# DeveloPassion's Newsletter 54 - Chaos bag Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨ If you enjoy this, please forward it to your friends 👍. If this email was forwarded to you, then don’t forget to subscribe and become a supporter ![[DeveloPassion's Newsletter Logo.png|DeveloPassion's Newsletter logo: lightbulb sprouting colorful idea nodes]] ## Welcome to the 54th edition Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩 Last week I told you about the beginning of a new chapter in my life… This week I’m ready to share the news. My wife and I have decided to separate. We have shared everything together for the past 17 years and have brought three wonderful kids into this world. Over the years, we’ve been happy and sad, joyful and down. We had great moments together. We also went through really tough times and lost many people we loved along the way (fuck cancer). But we’ve always kept going. We’ve grown together, built a nest for our family. We share a gazillion memories, and I will always cherish those. Life-changing decisions like this are incredibly hard and painful to take. No matter how confident we are about the reasons and rationale, emotions run so wild that it’s hard to think rationally. It’s really easy to feel bad, think we’re being “bad” persons, think we’re making a mistake, etc. Part of the challenge is to filter through the noise, remain rational, and face reality as it is, no matter how heartbreaking it may be. We all grow. Our aspirations change, our hopes and dreams evolve, our needs morph, and what was true yesterday might not be tomorrow. It’s all right. There’s no right or wrong way to grow. Loss aversion makes things even more complicated. We know what we’re about to lose, but not what we’re getting into. The unknown is always scary at first… In long-term relationships, the sunk-cost fallacy also weighs in the balance. We’ve invested so much in the relationship over the years, that we can easily convince ourselves that, if we invested just a bit more, tried again, things might change and get better. But our time on earth is limited, no matter what. It’s not always worth it to keep trying. Just like it wasn’t worth it for me to keep trying to make my previous startup succeed. Maybe it could have, maybe not. Life is a complicated mess, and nothing is black and white. Many of us carry childhood wounds and unconsciously keep suffering because of those. Those wounds impact the way we think, the way we act, the way we live. It takes a lifetime to figure out who we really are, who we want to be, what we really want out of life, to discover our limits, and acknowledge those. As you can imagine, the coming months are going to be a real emotional rollercoaster. Everything that I’m used to is about to change. I’ve actually never lived alone. Old fears of mine about loneliness are bound to resurface. I’ll need to face and fight those. I believe that keeping at least some stability is important for my sanity, which is why I’ll do my best to keep my journaling habit and my weekly publishing schedule. Although I don’t want to make hard promises at this point. I’ll see how things go. There are still tons of things that I need to figure out, and my support system is pretty fragile (being a lifelong introvert doesn’t help in such situations 😂). I’ll take things one day at a time… For now, all that really matters to me is to take care of my kids. I want to make sure they go through this with the least possible amount of pain, help them find a new equilibrium, and move on. I want to believe in abundance and hope that the future will be full of wonderful surprises. Life goes on. ❤️ ## The Lab 🧪 I didn’t have time to get back to the lab this week. I was only able to take a look at my weekly stats and review my progress during the past month. Here are my achievements this month: - I’ve explored [Remix](http://remix.run/) with André and got to discover why people are so excited about it - I started working on the Obsidian Starter Kit but put the experiment on hold until I find a new place to live - The [PKM Library](https://www.store.dsebastien.net//product/pkm-library) grew a lot (now 240+ tools), but sales slowed down since I’ve increased the price. So I might have identified the “ideal” price - The [PKM Journal](https://pkmjournal.com/) grows rapidly. New articles are pushed each week and the reading time keeps increasing - The [PKM community on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt//) now has 125+ members; it is now my favorite place to share interesting links about PKM and learning - The [PKM Daily](https://x.com/PkmDaily) Twitter account also gains traction - 1700 wonderful people are now [following me](https://x.com/dSebastien) on Twitter. The growth is slow, but I know why: I’m not very active at the moment and lost traction when I switched my attention to the War in Ukraine, but it was the right thing to do - I have almost 1K followers [on Medium](https://dsebastien.medium.com/), as well as a number of referred members. This brings in ~$100 per month, which is super cool ## Things I've learned so far this month ![[DeveloPassion's Newsletter 54 - Chaos bag - learned this month.png]] Caption: Some of the things I've learned this month March has been packed full of learnings so far. Personal development and psychology ended up being the two most important subjects for me this month, but I’ve explored and written about tons of ideas: - The value of serendipity in UX design - Ideas to engineer serendipity - Using reciprocity as a design principle - Childhood wounds that we carry and keep suffering from - Relationship issues that are caused by the wounds we carry inside and fail to heal - Neostoicism - The idea that intelligence + experience = wisdom - The idea that information + action = knowledge - The circus factor - The fact that we either seek stability and build within it, or accept the unstable and try to be as agile/adaptable as possible to cope - The idea that we create our very own prisons unconsciously - Duck syndrome - The concept of Veblen goods - Why running a default-alive business is key - The idea that being rich and anonymous is much more interesting than being richer and famous - Épochè (εποχή), the suspension of judgment - Ways to create unstoppable advantages - Why first-principles thinking can give us the edge we need to succeed - The broken windows theory - The Boy Scout rule - Emotional burnout - Community debt and technical debt - How to design for emergence - The relationship between TAM, SAM and SOM - The idea that helping users create daily rituals around a product is a way to make it more useful and important in their lives - The relationship between discipline, habits, action, consistency, and results - The idea that businesses need to remove as much uncertainty as possible for their customers - The concept of the “fifth column” - The importance of considering the intention behind actions (i.e., root cause vs “symptoms”) - The psychology of procrastination - The idea that tasting real freedom can make us unemployable - … ## Recent articles No new articles this week. ## How cool is that?! A skilled virtual assistant for Obsidian: LINK: [GitHub - paulbricman/dual-obsidian-client: A skilled virtual assistant for Obsidian.](https://github.com/paulbricman/dual-obsidian-client) ## Tips of the week Do yourself a favor; use a password manager. Use a strong passphrase to open your password vault, and let the tool generate all your other passwords. A different password for each site/service, 30+ characters long. You’ll be much safer on the Web ❤️ LINK: [KeePassXC 2.7.0 released - KeePassXC](https://keepassxc.org/blog/2022-03-21-2.7.0-released//) ## Books corner Life is chaotic. Risks, uncertainty, and doubts are part of it. It’s a fact, we can’t be certain of anything. Each decision has consequences (including inaction!). There are always risks involved. We are vulnerable. LINK: [[Daring Greatly (book)]] ## Quotes of the week - [[Quit looking back. That's not the direction you're going]] - [[Fears are like quicksand. The longer you stand in them, the harder it is to move]] ## PKM Links of the week LINK: [Who a Zettelkasten Is For (Especially an Analog One)](https://scottscheper.com/letter/3/) LINK: [How can we develop transformative tools for thought?](https://numinous.productions/ttft/) LINK: [Tools for thought: faster thinking or for better thinking? | Adolfo Ramírez Corona](https://typeshare.co/adolforismos/posts/tools-for-thought-faster-thinking-or-for-better-thinking) Full Calendar integration for Obsidian: LINK: [GitHub - davish/obsidian-full-calendar: Full Calendar integration for Obsidian](https://github.com/davish/obsidian-full-calendar) LINK: [How I Manage My Life - by Kevin Steel - KS](https://kevinsteel.substack.com/p/todoist?s=r) LINK: [Google Docs New Feature: Pageless - Google Docs Editors Community](https://support.google.com/docs/thread/150905607/google-docs-new-feature-pageless?hl=en) ## Tech Links of the week LINK: [Remixing React Router | Remix](https://remix.run/blog/remixing-react-router) It’s official; most organizations are 10 Java versions behind! LINK: https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/18 Hilla is a framework for building reactive web apps on Java backends. It seamlessly integrates a reactive Lit TypeScript frontend with a Spring Boot backend. LINK: [Hilla Introduction](https://hilla.dev/docs/) LINK: [Spring Tips: Hilla, an amazing new web framework from Vaadin](https://spring.io/blog/2022/03/09/spring-tips-hilla-an-amazing-new-web-framework-from-vaadin) PlanetScale Rewind is a data migration time machine. Revert changes to your database after a migration with no downtime and zero data loss. LINK: [It’s fine, Rewind: Revert a migration without losing data](https://planetscale.com/blog/its-fine-rewind-revert-a-migration-without-losing-data) Extend single sign-on to SSH with certificate authentication and make SSH easier to use, easier to operate, and more secure. LINK: [If You're Not Using SSH Certificates You're Doing SSH Wrong | Smallstep Blog](https://smallstep.com/blog/use-ssh-certificates/) Real-Time CPU Optimization and Automation. Keep your PC responsive during high CPU loads and automate process settings with rules. LINK: [Bitsum. Real-time CPU Optimization and Automation](https://bitsum.com/) LINK: - [[10 Essential Knowledge Management Methods Every Professional Should Master (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/10-essential-knowledge-management-methods-every-professional-should-master/-every-professional-should-master// LINK: - [[Why Obsidian is All You Need - From Simple Notes to Complete Productivity (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/why-obsidian-is-all-you-need-from-simple-notes-to-complete-productivity// LINK: - [[The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Obsidian (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/the-ultimate-beginners-guide-to-obsidian// LINK: - [[Knowii Community]] - https://www.store.dsebastien.net//product/knowii-community ## Related - [[Life-changing decisions are hard and painful to make]]