food thots - ugly delicious ep 1 & 2

The show was trying to push a few thoughts:

- Authenticity for authenticity sake is overrated
- True authentic experience comes from the culmination of one's experience from its birth place - which consists of culture, senses, and overall experience - rather than the pure taste of the food
- There is value in food that takes the essence of the dish and tries to make it the best it can be given the circumstances - whether that be the usage of experience, cooking techniques, or available skills.

Investing in Square: My 5 day experience

Making money is hard. Having patience is hard. Having hindsight is a blessing and a curse.

On November 21st, I bought Square stock at around 46.74 and the end of the week had soared to 48.86,  a 4.5% increase in value over a 3 day period.  I was ecstatic! I told my parents how I was flying high on my predictive skills (actually my friend just told me about the stock before and I got into the craze) and was poised to throw even more money into Robinhood.

What happened is what you probably expected, and my optimism was met with the real world.  Market forces decided that the stock was overvalued and the morning of November 27th, the opening after Thanksgiving, the stock dropped a dramatic 22% to 41.02, and with that almost all of the gains I have been accruing over the past couple months from my long term goals.  Had I went negative I probably would have gave up personal trading and shoved that money into Betterment to manage my portfolio.

But honestly, for how much money I lost that day, it the best reality check for me.

The hardest thing it taught me was, Making money is hard.  In the investment world, just because you have money doesn't mean your going to make money. There will, and always should be cared for that there is risk when you put money on the market.  Today it was a market force that pushed the price down, the next it could be a blunder such as Equifax's security breach that dropped their stock by 35%.

The second thing it taught me was, having patience is hard.  The urge to hit it big with these unicorn stocks and make it without effort is the pipe dream of investing.  But that's not always how it works out, and in most cases will shoot you in the foot.  Investment is a game of smoke and mirrors. There are a lot of games to be played, data to be analyzed, and bets to be decided.  Don't always be woo when a stock jumps, but be critical of why it's soaring, and can it maintain that growth.  In Square's case, the stock experienced a 241% increase at the one year mark, and 281% increase since its IPO two years ago.

The third thing it taught me was, hindsight is a blessing and a curse.  It is a curse because you can always kick yourself for all the things you did wrong, all the decisions you could have made that would have made you more well off, but you did none of them and you are where you are because you made that decision.  But that is not a healthy mindset to build from.  We take our losses, and learn from our mistakes.  Having the ability to examine real world data in the context of your own decisions, you can deconstruct what events may have lead up to the issue, what factors or indicators you could have caught, and how to be prepared for the next occurrence.  Taking all these has led me to take more into account when making decisions, and be a more critical investor.

Will I invest again? Hell yeah!

Dedication to your Craft / Competition

I feel that as I've grown older, the more complacent I've become to my surroundings and my situation.  Long are the days that I would be in literal anger over not beating someone in 1v1 Starcraft, or putting in work every night to increase my calf strength so that I'll be faster than the guy next to me on the grass.

~ Now that I think about it, both examples I brought up were out of competition, and competitive spirit.  But is that real genuine interest in your craft?  While it may be a mechanism for achieving greatness within your domain, in all honesty I feel like it is building a shaky foundation for what it truly means to be "dedicated" to your craft.  It almost sounds like I'm viewing the craft as a mere backdrop do my main goal of wanting to be the best at whatever you do.  I'm going to say this is different than my initial intentions for this document. but its somewhat interesting as well.

The differences lies in your motive, and your overall goals, and the changes what you value. It is a balance between these two trains of thoughts that we can come up with the ultimate form of mastery.

Motive

Lets compare the differences in motives between dedication to the craft and competition.

On one hand, we have the pure form of dedication to the craft.  The mindset that we are doing what we're doing in order to improve your skills and become the master of your craft.  We will not concern ourselves with the progress of others, in that our main goal is self-improvement.

Contrast this with our competition, and it stems from the wanting to be superior to your peers, to prove your existence and to acknowledge your strength.  This comes from a more social aspect and relies on the relationship between people.

Goal

With dedication, you will want to become the ultimate artist of your craft, having total knowledge of your field, and knowing the best solution to your domain.

With competition, you want to be the "Best", in that disregard of what maximum there is, you are better than everyone else.

Values

With dedication, you value the beauty of your skills, and what comes from this.

With competition, you value your status and power over others.

Yin and Yang

I kind of see the two as different sides of a coin, one pure of intention, and the other of passion and pursuit.  I think that by balancing the two we can create something truly special.  Lets take a look at how combining these two themes can benefit us.

Motive, what drives are being.  With only dedication, we actually have no sense of direction. Competition alone will only get you as far as your peers. But putting them together, you can use competition to create intermediate points that drive you to know your improvement.

Goal, where you want to be at the end of your journey.  With dedication, once you're at the top it is a lonely mountain.  You feel like you've reach your creative maximum.  With competition, you are are only as high as the mountain you've climbed, but that is all you will ever be, the top of that mountain.  Competition allows you to look at your peers in a constructive way, building upon your own skills, knowing where you stand, and where you can go.

Value, the essence of worth.  Dedication allows you to look back and what you created, as well as to motivate you to dream of what you can make.  Competition is an accelerating factor that allows you to grow from your peers and to unlock one another's potential.

Moving forward I will try to remember what the difference, and to make sure I'm responsive to side of the theme, and hopefully help me through my journey.

Back to the Books

After seeing some of my friends studying for their various classes, I had this weird craving to study.  Don't get me wrong, working has its gratifications (and pay!), but there is just something about the raw pursuit of knowledge, for knowledge's sake, that seems so satisfying.  

What better way to relive those days, than to go back to how I did it back then.

The books I'll be looking at in the weeks to come are:

Design Patterns (link)

I bought this book to help me improve my code quality by helping me to identify common programming designs and applying them into my work.  By building upon well recognized design patterns, my hope is that my code will be more readible to future users, and that I can have a better understanding on why these constructs work as such, and to be able to explain my code to others.

Clean Code (link)

Clean Code was a book that was recommended to me by the iOS Team over at Experian.  It instills the principle of writing intuitive code that is well organized and verbose enough to readers to understand what the intent of your code is. My goal here is to maintain a good code style that will allow for easier readability.

Great Expectations (link)


This is a classic book that I'm going to use in the down-time I need to relax.  Great Expectations is a book about personal growth and development, and how to deal with the coming of expectations.  I think this will be a good read, as I learn and grow in this time.

Personal Growth

Imagine if the Elon Musks, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates lived in the age of Facebook, Reddit, and Tinder.

I declare war on Time-Wasting! Getting off work at 6, and sleeping at 12, we have about 6 hours to do some stuff.  Yeah we take into account regular life-style things such as cooking, gyming, and just letting your brain rest.  My challenge to myself is to spend 2 hours every day focusing on improving myself, through literature, study, and financial know-how.

Time to get off my ass and start learning some shit.

Computing the Wild: Interfacing with the real world

Nothing short of amazing is the technological process and creativity that engineers and visionaries are creating.  Tonight I watched as someone potentially miles away was able to play with a rubber ball, watch as a table detected a phone call and shuffled it into the owners view, and allowed a designer to create a model car, all within the confines of a desk.

I admires the researchers and programmers that are moving us towards the future.  Their out of the box thinking is what makes people really awesome.  These are the kinds of people that will make the big break through.

Don't just accept things as they are, see what the possibilities are and make them a reality :)

How Habitica Is Changing the Game

Today's shower thought is dedicated to taking a look at the how Habitica is changing the game and for task tracking.

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Habitica is a new app that the gang started playing which connects the idea of task tracking with rpg avatars.  The novelty is that as you complete your self-assigned tasks, you also gain the ability to find and equip stronger gear, and hatch magical beasts to up your swagger.  As you gain more levels and equipment, you are able to tackle 'quests' which lets you and a party fight 'monsters' to get even bigger awards.  But you also have to fight yourself, as you are able to put negative tasks and habits that will take away from your life.  Assigning yourself tasks and not doing them is also detrimental to your health.

You can already see how this can get easily addicting.  Create tasks, get the satisfaction of earning something for completing them, and be rewarded in the form of in-game currency and drops.

What I find interesting about this app is that while the task tracking basis of the app is bare minimum, and at sometimes frustrating to reflect your intention, what it does excel at is motivating you to complete tasks by having that reflection component.

1. The app keeps track of your 'health', which is a direct relation to how you are keeping up with your priorities.  In times that you are doing well, your health stays strong, while when you are missing tasks, your health begins to drop.  This lends itself to a couple situations: Either complete more of your tasks, or to dedicate yourself to fewer expectations.  At the end of the day, it will help you balance yourself out and you can find what works best with what you have.

2. Motivates you to add more things you'd like to do, and allows you to reward yourself by incentivizing completion of such tasks.  Do good, get rewarded.  Pretty simple.

3. Tasks are Social now.  By completing tasks in a party, you are helping your friends complete the mission.  It's been researched that by helping others, you are generally more happier than helping yourself.