I haven’t logged in to LinkedIn for years (or even a decade?) but today I actually wanted to contact someone who is on there. I clicked the button for sending messages and was informed that I need a premium subscription to do that.

I understand they want to earn money and making users pay for features is a way to do that. But this is not a new feature that they are offering. It’s something we had before. It’s called email. It’s very strange that they take that away from their users and charge for a (lesser) replacement. All they have to do is not show the email addresses in the profiles. Very lame.

It reminds me of an old Simpsons episode. Mr. Burns had darkened the sun above Springfield with a large shield so everyone had to pay for more electricity, which was provided by his power plant.

In this post I don’t have any special idea in my mind to ramble about. This is just a “note to self”.

The message: Get more sleep.

I’ve been pushing myself hard lately. I’m not a big “you need routines” guy, but I do see their value. For instance getting a routine of writing these blog posts in place is great for exercising writing. For me anyway. But the problem is that I keep adding things onto my todo lists and my sleep schedule suffers.

A few days ago I actually slept so little that it lead to a lucid dream. You probably know what I mean. It’s a dream in which we know that we are dreaming. We are awake inside the dream. It was pretty wild. Interesting and trippy. But it came about because I slept to little and then fell asleep again and woke up soon after (and I guess, fell asleep again).

Long story short: My sleep schedule is messed up. This can’t be healthy.

On the other hand I don’t fall asleep watching Netflix or playing computer games. Lately I am pretty happy with what I do. I go to bed with a sense of accomplishment. (I won’t got into details on that however. Perhaps some other time.) This feels great.

But, alas, having to get up early does not.

I also think I drink way more coffee than the average person. (But I do not believe that too much coffee is bad for us. Unlike cigarettes or alcohol for example.)

And as you can probably tell, dear reader, I am quite tired now. But let me finish this post with something that just came to mind. Wow, a topic after all!

(Told you writing can take care of itself if we just start.)

The topic is pride.

Let me just ramble about pride for a second..

For a long time I didn’t get the concept of pride. What the big deal was. It seemed to be a bad emotion. Something like greed or envy. After all we are all the products of our genes and environment. What pride can we feel if we are, I don’t know, born smart or beautiful? Or if our parents or teachers taught us how how to behave properly so we are a success? Or if we got lucky playing some lottery? It’s not really our achievement. The universe kind of did that.

Well, to get it, I think we can choose to push ourselves really hard. I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger hard (“You start counting [reps] when it starts to hurt!”). Ok maybe not that hard..

But if we, for example, define some goals for ourselves and put a lot of tasks in our daily routine, and if we actually pull it off and do all what we promised ourselves we would do. Well, man (or girl), that feels pretty nice.

Yeah, I’m tired, but I feel good about myself right now. I actually did write something for the blog today.

I guess I’m a little proud of myself.

Shrug.

I am serious about improving my writing and therefore I bought some books on the craft. I’m currently reading “On Writing” by Stphen King and I will finish it tonight. (I want to write this first, because later I might be too tired to bother.)

It’s a pretty good book. There are some biographical parts that neatly lead into the “How to write” part. And the one thing that I want to talk about here has to do with how he approaches the story.

King says, just come up with a situation. The rest will write itself if you let it.

I really like this idea. Coming up with situations should be easy, after all, no?

Let me try.

“On his last day of the job and one day before he was to set sail on a yacht around the world, a decorated FBI agent discovers that his boss and most of his colleagues are crooks.”

Or how about this one:

“Aliens who can manipulate events see that the fate of the universe depends on humanity developing beyond their starsystem. Unfortunately humans are just about to start nuclear war. The aliens desperately need humanity to succeed and one of them comes up with a plan to make sure we do.”

The second one almost makes me want to write it immediately. So many possibilities here!

So King says, start writing, and the story will unfold almost all by itself. There will be a point, which he says some call creepy, but he calls exciting, when the characters start to come alive on their own. When they surprise the writer who just has to record what happens on paper (or, more likely, in his Word document).

What a great way to write a book. The author is the frist reader. He doesn’t know how it all will end, he just invents some people and lets them try.

The story is in us, King says. It’s like a fossil which we slowly uncover.

I assume the fossils in us are more interesting if we have read many stories ourselves. There’s more material to draw from. Watching a lot of movies may work, too, but I believe reading is special. What we read goes deeper. Fossilizes better, perhaps.

I also use this approach while writing all these blogposts lately. Just a one sentence idea and the rest takes care of itself. I trust it will and it does. (Well, it usually does. So far I deleted 2 finished posts, because they were boring.)

I already discovered this fact of life - that things can write themselves - before, by the way. When I write my diary. It often starts slow but then gets better and better. It’s actually a rather spectacular way to spend an evening, believe me. (Perhaps I’ll say more on this in some future post.)

Yes, writing is a discovery technique.

I am very pleased that the master himself, Stephen King, spells it out for us. We now have celebrity permission to try it out.

And seeing the two story situations I came up with (spontaneously) above, I am slightly tempted to try my luck with fiction.

A few years ago many would get Raspberry Pi computers for 40 Euros or so and install emulation software on it that ran old games. NES, SNES, Sega Master System and so forth. I was one of them. It was pretty good. And so popular that Nintendo eventually released their own version of it.

The emulators have a nice feature that the old original game consoles in our childhood did not have. Quicksave and Restore. It means you can press a button to save the state of the game. And another to continue playing from that point. And it takes 0 seconds, because the hardware is so fast compared to the games it runs. Which means you can try a tricky opponent 20 times without losing a life. Save. Then die. Restore. Die. Restore. Die. Restore.. Then win.

It’s a very useful feature when you are actually an adult with responsibilities. There’s only so many free minutes each day. With quicksave and restore I was able to finish a game in a few hours (spread over a few days).

Here’s what I’ve learned about old games. First, they are still good. Second, they are challenging and sometimes completely unfair. Third, the graphics don’t matter that much.

For example, I’ve played “Ninja Gaiden” on NES. It had probably 8 different colors. No, probably 4. It’s so far removed from modern 3d games, let’s say Grand Theft Auto V, you can’t even compare them.

Or can you?

For me, both GTA and Ninja Gaiden are fun and the graphics only matter in the first few minutes. Give Ninja Gaiden some time and it will look good to you.

Our brain is a fantastic machine. It will create the experience for us based on what it has to work with. If New York City is rendered in 4 colors.. it’s still New York City and needs protection against evil.

When we read books, we have 0 colors. And it’s still enough to create worlds in our mind. It sucks you in.

Have you by any chance read the book “Ready Player One”? I did and it looked great to me before Spielberg made his film.

No, I am standing firm on this. We don’t need great graphics.

The question is if there is any disadvantage to having them.

Everyone that has lived a bit has perceived that time seems to move faster as we get older.

For a child the two days before Christmas (and the presents) can feel like an eternity. The adult hardly notices. The twenty year old may believe that he will live forever. The forty year old thinks more often about his health and retirement.

I believe some scientist has attempted to quantify these differing perceptions. I won’t google it, but if I remember correctly, the perceptive middle of life is at the age of 18.

That means according to perception our life is half over around the time we get our driving license (here in Europe at least).

A crazy thought, no?

But I have observed something else in myself. Not only does my perception of my own biographical time change as time passes. But also of the perception of historical time.

Ok this sounds way too fancy, but I mean this: When I was 20 the year 1945 seemed very long ago indeed. Grandpa would talk about it. It was an important year for him. But to me it was ancient history. Just like Elvis Presley might have lived in the time of Beethoven as far as I was concerned.

As I get older, and perhaps as I read more, these distances get smaller. 1945 is not that long ago. And, as a matter of fact, neither is the year 0.

Some time ago I got into reading old philosophy books. The Stoics. Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And Plato and some other writers from that time (antiquity).

And when I started I was expecting some super hard to understand, far removed, treaties of ancient problems.

But no. No no no. They were like us. Just like us. The same people, they just didn’t have electricity and motorcycles. And they perhaps did not have scientific proof that the earth revolves around the sun. (However, they were not “flat earthers”, as one may believe, either. At least some Greeks did experiments to check, I vaguely recall.)

So that distance in time shrank for me, too.

What’s next? How long ago is it that cavemen walked the earth? What are 100.000 years in eternity?

Would we live 1000 years, would the middle of perception be at 180? Or would it still be at 18?

If the answer were 18, what would the point of a much longer life be then?

I am currently reading a book by Joseph Campbell. It’s called “Myths to Live By”.

I have never read anything by him before. I just bought it because the guy playing Edward Snowden in the movie trailer mentioned it. (Why not, right?)

Oh and he also is the one that came up with the concept of the Hero’s Journey.

And by .. god, or by all the gods he mentions in this book.. what a humbling experience this book is.

How can someone pack so much information about a broad subject in just one book? With so much clarity and.. precision?

For example I’ve read quite a bit about Buddhism, but I am not sure I have ever read anything better about Buddhism. And it’s not even a book about Buddhism! It’s just mentioned in a chapter or two.

It’s really humbling.

It made me think about the notion of a “seminal work”. It’s the one others refer to.

If it were a website, it would surely have a great Google Page Rank. (Top of the first page, just below the ads..)

Is it perhaps the rule that breakthroughs happen through the work of individuals? Or relatively small groups of people?

I am thinking about the physicists in the 19th and early 20th century. Planck, Einstein and the others. Or about the founding fathers of the United States. Or about the first Drum n Bass album.

There are these events, they spark something. Inspire others. They make humanity take a leap. They are the opposite of mediocrity.

We’re very lucky to have those people.

But let me return to books..

Authors that follow can take a book and summarize it. That’s useful. It’s great for a quick overview. They can of course also develop their own ideas on top of it. But they are not as groundbreaking.

Sometimes they are just rehashing. Repackaging. Simplifying. Popularizing.^*

Which is also fine, but..

I only want to read the seminal works. Only the best.

And who knows.. if I read enough.. perhaps one day.. I myself.. nah.

What would I even write about? But that’s another topic. :)

P.S.: Youtube is also full of of people summarizing books and ideas from those books, of course. That’s pretty great, too.

^* = It reads a bit like popularizing is somehow less worthy. Even though Campbell, who inspired me to write this post, is, as far as I know, a popularizer first and foremost. At least for me, who only knows one of his books. My point is, he impressed me by making the difference between a brilliant man like him and, I guess, the rest of us, apparent. (Also please excuse me, I am not really putting that much thought into these posts. They are like a download from my head onto the blog. I mean they take roughly as long to write as it takes to type them. But I should put more effort in! I do not want to waste anyones time, after all. However, while this may be a subject if debate - if anyone cares at all about this random blog, of course - I think the posts so far are ok. They each get something across. There was one so far that I had finished but which I deleted afterwards. Because it was saying nothing.)

There are so many products for weight loss. Pills. Shakes. Vitamins. Diets. Gym equipment. Actual gyms. With whole philosophies attached.

Yet it’s just a simple matter of eating less calories than we burn. Every day.

That’s it. Boom!

Like so many things in life, it really is that easy.

And here’s the kicker. Or a little extension. Our body will crave what we give it.

If we drink alcohol, we will want to drink more alcohol. If we smoke cigarettes, we will want to smoke cigarettes. If we eat at McDonalds, we will crave McDonalds.

If we eat healthy, we will… crave eating healthy.

Same goes for the amounts. When we reduce the amount of calories, we will be hungry for a few days. But each day a little less. Then it will stop. We will feel satiated.

Habits are really just a matter of making it through the first few few days.

The discomfort will go away.

We can rest assured.

The rest is psychology. For that my advice would be to define a goal.

P.S./DISCLAIMER: I’m not a doctor. I am sure there are conditions where the above does not apply.

There’s an (lingo requried:) insane amount of money to be made quickly^*. I’ve seen it happen.

How?

Earn the trust of enough people that you can predict price movements in the markets.

You are right more often than you are wrong. You know how to read charts. You can sense the temperature of the market. You have done this for a long time. Your intuition is very developed. Perhaps you are very specialized and only participate in a very specific, narrow market.

Actually, you don’t even need to predict anything, you just have to trade well and allow the public to see your trades in real time.

And then you go pro.

You (mostly) stop posting for the public. You create a website with a paid account for let’s say $100 per month that allows paying users to still see your messages. From your 25.000 Twitter followers 5.000 immediately sign up. They are certain they will get that money back in a few days of trading, anyway.

That’s $50.000 each month.

I’ve seen it happen, and it wasn’t just $100. And it wasn’t just 5.000 who joined. One person I’ve been following on Twitter must have made at least half a million dollars per month. He was into it. A real nerd. And rather humble. He made all that money doing what he loves. I mean, that’s great, isn’t it?

I am not objecting to this. It is what it is. But we should keep in mind that there is a very high chance that even the most skilled guru will sometimes be completely wrong. It’s just the nature of the markets. Some will be wrong many times in a row. Either way, there can be no guarantees.

If we participate, we must manage our risk. Not go all in when someone announces a trade. We must be smart about it and practice restraint each time.

Because if they fail they may simply call the market irrational. They can say FOMO (fear of missing out) has driven everyone insane. And so forth. Some of them will do that, anyway.

But it does not matter why they were wrong. When the result is that their followers have lost a lot of money.

Trading or not, I just think it’s an interesting space to observe.

The markets are wild, but I believe experienced traders might be able to win. More often than not. And this is enough. But getting that experience can take a long time. And it can cost a lot of money.

Maybe it really is better to pay someone, who seems to have the skill, for guidance.

P.S.: I think some people should definitely stay away from markets and gambling in general. But, I am not trying to motivate anyone to do anything. As mentioned before, I am just writing all these posts lately in order to get better at writing.

^* = Quickly once a followership has accumulated. This can take a while.

A few years ago if you were into old formats and bought a vinyl LP, it would often include a download link for the digital version of the music. I don’t know if they still care to include that. With Spotify I mean. But I think it was a decent thing to offer. I do not think we should pay twice for the same content, just because the medium changes. If you own the DVD you should be allowed to download the 4K version.

(Or shouldn’t you? Ok, I’m actually undecided. For one, I don’t know how much extra work is required for creating the new version.)

Books however put us in the same situation. We can get the printed version or the digital copy. (Usually for the Kindle reader.)

Digital books are great. They weigh nothing, they come with a search function and a nice highlighting tool. We can change the font and its size. And we can read on our computers and then, seamlessly, switch to our ebook reader or smartphone. The reading position, the notes and highlights are always in sync. And perhaps best of all: Tapping defines or translates words.

Printed books on the other hand still feel better. And look better. We can decorate our homes with them. I love it when I visit someone and they have a bookshelf. The books on it are usually different from mine. It’s very interesting to get to know people this way.

I really enjoy having unread books around, too. It’s like having my own private book bazaar. When in the mood I can walk over and pick something new. Or something that I’ve read a few times before.

I wish we could get the LP deal with books. Buy the paper version and get the download for free. Even if it costs a little more, I would pay for that option.

The title of the movie “The Imitation Game” is actually referring to the Turing Test. In this post however, I want to use it as a (catchy, I hope) reference to copying.

Recently, I’ve come across learning by copying on three occassions. First, I’ve read the “Boron Letters”. It’s a book, or rather a collection of letters with commentary, in which a marketer instructs his son, his protégé in the art of sales, to copy successful direct mail letters by hand. He says it is the best way to absorb the style and the method of the masters.

Another example is by Zed Shaw, a rather well known programmer who teaches programming the hard way. His method includes the verbaitim copy of example code. He emphasizes it repeatedly, to the annoyance of some students, I’m sure.

Finally, I’ve come across this method when reading about art schools. It seems that copying drawings or paintings is a bona fide method to learn how to draw and paint.

And sure, why not! It intuitively makes sense, doesn’t it?

As children we copied adults. Children have their own drive to explore, their curiosity. But they also seem to instinctively know to do as the elders do. Not just the elders, other kids, too. Remember Count Greystoke a.k.a. Tarzan? He was raised by apes in the jungle. And he became one of them by imitating their way of life.

The question is: Is even mindless, diligent copying enough? Will we learn the style of Ernest Hemigway by copying his books with a typewriter (or a pen)?

I believe so, yes. Because it’s not mindless after all. It can’t be. My reasoning goes like this: Let’s take a look at reading (books).

Reading probably is, perhaps next to hearing stories (from grandpa, or in Church or in a Buddhist satsang), still the best way to expand our knowledge. Why? Because our thoughts have to slow down. We get more processing time. The cognitive processing .. reaches deeper. We create more connections as we go.

Well, copying is what? Reading and writing. So it’s even slower! Yet we cannot be distracted.

If we want to copy a text verbatim or a picture as close to the original so they almost cannot be told apart, then we need to focus. We must put our mind to it. We must give it the full one hundred percent of our attention.

Sounds like it’s worth a try?

Whom would you like to copy?

P.S.: This reminds me of movies. Although I enjoy modern movies like “Thor” or the “Fast and Furious” franchise, something seems generally lost in modern film making. Has the audience lost the patience with the filmmakers or is it the other way round? (Or maybe I just watch the wrong films.)