how to live2

How to ruin your life

Evgeny Lepekhin wrote an anti-thread on how to ruin your life:

I added my two pennies worth to the wisdom:

  • When starting a project, always shoot for the moon — because if you’re not the best at what you do, you don’t matter.
  • Dream of an ideal world. Every time the reality turns out to be different, be sure to get overly emotional.
  • Don’t appreciate yourself for anything you’ve done. Remember: it’s never enough. Never.
  • Deprive yourself of things (and people) you love because you don’t deserve them.
  • Finally, stay where you’ve been born: it defines you now and has to define you for the rest of your life. Also, nobody needs you where you will go.

If I’m honest, these are the mistakes I myself have been making for the most of my life. Don’t think my life’s already ruined, though: at least, I can see them.

Use technologies, not services

There's a huge problem about almost every task or notes manager I've ever seen—the most important one, the root of all other ones like being slow, designed badly, or hard to get used to.

They can do too many things.

Say, I need a note-keeping app. The basic set of things I want to do is: open the app, type in some text, hit OK, have my text saved, close the app. I want to note something else, I repeat. Then I open it on another device, read, if unneeded, delete. That's it. Nothing more.

But no! Developers have done everything to make it highly likely that I'd be doing keeping notes but not what I need to keep notes for. I can tag my notes. I can sort them by creating date, date last edited or, certainly, alphabetically. I can make lists out of notes and notebooks out of lists. I can shove images, audio or, for some reason, embed a video from YouTube (not just include a link). I can write my notes in fifteen different fonts or format them with Markdown (or both). I can publish them with a single tap, protect with a passcode or send to a friend who use the app as well. Or, if my friend doesn't know (yet) about how great it is and how much use he can make of it, I can generate a link giving him 10% discount for the first month of use. No doubt, I can do eggs with it, the only reason I can't is I haven't found the doing-eggs button yet.

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