rianjs.net

It's pretty common to hear people make comments about others like "He's forgotten more about X than I've ever learned." Or they say it about themselves in a self-aggrandizing fashion.

Well I'm here to do the latter. I wrote this blog entry back in 2005, and while I remember being proud of the entry because it was well-written, informative, and had a snazzy title, I felt like I was reading someone else's writing. Because I'd forgotten every last bit of information recorded there.

So apparently this particular aphorism does have some basis in reality.

Back in January of 2007, I wrote a list of 52 things that I want to do before I die. To this day, it stands out as one of the most vividly-remembered things I've ever written. Turns out that writing a list of your life goals is actually pretty useful. It's sort of like writing a business plan for your life, and you might discover some things about yourself that you didn't know along the way.

[ 2007 list | All lists ]

1. Fall in love and get married
2. Stay married
3. Have a son
4. Have a daughter
5. See them both become self-actualized, successful people at whatever they choose to do
6. Meet my grandchildren
7. Never stop moving towards self-actualization and always make forward progress in self-improvement
8. Own my own business
9. Start my own financially-successful website
10. Be out of debt by age 29
11. Have a net worth in excess of $1 million by age 30
12. Have a net worth in excess of $50 million by age 35
13. Have a net worth in excess of $1 billion by age 50
14. Be on the cover of a prominent business or news magazine
15. Write a book
16. Go to South Africa
17. Visit Egypt and the pyramids with Fabien
18. Own a collection of fine watches. (God I love watches!)
19. Go to a professional driving school
20. Drive an open-wheel (Indy) car
21. Design my own home and have it built for me.
22. Own a new Ferrari
23. Order and pick up a brand-new Porsche 911 Turbo in Europe
24. Participate in a Porsche event on two seperate continents
25. Buy a Dodge Viper for Rich. Just to say "Thank-you."
26. Visit Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand with my dad
27. Visit Antarctica
28. Visit Iceland
29. Visit Norway
30. Go on an African safari (non-hunting)
31. Get my SCUBA license in Guam and go diving with Nick there
32. Dive the Great Barrier Reef also with Nick
33. Go to China and see the Great Wall
34. Throw a huge birthday party for myself when I'm old since I've only had one in my life.
35. Get rid of the bittersweet feeling that the holidays brings by having my own family where we stay home and celebrate and people come to us, rather than having to figure out where I'm going on what day. Be the center rather than participate in other people's centers.
36. Own a beautiful home somewhere in New Hampshire
37. Contribute something meaningful to a great charity or organization
38. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox-Yankees game
39. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox World Series Game
40. Go to the summer Olympics in another country
41. Do something truly extravagant with my close friends, just for the hell of it.
42. Create a full college scholarship to a worthy institution based on need and merit that can only be won by a white male.*
43. See a Josh Groban-Charlotte Church duet. Live. Somewhere in the first five rows.
44. Start a news-media company
45. Start an angel/venture capital fund for startups
46. Retire and run my own (or someone else's) charity.
47. Have a library in my home.

* There are many scholarships for women and minorities. At this point in time, however, boys are the minority in college. Society may have forgotten about them, but I have not.

As I mentioned in my last post, there's a lot going on right now, and for the first time in quite a while, everything that's happening is positive. I thought I would share my short term plans with the small number of readers I have more for accountability purposes than to say "Look at me!"

I firmly believe that getting others involved in your success is just as essential a part of the process as anything else. It's an extra measure of external accountability.

Finishing school

My first goal is to finish school. I've been struggling with motivation problems as it pertains to schoolwork, but I've recently been jazzed because I found out a piece of good news that I didn't anticipate: rather than graduating in December of 2009, I can graduate in May instead.

I can't even tell you how exciting this is. As someone who has struggled to finish anything, I can truthfully say that this will be a huge weight off my shoulders. I've never finished anything in my life. I'm just not one of those people that can put there shoulders down, dig in, and finish something. I have to believe in what I'm doing to get anywhere, otherwise I give up.

Things must have their own intrinsic merit. Merit cannot be imposed by an external force, otherwise I will not do it.

Starting my own business

I mentioned in my last post that David and I have something going, and that the business plan is largely written. While I don't think it was technically necessary to write the plan, I think it's been a worthwhile exercise, because it allows you to get a better handle on what you want to do; refine your income sources; learn about your competitors in a structured fashion; and just generally get a better handle on where you stand.

Getting a small amount of funding will be the next big challenge, but frankly I'm not really worried about that. It's a solid idea, the plan stands on its own, and I've done the hard part of asking for money to fund a business idea before. It was uncomfortable, but this time I'm actually looking forward to it because I believe in this from my toes right up to my (thinning) hair roots.

Wrapping up OnThePharm

I've been thinking about how to wrap up OnThePharm for a little while now, and I've hit on a good way to close it out. I won't share it here, but it's a topic close to professional students' hearts of all stripes and colors. I hope to get the two to three posts written in the next month.

Unlike some med bloggers, I won't be deleting the blog or taking it down or selling it. (Though I could probably sell it for $10K or so.) While I don't ever envision myself moving back to the medical field in any front-line capacity, I do still have a love for the field, and I would like to eventually be in a position to use the property to build a nice pharmacy publication. I'd like to hire a couple of pharmacy and/or medical students to write current news articles and opinion pieces for me on a pay-per-post basis. Get a nice theme, get a couple of premium advertisers and go to town. More as a hobby than to actually make a significant profit from it.

That will likely be 2-3 years from now, though.

Keeping my head above water

I haven't had a panic or anxiety attack since February. Before that it had been since ~November. I want to keep that going, and I think I'll be able to. My life hasn't felt this in line with my inner desires since I was back in high school, ready to charge off to university to conquer the world.

I'm able to exercise — I bought a nice road bike! — and I'm loving it. I just wish the roads around my house were less trafficked, and had fewer potholes. As it is, I have to keep my bike at my dad's house, because riding it is too painful (literally) to do so around here.

Over the last month, I've unconsciously begun moving forward again in a personal development sense of the word. I've started several new things, and dropped several others during that time. I've begun studying economics formally, and while I've struggled with motivation at times, I'm moving forward. David and I have something interesting in the early startup stages that will quite likely be incredibly profitable, but more importantly, it's relevant to anyone with a driver's license. While it's not interesting from a low-level, implementation point of view, it is interesting in that it does solve a big, higher-level problem.

So while the business plan for that is ~60% written, I'm juggling some other things as well. One of them being elimination. You see, one of the quickest ways to make progress when you're trying to work on yourself is to simply eliminate that which adds no value to your life. Here are some of the things I've done over the last two years…

Cut down time spent on discussion forums

As of this writing, I have 22,409 posts on the Ars Technica discussion forums. I'm sorry to say that most of that time has been wasted. Yes, I've made several friends, and many acquaintances during the time spent there, but there's been an inordinate amount of time and mental and emotional energy expended there, with little to show for it.

When I backslide and start posting more, I'm quickly reminded that I could better spend my time doing other things when discussions quickly devolve into dog-piling and other similar kind of uselessness.

Pruned my RSS subscriptions

Unlike many who enjoy technology, I don't find that having tons of RSS feeds essential or even particularly interesting. Lately, I've found it counterproductive, as seeing whatever new thing is coming tends to lend itself to a consumption mindset — so I've been religiously pruning subscriptions that don't add value to my life in any meaningful way. Even some of the blogs that I've followed for years. Indeed, this is a natural extension to cutting down on the amount of time spent on discussion forums.

I find that the less time I spend taking in information, the more time I actually spend doing things that are worthwhile. Things like biking, working on our business, and talking and spending time with friends or family.

I'm using RSS for three things now: to keep up with those I care about, to take in blogs that add value to my life — I've been loving Success Soul lately — and to take in a very limited amount of information in two narrow channels: technology and medicine. I have literally three feeds for news, and of the content they push, I read maybe 5% of what's published. I hit that "Mark all as read" button religiously.

Decreased my media consumption

I watch far less television than I did even two months ago. I actively avoid watching sports, because it's such an amazing sinkhole for time. It's currently baseball season, and someone in my family watches every single game. At six games a week at 3.5 hours per game, that's about 21 hours per week spent in front of the tube. Almost a full day.

What a complete and utter waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sports. Particularly playoffs. I would even like to own my own professional sports franchise at some point down the road — most likely basketball — but then passive consumption becomes smart business.

Decreased my alcohol consumption

I've never been a big drinker, per se. Maybe once a month I'd have a couple of drinks. Now it's more like once every two or three months. I find that as I spend time doing things that are worthwhile, my desire for alcohol has decreased to levels even lower than they were before.

Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses, and I believe that he was right. But I also believe that alcohol is, too. (And if you want to get technical about it, alcohol uses the same reward pathways that opiates use, which is why opioid antagonists show quite a bit of efficacy in alcohol dependence. )

Along with alcohol, I'll throw in cigars. I haven't smoked a cigar since my birthday, and I haven't really wanted one.

It should be noted that both cigars and alcohol are expensive hobbies relative to the satisfaction one derives from them. Worthwhile activities don't leave you with a foul taste in your mouth or a hangover when you're finished.

Pruned some friends

The greatest change that I have made in terms of lasting impact has been on friends. It's hard to cut loose the dead weight in one's life, because it's uncomfortable. Giving up booze and cigars is easy because they don't talk back. They don't call on the phone.

But it can be done, and I would urge those that are in unhealthy relationships — both romantic and otherwise — to reconsider. Life can be so much more rewarding without dead weight dragging you down.

–

You'll notice that a common theme here has been changing my mindset from that of consumption to that of abundance. I find that the less passive consumption I partake in, the happier and more buoyant as a person I become.

I have a couple of more personal development posts in the works, but not many, and they're less in the way of pontification, and more in the way of explanation. I don't find writing about personal development rewarding so I tend not to do it, and others are far better at it than I. What IS interesting are the results that come about as a result of making constant effort to better yourself.

Today was one of those days where you think to yourself, "Wow, if I had a day like that every day of the week, who knows where I'd be."

Very curious — I often have productive days where you get a bunch of stuff done. Do X, take care of Y. Normal stuff that does nothing for you except keep life running smoothly. Those days are merely mediocre. Average. Not anything special. Today wasn't like that. I actually finished a final exam in a class that I will be very sad to see go. I absolutely loved psychopharmacology, and I really wish there was a Psychopharm II or a Neurobiology I. I also wish there was a computational pharmacology or some other kind of class that I could dive straight into. But I know that even if there were, I'd be lost.

And that's something I want to change.

Days like today make me wonder where I'm going with my life. I'm sort of headed back in the direction of more technical and "science-y" type stuff. Really getting into the nitty gritty details of the brain thanks to school, and on the side, doing quite a lot of IT stuff. Not the rewarding kind of computer stuff — the creative kind — but rather the Do X, take care of Y kind of thing. Nonetheless, it has sparked some old desires of mine.

A very close friend of mine is moving home in the next five weeks, and I can honestly tell you that I've never been so excited for something in my life. It's like Christmas that's been years in coming. Someone close to me made an observation that was completely out of the blue — "I think you two were meant to go into business together and do something great. But I think he needs to work in the private sector for a while and you need to be academic for a while."

Probably so.

For no reason at all today, I decided to try to fix my old gallery software, as I had several hundred photos uploaded, and I wanted to be able to view them again. It's been broken for probably a year or so, and I wanted to back and look at some of the captions I had put on them. (I have all the photos offline, just not without the descriptions.)

Memories fade, but images do not.

Took me about an hour and a half, but I successfully got:

1. Gallery working again,
2. Upgraded to the latest version of Gallery 1 so that I could
3. Run the necessary scripts to import to Gallery 2 and
4. Import my old Gallery 1 galleries into Gallery 2

So my image galleries are now consolidated at the G2 URL, and this includes my trips to Europe and Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

http://rianjs.net/fotos/

Along similar lines, I've been thinking about what to do with this site, because I haven't been writing here very much. I like owning my name, and at some point, I will probably open some type of medical practice, and I'd really like to start doing some professional blogging under my real name instead of doing it anonymously like I have been lately. (That'll take quite a shift as there is some freedom in anonymity which allows me to post stuff I otherwise might not be able to — though perhaps less than one may be inclined to think.)

But at the same time, there's quite a lot of content here, and not all of it would I want potential clients and business partners to see, so I've gone back and pruned out probably 75-100 blog entries that are either nothing but fluff, or so contrary to the person I am today as to be "not me" anymore. Or just so negative I'm embarrassed to have written them.

At some point in the near future, I am probably going to change the look of the site as well.

…even when you're actually not.

With working 6 days a week, I find myself in a position with more money than I need to get by. Theoretically, anyway. Since I just barely started working enough hours, that leaves me with precisely zero financial flexibility in these first couple of weeks. Pretty much every paycheck goes to pay a bill that is due in the next 10 days, and while I'm not behind, it IS kind of annoying. Working all these hours and you look at your account balance, and it's hovering uncomfortably close to "E".

I suspect the week after next will be the time when I finally get a nice buffer in there again. Having made my car payment 4 days before it was due, and then paying rent right after that… well that means I'll have to make another car payment within two weeks. I like to pay my bills as soon as I'm able. Plus it's getting towards the middle of the month, which means that my car insurance will be auto-debited in two weeks. Urgh, annoying.

I'll be out of credit card debt by the end of next month, which is a relief, but it still feels like I have a long way to go before I can breathe easier. I've had to contract my lifestyle in the last six weeks because of not having any leeway, which was a bit of a challenge at first. Working six days a week means I basically just want to sit at home on the seventh, which is good for the wallet.

Tl;DR: Basically I'm cramming two months worth of bills into ~3 weeks, and it's frustrating because you don't get to see the fruits of your increased labor. I'm looking forward to being out of this position. The plus side is that I've been saving regularly throughout this time, which means that my savings account balance is growing rather than shrinking.

Money, debt, savings

This is Non Sequitur from August 15, 2007:

Sorry, my width isn't quite wide enough. Clicky for standalone GIF.

Mirrored here to prevent future link rot.

Comics, Non Sequitur, relationships

I like numbers. I see patterns and symmetry everywhere. Usually related to the number 3. I can't help it. I have to make my brain not look for patterns in DOBs. I'm not a mathematician by any means, but numbers are just nifty. I will literally space out after I've written a DOB that looks neat and completely miss anything someone is saying to me because I'm looking for patterns. It's bad.

Anyway, we had this woman come in probably a year ago, and her DOB was 3/22/66. I was immediately jealous of such an awesome DOB.

I think 3/9/27 would be cool also.

Ugh, I'm such a nerd. And I'm unashamedly in love with the number 3.

3