1. Take off your clothes
2. Stand in front of a large mirror
3. Start jumping up and down
4. Flex all your muscles
5. Observe how much of you appears to be trying to catch up with the rest of you.
Optional step for added “fun”:
6. Perform before and after each holiday meal.
Merry Christmahannukwanzika!
This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.
In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)
If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)
Interesting quote from Timothy Ferriss (author of the 4-Hour Workweek), from his blog, on why he doesn’t do much stock-market investing:
Here’s the deal — to beat the market consistently, you have to: 1) have better information than most people, 2) have superior analysis of the same information, or 3) have better luck than a Leprechaun.
Discarding luck as a strategem, and personally discarding better analysis because I don’t want to spend my life poring over annual reports or evaluating algorithms, there is a simple conclusion: don’t invest in anything that you don’t know inside and out better than most of the world.
