sudo vim /bassitone/.liferc
I swear I’m not a robot y’all. I just like keeping in the technical mindset as much as I can. It’s the only way to move forward - embrace the über geek!
I’ve been thinking a lot these last couple weeks. We aren’t in the old days anymore where work ends at 1700 and you can go home, watch the game, have a beer or two, and just forget about things until the next morning. No, cyber security - and especially the field of penetration testing and vulnerability assessment that I love so much - changes literally every day. The only way to stay on top, to excel, is to keep at it with almost the obsession of the great masters of classical music. Maybe not to the same level as Handel writing the entirety of the Messiah in the space of about three weeks, but something approaching that.
Does this mean sacrificing all of work-life balance? Nope. At least, I hope it doesn’t. It does, however, require some adjustments to be made. The current status quo cannot continue any longer if I’m to do what must be done. Here, I’ll lay out some new rules of life for myself. I’ve tried this before to little success - maybe posting publicly will be the answer. End goal: make life at least a little more meaningful, if not productive. Ideally by the end of this I’ll have a life worth living instead of, as Josh Groban sings in his upcoming Broadway debut (inspired by Tolstoy?) “hiding in my room at night, so terrified…all the things I could have been, but I never had the nerve” (2:57-3:20 or so in the below video if the embed is screwy, but the whole song is amazing)
No more video games. Full stop. It’s hard to think of any one thing that is a bigger waste of time than this. What could I have been by now had I devoted all those thousands of hours (yes, thousands if not tens of thousands) over the years to, say, programming? Writing? Exercise? Cooking? You get the point. There are far better things in life than mindlessly sitting at this computer attempting to be ever so slightly faster on the uptick, placing my set of pixels over a more precise set of pixels in real-time to cause someone somewhere else in the great expanse of the internet to have a 30 second waiting period before he (or she, I ain’t judging) can do the same to me? Instead of spending hours figuring out the best combination of digital cards to get progressively better rewards for in turn more digital cards, why not do it with real cards in Magic: the Gathering? At least the latter has some social value to it.
How can I rise today? A great almost hymn-esque song in the My Little Pony fandom contains the line “day for rising, night for sleep; as in Heaven, so below.” Everything I do should be toward this singular goal: be the best me I can be. If there’s something that I can do toward that end in a given moment, do it. This doesn’t necessarily have to be work - it can be screwing around with the homelab, writing a chapter in the next great novel I’ll never publish (until that one day I find an editor crazy enough), or something else. Every moment should have meaning and purpose. Only when the day’s rising is done should I even consider picking up one of the select few games that are intellectually engaging (Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and the like), or firing up Netflix, or screwing around on Reddit…
Be Present in Life. Take time to notice the little things going on around me. Engage with the world around me. If something can be done outside on campus or at a coffee shop or elsewhere that is around others, favor those locations over doing it at home in the relative darkness of my workstation. There’s nothing wrong with doing things at home of course, but they don’t exactly write songs about the beauty of the carpet or the fresh breeze of the central air, now do they. I mean, it’s possible someone might, music is weird these days. But it’s not that inspiring now is it?
Up and out of bed at 0800 (or earlier) every day. No exceptions. Even weekends. Or earlier, as the case may be once I’m out in the real world and actually working like a “normal person”. Seriously, I got up at noon on this Saturday and it’s now 18:17. Guess what, I’m still freaking tired as if I just woke up! If I’m going to be this tired, might as well get the extra hours of rising in. I’ve never been a morning person, but wasting all that time just laying in bed doesn’t make any sense, now does it? Having a dog would help, but it’s possible to do it without one. Or it should be.
Dale Carnegie gives you advice on anxiety. Use it. Pretty self-explanatory there.
Dare to Try. I had this in the back of my mind as I was writing the post the other day, but didn’t really know how to put it. Now I do. I will not be afraid to try to do
, whether it be as simple as eating an onion or as complex as reverse engineering APT-1. Okay, that might be a bit of an extreme example, but you get the idea. (and I do hope that one day I’ll know enough to even know where to begin such a project!)
More to come…
