By accident I’ve read today about Joe Nelson’s life experiment.
It’s a really inspirational post for me as it resonates a lot with what I’ve though about recently. I can argue a lot of minor details (because “but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”), but I can’t agree more with general direction the author takes.
I believe that one of the most limiting factors for current civilization is a culture of consumption. We have too much to consume and our uncontrolled consumption as a result “consumes” our time and available resources, leaving no opportunity to produce and create something.
It’s especially true for developers as we’re overhelmed by available technologies/frameworks/libraries/languages and are interested in trying “one more” shiny, just released thing, which is awesome and just got to HN. I’ve personally done that mistake dosens of times and I’m gonna tell about the recent one in the following posts.
To clarify: it’s not about sticking forever with old tools. It’s about clearing as much space/time as possible for generating new things/thoughts/ideas/products.
I’m not sure I’m ready to formulate it more clearly now, so I’ll start a REPL with my own experiment - instead of limiting myself, I’m going to make sure that I’m in “write only mode”.
What’s the write only mode? It’s the mode where I produce at least as much accessible output as I consume in my expertise areas. Preferably it should be a publicly available output.
The idea here is that it’s actuallly impossible to stop consumption by itself - it’s a dead end, especially in non-expertise areas. But what really makes a difference is what comes out of consumption - my only joy or something others can also use.