Josh Kaufman

One of my favorite English words is: kakorrhaphiophobia Abnormal fear of failure Kakorrhaphiophobia is an abnormal, persistent, irrational fear of failure. In clinical cases, it's debilitating: the fear of even the most subtle failure or defeat is so intense that it restricts a person from doing anything at all. https://joshkaufman.net/fear-of-failure/

Along those lines, here's a quick read about how "life is a bandit problem." "When you have more information about what works and what doesn’t, you shift to spending the majority of your time pulling the best lever (exploitation), but you keep exploring the other options in case your current best option isn’t the very best that exists. Here’s the thing: the exploration phase never stops." https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/

> What certifications should I avoid and what might be good to consider? Who exactly certifies the certifiers? Best to be known by doing good work. Here's a great read by Josh Kaufman> http://joshkaufman.net/alan-weiss-on-certifications-and-consulting/

No, but my buddy Josh Kaufman, author of the great “Personal MBA” book, is doing a new project (and book) about exactly that! He's using speed-learning techniques to learn 6 different skills fast, and one of them is learning a new instrument. Contact him here - http://joshkaufman.net/about/ - to see if he could give you some starter points for now, until his book comes out much later.

+1 for kettlebells. I've always hated strength training, but kettlebells just make me feel awesome---with only minimal soreness the next day, unlike what I get from squats. It's been about a year since I started doing kettlebell swings and get-ups 2-3 times a week, and both my wife and I have noticed serious changes in my physique. If you're not sure what kettlebell training even is, I recommend "Strength Training for Non-Athletes" (https://joshkaufman.net/strength-training-for-non-athletes/). If you're interested enough to buy your first kettlebells, I recommend the book Simple & Sinister for an explanation of the form and a training plan. (It's easy to hurt yourself with the wrong form, so you really want to read the book before working out with any significant amount of weight.) One more tip: I found the suggested starting weights to be way off from my personal ability. As a guy who hadn't done any weight training in years, I needed a 15-20 lb weight for get-ups and a 25 lb weight for swings when I started off. (But over the last year, I've worked up to 35 lb get-ups and 55 lb swings.)

My 2¢: 1. Life is about the continuous cycle of our human species development and where we fit in that as individuals. 2. A religion as a system of beliefs is not so much to be true as to fulfill a purpose. The purpose (and the religion) can and should be revised from time to time. (Religions can be replaced.) 3. Agreed. 4. Justice is grounded on power. It should be on reason. 5. We need adequate regulation. If what we have is adequate or not is a subjective and a political mater. 6. University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic learning. 7. Agreed. Overspecialization is a weakness in itself. 8. Partially agreed. The package of ability and personality is both genetically inherited and later shaped. 9. If in doubt, improve your ability to make an educated guess by learning more about the mater. This is what humans (should) do, as a species. 10. Luck is both given (by arbitrary events) AND created (by how we react to arbitrary events). 11. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect the logic. 12. Through "well-intended conservation" the good is at most just preserved (by definition), therefore the comparison is flawed. Also, it's worth noting that there is an effect called "absence blindness" that kicks in in such comparisons. http://joshkaufman.net/absence-blindness/ 13. Technological progress spawns a lot of things, including extinctions for many things that we come later to disregard. 14. Progress is not a…

This reminds me of the explore vs exploit dilemma: https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/ I'm still working on understanding this trade-off better... It seems to be a pretty good lens for looking at things, though.

Patrick's advice about taking dates off is spot-on for optimizing conversion rates on key pages. I've taken dates off of my most important evergreen resources. There's sometimes a happy medium - you can deemphasize the date with CSS or by putting it at the bottom of the post. Here's an example of a blog-style post on my site: http://joshkaufman.net/malinvestment/ People who want to find the date can find the date. People who aren't looking for it aren't likely to see it.