galdosd

I went to college for four years but didn't graduate. Today I'm having a great time coding and sys adminning in nyc. I enjoyed college times, but there's no way you could con me today into thinking it was at all necessary from an economic perspective. I think of college as a luxury good spot, not as an economic investment. So I kind of agree with you on one hand, even though I have a softspot for college. Point is this: college has positives, but an efficient way to spend 4yrs developing skills is not it.

Actually, I have an alternative theory to explain what happened. There is a lot of research documenting the mental benefits of exercise, especially on aspects like focus, planning, discipline, etc. These are just the sorts of aspects the author found began to wane.

Therefore, I theorize that actually it was the decrease in regular exercise that caused the change, not a vague changing habit of "completing things." After all, finishing what you set out to do can often be beneficial, but it can also be foolish when it later turns out that what was begun was unwise or low-priority.

Something doesn't seem quite right about the "always finish" theory to me, since I know many very successful people make a point of being able to stoically change priorities when necessary rather than getting mired in pointless completion of no-longer-useful goals.

The hard thing is that although we ARE ourselves, we do find ourselves reduced to theorizing as to why changes in ourselves are happening-- looking around to find a cause.

How would one test the "finishing things" theory against the "exercise increases focus" theory? No problem-- try going back to a better exercise schedule but letting things slide as needed in non-health related areas. I predict it'll be fine, suggesting it's exercise/health specifically that is affecting habits, not some sort of "getting into a bad habit of not finishing things" effect. If it's not, that suggests I'm mistaken and provides evidence in favor of the author's theory.

I'd be interested in the results.

Is it still worth learning calculus now that there's Mathematica?

I learned a different lesson, which is that you can win big by being willing to get your hands dirty. After all, Steve Pavlina's site is like a burlap bag filled with a mixture of turds and diamonds. I'd get over my disgust for fecal matter pretty fast if I found such an object.

(For example, his advice regarding waking up to an alarm was invaluable to me.)

You don't have to trust somebody to learn from them.

"Everybody is fine", huh?

I'm not sure you can make that claim so casually.

Oh, but the situation is even worse than that-- the Protestant work ethic already caught you (or us, or many people, whatever).

I'm talking about the assumption that exercise is some sort of pain for gain tradeoff that you would suffer through in exchange for a later reward, but is itself unpleasant or undesirable without the health benefits. This insiduous paradigm seems to be everywhere in (at least) American culture.

And so the magic pill already exists! And there's no patent. No copay. No HMO can deny you it. And it's fun!

Why would 01-01-01 be a problem? If you're writing a format string in this "format string by example" scheme, you don't have to be able to express every possible date-time in it, just a single chosen one.

Or perhaps force the choice of a particular (memorable) date-time, such as January 2nd, 2000, 3:04 am and 5 seconds?