Prioritize big-ticket purchases

I've made several spending blunders. I get sick thinking about how much money I spent.

My financial mental model was poor back then.

Stoicism and mindfulness keep me from attaching to those feelings. It still hurts.

Until four or five years ago, I bought a new winter jacket every year.

Ten years ago, I spent twice as much. Now that I have a fantastic, warm winter parka, I don't even consider acquiring another one. No more spending. I'm not looking for jackets either.

Saving time and money by spending well is my thinking paradigm.

The philosophy is expressed in most languages. Cheap is expensive in the Netherlands. This applies beyond shopping.

In this essay, I will offer three examples of how this mental paradigm transformed my financial life.

Publishing books

In 2015, I presented and positioned my first book poorly.

I called the book Huge Life Success and made a funny Canva cover in 30 minutes. This:

That looks nothing like my present books. No logo or style. The book felt amateurish.

The book started bothering me a few weeks after publication. The advice was good, but it didn't appear professional. I studied the book business extensively.

I created a style for all my designs. Branding. Win Your Inner Wars was reissued a year later.

Title, cover, and description changed. Rearranging the chapters improved readability.

Seven years later, the book sells hundreds of copies a month. That taught me a lot.

Rushing to finish a project is enticing. Send it and move forward.

Avoid rushing everything. Relax. Develop your projects. Perform well. Perform the job well.

My first novel was underfunded and underworked. A bad book arrived. I then invested time and money in writing the greatest book I could.

That book still sells.

Traveling

I hate travel. Airports, flights, trains, and lines irritate me.

But, I enjoy traveling to beautiful areas.

I do it strangely. I make up travel rules. I never go to airports in summer. I hate being near airports on holidays. Unworthy.

No vacation packages for me. Those airline packages with a flight, shuttle, and hotel. I've had enough.

I try to avoid crowds and popular spots. July Paris? Nuts and bolts, please. Christmas in NYC? No, please keep me sane.

I fly business class behind. I accept upgrades upon check-in. I prefer driving. I drove from the Netherlands to southern Spain.

Thankfully, no lines. What if travel costs more? Thus? I enjoy it from the start. I start traveling then.

I rarely travel since I'm so difficult. One great excursion beats several average ones.

Personal effectiveness

New apps, tools, and strategies intrigue most productivity professionals.

No.

I researched years ago. I spent years investigating productivity in university.

I bought books, courses, applications, and tools. It was expensive and time-consuming.

Im finished. Productivity no longer costs me time or money. OK. I worked on it once and now follow my strategy.

I avoid new programs and systems. My stuff works. Why change winners?

Spending wisely saves time and money.

Spending wisely means spending once. Many people ignore productivity. It's understudied. No classes.

Some assume reading a few articles or a book is enough. Productivity is personal. You need a personal system.

Time invested is one-time. You can trust your system for life once you find it.

Concentrate on the expensive choices.

Life's short. Saving money quickly is enticing.

Spend less on groceries today. True. That won't fix your finances.

Adopt a lifestyle that makes you affluent over time. Consider major choices.

Are they causing long-term poverty? Are you richer?

Leasing cars comes to mind. The automobile costs a fortune today. The premium could accomplish a million nice things.

Focusing on important decisions makes life easier. Consider your future. You want to improve next year.

Building A Second Brain helps us remember connections, ideas, inspirations, and insights. Using contemporary technologies and networks increases our intelligence.

This approach makes and preserves concepts. It's a straightforward, practical way to construct a second brain—a remote, centralized digital store for your knowledge and its sources.

How to build ‘The Second Brain’

Have you forgotten any brilliant ideas? What insights have you ignored?

We're pressured to read, listen, and watch informative content. Where did the data go? What happened?

Our brains can store few thoughts at once. Our brains aren't idea banks.

Building a Second Brain helps us remember thoughts, connections, and insights. Using digital technologies and networks expands our minds.

Ten Rules for Creating a Second Brain

1. Creative Stealing

Instead of starting from scratch, integrate other people's ideas with your own.

This way, you won't waste hours starting from scratch and can focus on achieving your goals.

Users of Notion can utilize and customize each other's templates.

2. The Habit of Capture

We must record every idea, concept, or piece of information that catches our attention since our minds are fragile.

When reading a book, listening to a podcast, or engaging in any other topic-related activity, save and use anything that resonates with you.

3. Recycle Your Ideas

Reusing our own ideas across projects might be advantageous since it helps us tie new information to what we already know and avoids us from starting a project with no ideas.

4. Projects Outside of Category

Instead of saving an idea in a folder, group it with documents for a project or activity.

If you want to be more productive, gather suggestions.

5. Burns Slowly

Even if you could finish a job, work, or activity if you focused on it, you shouldn't.

You'll get tired and can't advance many projects. It's easier to divide your routine into daily tasks.

Few hours of daily study is more productive and healthier than entire nights.

6. Begin with a surplus

Instead of starting with a blank sheet when tackling a new subject, utilise previous articles and research.

You may have read or saved related material.

7. Intermediate Packets

A bunch of essay facts.

You can utilize it as a document's section or paragraph for different tasks.

Memorize useful information so you can use it later.

8. You only know what you make

We can see, hear, and read about anything.

What matters is what we do with the information, whether that's summarizing it or writing about it.

9. Make it simpler for yourself in the future.

Create documents or files that your future self can easily understand. Use your own words, mind maps, or explanations.

10. Keep your thoughts flowing.

If you don't employ the knowledge in your second brain, it's useless.

Few people exercise despite knowing its benefits.

Conclusion:

• You may continually move your activities and goals closer to completion by organizing and applying your information in a way that is results-focused.

• Profit from the information economy's explosive growth by turning your specialized knowledge into cash.

• Make up original patterns and linkages between topics.

• You may reduce stress and information overload by appropriately curating and managing your personal information stream.

• Learn how to apply your significant experience and specific knowledge to a new job, business, or profession.

• Without having to adhere to tight, time-consuming constraints, accumulate a body of relevant knowledge and concepts over time.

• Take advantage of all the learning materials that are at your disposal, including podcasts, online courses, webinars, books, and articles.

He built a $40M hip-hop empire from street drug dealing.

50 Cent was nearly killed by 9mm bullets.

Before 50 Cent, Curtis Jackson sold drugs.

He sold coke to worried addicts after being orphaned at 8.

Pursuing police. Murderous hustlers and gangs. Unwitting informers.

Despite his hard life, his hip-hop career was a success.

An assassination attempt ended his career at the start.

What sane producer would want to deal with a man entrenched in crime?

Most would have drowned in self-pity and drank themselves to death.

But 50 Cent isn't most people. Life on the streets had given him fearlessness.

“Having a brush with death, or being reminded in a dramatic way of the shortness of our lives, can have a positive, therapeutic effect. So it is best to make every moment count, to have a sense of urgency about life.” ― 50 Cent, The 50th Law

50 released a series of mixtapes that caught Eminem's attention and earned him a $50 million deal!

50 Cents turned death into life.

Things happen; that is life.

We want problems solved.

Every human has problems, whether it's Jeff Bezos swimming in his billions, Obama in his comfortable retirement home, or Dan Bilzerian with his hired bikini models.

All problems.

Problems churn through life. solve one, another appears.

It's harsh. Life's unfair. We can face reality or run from it.

The latter will worsen your issues.

“The firmer your grasp on reality, the more power you will have to alter it for your purposes.” — 50 Cent, The 50th Law

In a fantasy-obsessed world, 50 Cent loves reality.

Wish for better problem-solving skills rather than problem-free living.

Don't wish, work.

We All Have the True Power of Alchemy

Humans are arrogant enough to think the universe cares about them.

That things happen as if the universe notices our nanosecond existences.

Things simply happen. Period.

By changing our perspective, we can turn good things bad.

The alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone may have symbolized the ability to turn our lead-like perceptions into gold.

Negativity bias tints our perceptions.

Normal sparring broke your elbow? Rest and rethink your training. Fired? You can improve your skills and get a better job.

Consider Curtis if he had fallen into despair.

The legend we call 50 Cent wouldn’t have existed.

The Best Lesson in Life Ever?

Neither avoid nor fear your reality.

That simple sentence contains every self-help tip and life lesson on Earth.

When reality is all there is, why fear it? avoidance?

Or worse, fleeing?

To accept reality, we must eliminate the words should be, could be, wish it were, and hope it will be.

It is. Period.

Only by accepting reality's chaos can you shape your life.

“Behind me is infinite power. Before me is endless possibility, around me is boundless opportunity. My strength is mental, physical and spiritual.” — 50 Cent

The Merge cut Ethereum's energy use by 99.5%.

The Crypto community celebrated on September 15, 2022. This day, Ethereum Merged. The entire blockchain successfully merged with the Beacon chain, and it was so smooth you barely noticed.

Many have waited, dreaded, and longed for this day.

Some investors feared the network would break down, while others envisioned a seamless merging.

Speculators predict a successful Merge will lead investors to Ethereum. This could boost Ethereum's popularity.

What Has Changed Since The Merge

The merging transitions Ethereum mainnet from PoW to PoS.

PoW sends a mathematical riddle to computers worldwide (miners). First miner to solve puzzle updates blockchain and is rewarded.

The puzzles sent are power-intensive to solve, so mining requires a lot of electricity. It's sent to every miner competing to solve it, requiring duplicate computation.

PoS allows investors to stake their coins to validate a new transaction. Instead of validating a whole block, you validate a transaction and get the fees.

You can validate instead of mine. A validator stakes 32 Ethereum. After staking, the validator can validate future blocks.

Once a validator validates a block, it's sent to a randomly selected group of other validators. This group verifies that a validator is not malicious and doesn't validate fake blocks.

This way, only one computer needs to solve or validate the transaction, instead of all miners. The validated block must be approved by a small group of validators, causing duplicate computation.

PoS is more secure because validating fake blocks results in slashing. You lose your bet tokens. If a validator signs a bad block or double-signs conflicting blocks, their ETH is burned.

Theoretically, Ethereum has one block every 12 seconds, so a validator forging a block risks burning 1 Ethereum for 12 seconds of transactions. This makes mistakes expensive and risky.

What Impact Does This Have On Energy Use?

Cryptocurrency is a natural calamity, sucking electricity and eating away at the earth one transaction at a time.

Many don't know the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, yet it's tremendous.

A single Ethereum transaction used to use 200 kWh and leave a large carbon imprint. This update reduces global energy use by 0.2%.

Ethereum will submit a challenge to one validator, and that validator will forward it to randomly selected other validators who accept it.

This reduces the needed computing power.

They expect a 99.5% reduction, therefore a single transaction should cost 1 kWh.

Carbon footprint is 0.58 kgCO2, or 1,235 VISA transactions.

This is a big Ethereum blockchain update.

I love cryptocurrency and Mother Earth.

I'm trying to understand why Bitcoin NFTs aren't ready.

Ordinals, a new Bitcoin protocol, has been controversial. NFTs can be added to Bitcoin transactions using the protocol. They are not tokens or fungible. Bitcoin NFTs are transaction metadata. Yes. They're not owned.

In January, the Ordinals protocol allowed data like photos to be directly encoded onto sats, the smallest units of Bitcoin worth 0.00000001 BTC, on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ordinals does not need a sidechain or token like other techniques. The Ordinals protocol has encoded JPEG photos, digital art, new profile picture (PFP) projects, and even 1993 DOOM onto the Bitcoin network.

Ordinals inscriptions are permanent digital artifacts preserved on the Bitcoin blockchain. It differs from Ethereum, Solana, and Stacks NFT technologies that allow smart contract creators to change information. Ordinals store the whole image or content on the blockchain, not just a link to an external server, unlike centralized databases, which can change the linked image, description, category, or contract identifier.

So far, more than 50,000 ordinals have been produced on the Bitcoin blockchain, and some of them have already been sold for astronomical amounts. The Ethereum-based CryptoPunks NFT collection spawned Ordinal Punk. Inscription 620 sold for 9.5 BTC, or $218,000, the most.

Segwit and Taproot, two important Bitcoin blockchain updates, enabled this. These protocols store transaction metadata, unlike Ethereum, where the NFT is the token. Bitcoin's NFT is a sat's transaction details.

What effects do ordinary values and NFTs have on the Bitcoin blockchain?

Ordinals will likely have long-term effects on the Bitcoin Ecosystem since they store, transact, and compute more data.

Charges Ordinals introduce scalability challenges. The Bitcoin network has limited transaction throughput and increased fees during peak demand. NFTs could make network transactions harder and more expensive. Ordinals currently occupy over 50% of block space, according to Glassnode.

One of the protocols that supported Ordinals Taproot has also seen a huge uptick:

Taproot use increases block size and transaction costs.

This could cause network congestion but also support more L2s with Ordinals-specific use cases. Dune info here.

Storage Needs The Bitcoin blockchain would need to store more data to store NFT data directly. Since ordinals were introduced, blocksize has tripled from 0.7mb to over 2.2mb, which could increase storage costs and make it harder for nodes to join the network.

Use Case Diversity On the other hand, NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain could broaden Bitcoin's use cases beyond storage and payment. This could expand Bitcoin's user base. This is two-sided. Bitcoin was designed to be trustless, decentralized, peer-to-peer money.

Chain to permanently store NFTs as ordinals will change everything.

Popularity rise This new use case will boost Bitcoin appeal, according to some. This argument fails since Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency. Popularity doesn't require a new use case. Cryptocurrency adoption boosts Bitcoin. It need not compete with Ethereum or provide extra benefits to crypto investors. If there was a need for another chain that supports NFTs (there isn't), why would anyone choose the slowest and most expensive network? It appears contradictory and unproductive.

Nonetheless, holding an NFT on the Bitcoin blockchain is more secure than any other blockchain, but this has little utility.

Bitcoin NFTs are undoubtedly controversial. NFTs are strange and perhaps harmful to Bitcoin's mission. If Bitcoin NFTs are here to stay, I hope a sidechain or rollup solution will take over and leave the base chain alone.

As technology develops, you should stay up to date

You don't want to fall behind, do you? This post covers 7 tech-related things you should know.

You'll learn how to operate your computer (and other electronic devices) like an expert and how to leverage the Internet and social media to create your brand and business. Read on to stay relevant in today's tech-driven environment.

You must learn how to code.

Future-language is coding. It's how we and computers talk. Learn coding to keep ahead.

Try Codecademy or Code School. There are also numerous free courses like Coursera or Udacity, but they take a long time and aren't necessarily self-paced, so it can be challenging to find the time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will transform all jobs.

Our skillsets must adapt with technology. AI is a must-know topic. AI will revolutionize every employment due to advances in machine learning.

Here are seven AI subjects you must know.

What is artificial intelligence?

How does artificial intelligence work?

What are some examples of AI applications?

How can I use artificial intelligence in my day-to-day life?

What jobs have a high chance of being replaced by artificial intelligence and how can I prepare for this?

Can machines replace humans? What would happen if they did?

How can we manage the social impact of artificial intelligence and automation on human society and individual people?

Blockchain Is Changing the Future

Few of us know how Bitcoin and blockchain technology function or what impact they will have on our lives. Blockchain offers safe, transparent, tamper-proof transactions.

It may alter everything from business to voting. Seven must-know blockchain topics:

1. Describe blockchain.

2. How does the blockchain function?

3. What advantages does blockchain offer?

4. What possible uses for blockchain are there?

5. What are the dangers of blockchain technology?

6. What are my options for using blockchain technology?

7. What does blockchain technology's future hold?

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay

Cryptocurrencies employ cryptography to safeguard transactions and manage unit creation. Decentralized cryptocurrencies aren't controlled by governments or financial institutions.

Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was launched in 2009. Cryptocurrencies can be bought and sold on decentralized exchanges.

Bitcoin is here to stay.

Bitcoin isn't a fad, despite what some say. Since 2009, Bitcoin's popularity has grown. Bitcoin is worth learning about now. Since 2009, Bitcoin has developed steadily.

With other cryptocurrencies emerging, many people are wondering if Bitcoin still has a bright future. Curiosity is natural. Millions of individuals hope their Bitcoin investments will pay off since they're popular now.

Thankfully, they will. Bitcoin is still running strong a decade after its birth. Here's why.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer just a trendy term.

IoT consists of internet-connected physical items. These items can share data. IoT is young but developing fast.

20 billion IoT-connected devices are expected by 2023. So much data! All IT teams must keep up with quickly expanding technologies. Four must-know IoT topics:

1. Recognize the fundamentals: Priorities first! Before diving into more technical lingo, you should have a fundamental understanding of what an IoT system is. Before exploring how something works, it's crucial to understand what you're working with.

2. Recognize Security: Security does not stand still, even as technology advances at a dizzying pace. As IT professionals, it is our duty to be aware of the ways in which our systems are susceptible to intrusion and to ensure that the necessary precautions are taken to protect them.

3. Be able to discuss cloud computing: The cloud has seen various modifications over the past several years once again. The use of cloud computing is also continually changing. Knowing what kind of cloud computing your firm or clients utilize will enable you to make the appropriate recommendations.

4. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)/Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a topic worth discussing (MDM). The ability of BYOD and MDM rules to lower expenses while boosting productivity among employees who use these services responsibly is a major factor in their continued growth in popularity.

IoT Security is key

As more gadgets connect, they must be secure. IoT security includes securing devices and encrypting data. Seven IoT security must-knows:

1. fundamental security ideas

2. Authorization and identification

3. Cryptography

4. electronic certificates

5. electronic signatures

6. Private key encryption

7. Public key encryption

Final Thoughts

With so much going on in the globe, it can be hard to stay up with technology. We've produced a list of seven tech must-knows.