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It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.
I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:
> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
Couldn't agree more. I always return to the following quote [1] from Marvin Minsky, who's an intellectual hero of mine:
> Most people think that accomplishments like [those of geniuses] require "talents" or "gifts" that cannot be explained… [but] I suspect that genius needs… unusually effective ways to learn. It’s not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of “higher-order” expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius.
> It depends… Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.
I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.
Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.
Keeping it simple is probably a good policy for most people most of the time. But for those who want to break through the plateaus that simple solutions will inevitably lead to, they can look to posts like this one.
I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.
> On that note, read some Extended Mind philosophy if you haven’t, originally from Chalmers I believe
Literally considering writing a book on extended mind theoretic ideas. Highly recommend Andy Clark's "Supersizing the Mind" (2010).
> do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?
Both. At first (~10 years ago) it was about managing deficiencies, but before long I was performing far above the average neurotypical knowledge worker.
Really glad to hear that. My recommendation is to put a lot of emphasis on the "environment" step toward the end of the article. Otherwise, you might find yourself gaining a merely temporary hold of self-control only to get distracted and fall back into a previous pattern of thinking/behavior.
I enjoyed "On Bullshit" but I would much more emphatically recommend Frankfurt's "The Reasons of Love," [0] the basic argument of which is that self-love has been wrongly maligned in our society.
Here's a taste:
> Insofar as a person loves himself — in other words, to the extent that he is volitionally wholehearted — he does not resist any movements of his own will. He is not at odds with himself; he does not oppose, or seek to impede, the expression in practical reasoning and in conduct of whatever love his self-love entails. He is free in loving what he loves, at least in the sense that his loving is not obstructed or interfered with by himself.
> I say this as someone who was probably like you once. … I also tried all the meditation techniques whilst relentlessly trying to optimise my productivity, work and life, resulting in an inevitable burn out. … Following that, I have ended up just using a few text files for organisation and I am probably more organised than I have ever been.
I applaud your journey. (Genuinely!) But isn't it possible that even though you and I have followed a similar path re productivity systems, the path has suited me better than it has suited you? And not because either of us is a better or worse person than the other, but because we're simply different?
Here's the way I see it [0]: Society is a pack of cards with multiple suits, and there's an ace in each suit. If someone else's ace card doesn't work for you, it doesn't necessarily mean they're full of sh*t; it might just mean they belong to a different suit.
The replication problems of the marshmallow test are certainly interesting, but I'm not sure how they are relevant to the point being made by Robert Sapolsky in the quoted passage.
His point has nothing to do with the predictive powers of the test. Instead it's that the children who succeeded in deferring gratification succeeded by means of effective strategies rather than by stoicism or genetics.