Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment? - Kevin_S
======
Jemaclus
Exercising. I run 3x/week now, and I sleep better, I feel better, I'm thinner,
and I snagged a wife. Should have started running back in high school instead
of spending my days playing MUDs. (Not really. I don't regret anything... but
I could have made more time for exercising.)

Also, playing guitar. I'm hearing impaired, and my audiologist told my parents
I could never be in the band at school, so they never pressed me to take
guitar or piano lessons. I wish I had learned piano as a kid, because I love
music so, so much (despite my hearing loss). That said, playing guitar is one
of my favorite things ever. It's so cathartic. I'm really bad at it, but just
playing helps melt away the stress of my life.

Also, when I was in college, I dated this gym rat for awhile. She told me one
day, "On days when I don't feel like going to the gym, I tell myself to do it
for five minutes. If I do it for five minutes and still am not feeling it,
then I give myself permission to leave." Then a few seconds later, she said,
"I never leave after five minutes."

I've adopted that outlook for almost everything. I don't want to go for a run?
I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't want to run, I can stop. I never
stop and always run the whole route. If I'd rather stay home and watch TV than
accept an invitation to happy hour with coworkers, I'll do happy hour for five
minutes. If I don't like it, I can make up an excuse and leave. I usually wind
up staying the whole time. This outlook has gotten me to do dozens of things
I'd never do: get certified as a scuba diver, take a trip to Peru, run a half
marathon, audition for a play, and so on. It's a game-changer, for me.

~~~
StavrosK
> I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't
> want to run, I can stop.

That seems like it's missing the point, though. When I don't want to go
running, say, it's the actual getting ready and starting to run that I don't
like. If I have gone through 95% of the effort to get ready and get into that
whole headspace and started doing it, it's really easy to just keep it up.

Ie it's not the "lifting weights" part of the gym that I don't want to do,
it's the "getting out of bed" part.

~~~
Jemaclus
That actually IS the point. The point is that I convince myself to do the
hassle by saying "It's only for five minutes," but obviously after five
minutes, you've already done the hard part, so you might as well do the rest.
It's just a psychological trick to actually start doing the thing I don't want
to do.

------
Balgair
Marriage.

She is my everything, and though as a GF she was that too, marriage is just
_deeper_.

Many of my single/unmarried friends don't have the trust and support that I
have. I try to tell them that 'pulling the trigger' is not with a gun aimed at
your head, but more of the starter's pistol in a 3-legged-race; it's fun. Yes,
we have issues, just like all humans. But as we have both grown and changed,
holding each other up is something I can't believe I used to not have.

Many 'millenials' seem to view marriage as a capstone to their pyramid. Get 'a
degree', get 'a career', find 'the one', fall 'in love', etc. That's wrong,
marriage a cornerstone you build a life together on top of. And yes, I am
lucky, I know it, and I love her even more as a result.

Maybe readers can extend this to any committed relationship, but I highly
recommend taking the time to find that person and jumping in when you are only
70% certain of the commitment ( about 1 - 1/e, for the math folks). Don't
wait, just love.

~~~
Kevin_S
I understand your point, but I think people put too much into the actual act
of getting married. For my wife and I, I realized essentially nothing changed
between us. The only real change was that I was no longer "living in sin"
according to my family, and people pester us more often about having kids.

Also people make the mistake of thinking getting married will change things
for the better. It never fixes issues.

~~~
astura
Marriage never fixes things, agreed, nobody should expect that.

However, marriage made our relationship way _deeper_ and _stronger_ compared
to just living together. Even though we committed to being life partners
before legally marrying.

(I'm talking about marriage here, not having a wedding - sometimes people seem
to confuse the two.)

~~~
Balgair
> sometimes people seem to confuse the two

Holy cow, will I ever echo that. I mention it in another comment, but to be
clear, marriage is _work_. Again, it's a cornerstone, not a capstone, you have
to build the house now.

(Another piece of advice: In an argument, you are both correct at the same
time. This is because you are co-owners and not co-workers)

------
mooreds
Accepting that I was an introvert. I remember the exact moment: I was
traveling, had just settled down with a good book at a hostel, and then heard
some folks heading to the bar. I remember thinking "gosh, I should be social,"
and then "nah, I'd rather be here."

Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.

~~~
gt_
I was going to add almost the exact same experience. Congrats to us both!

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Y'all should go have a drink and be social! Oh, wait...

I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me
to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better
extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because
I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an
extrovert[0].

[0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.

------
mox1
For me, it was using version control on my code.

I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when
inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error
message.

Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took
me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated
before I found the problem.

It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo
version.

After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no
matter how small) inside some type of version control system.

~~~
nilsocket
I would prefer linter's. Go's tools just make your code stand out in vscode
especially.

~~~
astura
No reason not to use both.

------
dahart
1: Kids. My wife and I waited to get married, and then were part scared after
we got married, and part selfish and wanted freedom to play and travel, so we
waited more. I don't regret our adventures at all, but after we had kids, I
realized my fear was unfounded and we still had a lot of freedom to play and
travel.

2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to
try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and
until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner,
before having kids, and with someone else's money.

Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve
it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway
is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be
only fear.

~~~
valleyer
Is there some factor you can share that allowed you still to enjoy your
“freedom” even after having kids? I share that same fear.

~~~
jrowley
One thing to consider is that the sooner you have kids, the longer you get to
have them in your life.

~~~
anyfoo
Given his question, that would sound like an argument to have kids later,
rather than earlier, or what exactly do you mean?

~~~
dahart
Only if you don't like your kids. If you like them, having them around is a
lot of fun. :)

Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become
teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free
time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd
assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they
have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties
and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little
nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were
younger.

~~~
anyfoo
Thanks, that’s reassuring. For some time, I rather settled on not wanting
children, but my SO is convincing me otherwise. It’s always nice to read that
I won’t have to completely give my life up, or at least not forever. :) I
understand that that depends a lot on the situation, but I think we might be
financially stable enough, and also potentially moving to a country that gives
much more support to parents, that it might be the case for us.

------
danielecook
Turning off email notifications on my phone. Finally pulled the trigger when I
was relaxing on a Friday night and getting work emails. It’s usually more
efficient to deal with email only once per day anyways.

~~~
marssaxman
I've never understood why people started subscribing to work email on their
personal phones to begin with. Why would you _want_ to get work mail when
you're not at work, and why would you want to use your own hardware to do it?
I've never done that and nobody I've worked for has ever asked me to do that;
my personal phone is for my personal communication.

~~~
infinii
I had similar feelings until I realized that work would pay for my monthly
cellular bill (including data roaming while abroad).

------
joshaidan
Stop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you
feel; I'm responsible for my feelings.

For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the
party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something
about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends
over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my
feelings won't change how I feel.

~~~
sprremix
Amen to that. I still have that reflex of "blaming" others (thinking something
happens because THEY believe something instead of what I am doing) and I
really have to step back from the situation and think about it. Absolutely
hate it when my brain does this

------
kelukelugames
Getting professional help for everything. Speaking, singing, powerlifting,
acting, etc. I enjoy learning on my own but having a good coach can accelerate
my progress and catch bad habits.

~~~
dylanlacom
Cool. Where have you found good coaches for these activities?

~~~
Balgair
Tim Ferris talks about this problem. His solution was to look up the
'Silver/Bronze' people, not just the 'Gold' people, in an event and just email
them. I think he went to a 'silver medalist' in some surfing competition for
lessons and claimed that 3 hours skype sessions were only $120. Ferris'
reasoning was that the silver person was only 0.1% 'less' than the gold, so
the price differential is totally worth it for private lessons. Also that most
'silver' people have never done private lessons in their expertise so they are
very willing to help. It takes like 5 minutes of googling for this and writing
some emails, maybe 30 minutes in total including negotiations for payment.

------
analogwzrd
I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school.

For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment
so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like
crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I
realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers
with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have
bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the
property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true
in every area though.

Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after
undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career
ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I
should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.

~~~
jrowley
For going back to grad school, was this a masters or phd or mba or something
else?

~~~
analogwzrd
Masters. If I got a phd, it wouldn't be in engineering. I thought about an
MBA, but I felt I needed to focus on becoming much more technical.

------
Posibyte
Cleaning. It sounds sort of childish, I know, but cleaning was always such a
secondary thing to me. I wasn't dirty, but I was messy. I would constantly buy
things from Amazon, toss the box in the garage.

One weekend, a friend and I flattened and recycled every box in that garage. I
bagged up every messy bit of trash, bought new furniture to help organize my
things, and I feel like I can relax again in my own home. It was a problem I
never knew was harming me, but since that weekend, I've been happier than I
have been for several years.

------
0898
Automating cold outreach emails.

I organise an event for people who run agencies in London
(www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and
then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them
into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like
to check out the event.

It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me
somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.

Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run
this business.

~~~
Festro
Wow, illegal marketing. Go you.

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-
pecr/electroni...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-
pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/)

~~~
0898
"You can send marketing emails or texts to companies." Am I missing something?

------
tabeth
Partnership.

Literally everything in this world is easier with partners you can trust.
Because of this I do everything with every others now.

* Real Estate - Find people you want to live with and split the cost. Everyone wins.

* Friendships - These are people who can emotionally support you, teach you, mentor you, etc.

* Marriage - For obvious reasons.

\---

I'm attempting to "split everything". So far I split rent, my phone bill, all
utilities, Netflix, Google Play, etc. People are rightfully concerned about
the potential downside to such partnership, but I realize now, more than ever
that somehow, paradoxically the more you want partners the better it will work
out. The key is that you should try to make it so that all people involved
have similar stake. All for one, one for all, so to speak.

TLDR: Life is a multiplayer game. Find your players immediately.

~~~
michaelthiessen
What areas have you found to have most impact/benefit from splitting in this
way, and how have you split them?

------
LeoPanthera
Wearing earplugs at night. _Vastly_ improved my quality of sleep. I use a
vibrating watch to wake me in the morning.

~~~
manmal
Is your environment noisy, or does this help you even in a quiet room?

~~~
LeoPanthera
It's not especially noisy, but it helps me sleep anywhere. It's a godsend in
hotels. I don't know why I never considered them before.

------
stevebmark
Getting a domain expert (which I wasn't) to analyze my solution, long after
launching it, and realizing it wasn't the ideal solution.

And blocking the shithole site Reddit until I didn't have the urge to check
it.

------
jrowley
Deleting the twitter, reddit, and facebook apps from my phone. I still access
FB through the browser when I want to check something, and I check strava and
instagram daily, so I'm not totally free, but it feels better.

I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.

------
darioush
Leaving grad school and getting a real, balanced job. It really hit me when
during an internship I asked 'is the building open on weekends', and I was
told 'yes, but why would you want to be here?' A further 'reckoning' was when
I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity costs.

Also if you are obese, you need to fix that sooner rather than later.

~~~
dabockster
> was when I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity
> costs.

Money aside, the biggest opportunity cost of education is time. Looking back
on my undergrad, I spent an extra year trying to edge out a BS degree when
everyone around me was telling me to take the BA in CS and settle for that. In
the moment, I felt that the BA would hinder my job prospects. Now that I've
been out for a year and a half, I realize that I kind of wasted a year in
terms of time. I probably would have been in the exact same place I am now if
I had just decided to graduate with what I had at the time.

And, to add further, I ended up earning a BA anyways. But that's another rant.

~~~
darioush
There are other opportunity costs, like losing your passion for what you're
doing. After going to grad school in CS I can't do anything with computers
beyond my day job. I can't even play video games anymore.

There are other costs too like dealing with unnecessary mental stress of job
scarcity, arbitrary deadlines, arrogant and self-absorbed people.

But time is very easy to overlook as well.

------
rodolphoarruda
Keeping my personal and professional projects notes in digital format. I used
physical notebooks as my sole tool for project notes from 2002 to 2013, so
"more than 10 years". It is very hard for me to search for things that I
actually remember I took notes at the time, but can't find them quickly.
Sometimes I need contact information or even addresses I made sidenotes of,
but they are lost somewhere in my stack of dusty notebooks.

Curiously enough I took one of them last weekend and tried to digitize it into
Evernote, via a photo. But I didn't like the final format, and it felt like a
ton of repetitive work to get a single notebook in. So I put this aside.

------
bshimmin
Buying the most expensive bin bags my supermarket sells. They come with a nice
drawstring and are tougher than normal ones. It's remarkable how much more
pleasant the task of taking the bins out is for the sake of spending about an
extra £1 every month or so.

(I imagine you can probably extend the same reasoning to many things, but for
me, it was bin bags.)

~~~
StavrosK
For me, it was brand-name socks. They just last so much longer than off-brand.

------
reactbro
I dropped out of the software industry and moved to Greece. Now I go fishing
in the morning, read in the backyard in the afternoon and play saxophone at
the local taverna at night. I make all my money committing cybercrime.

~~~
fosco
Can you elaborate on the last sentence? Serious question, unsure of the
seriousness of statement.

~~~
Toast_25
His other post states:

> I make $3000 a month committing cybercrime

EDIT: AFAIK a decent threat hunter or RE can earn about 3x that legally in the
US.

~~~
fosco
I think I am just shocked someone is okay with saying they make a living off
screwing others

yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you
would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I
just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any
conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...

~~~
Toast_25
I figure it's along the same lines of being a sex worker or something like
that. I would gladly be one if it weren't for the fact that I (probably)
wouldn't be able to work in tech and would have to live with social stigma
attached.

Same goes for cyber-crime. I want to be on the good side of cyber, and I can't
do that if I'm a criminal. I also don't want to live my whole life looking
over my shoulder over fear of something I did in the past. This happened to
malwaretech and they're not even sure he actually committed the crime.

------
x43b
Stopped thinking that working harder at what others think I should be doing is
the key to my success and start evaluating what should I do rather than only
how do I do it better.

Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.

------
binarymax
Exercising every day as the first thing I do every day.

I used to do it when I was younger, but took a break for about 6 years. A year
later still trying to catch up from that lost fitness.

------
dphassler
For me, it was budgeting my money with intention. YNAB happened to be the tool
that worked for me, after many failed attempts with other products.

I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I
had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.

~~~
anyfoo
Same here. I thought budgeting was only for when money is tight, but it is
amazing how much clarity and overview a budget gives you over your financial
situation, and how it helps in attaining even larger goals.

It’s just a shame that desktop YNAB isn’t developed anymore. I will hold onto
YNAB4 until it falls apart.

~~~
iffycan
You might be interested in this:
[https://www.bucketsisbetter.com](https://www.bucketsisbetter.com)

~~~
lzy
May I ask if there are any limitations for the untimed, free trial as provided
on your site? If none, what is stopping from any of your users from using the
trial indefinitely?

But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me
to want to try using it with my SO.

~~~
iffycan
No limitations. After a few months, you'll get nagged a bit, but the trial
version has every feature the full version has. There's nothing but your
penchant for honesty stopping you from using it indefinitely :)

------
smoe
Only enable desktop notifications that I actually need to respond to
immediately. Since about two years I only get notified for:

\- Laptop about to fail (Battery less than 10min, out of disk space)

\- Calendar

\- Site reliability alerts

Similarly I hide things like menu/tasks bars by default and just toggle them
in for the rare cases I need some information from there.

It is just such a pleasant experience to have 100% of the screen be used by
stuff relevant to the task at hand and only allow very specific distractions.
It is a bit less pleasant at times to make it clear to some coworkers, that
just because the company uses a chat system and project management tools with
live updates, that not everyone has to respond to anyone immediately.

------
indubitable
Cooking, Airbnb, Uber, working independently, pursuing physics seriously.

Physics in particular has been oddly life changing. At some point I think we
all look for some purpose or meaning in life. I found it in discovering how
little I truly understood about our universe and how bizarre and illogical a
universe we truly live in. The mystery and intrigue of our universe leaves me
with that child like enthusiasm and interest for discovering ever more.

I mean understanding something relatively simple like time dilation, and its
implications, is something that is sufficient to upset one's entire view of
the universe. Or even very simple things that we all learn in high school but
mostly take for granted such as the beautiful interaction in energy conversion
and conservation - and again the implications of such. On that topic the
nature of energy itself. Could most people describe energy to a person with no
knowledge of physics? And then you can start getting into truly bizarre things
which I suppose is an appropriate synonym for quantum mechanics. And this is
all just a random sampling of one specific area. Understanding things on a
deeper level, and the interaction between all of our physical systems - it
just creates a very interesting and exciting universe that I'm happy to simply
seek to learn more of. Prior to pursuing physics more seriously, I did not
have any clue how little I knew. And it's the sort of subject where the more I
learn the more I understand how little I know. Fun stuff!

~~~
michaelthiessen
How did you go about learning this?

I have had Feyman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year now,
and hope it won't always be in my "someday" bucket.

~~~
indubitable
I had the same thing in that it was always an issue of motivation. Try to find
something to draws you in. For me this was special relativity and its
implications. Time dilation in particular felt like something that could not
be what it seemed after covering the basics using Wiki/YouTube/etc. So I
picked up an introductory book on it. I'd highly recommend _Spacetime Physics:
Introduction to Special Relativity_ by Taylor/Wheeler. It's extremely well
written and just as importantly has plenty of problems to test your
understanding. And it was even more fascinating, and bizarre, than I initially
thought. From there everything becomes much easier to get into simply because
of that intrinsic motivation of awe and wonder.

After that I turned to more 'big picture' stuff to try to at least get a
survey of the breadth of knowledge. Like you mention the Feynman Lectures are
great for this. You can also find them online [1] which may be more
convenient. "A Brief History of Time" is also a phenomenal big picture look at
cosmology, which is my current primary interest.

Perhaps the best resource of all, and what I'm currently working through, is
Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretic Minimum." I first saw this as a book. It's
essentially a physics overview intended for those with a solid mathematical
background, but without much formal education in physics. The book is
excellent, an even better resource for this is the site [2] for it. It has
extensive coverage and lectures on all major topics. The only downside is the
lack of questions or material to test your understanding.

Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to find something that draws
you in. From there everything is easy. Take a weekend sometime and really dig
into something that fascinates you. Time dilation in general, the twin
paradox, black holes and their funkiness at the event horizon, the two slit
experiment in quantum mechanics, etc. These are all things with massive
amounts of information available that can really draw you in.

[1] -
[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/)
[2] -
[http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses](http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses)

------
Avshalom
June 30 2016: counseling, with the corollary--August 19: 30 mg citalopram

~~~
locusofself
+1 citalopram. only downside is a bit of jaw tightness

------
0x4f3759df
Plotting my escape from the corporate world

------
jimmywanger
Music. Music has such mathematical undertones - classical music especially
speaks to me.

I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory
when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a
bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a
tonal language at that.

------
nickthemagicman
Applying project management tools to manage everything in my life.

For example: getting a mortgage or paying taxes are relatively complex
processes with alot of moving parts: tasks, documents, deadlines, etc.

You make a Kanban and divide it up into tasks and a pipeline and notes for
each tasks status.

Trello is what I use but there's other tools as well.

Holy crap it makes your life easier.

------
derwiki
I've been practicing yoga for about 4 years now, and I'm amazed at how
positively it's impacted my other sports (climbing, snowboarding) as well as
my mental well being. Also excited that this is a form of exercise I won't
"age out of".

------
corford
Lifewise: Adopting a dog (suspect next one will be quitting smoking when I
finally muster the willpower to do it)

Techwise: Moving away from piles of hacked up bash scripts and fully embracing
an 'infrastructure as code' mindset (and the associated tools)

------
dumbfounder
Not focusing on what it takes to retire from Day 1. I did several startups and
always dreamed I would retire rich from those pursuits. I got close, but no
cigar. I am 42, and just a few years ago turned my sights hardcore towards
hitting retirement goals. It might take another 20 years. It is something I
will drive into my kids once they enter college. I will still also encourage
them to do startups, but I will want them to understand the impact it has on
their ability to retire early.

Side note: if I had held the Amazon stock I sold to start my second company
and focused on retirement the past 15 years I would be (semi) retiring right
about now.

------
closeparen
Moving from the suburbs to the city. Turns out that buying you way out of an
hour-long 3-segment public transit odyssey is actually a _great_ use of
discretionary income. It was also basically budget-neutral when I sold my car.

------
clay_to_n
Bash. As an intermediate programmer, I learned it too late. Scripts were
always magic to me since I was used to compiled languages. Especially useful
for certain build tools and manual steps programmers are running from the
command line.

Personal financial tracking - budgeting and tracking everything in Mint or
YNAB. Going from "I spend about this much total money per month" to "I spend
this month in each of these categories" was big as far as having confidence in
my finances.

Similarly, setting up a retirement account. You should do this as soon as
you're over 18 and have a full-time job, no matter whether your salary is low.

------
zitterbewegung
One was when I realized I should try to do something that I can do to push my
boundaries and instead do something I can right now. I'm writing down more
koans like this and I might sell it as a deck of inspiration cards.

Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful
but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on
just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would
immediately turn it off.

Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some
notes are better written.

------
jaredcwhite
Virtually every major step forward I've undertaken in life, I've had this
reaction after the fact. "Why didn't I do this sooner?" It's making me a
little bit quicker on the draw as time goes by. When weighing risk vs. reward,
I'm more apt to lean into the reward. Risks are usually far more daunting when
they're in the realm of the imagination. (And like many I suspect, I'm pretty
good at imagining impending doom.)

------
stephanos2k
Blogging.

EDIT:

It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like
~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication,
organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by
teaching etc.

Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working
out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open
sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).

~~~
kelukelugames
Story? :)

------
aaronpk
Spending less and saving more.

~~~
Waterluvian
Spending more and saving less.

To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university
frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a
good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't
realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.

~~~
aaronpk
That makes sense. Until I started tracking it, I was surprised at how much I
was spending that I really didn't need to be. That's more the kind of spending
I was talking about.

~~~
Waterluvian
Yeah for sure! I'm in favour of your approach too. I think maybe there's a
magical answer of, "all things in balance!"

------
FruityFarm
Listening to podcasts or reading while commuting.

~~~
derwiki
More specifically for me: podcasts while I'm walking to/from transit or
driving, and reading a BOOK (not HN, Reddit, etc) if I'm sitting on a bus or
train.

------
jbuss
Using a chrome extension[0] to block social media sites during work hours.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-
site/eiimnmi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-
site/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh)

~~~
tmikaeld
Seems this particular extension is very upfront about the fact that they
gather quite a lot of data from your tab history/usage/habits and then pass
that to 3rd parties.

[https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html](https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html)

~~~
jbuss
Hadn't considered that. Are there others you would recommend?

~~~
astura
If your work computer is not also your home computer you can just edit your
hosts file to block social sites on your work computer.

------
PatientTrader
Reducing sodium intake. You will instantly lose weight, feel less sluggish,
have more energy etc. By simply reducing the amount of sodium in your diet you
are increasing your chances of living longer. Over 500,000 deaths each are
from complications with high sodium levels causing health problems.

~~~
astura
I don't doubt that you might have benefited from a reduction in sodium intake
but most people won't. The majority of people are not hypersensitive to
sodium[1]. Limiting salt to some arbitrarily low number can have negative side
effects, for example, my vegetable consumption went up _dramatically_ when I
let go of my anxiety over putting salt on them.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-
end-t...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-
on-salt/)

~~~
PatientTrader
Keep in mind that fast food companies and a large share of food manufactures
thrive on using high amounts of sodium in their processed foods to increase
shelf life and improve margins (i.e. from factory until bought by consumer). I
don't doubt the validity of that research, but I would be interested to see
who funded it. And of course all humans need sodium to maintain a healthy
balance, but many foods we eat today unexpectedly have excessive amounts of
sodium in them.

------
cozuya
PrettierJS. Do you write javascript and have heard about this and thought to
yourself "oh yeah sounds neat I'll look into it when I have the time" just
like a ton of other things? This is the exception. Go spend 1/2 hour getting
it set up now.

------
derwiki
Better posture. It's really easy to dump all your weight into a rounded back
with your head reaching super far forward. But if you are mindful about your
posture, you can help prevent lower back injuries.

------
muzani
Cutting out BS from my life.

Quitting a job. Firing a client. Breaking up with a girl. Talking with
recruiters I don't like.

It never gets better. Just cut it when there's enough evidence to support.

------
ta12111
Cancer that wasn't fatal, but close.

Followed by less interest in work/money, more interest in family.

Money still matters, of course, but I'm much more in tune with how much I
really need.

------
kamaal
Equity investments and research.

You don't know how compounding works, unless you actually have some skin in
the game and see it work.

------
rijoja
Listening to Tchaikovsky instead of metal while working, makes the whole
process feel a _lot_ more epic!

------
csense
Quit Facebook.

------
dhubris
Getting therapy. Reckon I could have saved myself ten or fifteen years of
suffering.

------
projectant
Hatha yoga.

