I am the laziest fucker I know, and I desperately want to change this

Last week I read danb's excellent post - How I Cured My Procrastination
and it inspired me to bring about some changes in my life as well  

I believe any engineering potential I have is being severely held back by my crippling laziness  



Why Now?  

-> I'm going to UIUC this Fall (yay) - I have 0 experience with the American education system or the job market, I cannot afford to be lazy, unproductive and unorganized  

I am going to be surrounded by people who are not only smarter than me¹ but also have a better work ethic  

-> No better time to start than right now - the way I see it, fixing my work ethic and curing my procrastination will also help me improve my physical health which has been a long time personal goal of mine

 


What I have going for me :)  

-> I have no time consuming hobbies - gone are the days when I'd spend 6 hours grinding chess and watching an endless amount of fantasy football videos. I barely watch 3 hours of television a week  

-> People around me - I personally know a few truly cracked and inspiring engineers, I have picked up some things through sheer osmosis  

-> Acceptance - I am well aware of the difficult lifestyle & behavioural changes I need to make, something I used to struggle with  


What I don't have going for me :(  

-> Brainrot - Unfortunately, I have replaced all the chess content with mindless ig slop. Zucks algorithm has turned my mind into mush, I spent 3 hours daily on ig this week, which is 3 hours too many if we're being honest    
Consuming short content has also fucked my attention span up, I can hardly go 10 minutes without reaching for my phone  

-> Lack of patience - If I am not instantly good at something, I quit.  

Although tbh, I have been making progress in this department (I recently put myself through learning vim motions even though it tanked my speed)

 


My plan -  

-> Consume better content, conciously - I have tonnes of book recommendations from people much smarter and more experienced than I am, it is in my best interest to stop wasting time on ig and instead just sit and read shit  

• Everything from danb
• Binge Karparthy's yt channel
• Designing Data Intensive Applications
• Reading list of 30 papers that Ilya gave to John Carmack [ source ]
  
  
  

 

-> Be extremely comfortable with my tooling - I was never picky about my editor. Only after I saw ThePrimeagen flying around in his setup did I make an attempt to address this.    

My current dev setup is not perfect, it never will be, but I like it

 


-> Resist the urge to reinvent the wheel - Identify people who you look up to, and mimic how they work/study. Popular examples would be -  

• ye
• ludwig
• yacine
• jason liu

 

I copied your cadence, I mirrored your style<br> I studied the greats, I'm the greatest right now  ― J. Cole – MIDDLE CHILD