5:51 AM
This Morning and Last Night
I woke up a bit before 5 AM this morning, after "going to sleep" at around 9:30 PM. In reality since it was my first time trying to go to sleep so early in a long time, I was still awake for probably over an hour, just lying down, lots of random thoughts going through my head. There were also fireworks going off almost the entire time. I wasn't sure what time I fell asleep exactly, but I'm estimating around 11 PM.
This morning I made some of my logs private while I caught up on them. I'll make them public again eventually. There's really not much for me to do this morning except study, work, and/or catch up on things. I'll probably do a little bit of each since I have actual work starting at around 9 AM.
9:42 PM
Last Night
The funny thing about last night is that I was thinking about how easy it was for me to fall asleep before. I would just lie down, and instantly fall asleep. This time around, trying to sleep early, I actually had a hard time even though I felt sleepy and tired too!
Morning
Anyway this morning I just worked on catching up on my log entries. I spent 2 hours on doing that and I got around 70% done. I thought I would have to dedicate an entire weekend to doing it, but I was able to get it almost done today. That's the power of concentration with no distractions, I guess. I'll get it done tomorrow if I just work on it again in the morning.
Work
After that I started work at around 9 AM, and I just worked on things the entire time. I got a good amount of work done, like always. There's not really been a work day where I haven't been productive and when I haven't gotten a lot done. I'm really good at getting stuff done for other people, but not for myself, until recently when I cut off all entertainment (and my hair, on the same day) and I've experienced massive discipline and concentration growth since (it's only been 2 days though).
George Hotz
I watched/listened to a lot of interviews today with some of the biggest players in my field such as George Hotz and Donald Knuth. I saw George Hotz solving some problems on hackerrank, and this guy is an expert. He just solved everything so easily like the legend he is. But, he is still just human, so he actually messes up a lot. This guy was already one of the top people in the field when I first heard about him in high school, and he has since accomplished so much more since then. Yet here he was, messing up on some easy to solve problems. In some problems I think I even came up with better answers than he did, but he is still so much better because he took very little time to solve each of the problems and he was livestreaming (so he had comments coming in as distraction).
Steve Jobs
In a George Hotz interview he mentioned Steve Jobs going into Xerox Parc and just taking all the good ideas (GUI, Mouse, etc) and from that he turned Apple into the mammoth company it is today, and so I watched a Steve Jobs interview about Xerox Parc too. I learned a lot about Steve Jobs and Xerox Parc, learned that Steve had top level charisma and was seriously a world changer. Here's a guy who genuinely changed the world. Steve Jobs is already going down in history as one of the most influential people who have ever lived.
Xerox Parc
Xerox Parc was also quite the extraordinary place. At Xerox Parc hey came up with ethernet, gui, object-oriented programming, bitmap graphics format, WYSIWYG, MVC design pattern, laser printers, LCD displays, and a bunch of other stuff, all in that one building, in just a few years. The innovations they came up with were so revolutionary that they are unsurpassed forever. Like the concept of GUI will never be surpassed, how can it? How can OOP or the MVC design pattern get surpassed by anything? I don't even know if LCD or laser printers have ever been surpassed. There were basically just a bunch of legendary minds coming together at Xerox Parc, and yes Steve Jobs came in (there was actually an agreement for Steve Jobs to give them a million dollars worth of stock in exchange for a tour) and took a bunch of ideas out from there and developed them for the real world.
Ronald Wayne
I also listened to some interviews with Ronald Wayne who was the co-founder of Apple along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but who left the company after like a week or so and gave up his 10% ownership of the company. That 10% ownership is now worth over $100 Billion. Everyone thinks he made a mistake, and objectively he did, but Ronald Wayne doesn't see it that way. It was interesting to hear his take on it and he was just glad to have been part of something that really changed the entire world. He quit Apple so early because he had his own company he wanted to work on and he didn't want to be liable for anything the Steves did (he was the wealthiest of the three co-founders at the time and feared being personally liable for Apple's debts and expenses). He also did not see himself enjoying his work at Apple, which is another reason why he left so early. But yeah, giving up $100 Billion opportunity and not feeling any regret from it, now that is admirable.
Walking Outside
Anyway I also did a bunch of other cool stuff today. I worked on some personal projects, and then I went out for a walk. I didn't listen to any audio programs while walking this time (probably because I'd been doing it for most of the day) and it felt like time moved by so much faster. There's this long stretch of sidewalk that feels lke it takes a long time to walk normally when I'm listening to something, but it didn't feel like it took that long to walk through today. I only walked for about 40 minutes today before turning around, and I still got to the car really late at around 9 PM (but normally I'd get there at 9:40 PM, when it's really dark).
Anyway that was my day today. It's currently now 11:08 PM and I'm going to go to sleep right now, or try to anyway. I'm planning on just finishing up my logs tomorrow morning, doing work at my job, listening to some more interviews, doing a bunch of practice problems, etc.
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