no problem too small
my experience of solving stupid little problems for a month
Dear reader,
July has gone and it really flew by. That’s not the usual experience of summer, when everyone (me included most summers) usually goes on a holiday to the seaside and takes it easy. Our much anticipated 2-week-long seaside holiday lasted 6 days: 2 on the beach, 2 at the apartment and 2 at the hospital. At least everything was really symmetric.
See, I’m in my quit-the-social-media phase again, a clumsy statement as I’ve learned from AA-attending users of sobriety subreddits that one should never call it “phase” as it sets you up for failure from the get go. Still, I want to use that statement because I like it, so I’ll leave it like that. I haven’t noticed any drastic changes except for being extremely motivated to just do a bunch of stuff the entire day after jumping out of bed very early.
My unholy social media trinity includes Substack1, the app that continues to pretend that it’s another app. It attracted me initially when it pretended that it’s Medium that doesn’t suck. Then it was also attractive when it looked like Twitter that doesn’t suck as Twitter was being passionately driven to the ground by Elon. But now I’m not that attracted anymore since its pretending to be TikTok that doesn’t suck because that is impossible. One of my long-held beliefs is to not participate in any platform that shoves short-form video clips down my throat and I stand by it.
Not using Substack as a social media app puts me in a bit of a pickle since that’s one of the main ways that this newsletter has attracted more readers. The funny thing about writing newsletters regularly is that every newsletter that gets sent out actually decreases the number of subscribers2, which is something I thought only happens for small newsletters like mine, but it turns out is universal3. This is why it’s an absolute must for anyone writing a newsletter to have some sort of social media presence as not having it practically guarantees the number of readers will be zero if you continue doing it. This is one of the reasons I’ve used the term “phase” above.
All of this accumulated disrespect made me spend some time updating my old blog again, a simple static page I’m running since 2011. There’s something attractive in writing a simple blog post about anything I think is even mildly interesting and publishing it online, knowing it won’t hit anybody’s inbox, knowing that few people will stumble upon it. There’s something attractive in not considering yourself a master of the craft and having a humbleness about it when you’re doing it.
I think over time my motivation for writing has changed. I no longer want to solely write the most beautiful blog post I’m capable of. I don’t want to do it if that means sacrificing what makes me me. And I think when I’m writing a simple little blog post on a simple little blog, I’m much closer to real me for some reason. I think one can more easily lose touch with one’s true self if one is focused only on trying to write the most beautiful sentences possible.
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This process of updating my blog led me down very interesting paths. It led me down the path of trying to improve things, even if they are small. Here are some of the small issues that I’ve solved for myself: a command that creates a blog post in the right format, assigns it the current timestamp and opens it in editor. That led me to the command that deploys the changes to my blog which I run with a keyboard shortcut now. And this all led me to optimizing the build process of my blog from having 3 seconds rebuild times to 100 milliseconds. And this made tinkering with it much more enjoyable. 4
Even though these were silly little things I was working on, working on them excited me to the point that I started waking up even earlier than I did before, jumping straight to the computer and then continuing to optimize. This started the positive feedback loop, since when you start optimizing like this you notice other things that need optimization, and that spills over even to the things in the real world.5 Even things that don’t need to have technical solutions. For example, this made me make a wonderful discovery of washing machine timers, which I am ashamed to admit I’ve missed in my 36 years of existence on this planet, which directly helped annihilating the tower of dirty clothes that kept piling up.
I also created two stupid little apps for two stupid little problems that we have: a) what are we going to cook today b) what trash goes out each week. The solution to a) just takes a list of meals and gives you random breakfast, lunch and dinner on a page reload. The solution to b) removes the need to look at the horribly formatted PDF file to detect the type of trash that goes out and is just a static page that displays a properly colored bin.
Of course, these stupid little ideas lead to more ideas, because they keep multiplying when you start tackling them, unfortunately (my main reason for abandoning projects).6 I have decided to tackle this problem of ideas multiplying by surrendering myself to ideas completely by having an IDEAS.md file in my iCloud that I can access with one button press from my phone and with a single keyboard shortcut from my computer. I don’t ever want to forget an idea again. 7
Apparently ideas like that kind of treatment, because they keep coming (this file currently holds 22 ideas, some of which have already been implemented). I would tell you the craziest idea I’m working on right now, but I don’t want to jinx myself by sharing it too early, so I’m going to keep my fingers shut. I’ve learned my lessons.8
All of this made the evening watches of Bear almost painful. I’ve realized I love spending time on activities that are generative. I absolutely love reading things that inspire me, give me more ideas on what to do or try. I find these kinds of blog posts of books absolutely wonderful9. The absolute polar opposite of the blog post that complains about something or says how we have too many people writing blog posts today. Writing these blog posts is not that generative and this is why I’m not enjoying it as much as I could, but note taking absolutely is.
Thinking about these experiences made me remember that famous Steve Jobs quote: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” I would say that it’s not that important that other people use it, but the fact that you can build it and change it at least for yourself is absolutely beautiful. And it’s so enjoyable to use something that you yourself have made.
My fault was thinking that the problems need to be marvelous. They don’t. I don’t need to build the next Google. I can just build a stupid little website that makes knowing what trash I should take out a little bit easier. No problem is beneath me. Writing about this made me remember something Richard Feynman said long time ago: “The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”
With that dear reader,
I’ll wrap it up,
I hope you solve problems this next month,
No matter how trivial they might be,
Yours,
SH
My unholy social media trinity: Substack, Twitter, Reddit.
It would be very funny if you unsubscribed after reading that sentence.
Ironically, I’ve discovered this fact while scrolling Substack Notes. The internet has many downsides, but I find the fact that you can discover how many things that you thought are only your experience are in fact universal the most beautiful aspect of the it. This is one of my favorite aspects of reading fiction. It makes me experience other people’s interiorities and realize that they are not that different to mine.
If you’re interested in a more technical piece about this, I wrote about the experience on my old blog.
This is one of the reasons why I dusted off a copy of “The Pragmatic Programmer” from my book shelf as one of the most important lessons from that book, as I remember from my first read almost 15 years ago is that spending time on optimizing your environment is always worth the effort.
This might not be a bad thing, because if I remember correctly Github got started because a couple of developers were building a game and they needed a good way to share their code. I think abandoning the project they started to build Github worked okay for them. I think I’ve heard that they are now building games again after selling Github to Microsoft.
I don’t know what exactly compelled me to create it other than learning about ThePrimeagen’s tmux config which includes keyboard shortcuts for quickly jumping to TODO.md files which can be but don’t need to be scoped by the current directory.
To be completely honest with you, I’m doing the absolute worst thing you could do if you want to finish a project: I am juggling multiple projects at once. I find that the most fun thing to do. When I am a little demotivated by a project I jump to another one and do some things there and when I get more ideas about the jumped-off-from project I get back to it. I remember reading somewhere that the inventor of Zettelkasten also worked like that. He didn’t want to do anything that’s not fun for him, so he wrote multiple manuscripts at once. He didn’t focus on finishing them, yet he still finished them. Having a little AI running in a terminal and giving it tasks that I don’t want to deal with also helps. It solves all the stupid build issues that I don’t want to focus on so I can continue thinking about things that matter.
Here’s some of the newsletters I’ve been really enjoying recently: Sasha Chapin’s, Cate Hall’s, Henrik Karlsson’s, my friend Stanko’s and last but not least, Aaron Francis’. I would really appreciate it if you sent me a blog post that inspired you if you have some free time for that.
No problem too small. An important point to remember.
“I think one can more easily lose touch with one’s true self if one is focused only on trying to write the most beautiful sentences possible.” — this line really got me thinking. :)