Freestyle Mind

New Journey

2011-11-12T17:30:00+01:00

I’ve been traveling a lot this year, both for work and for pleasure. Just two weeks ago I was in NYC and now I’m heading to the Bay area for a new job opportunity. I’m also going to move there early next year.

For the first time in 5 years I’m going to switch from self employed to employee again. That’s a huge change, but sometimes it’s right to do so if a better opportunity comes. If you can work with great people and in a great environment, that’s awesome.

About this blog

You may have noticed a lack of posts lately. The reason is simple: I’m focusing on something else. I’m focusing on my programming career. I want to become really good at it and that requires a lot of time, and that’s where I’m spending my time. This blog has been a fantastic journey, a very successful one, but from day one I always said that to me journey was an experiment, a tool to get somewhere else, not a destination.

I’ll probably post here again but right now I don’t know when. For now I just want to thank everyone for being part of this journey and for making it possible. It’s hard to say how much this blog has done for me in the past years, but it’s a lot, it literally changed my life for good.

If you desire to do so, you can follow my new adventures on twitter. Thank you!

Motivational Videos

2011-08-16T23:33:00+02:00

I’ve come across a few videos the other day which I think you might enjoy.

Secrets to success Pt. 1

Secrets to success Pt. 2

Will Smith shares his secrets of success

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in your email and don’t see the videos, click here.

Taking Drastic Changes

2011-08-13T20:40:00+02:00

While I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a small room in London while enjoying a fantastic (but cloudy) view outside. I’ve spent the whole afternoon practicing programming after a 3 hours walk alone in the center.

I’m in London because I’ve started a new job at a small company where we do lots of mac and iPhone programming. Before that, I was doing mostly web development full time. I was a little scary at first before starting this job, but it’s paying off day after day and I’m learning a lot. I’ll eventually get back to Italy at the end of the week, but plans are that I move here early next year.

From time to time, especially when I’m alone for more than a few days I start to think about all those scary things that I did to get where I am now (which is nothing special really).

For example, when I quit school I didn’t know much about what I wanted to do in my life, so I did whatever job I could find. That turned out to be factories jobs where I lived.

When I learned that I could make some bucks selling stuff online, I did that, but it wasn’t easy. I had to open a company (I was 19 years old), find someone to buy in stock, and then sell. I can perfectly remember the day when I got offered a new job at a construction company, and I turned it down in order to start my company. It was scary, but I knew I had to do it.

Eventually, I quit selling on eBay and started to do consulting full time. Again, that was scary. Until then I’d been programming only for things that I personally needed, and I was lacking real world experience and education. After 5 years I now know that this is what I want to do all day.

Big changes are not only career-related though. Last year I decided to move to another country with my girlfriend and a friend who I’d never meet in person. Neither of us knew the language well, and never visited that country before, but everything turned out to be just right, and we all made lots of experience. After that, me and my girlfriend moved back to Italy in winter and moved to a new apartment, and we’ll probably move out again next year to England. We just got a dog and we’re getting married next month.

All of these “changes” are not taken lightly by us. There are many things we have to consider each time I say no to a client or accept a new job. I’m very uncertain as to what we’ll be doing two months from now, yet at the same time I know that I’m only going to regret the things that I won’t do, so I’d better do them while I can Sure, we’ll be making a lot of mistakes along the way, but are we really learning something if we’re not failing from time to time?

Don’t let your fears stop from doing what you love. Want to start your own thing? Save a little money and then go for it. Want to travel the world? Find a job you can do from home, and then let the world be your home. Will it be easy? No, but nothing that’s worth something is easy to get.

Whatever you do, make sure you’re a little scared from time to time, that’s how you’ll know you’re pushing your limits.

Low Energy? Try Vitamin Supplements

2011-07-05T14:50:00+02:00

I’ve been noticing a degrade of energy on myself since the beginning of the new year. I don’t know what changed, but I used to be pretty energetic throughout the day, and now all that positive energy was gone. Some examples: I would need to sleep 9-10 hours per day, and still wake up with an alarm clock. I would have low concentration while working and driving at night, and less motivation to work on the important stuff. Pretty bad.

Even though my motivation was low, I started looking for a solution. I tried changing my diet, doing more exercise, taking regular breaks, etc. Nothing helped. At the end of the day I still needed 10 hours of sleep along with a constant sense of grogginess. At one point (and I should have done that before) I was so tired of this situation that I started talking about it with others, until one day someone recommended to try vitamin supplements.

Now, I’ve always been suspicious about taking supplements, but I decided to give it a try anyway. I was recommended a vitamins and minerals supplement which can be taken every day for as many days as you want. Natural stuff, with an added bonus that is being produced locally.

So I bought this vitamins supplement, thinking that it would have been hard to notice any difference. Turns out I was wrong, as I started to feel better right away from day 1. During the last two weeks in fact, as I started to take this supplement, I’ve started to sleep 8 hours a night instead of 10, without and alarm clock. I also feel a lot more energy and motivation during the day, and I’m less tired in the evening and night, even if I’m driving.

I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I’m happy to have found a solution, even though it would be better to get these nutrients from food.

If you feel like you have low energy during the day and you are already sleeping enough and eating well, you may want to give supplements a try. Go for something natural, and ask your doctor if you don’t know which one to choose.

Productivity For Programmers

2011-06-17T10:40:00+02:00

Ed Weissman is one of the top contributors of hacker news, a community dedicated to programmers and startup owners.

He recently released a book containing his best comments on the website, which is truly a goldmine of information. You can find the free version here.

Inside the book you can read about productivity, startups, work life, and more. It’s truly a book to be read (and implemented) again and again.

P.S. Even if you’re not a programmer, if you can manage to go through a few programming related questions, you can still manage to get a ton of useful information.

New Comments And Other Changes

2011-06-12T17:20:00+02:00

Edit: I plan to add the old comments in the next couple of days.

Hi Everybody,

Just a quick note to inform that I’ve changed the comments system to use the Facebook social plugin. Should be more fun and easy to use.

Unfortunately that means that the old comments will not be displayed anymore. I still have a copy of all of them though!

I’m going to make a lot of changes in the next days, as I’m working to create a newer version of FreestyleMind. See you soon with my next 30 day challenge!

How to: Remember Things and Increase Your Intelligence

2011-05-24T12:55:00+02:00

In this post I want to share two tools that I use for remembering things and increase intelligence. The first one is a software based on the spaced repetition algorithm, which enables to remember things on the long term, the second one is a game that uses multi sensory learning in order to improve your working memory and fluid intelligence.

Both programs are free and available for all platforms. Low hanging fruit, someone would say.

Remembering things with Anki

Anki is the program I use for remembering things. Sometimes I find it hard to remember important concepts in the long term, so I use this tool to assist my learning process.

Anki is useful for:

Remembering important concepts.
Learning a foreign language.
Memorizing formulas.
Memorizing poems or other things that you don’t want to forget.

I highly recommend that take a look at the main website to learn how it works.

A few tips from my own usage:

Use one deck for everything. This will make it easier to review once you have many flashcards. Use tags for organization.
Only try to memorize what you really understand. Don’t try to memorize something that doesn’t make sense to you. That’s time lost.
Use it for everything, especially for important concepts read in a book or blog post that you want to remember.
Always delete the old stuff that is no longer relevant or that you’re no longer interested in.
Prefer short questions with a direct response when possible.

See this essay for more tips about learning with spaced repetition software.

Increasing intelligence with Brain Workshop

Brain Workshop is a game that promises to increase your intelligence. It is based upon scientific studies about multi sensory learning. You can find references of those studies in the software home page.

I normally don’t play brain games because they’re often highly ineffective once you learn how they work, but this one is different (read hard).

I usually play this game for a few sessions every day, and I’m noticing some improvements in my cognitive abilities (although I haven’t measured anything, so my results may be biased). Still worth a try.

Coming up next more content on learning and intelligence. Stay tuned.

It's Ok Not To Be An Entrepreneur

2011-05-18T10:30:00+02:00

People are obsessed with money, so what do they do? They read some inspiring post and dream about what they could do if they could quit their job, live in an exotic country and get paid to do what they love.

It’s easy to sell a lifestyle like that, what they forget to say is that it seldom happen.

Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur

The most perplexing thing about stories like the one above is the get paid to do what you love meme. Scientific studies show that whenever you are getting paid to do something, it’ll soon start to feel like work, and sooner or later you’re going to dislike it. Wasn’t doing what you love the most important thing?

Of course, not everyone is the same, and generalizing from one example is always a bad idea. Just don’t buy the “do what you want, where you want” trap. It’s untrue, there’ll be a lot of hard work to be done, and not all of it will be fun. And what if you start a blog and you run out of things to say? That too happens, and having a rigid schedule will kill you.

What about internet marketing, in general? That too, is a lot of work. I tried it and got some success, clearly I was in the right path, but it just wasn’t worth my time to go and build websites only with the intention of making money. I’d better spend my free time on some open source project and help people for real (but that’s just me).

We don’t care about the money

Last month I was contacted by a company that was interested in acquiring this blog. I wanted to see if we could make a deal that was beneficial for both me (and the readers) and the company, so I listened to them. They offered me a position where I would get paid to continue writing, plus a sum of cash upfront. You know what? I eventually refused. Not because they were a bad company or the offer was too low, I just thought that by transforming writing into work the blog would lose its value, whatever that is.

It’s always fun to see the face of people when they learn that I could make a living out of this blog (but see the point above) with the traffic I have, but instead I choose to show as little ads as possible. You know, sometimes I really enjoy something and I want to share it here, but that’s the exception.

And what the heck, if I stop writing for a month no one is going to complain. Actually, people sent me thank you emails when I quit my newsletter. It looks like saying nothing is more important that saying anything.

Hundreds of people were subscribing to my newsletter every month, but it just didn’t feel right to me, so I quit, without any up-sell. The exact opposite of what every internet marketer will tell you.

How to make money

There are thousands of ways to make money. Most of my income comes from programming consulting, should I write a book about how to make 100$/hour by doing consulting? No, chances are you wouldn’t like it.

My advice is to keep doing what you’re doing, write down some goals, and figure out how to get there. Remember that goals should be about what you really want, not what I or someone else on the internet told you.

If you enjoy working for someone else, there’s nothing wrong with it. The world needs more people like you, and less of the “I make money by teaching people how to make money” kind.

That had to be said.

P.S. The title of this post refers to entrepreneurs, when in reality I talked about a very different kind of people. I know that’s incorrect but I hope the point was made.

You're Not Good At Math - Another Belief to Unlearn From School

2011-05-16T15:20:00+02:00

You can replace Math with Physics, English, and any other subject taught at school. The pattern is always the same: after a few years of school you realize that you’re just not good enough in some subjects, Math usually being on top of that list.

But are you really bad at Math, or is it just that it’s a difficult topic to teach in the first place, and that you could become a Math genius if you were taught in a way that fits your model of thinking? I’m pretty sure it’s the last one, you’re certainly smart enough to get through the Match taught in school.

So why do certain students get better grades than others? Because their brain can easily process information in the same way as it’s presented to them by teachers. They’re not necessarily smarter than others, they’re just lucky to have their brains wired that way.

Thanks to the information age is easy to obtain information in a way that fits your thinking. Continuing with the Math example, you can find hundreds of websites devoted to teach you Math in a way that many people have found helpful. Hopefully one of them will fit your way of thinking. Khan Academy is definitely my favorite. Better Explained is another website devoted to explaining the how and why of things. I highly recommend those resources.

I don’t know wherever you actually want to go back and learn Math, or statistics, or history. Just know that if you ever want to do it one day, you can. You can build your skills from scratch and become proficient in those subjects by learning whole university programs from the comfort of your home.

Coming up next actually how to go and learn a broad topic like Math or Physics, assuming you have no time to go back to school.

Taking Real Breaks With The Pomodoro Technique

2011-04-30T11:25:00+02:00

The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity system in which you work for 25 minutes straight without distractions, followed by a 5 minute break. Every session of 25 minutes is called a pomodoro, and every 4 pomodoro or so you take a longer break of 15-20 minutes. The Pomodoro Technique is one of the best productivity systems that I know of. You can find more information about it on the official website.

So what can you do during all those breaks? My idea is to do as much movement as possible. You don’t need to follow the Pomodoro Technique do do these, just take a break and try some of them:

Clean. Breaks are an ideal opportunity to clean your desk, take out the trash, and decluttering your environment. The less physical and mental things that you have to keep track of, the better you’ll feel.
Stretching. Stretching your arms, head, body and legs is a quick way to gain some refreshment. I recommend that you watch some instructional videos on youtube if you’re not familiar with stretching exercises, and then proceed slowly with them. You should find some exercises that you can do in a crowded office without others noticing you if necessary. Don’t worry if you feel like a robot in the beginning, with time you’ll see big improvements.
Walk outside. If you’re allowed to go outside, take the opportunity to watch the mountains or the landscape ahead of you (which hopefully is not another building). Not only will you find it beneficial for your mind and inspiration, it’s also an opportunity for your eyes to relax.
Exercises. Once you’re trained, you can easily do 50 pushups and abs in under 5 minutes including rest. Bruce Lee was known for doing abs exercises while watching TV. He knew that every opportunity was good for training his body, and that’s what you can do during your breaks as well. You may not become the next Bruce Lee, but being in perfect shape does not require special skills other than constant exercise.
Shadow boxing. This is a quick tip for martial artists. If you’re working in a private and quite place, you can take a 5 minute break and do some shadowboxing to exercise your skills. For those new to martial arts, shadow boxing is the art of fighting with an invisible opponent in order to practice your skills. It’s also a good way to burn calories.
Just lay down and relax. Perhaps you work while standing up, and after a while you get tired. Use these breaks to lay down on a chair and close your eyes for a few instants. Let your thoughts navigate across your mind and wake up refreshed. Here’s a 3 minute nap tip that you may find useful.

I’m sure you can find a lot of other things to do during your breaks. My only advice is to take them often and do something that allows you to relax and move around. Some people may think that taking so many breaks can be unproductive, but in my experience this is seldom the case. The Pomodoro Technique philosophy is that when you work, you should work without distractions. This way you can maintain a very high level of productivity without burning yourself.