“Be specific” is a nice flinch, I’ve always had it and it helps a lot. “Don’t moralize” is a flinch I learned from experience and it also helps. Here’s some other nice flinches I have:
“Don’t wait.” Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it’s automatic.
“Don’t hesitate.” With some effort I got a working version of this flinch for tasks like programming, drawing or physical exercise. If something looks like it would make a good code fix or a good sketch, do it immediately. Would be nice to have this behavior for all other tasks too, but the change would take a lot of effort and I’m hesitating about it (ahem).
“Don’t take on debt.” Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don’t remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it’s served me well.
A nice hack from GTD is to keep a ‘wait-for’ list. I use that for orders, reactions to inquires, everything where someone has to get back to me. Put it on a list and forget about it.
Extra points if you do not check the arrival time of you internet purchases at all during the first week of waiting.
I have the same debt-flinch, and the same feeling about how well it works, but with one qualification: I was persuaded to treat mortgage debt differently (though I’ve always been very conservative about how much I’d take on) and that seems to have served me very well too.
This isn’t meant as advice about mortgages: housing markets vary both spatially and temporally. More as a general point: it’s probably difficult to make very sophisticated flinch-triggers, which means that even good flinching habits are likely to have exceptions from time to time, and sometimes they might be big ones.
Agreed. Kiyosaki’s “Rich dad Poor dad” has lots of good advice about the difference between “good debt” and “bad debt”.
AFAI recall it boiled down to “only borrow money for assets, not liabilities”
ie—good debt is borrowing for things that will continue to make you more money (including your appreciating house or your business) and bad debt is for things like holidays or house redecorating projects—things that simply take cash our of your hand.
Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” has also received some extremely harsh criticism, some of it at least from people who seem to have a clue what they’re talking about. I haven’t looked at it myself and am not a financial expert, but would advise anyone considering reading it and/or taking Kiyosaki’s advice to exercise caution.
The same can and should be said about any book that purports to advise people on how to become rich.
I wish people were required to include in the appendix of such a book their net worth as independently assessed by an external audit and tax returns and other filings presented to show that they are wealthy and have actually gained that wealth in the manner described by the book.
Even then caution would still be needed as if markets are efficient (or even slightly efficient) then something that provided market beating returns 3-5 years ago (or however long it has been since they gained their wealth) should be expected to only provide market rates of return currently.
I doubt it. But there are some for which no more caution is needed than could be taken largely for granted with an intelligent bunch of people like the readership of Less Wrong, and some that aren’t very approachable by anyone who isn’t quite expert already. There’s no need to say “exercise caution” about those. It appears that Kiyosaki’s book is very approachable and may be very unreliable. That’s an especially dangerous combination, if true.
The classic is Andrew Tobias, “The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need.” You can trust it because he’s not selling anything and teaches common-sense, conservative advice: no risky speculation or anything.
Yes, that is discussed in the book. He makes a big deal about the difference. In fact he discuses the seeming inconsistency of accountant putting large items into the “assets” column that do nothing but depreciate in value...
I’d argue that the main point of Rich dad, poor dad can be summarised as:
1) assets put money into your pocket, liabilities take money out of it
2) you gain wealth by adding to your assets instead of your liabilities
It’s roughly equivalent to the dietary advice of “you lose weight by making sure there are more calories being spent than eaten”
Well, it makes me sad to see a very standardized and crisp term like “liability” used in such a confusing and nonstandard way. Especially when there is another equally crisp and very standardized term (“expense”) that could be used instead. And I do not want to talk about it anymore.
This is what my mother said to me: all types of debt are bad, but mortgage debt is unavoidably. My chosen career field is nursing, which is a pretty reliable income source, so I’m not worried about taking on a mortgage when the time comes.
“Don’t wait.” Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it’s automatic.
Could you elaborate a bit on that?
I noticed that I often wait for small tasks that end up taking a lot of time. For example, I need to compile a library or finish a download and estimate that it won’t take long, maybe a few minutes at most. But I find it really hard to just do something else instead of waiting. I can’t just go read a book or do some Anki reps. Whenever I tried that, I either have the urge to constantly check up on the blocking task or I get caught up in the replacement (or on reddit). So I end up staring at a screen, doing nothing, just so I don’t lose my mental context. At worst, I can sit for half an hour and get really frustrated with myself.
I find that I worry a lot less about checking up on background tasks (compiles, laundry, baking pies, brewing tea, etc.) if I know I’ll get a clear notification when the process is complete. If it’s something that takes a fixed amount of time I’ll usually just set a timer on my phone — this is a new habit that works well for tea in particular. Incidentally, owning an iPhone has done a surprising amount for my effectiveness just by reducing trivial inconveniences for this sort of thing.
For compiles, do something like
$ make; growlnotify -m “compile done!”
or run a script that sends you an SMS or something. This is something that I’m not in the habit of doing, but I just wrote myself a note to figure something out when I get into work on Monday.[1] (For most of my builds it’s already taken care of, since it brings up a window when it’s done. This would be for things like building the server, which runs in a terminal, and for svn updates, which are often glacial.)
[1] This is another thing that helps me a lot. Write things down in a place that you look at regularly. Could be a calendar app, could be a text file in Dropbox, whatever.
Not necessarily true. git and svn are suited to slightly different applications.
For one thing—sometimes you want One Source of Truth… which svn gives you, and git does not.
If you have a central git repository to which all contributors have write privileges, you can treat it a lot like a svn-style centralized VCS that just happens to be git. Is there a significant advantage of svn over this kind of git setup?
If it’s something that takes a fixed amount of time I’ll usually just set a timer on my phone
Consider…
<ctrl><space> invokes Quicksilver.app . enters text mode <message> <tab> to action pane Large Type <ctrl><enter> to make a compound object Run after Delay… or Run at Time…
… and Quicksilver.app does this very nicely without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard (if you’re making tea… your fingers probably already left the keyboard).
Consider also
<ctrl><space> invokes Quicksilver.app . enters text mode <message> <tab> to action pane Speak Text (Say) …
(These suggestions live in mac land. If you live in Windows land, consider moving. If you live in Linux land you’ll probably figure our how to do this yourself pretty quickly :)
I couldn’t get growlnotify to work reliably on my Snow Leopard. And some of Growl’s preference panes are absurd. And Growl insists on growling at you every time it auto-updates itself, with no way to turn that off. My friend Darius dislikes it, too.
I’ll tell you what I do even though it is far from ideal.
I have the program play a sound file to notify me. Sound is not the best way for a program to notify me because I have a habit of taking off my headphones, but leaving them plugged in.
After you install the free app “Adium” you can find some nice chimes in /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds/
I use the following command line to play a chime:
open -a VLC /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds//TokyoTrainStation.AdiumSoundset/Contact_On.m4a
Of course this presupposes you have VLC installed. And the first time I play a chime, there’s a delay of a few seconds while VLC loads the chime.
ADDED. I also use a visual signal as follows. In the “Hearing” tab on the Universal Access system pref pane, I check the box “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs”. I use the Emacs function DING to generate the aforementioned alert sound. Sorry, I do not know how to generate an alert sound from the shell.
“Don’t take on debt.” Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don’t remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it’s served me well.
Same. And it has also served me well, although maybe not solely because of that preference–I was in a better financial situation to start with than many university students, and I’m a workaholic with a part-time job that I enjoy, and I also enjoy living frugally and don’t consider it to diminish my quality of life the way some people do.
The trouble with not waiting is that it increases your number of mental context switches, and they can be really expensive. Whether “don’t wait” is good advice probably depends on details like the distribution of waiting times, what sort of tasks one’s working on, and one’s mental context-switch speed.
“Don’t wait.” Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it’s automatic.
For purposes of avoiding ambiguity this might be better phrased as “don’t block” or “don’t busy-wait”. Although combined with #2 it might indeed become “don’t wait” in the more general sense to some extent!
“Be specific” is a nice flinch, I’ve always had it and it helps a lot. “Don’t moralize” is a flinch I learned from experience and it also helps. Here’s some other nice flinches I have:
“Don’t wait.” Waiting for something always takes more time than I thought it would, so whenever I notice myself waiting, I switch to doing something useful in the meanwhile and push the waiting task into the background. Installing the habit took a little bit of effort, but by now it’s automatic.
“Don’t hesitate.” With some effort I got a working version of this flinch for tasks like programming, drawing or physical exercise. If something looks like it would make a good code fix or a good sketch, do it immediately. Would be nice to have this behavior for all other tasks too, but the change would take a lot of effort and I’m hesitating about it (ahem).
“Don’t take on debt.” Anything that looks even vaguely similar to debt, I instinctively run away from it. Had this flinch since as far as I can remember. In fact I don’t remember ever owing >100$ to anyone. So far it’s served me well.
A nice hack from GTD is to keep a ‘wait-for’ list. I use that for orders, reactions to inquires, everything where someone has to get back to me. Put it on a list and forget about it.
Extra points if you do not check the arrival time of you internet purchases at all during the first week of waiting.
I have the same debt-flinch, and the same feeling about how well it works, but with one qualification: I was persuaded to treat mortgage debt differently (though I’ve always been very conservative about how much I’d take on) and that seems to have served me very well too.
This isn’t meant as advice about mortgages: housing markets vary both spatially and temporally. More as a general point: it’s probably difficult to make very sophisticated flinch-triggers, which means that even good flinching habits are likely to have exceptions from time to time, and sometimes they might be big ones.
Agreed. Kiyosaki’s “Rich dad Poor dad” has lots of good advice about the difference between “good debt” and “bad debt”.
AFAI recall it boiled down to “only borrow money for assets, not liabilities”
ie—good debt is borrowing for things that will continue to make you more money (including your appreciating house or your business) and bad debt is for things like holidays or house redecorating projects—things that simply take cash our of your hand.
This has worked pretty well for me so far too.
Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” has also received some extremely harsh criticism, some of it at least from people who seem to have a clue what they’re talking about. I haven’t looked at it myself and am not a financial expert, but would advise anyone considering reading it and/or taking Kiyosaki’s advice to exercise caution.
The classic takedown of Kiyosaki is from John T. Reed.
Thanks for the link. ok, that made me reconsider entirely. Lots of good points here.
I guess I liked the motivational tone of the book—but yep, it looks like his facts are not so hot (and in a lot of cases entirely fictional).
The same can and should be said about any book that purports to advise people on how to become rich.
I wish people were required to include in the appendix of such a book their net worth as independently assessed by an external audit and tax returns and other filings presented to show that they are wealthy and have actually gained that wealth in the manner described by the book.
Even then caution would still be needed as if markets are efficient (or even slightly efficient) then something that provided market beating returns 3-5 years ago (or however long it has been since they gained their wealth) should be expected to only provide market rates of return currently.
Is there any financial advisor or financial book that you can recommend without reservation and that people can take without exercising caution?
I doubt it. But there are some for which no more caution is needed than could be taken largely for granted with an intelligent bunch of people like the readership of Less Wrong, and some that aren’t very approachable by anyone who isn’t quite expert already. There’s no need to say “exercise caution” about those. It appears that Kiyosaki’s book is very approachable and may be very unreliable. That’s an especially dangerous combination, if true.
The classic is Andrew Tobias, “The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need.” You can trust it because he’s not selling anything and teaches common-sense, conservative advice: no risky speculation or anything.
Sorry, I was attempting to be clever, cynical and hip. This apparently impeded effective communication.
Let me rephrase it so that it is more difficult to misunderstand:
All financial advice should be received with reservation and taken with caution.
Better?
Ramith Sethi: iwillteachyoutoberich.com
Kiyosaki is nice for some mindset and basic approach, but horrible on the concrete advise. Do not go into buying houses due to his books.
My small favorite is George Clayson: the richest man in Babylon. Then there is a galore of more modern books. Check out Ramiths recommended readings.
Only borrow money for assets, not expenses.
The book defines a liability as “something that takes money from your pocket”—so the two can be considered roughly equivalent.
OK, but that’s not the standard definition of a liability used by accountants and such.
Yes, that is discussed in the book. He makes a big deal about the difference. In fact he discuses the seeming inconsistency of accountant putting large items into the “assets” column that do nothing but depreciate in value...
I’d argue that the main point of Rich dad, poor dad can be summarised as:
1) assets put money into your pocket, liabilities take money out of it 2) you gain wealth by adding to your assets instead of your liabilities
It’s roughly equivalent to the dietary advice of “you lose weight by making sure there are more calories being spent than eaten”
Well, it makes me sad to see a very standardized and crisp term like “liability” used in such a confusing and nonstandard way. Especially when there is another equally crisp and very standardized term (“expense”) that could be used instead. And I do not want to talk about it anymore.
This is what my mother said to me: all types of debt are bad, but mortgage debt is unavoidably. My chosen career field is nursing, which is a pretty reliable income source, so I’m not worried about taking on a mortgage when the time comes.
Could you elaborate a bit on that?
I noticed that I often wait for small tasks that end up taking a lot of time. For example, I need to compile a library or finish a download and estimate that it won’t take long, maybe a few minutes at most. But I find it really hard to just do something else instead of waiting. I can’t just go read a book or do some Anki reps. Whenever I tried that, I either have the urge to constantly check up on the blocking task or I get caught up in the replacement (or on reddit). So I end up staring at a screen, doing nothing, just so I don’t lose my mental context. At worst, I can sit for half an hour and get really frustrated with myself.
I find that I worry a lot less about checking up on background tasks (compiles, laundry, baking pies, brewing tea, etc.) if I know I’ll get a clear notification when the process is complete. If it’s something that takes a fixed amount of time I’ll usually just set a timer on my phone — this is a new habit that works well for tea in particular. Incidentally, owning an iPhone has done a surprising amount for my effectiveness just by reducing trivial inconveniences for this sort of thing.
For compiles, do something like
or run a script that sends you an SMS or something. This is something that I’m not in the habit of doing, but I just wrote myself a note to figure something out when I get into work on Monday.[1] (For most of my builds it’s already taken care of, since it brings up a window when it’s done. This would be for things like building the server, which runs in a terminal, and for svn updates, which are often glacial.)
[1] This is another thing that helps me a lot. Write things down in a place that you look at regularly. Could be a calendar app, could be a text file in Dropbox, whatever.
I assume someone’s already told you you’ll be better off with Git?
Not necessarily true. git and svn are suited to slightly different applications. For one thing—sometimes you want One Source of Truth… which svn gives you, and git does not.
If you have a central git repository to which all contributors have write privileges, you can treat it a lot like a svn-style centralized VCS that just happens to be git. Is there a significant advantage of svn over this kind of git setup?
Consider…
… and Quicksilver.app does this very nicely without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard (if you’re making tea… your fingers probably already left the keyboard).
Consider also
(These suggestions live in mac land. If you live in Windows land, consider moving. If you live in Linux land you’ll probably figure our how to do this yourself pretty quickly :)
I couldn’t get growlnotify to work reliably on my Snow Leopard. And some of Growl’s preference panes are absurd. And Growl insists on growling at you every time it auto-updates itself, with no way to turn that off. My friend Darius dislikes it, too.
Is there a better alternative?
I’ll tell you what I do even though it is far from ideal.
I have the program play a sound file to notify me. Sound is not the best way for a program to notify me because I have a habit of taking off my headphones, but leaving them plugged in.
After you install the free app “Adium” you can find some nice chimes in /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds/
I use the following command line to play a chime:
open -a VLC /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds//TokyoTrainStation.AdiumSoundset/Contact_On.m4a
Of course this presupposes you have VLC installed. And the first time I play a chime, there’s a delay of a few seconds while VLC loads the chime.
ADDED. I also use a visual signal as follows. In the “Hearing” tab on the Universal Access system pref pane, I check the box “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs”. I use the Emacs function DING to generate the aforementioned alert sound. Sorry, I do not know how to generate an alert sound from the shell.
why not use mplayer for the sound?
These days I use /usr/bin/afplay. The advantages are (1) lightweight program that loads quickly, (2) installed by default on all Macs.
Just to follow up: there is indeed a Growl for Windows, and it comes bundled with a growlnotify.exe that I can run from a cygwin bash shell. Rejoice!
I usually continue coding during long recompiles (over a minute or so), just don’t save the my edits until it’s finished.
You could also make a version control commit before compiling and then use “git stash” or equivalent to save your while-compiling edits.
Same. And it has also served me well, although maybe not solely because of that preference–I was in a better financial situation to start with than many university students, and I’m a workaholic with a part-time job that I enjoy, and I also enjoy living frugally and don’t consider it to diminish my quality of life the way some people do.
The trouble with not waiting is that it increases your number of mental context switches, and they can be really expensive. Whether “don’t wait” is good advice probably depends on details like the distribution of waiting times, what sort of tasks one’s working on, and one’s mental context-switch speed.
For purposes of avoiding ambiguity this might be better phrased as “don’t block” or “don’t busy-wait”. Although combined with #2 it might indeed become “don’t wait” in the more general sense to some extent!