'm gonna give it another read to motivate myself to finish strong. good luck to you and happy Thanksgiving!

Ok so like others I applaud the fact that you are at least setting ANY goal and have decided to get out of being in the standard paycheck-to-paycheck until 65 or later lane.

However I think your goal is laughably bad. I hope you'll reconsider your approach to goal-setting, as having only one large goal you will never achieve (and sorry to say, this is not doubt or 'hating', but simple reality, you will never achieve $1b) is only going to hurt you as if you had no goal at all.

Set milestones. Right now your biggest goal could maybe be to replace your income from your job. But you also need goals along the way. How about your first dollar made online? Or, I like the idea the Income School guys have - pizza day (when you earn enough to buy yourself a pizza). Then set some GRADUAL milestones from there based on something measurable and actionable. $100/mo, $1000 total, $250/mo, whatever. Or, 50 posts written; 10,000 total users; and so on.

Right now you have one big goal that will only demoralize you. You're trying to fill an olympic swimming pool by pissing in it. There is optimism and setting high goals, and then there is self-deception and delusions of grandeur. And setting goals of the latter nature is only another symptom of the same problem that got you here in the first place. You're not being real with yourself. You're pretending. You're playing make believe and acting like something will come along and future you will magically figure it out. And I get it because I think most people start out there. However, you need to recognize that if you fail to address this flaw, you might as well go back to coasting through life. It would at least be more fun.

If I could, I'd recommend you to check these 3 ideas out:

• SMART Goal Setting: With heavy emphasis on the R.
  
  
• The Millionaire Fastlane: You need a reality check on how money is made, in the same vein as the Quora answer /u/Me_you_who posted. Ignore the shady title, this is a good book and will show you how you can approach huge goals like this.
  
  
• /r/fatfire: These folks are living high on the hog and on much less than a billion. Don't demoralize yourself with a silly goal just because you don't know the reality of having, say, $10m in the bank.
  
  Good luck and hope to see your case studies in the future.

This is my own interpretation, with a little added psychology. There are two big factors I'd consider in this and they both fall under the description of "environment".

1. The Social Group. Everyone plays a role in their social group. Each person exhibits "expected" behaviours. It makes social gatherings easy and "predictable". We are a species of comfort. Find out what role you play and change it. This is hard because it surprises and makes a lot of your friends uncomfortable. We are afraid of change.
   
   
2. The Drinking Setting. The drinking environment plays a huge role. When people choose to drink, they are often aware of the drinking setting. Most people drink in a setting where they are able to experience new emotions. They're getting drunk and being vulnerable, guarded, happy, sad, etc. Many people go to bar exactly for the unpredictable nature of meeting new people, feeling attractive, flirting, etc. This kind of environment creates a feedback loop for people to try out a different persona and not be, for the most part, shunned by their social community. This environment is hard to reproduce.
   
   Now here's the thing about people. We are pre-disposed to certain behaviours as cultivated by our genetics and our environment but we are incredibly malleable. If you decide to be happy, you will be happy. Same with sad, confident, timid, outgoing, shy etc. Gain experience with new behaviours and then reproduce them. After enough reproduction you will no longer have to "choose" to be the fun guy. It will be natural. This is what people often call being "on".
   
   As an aside, be wary of narcissistic tendencies, particularly dishonesty. As soon as you begin lying to yourself, you're going to be in for a world full of hurt and disillusionment.
   
   Also bear in mind that not everything lasts, learn and grow. Like everything else, there's time for friendly banter and the "fun guy" but I wouldn't invite that guy to too many funerals or business meetings.
   
   If you're interested in doing a little background homework that expands on the ideas discussed, don't hesitate to consult the rules.

I'm on the job hunt right now. Had an interview on Monday, another one scheduled for Thursday. Two different jobs, more excited about Thursday.

The Monday company offered me job that day, but with a vague position description and vague title, and at a low pay. I asked for more detailed information and for time to decide. The recuiter pushed me for a verbal acceptance. I felt really pushed when they don't even know what they want from me, other than for me to start, analyze their operations and tell them how to fix it. All for a new VP of Operations who doesn't seem to know what he's doing, but he's been with the company from the beginning and is friends with the owner. Yeah that sounds like a great time! (Actually a total recipe for disaster.)

Since then the recruiter has blown up my phone, even texted me, asking me to call back. Yet no email with position details nor formal offer. I really need a job but this?

Yet despite the wisdom in my folly, it's scares the heck out of me to "play hard ball" like this. I need a job, why not humble myself to do the VP's job for the pay of an administrative assistant? What they offered me is less than the pay for entry level service position, a detail the VP told me iny interview. I'd be insane to accept.

Not much advice here, sorry. Many commenters said research the comparables salaries in your area, and I'll add know what deliverables are asked of you. If it's a position you're already doing, know what you've done already.

And go for it, know the number that is more than fair for the job and start by asking for more than fair (start high) as this is a basic mechanic of negotiations.

Go get 'em!

(Also I was at a women's networking event last night and the book Lean In was recommended, I'm excited to read it!)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0385349947?pc_redir=1413072830&robot_redir=1

A few years back, I was unhappy at my position. When I told my boss I was resigning, he asked me why and I expressed my concerns, particularly with many of the tasks I was spending my time on. He suggested that if I didn't like doing them, then to stop and spend my time on the tasks that truly interested me. He also pointed out that the worst thing that could happen was that my employer would fire me and I was already prepared to quit.

While this advise wouldn't work for many situations, it was very timely for me, because I had been spending much of my time addressing areas that others in the organization should have been responsible for. With this advise, I completely changed my focus and began to enjoy my job. I ended up staying with the company for an additional 3 years and consider that time some of the most successful part of my career.

I know that it sounds cliche, but my big learning was that sometimes we make our own happiness and that happiness can be found right where we're at. In my case, I wasn't properly establishing boundaries and employees are always happy to move their work to someone else. Of course, sometimes we're just in a bad situation (or the wrong job) and need to move on.

My advise is to decide why you're unhappy and act accordingly. Is it because of the job? Or because your social life is lacking? If you decide it's work related, I would suggest having a conversation with your boss to discuss your concerns and put together a plan to make it better. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Again, the worst that can happen is that you decide it's time to move on.

And lastly, I would recommend reading Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominquez (http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320519091&sr=8-1). Not only is it a great book on frugality, but it also does a great job of putting work into context of our overall lives.

I shudder to think how many people have wasted their lives forever chasing their "passion".

I'd strongly recommend reading: https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You-ebook/dp/B0076DDBJ6

if you can find a copy at your library.

That said, honestly if you're finding it boring as an undegraduate.. Stop studying it. UNLESS you can do some work experience & find you enjoy it. Plenty of subject matter areas where the undergraduate academic side is not remotely representative of the day to day reality. That's a double edged sword that can cut both ways, some people live the university student part, but not the actual work.

Honestly if I were in your shoes & I didn't have any dependents, I'd:

1. put my studies on hold
   
   
2. Get a full time job with a hard end date. 3 or 6 months, no matter what
   
   
3. Find some interesting low cost locations with waterfalls to jump off and waves to surf & go
   
   
   There is never an easier time in your life for this sort of travel. Have some amazing experiences, rough it (so even suburban middle class will seem like incredible luxury), do a lot of soul searching & then worry about the academia & career stuff later. Set hard deadlines that you're only going to go for X months / years, so you don't end up a 30 something beach hobo (or do, it's your life, maybe you'll be incredibly happy with a shack in the dunes) & give it a shot.
   
   Right now it sounds as if you want to achieve some magical passionate paid employment to fund adventures later, when there is never going to be an easier time to have an adventure than now.

I would recommend this book: see if your library has it. It's a "how to college" book that talks about time management, study skills, that sort of thing. It's not quite what it advertises itself to be in the title, but I think it would be useful for you.

I would second /u/SmellsLikeDogBuns (interesting name), and encourage you to attend community college. It's cheap, you can easily fund it with Pell Grants and working a part time job, and getting into a four year school as a transfer student is much easier.

> What's the process of applying to a school like? SATs and things like that?

The school's website will list the requirements. There's an application you fill out (either school specific or the common app), and then they sometimes want test scores (SAT, ACT). US News' rankings are the most commonly used for finding the "best" schools, but your local community college would not be a bad place to start.

To be honest, I've never really participated in a traditional hiring process, so I don't know. I'm confident enough in my general competence that applying for jobs in the future doesn't really scare me. It seems your career philosophy is fairly traditional, which isn't a bad thing, but I do think "committing" less to one specific track can save you a lot of stress.

I would check out So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport. If you can learn to work around your ailments and hone a special skillset, I believe you'll be respected and desirable as an employee! I don't know about outdoorsy stuff, but I am confident you can pave a way for yourself to do something at least park ranger-esque. Though you'll need to play the long game. Keep learning after college and consider everything research for eventual perfect job- one that caters to your interests + skills while accommodating your illness.

I know it sounds out there, but this sort of strategy could really be the way of the future. It's a risk worth taking, given that a traditional path (e.g. climbing a corporate ladder) is excessively difficult for PWN.

To hell with the Career! Identify a problem you learned in the years you have put in so far, design a solution and build it up while helping your son grow too!

The ugly truth is - careers are an illusion used to convince people to use up their most precious years. So they can retire at 70, die a few years later with no time to use the money they saved.

Please do not look at this change as a negative thing! Join a group of entrepreneurs (real ones - not some MLM bs), learn how to a) find a problem to solve, b) create a solution c) listen to your customers d) maintain control.

Takes about three years to take a viable idea to reality - your son will still be young, and you will not have missed the chance to spend time with him. And if you succeed, you'll make more money than your husband :D

Surround yourself with people who do the things you need to succeed with your new focus

Evidence:

https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284

https://www.amazon.com/UNSCRIPTED-Life-Liberty-Pursuit-Entrepreneurship/dp/0984358161

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Fastlane-Crack-Wealth-Lifetime/dp/0984358102

https://www.startupschool.org

Stay-At-Home Parenting is not a prison sentence! It is an opportunity to break free!

Read stories of success, surround yourself with cheesy inspiration to keep moving forward. Whatever it takes - it's a process, start now and make this your "Eff this! I want a second house in the Cayman Islands" moment.

Write down your dreams, how much they cost, list the steps you need to obtain that money, and put dates on them. Then, go!

And good luck! You will fail at least once - regroup and do it again.

Unlike most things in life where one bad apple spoils the bunch - with entrepreneurship, one good crop feeds you for life.

I just finished reading a book that I really wish I'd read five or six years ago: So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport. Basically, it points out flaws in the "follow your passion" ideology and offers an alternative route of developing marketable skills and selling them. You sound like you have some decent skills, so if you focus on honing the skills you enjoy to the point of being able to innovate them and push to the next opportunities, you can do well.

Dan Miller's 48 Days to the Work You Love is also handy for cross-transferable skills and career-hopping.

Hope these help!

I think you might be viewing all work as the rat race, which isn't correct. The people who say 'this is just being a grown-up, deal with it' are making the same mistake. It's possible to set up your life to avoid this by finding enjoyable work and having low enough expenses that you can take risky or low-paid options. So:

Develop valuable skills that you enjoy using You need skills that you can exchange for things you need or care about such as money, schedule flexibility, short hours, or interesting work. You say you are not good at many things. You'll need to get good at at least one thing that other people will pay you for. The book So good they can't ignore you is the best resource on this topic. It's about building a satisfying career by developing valuable skills. Also check out this series of blog posts from the author.

Reduce your costs If you can avoid big expenses that other people spend on, then you have a lot more flexibility to pursue career options that are more enjoyable but are risky or low income. For example, move to a cheaper region of the world, live on a sofa, live in a van, don't have a car, don't have a partner who cares a lot about domestic comfort. I'm not sure what the best online resources are for this, but try googling things like: minimalism, frugal, early retirement, mrmoneymustache, vanlife, and digital nomad.

I had similar thoughts when I left the Corps.

Hard to give advice on what to study, because at some point it has to interest you, or you have be ok learning a lot about it.

The easier thing to say is don't study business/management as an undergrad. It's pointless. There's a reason why the fancy schools don't even offer those degrees. Learn skills.

Start taking classes and then chase where you excel. If you like numbers, go into math or some science program. Or if you're good at writing/talking, chase that.

The key is to keep thinking about how what you're learning becomes a useful skill set for someone who needs to hire people.

Let me suggest two books, both are likely in your public library.

The first book makes the great point that you shouldn't worry about long term goals. Get better at things, take opportunities when they come up, and put your effort into the work. My life got so much better when I finally started living that advice.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124

https://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2016/dp/1501274643

It's late, and I kind of skimmed, but here are some thoughts.

• If you are getting overwhelmed by a backlog, you need to either learn to ignore it (set a daily limit and consider it a success when you finish them), or prevent the backlog from happening by setting appropriate intervals or controlling how many "new" cards you start at a time.
  
  
• I can't imagine typing in vocab items. It's probably slowing you down by a factor of 10, and just isn't worth it.
  
  
• Anki is not ideal for learning facts for the first time, and is not designed for it. It might very well be better to start with paper flashcards or a two column list to familiarize yourself with new words, and only use Anki for getting them into long-term memory. Personally, I don't mind "failing" new cards repeatedly, so I skipped that step sometimes.
  
  
• > Once you get to a certain point (around 100 cards), start filtering well-known, older cards into an "infrequent practice" deck which you only review every three days. Sooner or later the infrequent practice deck will probably spawn a "very infrequent practice" deck, but I haven't gotten to this point yet.
  
  This is spaced repetition. What Anki does is optimizing this process to minimize the number of repetitions per item over the long term, which becomes vital as the size of your deck grows.
  
  
• > Anki ... its biggest advantage is in overcoming the organizational/logistic limits of 3x5s, and you can probably overcome that with sufficient organization.
  
  Nope, no way. You can't keep track of thousands of paper cards. You can't travel with them. You can't search for a card by its content. You can't label them and fish up a set of related cards instantly. You can't reformat them instantly.
  
  Basically, there are good and bad ways to use Anki, and these issues have been discussed to death on the internet. Not only that, but there are probably differences in preferences with things like language learning and SRS, and some things that work well for some people just won't for others. There's enough here to suggest that you are probably causing yourself unnecessary problems with Anki. I can speak from experience that I've had times when Anki worked extremely well for me and times when it didn't, and the distinguishing factor was that in the latter I was over-complicating things or overwhelming myself unnecessarily.
  
  Sidenote: a while back I had a little box from White Rabbit Press with colored dividers. The idea was to use it for simple spaced repetition of small batches of their Kanji flashcards. Another thing some people like are ring-bound mini vocab cards, though those are not good for spaced repetition.
  
  Personally, I'd keep using simple lists if that works for you. In fact, if you create your lists as a spreadsheet, you can print them to learn, and then export as a CSV file to get them into Anki. You can even shuffle and reprint them if you feel like you need an extra "learning" round.
  
  Final thought: I cannot take the paper notes vs laptop thing seriously. This requires a lot of explaining, but the gist of it is:
  
  

1. The phenomenon seems to have to do with attention, so if you take notes in a mindful manner, processing and rewording rather than transcribing, etc., the effect should evaporate. Needless to say, this would be extraordinarily hard to test experimentally.
   
2. Electronic notes have numerous advantages, not the least of which is that you can edit and reorganize them after the fact in a way that is completely impractical with paper notes. This alone negates any advantage that paper notes might have.
   
3. Taking notes is not the end of the learning process; it's the beginning. For details, read Cal Newport's How to Become a Straight-A Student. If you are doing the things that you need to do to really learn something, whether you took notes on paper or on a computer is not going to matter.

I favor the craftsman mindset over the 4-hour workweek approach, so I (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not find much value in Ferris's work. I've read 4-hour-workweek, some of his blog posts, seem some TED talks, and flipped through 'Tribe of Mentors, all of which I found mediocre. The biggest advocate of the craftsman mindset that I know of is Cal Newport. I've read his blog (studyhacks) and his book (So good they can't ignore you). I think his work tends to be better researched and more substantive. I recommend both.

I suspect that the differences between the two has a lot to do with where they come from. In my view, Ferris is still the salesman he was when he started out. Many of his strategies are great for salepeople - 'firing' bad customers, offloading customer support tasks, etc. However, its worth thinking about what he is selling here - and I think the core idea in Ferris's work is that you can make an easy buck. I don't know that this idea is worth buying, nor that he offers anything more valuable than a few productivity tips. Newport is an academic, and so his work is oriented more as an attempt to answer a question: what choices result in happy and successful careers. He started out looking for general trends in career satisfaction and success, and his books are reports of what he's found. Of course, he is still selling something - but I think he is selling something more valuable: empirically driven insight into meaningful work (the key insight, by the way, is that you need to adopt the crafstman mindset).

I highly recommend reading this book as it talks extensively about this very question thoroughly in a way I cannot
http://www.amazon.com/Lean-In-Women-Work-Will/dp/0385349947

I listened to the audiobook since I'm such a multitasker these days but however you can ingest it, I think it may help to get advise from someone who did the work/raising kids balance (very) successfully. IMO, don't put your career on the backburner since research shows this will help with long term happiness and even marriage success. This goes without saying, but your career is just as important as his

By the way, employers are not allowed to hold it against you for being a mother, this is a form of discrimination you are (legally) protected from (but may still encounter). Look up Family Responsibilities Descrimination

Would also recommend the 48 Laws of Power. There are parallels with the Laws and how Trump operates:

• LAW 2) Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies
  
  
• LAW 3) Conceal your intentions
  
  
• LAW 4) Always say less than necessary
  
  
• LAW 6) Court attention at all cost
  
  
• LAW 7) Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit!
  
  
• LAW 12) Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim
  
  
• LAW 15) Crush your enemy totally!
  
  
• LAW 17) Keep others in suspended terror --- cultivate an air of unpredictability!
  
  
• LAW 27) Play on people's need to believe, to create a cultlike following
  
  
• LAW 28) Enter action with boldness
  
  
• LAW 29) Plan all the way to the end
  
  
• LAW 32) Play to people's fantasies
  
  
• LAW 34) Be royal in your own fashion --- act like a king or queen to be treated like one!
  
  
• LAW 36) Disdain things you cannot have --- ignoring them is the best revenge!
  
  
• LAW 37) Create compelling spectacles
  
  
• LAW 43) Work on the hearts and minds of others!
  
  
• LAW 45) Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once!
  
  
• LAW 48) Assume formlessness!
  
  
  
  

2009 B.S. in Psychology here. I was the same way. I loved learning about Psychology, but never wanted to go into it as a profession.

I wouldn't worry so much about finding something directly related to Psychology. I haven't had a job yet that required a degree in Psych and I probably never will. The most important thing is that you graduate and make connections.

Every step I've taken in my career has been made through connections. Your network is more important than your degree.

Also, a friend of mine recently led me to So Good They Can't Ignore You. It describes a method of finding the right career in a way that makes sense, I think.

Good luck, fellow Psych major!

If you haven't yet, try reading "What Color is your Parachute". It offers lots of career changing advice, guidance on finding out what sort of work you'd really like to do, and also tons of great resources that you can pursue, including some lesser known job hunting sources like job search groups, which I'd never heard of before. It also just sorta gets you into a more optimistic mindset, I think.

Another one I would recommend would be "Never Eat Alone", which is about meeting and cultivating a great network. As we all know, an awesome network can be a huge asset.

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List

Read This First

1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
   
   

   Fundamentals
   

   
   

2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
   
3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
   
4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
   
5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
   
6. Rework
   
7. Writing Secure Code
   
8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries
   
   

   Development Theory
   

   
   

9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
   
10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
    
11. Introduction to Functional Programming
    
12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
    
13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
    
14. Modern Operating Systems
    
15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
    
17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    
    

    Philosophy of Programming
    

    
    

18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
    
19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
    
20. The Elements of Programming Style
    
21. A Discipline of Programming
    
22. The Practice of Programming
    
23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
    
24. Object Thinking
    
25. How to Solve It by Computer
    
26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
    
28. The Intentional Stance
    
29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
    
30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    
31. The Timeless Way of Building
    
32. The Soul Of A New Machine
    
33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
    
34. YOUTH
    
35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

36. Software Tools
    
37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
    
38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
    
39. Practical Parallel Programming
    
40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
    
41. Mastering Regular Expressions
    
42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    
43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
    
44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
    
45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
    
46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
    
47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
    
48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.
    
    

    Design
    

    
    

49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
    
50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    
51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
    
52. The Non-Designer's Design Book
    
    

    History
    

    
    

53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
    
54. Death March
    
55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
    
56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
    
57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
    
58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    

59. The Art of UNIX Programming
    
60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
    
61. Programming Windows
    
62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
    
63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
    
64. lex & yacc
    
65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
    
66. C Programming Language
    
67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
    
68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
    
69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    
70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit
    
    

    DevOps Reading List
    

    
    

71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
    
72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
    
73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
    
74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
    
75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
    
76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
    
77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
    
78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
    
79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    
80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud

This is basically the thesis of Your Money or Your Life, which I'm currently reading.

I saw your comment in the original thread, and I'm glad you made a separate post to get it more attention. I don't know if this is something you realized on your own, or if you got it from this book or another, but it really doesn't matter.

Thinking of money in this way has given me more motivation to save than I had before, which should help me reach my goals sooner.

Again, thanks for sharing this viewpoint. Hopefully it helps another see the light.

Uhmmm, are you sure?

You're here, you can write better then the average Redditor, and have the courage to share with us this piece of news.

Anyway, like someone else commented conscientiousness is just as important as IQ; moreover there are many different types of intelligence which combined for the IQ; find the one where you excel, combine it with your passion, add hard work and you can live a happy life doing something that you love. How smart is that?

Did you do the Self Authoring? Do it. As you do it think about the life of your dreams, which activities would you like to do, both as a career and as hobby, think as wildly and diverse as you can.

As you think about career makes sure you think about the work, and not about the benefits/results.

I wish you best of luck and don't hesitate to post again in this forum; your post and people's comment help other people who didn't have the guts to post but go through similar experiences.

Also, check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Are-Personality/dp/031623673X

I'd highly recommend the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love". I was feeling pretty burnt out in my job, and while this book didn't completely take that away, it helped me to see that a great option for finding more meaning/autonomy/enjoyment in work is to accumulate "career capital" and exchange it for desirable outcomes for yourself. Since reading this, I've started taking classes, I'm going for my Master's, and I'm going to work my way to more autonomy in a few years' time (hopefully). Now, my days feel less like a drag, because I've got a goal I'm working towards.

Good luck!

For me, the short answer is I spend less money.

The long answer, though, has to do with the YNAB method, reading some key financial books and ultimately changing the way I view money. Earlier this year my soon-to-be father-in-law gifted me The Millionaire Next Door. Then I read Your Money or Your Life. Those two books, combined with being so exhausted from living paycheck to paycheck, got me started down the path of actually really caring how I handled my money.

I had been using a basic spreadsheet to track income and expense but after finding YNAB, via Reddit of course, things just started to change. I stopped buying stupid shit I didn't need. I eliminated impulse buying. I stopped buying coffee and going out to eat a few times a week. Those little things add up. I saved for things I wanted instead of putting them on credit and paying for them later.

It sounds like you've got a lot of that under control already though. Like /u/ASK_IF_IM_PENGUIN said, it's the method. The four rules. You can absolutely incorporate those four rules into your existing spreadsheet and not pay a dime for the software. But the software they've developed is so goddamn good it just makes doing it myself so unappealing.

The other thing that helps is their support system. There is so much content available on YouTube. The podcast is awesome. You can even take their online courses for free.

Give the trial a go. You can use it fully featured for 34 days I think. There's a good chance it'll drop to $15 whenever the steam sale happens in a week or two. Pick it up then if you like it. If not, no harm!

Cal Newport wrote an excellent book on the subject of finding rewarding work.

Nearly all lucrative careers involve doing something that is considered "crappy" or "hard" by most people. The reason that technical jobs pay so well is that few people are willing to slog it out to the end. There's a scarcity of engineers, so they get to command a hefty salary.

Some of the people who stuck it out to the end of a technical program are there because what other people see as a hardship, they see as something genuinely enjoyable. While some people look at a textbook and see a boring slog, others can look at a textbook and see a collection of interesting mental exercises and puzzles. But some of the people who made it through are people who have a high tolerance for discomfort, and were willing to frontload their stress: these people decided they'd rather tolerate 4 years of academic stress instead of have to cope with potentially decades of economic and career stress struggling to get a job in a less-lucrative field.

The best of all worlds is when you can find that job that nobody wants because it "sucks" but you actually think it's awesome because you're in some way abnormal. For example, a lot of people are terrified by public speaking, but I personally love it and find it energizing, which has led me into a lot of jobs that surprisingly had little competition. (A lot of this took the form of sales "jobs" working as a one-man sales force for my own entrepreneurial exploits.)

P.S. - I ended up going through college to get an engineering degree and decided to go my own way (start my own business) after college. But personally, I'm actually happy that I got the degree. For one thing, it gave me a good deal of peace of mind, knowing that if my business ever failed, I had the option of going into the workforce as a junior engineer and having a relatively safe shot at a reasonable living. For another thing, it helped for me to reinforce that my entrepreneurship was something I was doing because I wanted to do it, not because I had to do it. But for some people, spending 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars on a safety net might not be the best move.

Oh, and BTW, academic probation isn't a huge deal in and of itself if you aren't looking to go into a graduate program. Sometimes, it's a symptom of a real problem, and it might be a wake-up call if your approach to academics just isn't working, but like any mistake it's something that you can learn from, and hopefully not repeat.

Find work that you can do without getting worn out, whatever it is (IT, landscaping, dental hygiene, construction, etc.). Do it well and become known as a good worker.

Once you have an income, pay down your debt asap (if you have any) and also begin saving regularly. It can be in a savings account, cash in your drawer, or even bitcoin. Just start putting money away for emergencies (car repair, security for a new apt, etc.).

Once you have that, start following a frugal lifestyle. Don't spend money on needless consumption goods like magazine subscriptions, cable TV, pick up trucks, eating out all the time, smoking cigarettes, etc. Learn to calculate the true cost of things in terms of your wage. Earn $15/hr? A new PS4 costs $300 - is it worth 20 hours of your life?

If you can lead the frugal lifestyle (cooking at home, growing food, basic home DIY maintenance, bike riding) and hold down 4-6 months of emergency savings, start investing in index funds. Throw money in there whenever you get a chance and you will get dividends (which you can use as income or reinvest) and appreciation. At this point you're fairly well-off.

A great book for personal finance/material prosperity is Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life. That book can take you from wage slave to "financially independent" in under 20 years.

A great blog I recommend for similar advice is Mr. Money Mustache.

If you can't tell from the responses, networking (building relationships) is very important.

Being social, helping others, and letting others know specifically what you do and for whom is very beneficial. I've gotten a lot of referrals from my network.

You never know when someone that's a relatively weak tie in your network has an opportunity to refer business to you or send you introductions to others. If you can stay top of mind with those people, then you'll have access to more opportunities.

Here are some books worth reading if you haven't read them before:

• How to Win Friends & Influence People - http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034
  
• Never Eat Alone - http://www.amazon.com/Never-Eat-Alone-Secrets-Relationship/dp/0385512058
  
• Adversaries into Allies - http://www.amazon.com/Adversaries-into-Allies-Manipulation-Coercion/dp/1591846366
  
  Make sure that when you start "networking" you aren't just peddling business cards. It's about making a connection, adding value to others, and staying in touch. If you go to conferences, aim to meet and get to know a handful of influential people. Don't push 200 business cards onto others.
  
  If you have troubles staying in touch with all the people you meet or want a more efficient way then a text file or excel file, then try using a tool to help.
  
  I co-founded a SaaS that helps freelancers make sure they stay in touch with the important business contacts you meet, but that you don't see on a frequent basis. I use it to make sure I'm staying in touch with a large group of people that I've met in the past or want to build a better relationship with. http://relate.ly

At 27 I did. Wish I knew sooner because my life has been improved dramatically by acknowledging who I am rather than who I think I should be (which was largely determined by others' expectations of me).

If you want to deep dive, I'm a huge evangelist concerning the personalityhacker podcast/website -> https://personalityhacker.com/

You can find some INFP-specific podcasts on the site which can validate a lot of things in your life.

There are also some neat books that I think are great introductory/overview material to this area of study that you can probably find at your local library like the ones below. I recommend them to people that I think find MBTI-related study interesting/want another lens to look at themselves with.

(My favorite broad introduction to types. Hardly technical but accurate, I believe)
https://www.amazon.com/What-Type-Discover-Who-Really/dp/014026941X/

(Career focused one)
https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Are-Personality/dp/031623673X

(One that talks about the theory in general but gives interesting suggestions on how to communicate with different types [note to self, look at what you need in conversations under your section to get your needs met conversationally])
https://www.amazon.com/Art-SpeedReading-People-Speak-Language/dp/0316845183/

(One that talks about personality types for children but can still be used to be insightful for yourself)
https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Nature-Understand-Childs-Personality/dp/0316845132/

(Excellent book about just infps)
https://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-INFP-Survival-Guide/dp/1945796154/

Warning: if you're an INFP and you start looking at information about other types, you will probably be constantly debating in your head as to which type you are. This is normal.

I think the best thing an INFP can do with such self knowledge is to a build a life to get their needs met without being righteously indignant (i.e. a jerk) about it when faced with resistance

This does not sound like a training book based on recent scientific evidence. If you learn well from reading, Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor would be a good place to start. As others mentioned, it sounds like you need to teach a reliable "drop it" (drop something already in their mouth) and "leave it" (stop giving attention to the object, e.g. a person or dog across the street or something they're about to pick up).

If you learn better visually/hands on, it might be a good idea to sign up for a puppy class somewhere. This will provide your pup with good socialization with other people and dogs too. I would recommend someplace that teaches using positive reinforcement, whether that be a local place or a chain like PetSmart.

Here are some videos for "leave it" [1] and [2]. The first is very short, while the second is a little more in depth. They are both basically the same concept. Both of these channels would be good resources for teaching other behaviors as well.

I was unable to find videos that I liked as much for "drop it," but these still might be helpful [1] and [2]. I'm not sure I'm personally as big of a fan of the method in the second video here, but you may find it to your liking.

Yep, Visualization did jack shit for me too. I've read many self-help books, and so far the only ones that have helped me were those written by scientists who have researched their field for a long time, and people recommend them, that also had practical exercises in them. Very specific, but that's the truth. Here's a list:

• The Procrastination Equation / Steel
  
• The Willpower Instinct / Mcgonical
  
• The Happiness Advantage / Shawn Achor
  
• Straight-A Studnet / Cal Newport
  
• No More Mr. Nice Guy / Glover
  
  All the rest, including positive psychology and Tony Robbins and all that jazz, didn't help me none.What area in your life do you want to improve?

Sorry to hear about your troubles!

Hmm, for job hunting I'd recommend:

Break The Rules: The Secret Code to Finding a Great Job Fast

It has the best way of looking at "selling yourself" to people I've ever seen in a book. Plus it came out in 2001 and you can buy it for a penny + shipping.

If you're interested in working for yourself (starting work now, not waitin around), I'd recommend:

Secrets of a Freelance Writer: How to Make $100,000 a Year or More

Or anything by Robert W. Bly. The guy's a genius.

For idea-generating for non-writing self-professions, I'd recommend:

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future

If you create your own start-up, Bly has a marketing book too. I'd get that. Anything business-related written by the guy is worth its weight in gold.

If you don't see a job in sight, I would highly consider self-employment, just because you can start today. I think it's great that anyone, anywhere can say "I'm now employed" if they want to. There is responsibility for paying yourself, of course, but now no one can fire you, and they don't take a percent away from your earnings. You get all the kickback. And it's not a pyramid scheme-ish company like Amway, where layers of people are all getting a chunk of your profit (just like any other job you work for other people).

You sound intelligent and experienced; you should go for it if you've got the gumption.

Maybe not what you are looking for, but a great primer, that goes into pretty good detail with numerous examples is Don't Shoot the Dog It covers a lot of conditioning techniques and is as accurate in its descriptions as any textbook I have used. I know it covers the basics, differential reinforcement and I THINK counter conditioning.

One thing to keep in mind with behavioral psych, semantics are very important when you describe any contingency. So you may want to think of Extinction as passively reducing a behavior by ending the reinforcement of behavior. Counter conditioning is more in line with Differential Reinforcement of an Incomparable (or Other) behavior. So in the case of something like a panicking fear response, you would instead reward opposite behaviors like calmly sitting. This is often done gradually.

Difficult to beat u/runeaway will all the resources in his response. A lot of helpful stuff in there.

Perhaps some anecdotal examples from my personal practices will give you some insight. I started a journal a few months ago and keep it pretty simple.

Every morning I read a section from a classic Stoic text such as Meditations, The Enchiridion, Seneca's letter's, etc... and try to write out what the text is saying in my own words along with any additional notes I feel are important, usually in bullet point format. The Daily Stoic is helpful for this since it has a quote for every day of the year.

I then follow up by asking myself "What did I do well yesterday? What did I do poorly?" and write out my responses. This allows me to reflect on the day before to see if I am acting in line with my ideals.
Usually only takes me about 15 - 20 minutes to complete this exercise so it is not difficult to keep up with.

Also, it is not necessarily a Stoic practice, but a few individuals here including myself like to engage in some form of mindfulness meditation. I personally do 5 - 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation sitting in a chair after writing in my journal.

After that I like to do about 10 minutes of quick exercises (a form of practicing discomfort).

Then it is off to work. On the commute I typically do some form of negative visualization of the day ahead.

Hope you found that somewhat insightful. Best of luck to you in your everyday practices!

> A little bit of discipline will go a long way. Focus for 1 hour a day. Just 1 single hour a day. Your ability to focus is a mental muscle. It gets stronger the more you practice.

I agree. Specially in your case, OP. You need a smooth start, establishing realistic studying goals until you make it a habit to study for longer hours.

Besides that, I'd recommend you to read this book:http://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight--Student-Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref

> I have no faith that I can study at high levels, especially that I'm planing to start studying to become an engineer

Don't think like this. I know that it might sound cliché, but you need to believe in yourself. This type of mindset is crucial: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/

Try creating an study habit and, along the way, look for study techniques that will help you with your struggle. Searching for topics about "spaced repetition" and "active recall" in this subreddit is a good start.

Good luck!

Agreed. Certainly nothing easy about it. And I'm sure if you asked your friend if it was really that easy to turn a single check into a million dollar business, he probably would say it was easy.

I would suggest taking some time and making sure you have a handle on where this is going to go long-term and what it's going to take to get there.

I read a book, Millionaire Fastlane. I actually pulled out his major points and dumped it into a spreadsheet to 'grade' my business. I do it every few months, just to make sure what I'm working on is still in line with my plan. Asks some good questions like how it going to scale, USP's, ability to automate, etc. Good stuff.

You should read "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg.

I don't want to be a parent, but I've found lots of professional inspiration from that book, and as she is an extremely successful working mom, she writes from that perspective, and about her having children while being professionally ambitious.

If your career is the only reason you don't want to have children, it's worth checking that book out. It's hard for me to tell if all your fears stem from being an "absent working mom" stereotype, or you truly don't want children.

I'm similar to you in some ways, however. Six or seven years ago I knew I wanted children, and now the older I get, the more I enjoy my life as it is and don't want to introduce an unknown variable. My now-husband was always "meh" about the idea, so for him it was more of a relief when I decided I definitively do not want children. I'm only a year older than you, but that feeling hasn't passed. I really like my life how it is right now! And deciding to not procreate isn't selfish at all, and don't let people tell you otherwise. Selfish is creating another human being just for your own vanity.

But you're also right in that if he really wants children, he will resent you if you do not want them and never change your mind. For both of your happiness, it may come down to you having to cut him loose for both of yours happiness. You both deserve partners who are on the same page. Sorry I don't have any definitive advice.

Recent ChE graduate here. I made it out alive so you can too. Here's my list:

1. Read this book by Cal Newport. I can't highly recommend his work enough. In the interest of full transparency I finished my degree before I was introduced to Cal, so I only got to take advantage of his methodology during my last semester. However, it worked fantastically and I can only imagine how much better my other 7 semesters would have been if I found it sooner.
   
2. Use chrome extensions like Chrome Nanny and Stayfocusd to help yourself keep on task. If you don't use chrome, get on it.
   
3. Talk to upperclassmen. This may seem kind of odd, but they learn so much over the years being there that they can prove to be one of your best resources. Do you think most of the answers on /r/engineeringstudents come from freshmen? Go and talk to them. They can give you hyperspecific examples of how to excel because they've done the exact same classes you have.
   
4. Go to office hours. I've had plenty of professor's that outright admitted to me that they are biased towards students that actually attend their office hours and are that much more willing to help you out. Instead of being like the other students who are bitching and moaning saying "that's not fair, they shouldn't play favorites blah blah blah!!" do the smart thing and take advantage of it. Think about it, he/she is setting aside time SPECIFICALLY for you. Take advantage of it. Work on the assignment before you go and have specific questions. This could be the most important part of office hours. Don't just show up expecting it to be handed to you. At least make an attempt and they will shower you with help.
   
5. This may be the most important one so listen up. DO! THE! WORK!! Don't get caught up in that "just one more" mentality. There will never be one single lifehacker article, lifestyle design blog, or reddit post that will change your life (this one included). There are no shortcuts to the things that matter most in life. If you really want it, then go out and get it. No "Top Ten Tips For Beating Procrastination" blog post will magically turn you into a straight A student. If it was that easy everyone would do it. Engineering is difficult. That's why we do it. Plain and simple. At the end of the day every little "tip" and "trick" is just that... a trick. If you don't really want it, it's not for you. It's probably not what you want to hear and I might get downvoted for it, but it's what you need to hear. Spring semester junior year I got an average of 4.77 hours of sleep a night (including weekends and spring break). I've spent 10 hours in a room staring at a problem, only to walk away with three lines done and having to come back the next day for more. There is no substitue for just plain hard work and determination and you've got to be willing to do it.
   
   
   tl;dr: Seriously? You want a two sentence summary? GTFO! If you are so lazy you can't be bothered to read something this short, drop out now. There are no shortcuts for the things that matter in life.

You can find a lot of free information on the internet. At free, it's overpriced.

>What do you guys think? Do you have to spend money when you are just starting out?

A lot of people don't think so, from the freemium to open source to the unpaid internship the consensus would seem to be free is the way to go.

So I'll say the only time this is false is when when you use free to make up for ignorance about marketing. Because it takes exponentially more savvy to monetize free -- the epic fail of most small business.

The people using free seem to think free killed marketing. It didn't. Free made marketing smarts critical for survival.

I think if you can sell it, then you can give it away. If you couldn't sell it, don't give it away. A bitch slap of truth right there.

Because when you understand what I just said, you don't have to stop at Free.

Getting Real is marketing material 37signals sells to potential customers. The cost to buy 37signals latest marketing materials is $13.85.

Having potential customers pay for content marketing is better than free. That is the principle content marketers can't comprehend. If you couldn't sell it, don't give it away.

Seth Godin understands this. Another way to see this: The money you're paying for marketing and advertising and for SEO is a tax on mediocrity. Want to spend zero, or less? Don't come to market with an unremarkable product.

37signals can give stuff away free. So can Seth Godin. Others ... not so much. They are overcharging.

Hey OP, sorry you feel this way. At your age I was doing really bad and severely depressed too. I'm going to give you the advice I wish I could tell my 18 year old self. First, go to a doctor and get on some meds. I found that with the ADHD meds, as my life started righting itself the depression and anxiety went away.

If you feel like your life sucks, anyone, ADHD or not would feel depressed and anxious. So your first step is work on your ADHD. Second, read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Fastlane-Crack-Wealth-Lifetime/dp/0984358102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473093068&sr=8-1&keywords=the+millionaire+fastlane

Don't let the title fool you, it is not gimmicky at all. Out of all the self-help books on finance and wealth I've ever had, I threw all of them out except for this one. If you can't afford it, I'm sure there are free copies out there on the internet. Just find any copy and read it. They have a message board too, filled with people just like you who didn't get good grades and didn't fit the mold of graduate and get a job. Guess what? A lot of them are rich now, and probably laughing at those teachers who thought they were stupid.

Step 3, start your own business and prove everybody wrong. You won't have to get a job, and can avoid most things that are hard for your ADHD. When you're successful, you won't have to live off your parents, and will probably be able to support them instead of the other way around. You'll give yourself something to be proud of. Not saying it will be easy, but it has been done and can be done again.

I still have a job right now but I'm actively working on my own business. I've met so many great and helpful people on the TMF board that inspired me. TBH working on my own business is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. It's been progressing steadily and I will be able to quit working for someone else forever very soon. As someone with ADHD, you can actually use your hyperfocus to your advantage. Lots of famous entrepreneurs have ADHD. I think it's something where people with ADHD actually have an edge over non-ADHD people.

Lastly, please take it easy on yourself. Life can already be hard without your subconscious knocking you down everyday on top of it. Forget about what other people's expectations are for you. The only person you should compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday. That sounds cheesy as hell, but if you start developing yourself seriously in any area (like skills, etc), you'll find that it's true. Good luck OP, you got your whole life in front of you. If you give up now it's all over, but if you don't you have until the day you die to make something of yourself.

https://www.amazon.ca/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124

Read this book before you do anything rash- he offers a framework/perspective you might find helpful.

It's always hard to tell whether we are thinking "this is hard I want to stop because it's hard even though its making me grow" VS. "this path is legitimately pointless and not going to lead me to where I want to go with my life".

Pretty sure everyone deals with this kind of doubt- especially when you're really challenging yourself. Which is OFTEN a good sign, it means you're outside of your comfort zone which is where growth happens.

I'm just saying step 1 is figure out if this is just edginess due to perfectly normal feelings of inferiority (I'm not good enough/this is easy to everyone else) The first sentence of your post makes it pretty clear you're AT THE VERY LEAST adequate. "3rd year PHd student at a large research university..." I would bet on you being fairly capable, hardworking/intelligent. just a hunch. :)

The idea of "quitting" is seductive because there's no reality there- it's a pure concept that exists in our heads, a fantasy we construct when facing a difficult reality. This is a normal human reaction- you are normal.

TLDR; It's super healthy and normal for these kinds of doubts to come up. Also, even the most meaningful work is often difficult, boring, demanding and stressful- that's true in any field. But if you hate yoga and believe it's useless you shouldn't be working in a yoga studio. And if you have some other ability/skill that will meaningfully contribute to the world (WHILE GETTING YOU PAID) then it might be worth exploring that option first- before throwing away all your hard work.

Sounds like your attitude towards work has taken a hit and you need to realign yourself with YOUR purpose and motivation that doesn't involve rewards such as the approval of a parent.

You may find All Your Worth authored by now Senator Elizabeth Warren a valuable read. If you can't grab a copy of the book, this blog post lays out a pretty good summary which explains 20% as a healthy savings rate and some suggestions for investing that. At your age, risk tolerance is high so you should be able to target a great deal of your savings to stocks and other securities. Good luck!

First off, welcome.

Welcome to one of the last pure sports on Earth.

Yeah, you lost. It happens a lot. One of the Sport's all time greats, Ramy Ashour, speaks fondly of losing 0-27 in the first tournament he ever entered as a junior.

Losing is a part of sport and a part of life.

To answer your question, you should absolutely continue in our Sport. Squash is brilliant at building resolve, it's not a sport of passing shots but of perseverance and endurance. It's about digging in and overcoming the voices telling you to quit and just keep getting the ball back.

I can tell you now, with very solid experience that kids all develop their game at different rates. The best players I've seen are often the ones at 14 & 15 who couldn't keep up with their peers, they just hadn't developed as much. Work hard, set those players as your target and never stop getting the ball back.

They say you can't put an old head on young shoulders but this old head wants to try for a moment. Go pick up a used copy of The Inner Game of Tennis and start working on your mental game. It's never to early to teach yourself how to mentally compete, to support yourself and hone the muscle between your ears.

In closing, stay in the sport, be gracious when you make Varsity next year and don't delete your post. You'll smile next year when you look back on these doubts.

Since you can't put more hours into the day, one of those items is going to have to give if you expect to give the friend more time on that day.

You could fit the friend into the same time slots that you do those items, you could just flat out reduce how much time you give those items, or you could get more efficient in doing items.

I've already posted my initial thoughts on squeezing the friend into your time slots (phone calls, study together, eat one of your meals like breakfast/lunch/dinner together) without changing them, and thoughts on reducing the time for the others (exercise, morning routine) that seem like they can be reduced.

So the last thing I can advise is getting more efficient with your studying since that seems to be sucking up a lot of time. And for that, I'll share this book (especially chapter 2) and this book by Cal Newport.

>So would you say that we should ALWAYS check your overconfidence?

One should not use a declarative like "always" and "every" since situations will be different from time to time you can't state a universal to them.

One has to look at what is magic being used for. Is it a model of reality? In this instance would we benefit more from a more accurate model.

>ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing

All these things can be increased with out magic. Knowing the numbers and social norms and psychological drives all can do this more accurately and with better results.

>exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success

But does it really? Does it increase the probability of success empirically or are we just "Fooled by Randomness"?

Lose the swift programming course, it’s not really relevant to you, and you already have a lot to cover in a tight space of time.

Good luck with your studies. As others have already said in this thread getting a researcher position will be super hard. There aren’t all that many positions available, and there’s so much hype around ML that they’re all super over-subscribed. You might be right that you don’t need a PhD, but a PhD and research experience are useful and you will be up against those that have them. You should consider getting some industry experience as a data scientist or data engineer (which might be a bit easier to get hired as) to complement your self study if you’ve decided academia is not for you.

You’ve got a lot of reading to do already, but I found the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You a helpful read when faced with a tough career choice. It’s not super long, and has some interesting ideas (mostly based on anecdotal evidence but useful nonetheless).

Honestly - through rigor. I would suggest studying logic, some philosophy (this is about the structure of arguments, and deduction in a general sense) and then something applied, like policy analysis or program evaluation. <- those last two are just related to my field so I know about them, plenty of others around.

Some suggested books that could be interesting for you:

Intro to Logic by Tarski

The Practice of Philosophy by Rosenberg

Thank you for Arguing by Heinrichs

Policy Analysis is instructive in that you have to define a problem, define its characteristics, identify the situation it exists in, plot possible solutions (alternatives), and create criteria for selecting the alternative you like most.

Program Evaluation is really just tons of fun and will teach a bunch about how to appraise things. Eval can get pretty muddy into social research but honestly you can skip a lot of that and just learn the principles.

The key to this is that you're either very smart and can learn this stuff through your own brains and force of will, or, more likely, you'll need people to help beat it into you WELCOME TO GRADSCHOOL.

The book is actually by Sheryl Sandberg and I got a lot from it as well!

As you read this book, keep in mind the perspective of who is writing it. Sheryl is the COO of Facebook, a billionaire, Ivy educated for both undergrad and MBA, etc etc etc.

I really enjoyed the book and it was truly inspiring--but it is from a pretty skewed perspective.

My personal view is this....
Nobody on Reddit knows you better than you do. There are a lot of questions you should be asking yourself and discussing with your husband to get his view. Here is what comes to mind for me:

• Does your age play a role in the timing of the baby (i think you have a lot more time to decide if you are 28 instead of 38), and if so, have you discussed with your OB and/or husband?
  
• Do you think you can do both at the same time?
  
• Would you be able to have your baby with you in your baking space?
  
• What would happen if you did lose some of your customers or your business suffered from extra time the baby is taking from you?
  
• Do you rely on this business as a major component of your income for your family?
  
• Do you make enough income from your business that it would make sense financially to put your child in daycare? Even if you don't, would you still want to focus on your business and have your child in daycare?
  
• Aside from your business are you financially secure enough to have a child?
  
  Truth be told, there are a million ways you can make this work. I think one thing you will get out of "Lean In" will be the sense that you can or simply will make it work.
  
  Don't forget to give yourself love and care during the process of starting your family--I think it is all too common for mothers to bear the lion's share of the familial burden.

Start With Why [Simon Sinek]

48 Laws of Power [Robert Greene] (33 Strategies of War, Art of Seduction)

The 50th Law [Curtis James Jackson]

Tipping Point:How Little Things Can Make a Difference and Outliers: The story of Succes [Malcolm Gladwell]

The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy [Ryan Holiday] (stoicism)

[Tim Ferris] (actually haven't read any of his books, but seems to know a way to use social media, podcast, youtube)

Get an understanding to finance, economics, marketing, investing [Graham, Buffet], philosophy [Jordan Peterson]

I like to think us/you/business is about personal development, consciousness, observing recognizable patterns in human behavior and historical significance. It's an understanding of vast areas of subjects that connect and intertwine then returns back to the first book you’ve read (Start with Why) and learn what you've read past to present. Business is spectacular, so is golf.



To Add:

Irrationally Predictable:The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - [Dan Ariely] (marketing)

The Hard Things About Hard Things - [Ben Horowitz] (business management)

Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It - [Charlamagne Tha God] (motivation)

The Lean Startup: Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - [Eric Ries]

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, How to Build the Future - [Peter Theil]

There's a good book called The Dip by Seth Godin.

It talks about a few important factors such as why competition helps increase marketshare, but also most importantly about why being #1 can be important and to pick your battles wisely.

I feel the article definitely made some good points and I'll just avoid the "fluff" controversy that's brewing in here by saying it's always good to see an idea from multiple angles.

Hope this helps!

Just because someone is full of themselves doesn't mean you can't learn from them. And it's not tailored to exactly to being a college student but I found he goes out of his way to make the over-arching principles clear.

I'm a college student too in a field fairly similar to yours. I don't know if you're a big reader, but this is another great book that has a lot of research into people who get to the top of their fields versus people who stay mediocre. It was written by a guy who has a phd in comp sci from MIT and wrote a book while doing his dissertation: http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124

Just a recommendation, best of luck with it.

I think automation is one of the answers. You put money away as soon as it comes in. That way, you hardly see it and you don't feel that you can spend it. (The paying yourself first principle, where you put money aside for your future self and see that as some kind of bill that just needs to be paid).

One easy way would be to put aside $6k/month into a savings account (you possibly already have the savings account, so you just need to create one or two automatic transfers per month, set to happen right after paychecks come in).

Maybe also easy (-ish): start overpaying on your mortgage. Put in an extra $2k/month. Your interest rate on the mortgage probably isn't extremely high (probably like 3 to 4%?), but hey, putting an extra $24k/year there surely beats spending the money on stupid stuff, right?

A bit harder would be to do some research into tax-friendly ways to save money. Put the maximum amount of money into the 401k at work, for example. And decide which investment options to choose. For your own company, you can also open a 401k for yourself, but there are also some other options for people who are entrepreneurs/own their own business; so you would need to research that as well.

So start with the savings account; and try to get the rest up and running by say the end of January.

I want to tell you that you may very well be able to change your attitude towards money. I come from a similar background, and it just took me a few years to change my attitude around money, when it finally came in. I also had a few years of spending everything (and then some). I have managed to change my ways and am happier for it. And I think you can do that, too. (Because I'm definitely no superhuman).

One book recommendation: "Your money or your life", by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez.

Also check out the FAQ at the subreddit /r/personalfinance, they have recommendations on how to use the 401k, what investments to choose, etc.

that's exactly what we are thinking of doing, just not to Maine. We really love the outdoors so california is great, but it's $300k for a decent house way out in the desert now.

if we want to live in a decent area, it's $500-700k for a 40 year old home. With that much money, we could live somewhere nice, pay off our home early and then invest the rest. that's why we are thinking of moving somewhere like Galveston Texas. It's a beach city, lots to do, close to Houston to get our city fix, and the COL is pretty low.


I righly recommend the book 'Your money or your life' by Vicki Robin. It talks exactly about what you are referring to and has examples of people doing that.

https://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503338083&sr=8-1&keywords=your+money+or+your+life

seriously, buy it now, it's great

In a race, the one who is most motivated and most passionate about winning, is more likely to win. Depending on the race, it might be ok to come in at 4th or 400th place. If you're the 400th best plumber in America, you are kicking ass. If you're the 5th best search engine, maybe not so much. Swap the term 'passionate' with 'interested in' and that's probably enough.

The thing is that you have to have an interest in your business or else it gets boring and you will fail when you hit the dip.

• Anki.
  It's a flashcard program structured around spaced repetition. Repetition is the only way to memorize things that aren't traumatic and spaced repetition is the most efficient repetition for us.
  
  
• Another reliable memory technique is to make a "memory palace."
  You basically pick an area you're very familiar with (your house, your favorite running route, etc), then put stuff you want to remember on different parts of the path. The more senses you can apply, the easier it'll be to remember them.
  Check out this TED talk when you can.
  
  
• Summarize what you want to learn, and read over this list right before you go to bed and right when you wake up. We do a lot of memory consolidation when we sleep.
  
  
• I've heard good things about ice baths, if you ever really need to memorize something really quick. Even just putting your arm in ice would help. It'll be uncomfortable, but you'll remember the experience.
  
  
• Check out this blog for some general good study tips and philosophies. For really good strategies, I can't recommend his book enough.
  
  
• I got a lot out of this ebook too.
  
  Hope it helps man!

bootcamps are helpful in building your professional network, teaching you modern web development practices, and learning how to market yourself as an engineer. Is that worth ~$12,000? maybe, maybe not. It definitely works for some people, though, and usually for people who are motivated and excited about starting a new career.

...and you don't sound that motivated or excited. One book that I wish I had when I was going through my post-college meandering was So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is one of the best big picture career books out there (admittedly, that's faint praise). The basic premise is that the advice of "follow your passion" is mostly bullshit, and that hard-earned craftsmanship is the key to long-term professional success. As someone who's been working for now for ~10 years, his advice really resonates with me.

You should try reading So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. You can find happiness in any career.

Also check out The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This will teach you how to derive happiness from internal resources and not external. It's a balancing act between physical, mental, social, and spiritual fulfillment.

One last resource, Mr Money Mustache. Working towards Financial Independence is one of the best things you can possibly do in life, regardless of what your career path is. Once you remove money as a deciding factor in everything you do, you become able to make decisions based off of what you want to do (not have to do because I gotta pay the bills!).

Had this list together from a blog post I wrote a few months ago. Not sure what exactly you're looking for, but these are my favorite books and I'd recommend everybody read them all. There are other great books out there, but this is a pretty well rounded list that touches everything a company needs.

The Lean Startup https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898

Business Model Generation https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788

Talking to Humans https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Humans-Success-understanding-customers-ebook/dp/B00NSUEUL4

Predictable Revenue https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices-Salesforce-com/dp/0984380213

To Sell is Human https://www.amazon.com/Sell-Human-Surprising-Moving-Others/dp/1594631905

Rework https://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745

Delivering Happiness https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220

Sometimes you can use books as "mentors." I'd recommend:

Your Money or Your Life - This motivated me to get my savings rate up to 70%+

The 4-Hour Workweek - Currently reading this and it definitely seems like a good read to get motivated to start a business, run a business more efficiently and reclaim your time.

Check out Library Genesis for a possible free download of the epub/mobi/pdf...if that's your thing.

I'm going to give you an alternative perspective.

The 'Stay Plan' is the same as the 'Go Plan'. Regardless as whether you're with her or not, you must work on you. Having her as the 'sharpening stone' to hone your Frame and MPoO does add a measure of value to your path and your mission. This woman WILL continue to test your Frame, she's doing it now with all the strong emotion. Use her as the metric to your progress.

Contrary to the other voices, there's no urgency here and you have the better hand. Do what it takes to make your hand better. If that means going to another state for a brief, measured period to 'sweeten to pot', then do not lightly take that off the table.

Get your head on straight, retainer a lawyer, and build your plan.

Given your circumstances, the next book you should be reading is The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Like right now!