benohear

Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg would likely help you further.

The key trick is to start really small to remove the hurdle of getting going and establishing the habit, and returning to small in moments of low motivation or other impediment (eg 1 pushup will keep the momentum. 0 pushups won't)

Why does that matter?

First, I would imagine that in a fragile market any major piece of bad news could trigger the necessary panic (the Credit Suisse hedge fund story would have been a prime candidate), but it seems impossible to know in advance which one.

Then, I would have thought that if you are wondering what to do with your money the more important thing would be a rough sense of timing (or market level) for the crash and a sense of what assets will do well in the aftermath.

According to David Hunter that level is SP > 4700, which he reckons will be reached in the next few months and in the aftermath equity will perform poorly and commodities will do great.

By the way, if anyone has reasons to believe this is full of shit I'd love to hear them. I'm certainly no financial expert.

Buy a pan without a non-stick coating (eg stainless steel or enameled cast iron) and try and fry as much as you can in it.

The feedback is straightforward: If your food sticks, you've messed up. It teaches you loads about the right amount of heat and patience.

I wonder to what extent people are substituting their estimated score with their estimated relative position.

Let's say a 50% score at a test puts you in the 1. percentile and 70% in the 99th. I would actually expect people to estimate their relative position roughly in line with their results.

This is all very cool, and FWIW I also love the retro design.

Sorry if I missed it, but one thing I couldn't find on the website is what legal entity is behind the service. It would be important for me and the organisations I work with to know who we are trusting with our data.

It might even be a legal obligation to have that info on the site depending on which country you are located in (Germany for sure, not sure about others).

A simple rule for dealing with comments is « no feedback on feedback ».

Obviously works best if the person commenting doesn’t have any power in the situation. That being the case, avoiding a big discussion and extracting whatever useful information is contained in the comment is a net win.

May I suggest two framings that might help?

The first is that the option of being permanently productive doesn’t seem to be open to you, at least not right now. The bit that makes compulsive behavior so hard to get rid of is that it bypasses the executive circuits of the brain, and if you are fighting on two fronts by trying to do reestablish rational control AND strong arming yourself into doing something productive in a state of exhaustion then it is even harder.

So realistically at the moment the choice is between meaningful downtime and endless YouTubes (or whatever your rabbit hole of choice is). Once you have reestablished executive control then you can consider reintroducing productive activities.

The second reframing is to view culture and social interactions as learning about the human condition. You’re still growing your brain, just not in a way that is directly applicable to your professional life.

And in any case: No one should go through life without having read War and Peace :-)

To your last point, if it is possible for drug addicts and alcoholics to overcome decade long compulsive behavior, there is no reason you can’t too.

If you are genuinely clear as to your values and what gives you meaning then mostly it would be a case of building new habits. I’ve found B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits to be really effective for that.

One other thing worth mentioning is that you might be beating yourself up for not being productive in your spare time, which is particularly self defeating since the feeling of guilt will lead to more of the avoidance behavior. If you are tired after a full days work maybe start by planning more meaningful ways to relax, like watching a good movie, taking a bath or reading a book.

Finally make sure you are actually pursuing happiness in the right place. Laurie Santos’s podcast on happiness is well worth a listen (and is conveniently also a relaxing thing to listen to in your spare time :-)

The bit I struggle with is the contradiction between "try ideas out cheaply and fail many times until you hit on the right one" and "believe in what you do and keep going come what may". How do you pick between the two?

How about feeding the top 20 into Bingo Card Creator?

Interesting. What sort of backend do you use? Is it homegrown or can you integrate with e.g. Wordpress?

If you're doing a fixed price project, how can you get oDesk to let you hire the candidates for just one hour?

That sounds like a great plot for a sci-fi movie. Not sure if it would be a utopia or dystopia though ...

Jason, this is amazing stuff.

As the father of an 8 year old, I'd love to know how you got the kids to the point where "Create a web page called big-green-circle.html" and "Hint: use the events onmousedown and onmouseup" made any sense to them.

(alternatively, just put your curriculum in an ebook - I'm sold already)