Fuck You Sunday
I have been fortunate enough to be able to focus on nothing but AI for the past year or so. I don&#x27;t talk about it as much as I&#x27;d like, because it feels like talking about the mansion you got to live in for a year, among people who don&#x27;t have mansions.<p>I just try to work as hard as possible every day and hope it benefits others in the end, somehow.<p>There are some lessons that might be worth sharing, though, so maybe I should talk about it anyway. When I was much younger, a sharp programmer in #gamedev on Afternet – a sort of guru figure named Washu – was talking with me, which is to say I was rambling to him in the way teenagers do about hopes, dreams, life, all the ways you want to change the world, etc. I was saying things like, &quot;If only I didn&#x27;t have to work. I would do so much. It feels like my potential is being drained.&quot;<p>He replied, &quot;If you&#x27;re not productive at work, you won&#x27;t be productive outside of work.&quot;<p>That always stayed with me, partly because it made me mad. Who does he think he is? He doesn&#x27;t know me or my situation at all. And yet, over the last decade-and-change, it&#x27;s been an inescapable truth. I left that job a couple years later with $15k in the bank, exhausted, and thoroughly not looking forward to the next one. So I sat down, finally free of job, and started to change the world...<p>... by playing dota. All day, every day.<p>Now, I wouldn&#x27;t trade those days for anything. It was necessary soul-searching, and it prepared me for this last year, where I was able to be productive. But you must understand: unless you&#x27;re disciplined, you need to focus on simply being happy at work, before you can be happy <i>outside</i> of work.<p>There&#x27;s a very good chance that you&#x27;re making yourself unhappier than you need to be, because instead of simply choosing to be happy (which is often, but not always, a choice), you are choosing to be unhappy (by dreading that alarm).<p>The flipside is, once you&#x27;re ready, you really can do so much more, when you get to focus for multiple days on problems of your choosing. Or multiple weeks.<p>I don&#x27;t know if anyone needed to hear that, but... just remember, you can choose your mindset, even though you can&#x27;t choose your emotions. Mindset != emotion, and emotions tend to follow mindset in the long run.