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The information firehose we’re blasted with daily mocks us to focus. It consumes and divides our attention and defiantly laughs at our plans.

Pre-COVID, I outlined how I changed things up to deal with the fact I was grinding rather than progressing critical information consumption.

The reset definitely helped consumption-wise, but ultimately I want to be applying knowledge I gain. In particular, I was still having issue with what I describe as the ephemera class of information, so wanted to see if it I could improve my flow, and make sure I was extracting the important (and discarding the unimportant faster) to leverage longer term gains and opportunities.

Having fewer, better things will likely make you happier. “The things you own, end up owning you.”. Only invest in things you spend a lot of time with and where money invested will make a quality of life difference.

This is my “would buy again” list of items I’d immediately replace if needed.

(nb: I’m not receiving sponsorship or affiliate revenue for any of these things, just genuinely wanted to recommend them to people who might need them.)

I’ve had a theory of happiness since my twenties.

I’ve often wished I’d listen to it more since it’s powered the really good parts and decisions in my life. And strangely, I’ve found it holds for most people, in most places, I’ve been. And I’ve been around.

I don’t talk about it much, because I’ve often thought it’s obvious, even silly. But it’s been surprisingly transformative for people I’ve told about it who nudged their lives in its direction.

I’m convinced now that the underlying database for my life needs to move longer-term to human-readable, plain-text formats. As much as practical. And files under my control. But, it’s hard being an OG when everyone is shouting cloud. How do you do it? Why would you do it?

Sounds old school, I know… but, more than a decade of hard knock lessons about applications, apps, and companies have taught me that the only thing you can rely on is plain text representations. If you want any semblance of continuity and history in your data. Doubly-so for the metadata around your data.

A forum foray into end-of-year management summaries (with ledger-cli) had a handful of people asking about my blog setup and its speed. I realized it’s changed significantly from posts three years back (and where I was using Jekyll and Gatsby), so time for an update post.

TLDR

The benefits of this setup are:

• very fast - due to static content and CDN (content delivery network)
• cheap - pennies-a-glass: it costs me ~$1 USD a month even for very large traffic amounts
• discovery - unlike other setups on managed providers like Github Pages etc, it’s SEO-friendly
• easy-to-operate - simple, easy commands to setup and execute deploys
• zero-maintenance - other than Amazon SSL cert updates (now automatic), have not touched it in nearly 3 years now

Despite the fact I was not the biggest Go fan at the time, I tried Hugo . Hugo was blazingly fast to build, has a heap of convenience features I really liked, and a nice ecosystem of plugins, along with some decent themes. Also, it compiles/comes as a single static binary to use. While Jekyll and Gatsby are both nice, both were dead slow to generate (additionally, every node update kept breaking Gatsby or its plugins when I was using it.). Hugo also takes care of your asset pipelining for you which can be a major headache with other static site generators.

TLDR

Buy it. Very few quibbles. Great linux laptop with a commitment to 100% repairable and upgradeable is impressive and future facing. I recommend the DIY version if you’re technical. You’ll love putting it together. Works great on Arch Linux 20211101 and above.

Preamble

My daily driver has been an M1 Macbook Air. It’s been a worthy successor to the 12” 2016 Macbook I adored. It’s light, powerful (the M1 chip is a wonder), quiet as it’s fanless, has a stunning display, good keyboard (despite critics), impressive battery life, quality speakers, and a solid webcam for WFH conf calls. It’s been an excellent machine to date. This is, perhaps unfairly, I high bar to meet when comparing Framework’s laptop against. Tough competition.

Going totally remote WFH over 2021 tweaked choices. I really tried to simplify tooling and focus on process though experimented (particularly between org-mode, notion, and logseq for GTD.).

Flirting with Zettelkasten did not work for me. Spent more time curating notes then action, and wanted a system which defaulted to doing (though some ZK practices made me better at absorbing material and acting on it).

For the interested, you can see the toolchain evolution through 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some possibly better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year and year two of the pandemic.

Succinctly:

1. Be open.
2. Make lotsa little bets. Collect free non-lottery tickets.
3. Always take care of your downside.

Luck is an attitude, not a thing. Be open to experiences and opportunities.

We don’t pay truck to the role of luck in successful people’s lives. I get irked with business biographies as unbalanced personality cults where luck or psychopathology noticeably outruns talent.

Smart, productive, and ambitious are table stakes these days. Luck, and having help (and being raised white, male, and in the West to be clear about entitlement), often play an outsized role in many success stories we lionize as self-made.

I read 47 books in 2021.

There’s no real trick to reading that number. Make it a daily habit (get an hour in every day) and carry a Kindle everywhere. Block your lunch hour or another time if you need to schedule.

My star ratings out of 5 are below for every book. Good stuff is in the “To Read” list. I’ve also included a “Do Not Read” list for books I wish I had not wasted my time on.

Part III in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .

Part II focused on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out.

This post focuses on moving into slightly more advanced investment topics and strategy around building your portfolio.