It’s like doing a puzzle and finding two pieces stuck together correctly in the box.

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First of all, I want to take the opportunity to say that if you would hear me saying the previous blog-post in a conversation I think you would take it very lightly as I would say it rather jokingly and light-hearted.

When something is written down it seems to take on a life of it’s own. Everything gets analyzed and immediately gets much more serious than how it was intended. This is why I have almost completely stopped writing down thoughts in this blog, I don’t like to have them over-analyzed or confronted, they’re just thoughts, thoughts means nothing—actions mean something.

I like writing down my thoughts so I can form them in some sort of completeness and analyze it myself, but if the reader of the thoughts doesn’t understand them 100%, it just makes the situation worse.

Now about the actual post. Of course I don’t feel entirely worthless because some other dude has done something I want to do. There is some kernel of truth to the whole sentiment of not accomplishing something note-worthy, but that’s just some passing thought I wrote down to be able to look back on and remember how I felt at that particular point in time.

For the sake of making the previous post more understandable, I will try to put some of my own analytics into it.

I have been consulting since I was 14 and I’ve done some stuff that I thought was pretty cool at the time. I would consider these accomplishments. But you sort of have to understand where I’m coming from. In my world, everyone has a masters degree, anyone can get a masters degree; you just have to spend 5 years and you get it in the mail. About half the people in my world work as consultants in parallel with school. Two of them have been CEO’s of 25+ employee companies and one is an Executive VP.

Now I have two choices, I can observe the real world as it is, where having a masters and being CEO of a small consulting firm is a pretty good job. Effectively saying to myself “I’m good enough”, and just settling for that.

Or; I can say “I want to do more, be better and improve myself continually”.

I don’t like the “Good enough” mentality. Sure, I’ve accomplished something by working as a consultant and by getting a masters, but you know what? That’s not really that special. I spend 8 hours a day on something just like everyone else.

What matters to me is what you do in those other 8 hours. Right now, I think I spend around 2 of those 8 hours coding, I spend 3 of them watching TV shows and I spend 3 of them surfing HN and Reddit.

The reason I look up to luddep so much and those other people who are just like him, is that they spend their extra 8 hours on doing something productive and important. They spend their free time on improving themselves.

So if I only spend 8 hours on something important every day, like every other human being in the world, how could I possibly claim to be improving myself? I don’t think I can and that’s what I mean by not accomplishing anything. I piss away my 8 hours (or at least 6) when I could be doing something important with them.

So why am I writing this post instead of using my time for something productive? I don’t know, maybe I’m just really fucking lazy, maybe my theory is wrong, maybe I am satisfied at being average (in my world).

That’s why I labeled the previous post “thoughts”, because it’s just that, thoughts. I don’t have the answer to any of these questions and I don’t actually know if any of the questions are in any sense even relevant. I don’t actually walk around and think “What am I spending this hour on? What am I spending that hour on?”, I do what I like to do, do what I have to do and go about living my life as best I can. Don’t you sometimes think “How could I be better?”. If you don’t, I’d say there’s something wrong with you.

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Francisco Tolmasky is the founder of 280 North, one of the coolest startups I know of, and I recently came across a tweet of his.

Having dinner with @280north @johnhering and @luddep

@luddep is the guy that has been making me feel worthless lately. I’ve talked a bit with him on IRC and he’s a really cool guy, totally down to earth and nice and all. He’s a Swedish guy from Uppsala and went to IT Gymnasiet, not that different from my own back-story.

This is what bothers me though; this kid is fucking 18 years old and he’s done a bunch of really cool small projects, has time to learn and code Objective-J so much that he’s really into the Cappuccino community, and obviously a very talented coder (which would lead him to have dinner with Tolmasky and 280). He’s 18 and he’s hanging out in San Francisco with some of the most awesome people in the world.

Having dinner with Tolmasky and 280 is to me like having dinner with Justin Bieber is to a 14 year old girl.

And where am I? Living outside a small town in an even smaller town trying to find time to code without failing school. It’s a very lighthearted not-that-negative way of feeling worthless. I know the only thing I could possibly do to change things is work harder and be positive. I just felt like complaining a bit and making some excuses.

Edit: Read the follow-up on this blog-post.

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I say that I embrace my laziness but that is not to say that I just accept that it’s there and that I have to live with it. It is not saying that I like it either, but that I have come to use it to what I believe is my advantage, and especially come to find ways to work around it. You could call it tricks to make myself less lazy. One of those tricks is using a calendar, but another more important trick is what I want to talk about in this post.

Diversity is a keyword in my life. I like to do many different things, see different places and have many different experiences as all people do. But diversity is the opposite of focus, which I believe is key to doing things efficiently and well. To lead a good life one needs diversity, to accomplish and achieve one needs focus. Diversity and focus ties in deeply with my laziness. Being lazy is clearly counterproductive to being focused, but it helps me to be diverse. Laziness breaks focus and allows me to pursue other interests, but it also forces my brain to be occupied by just the important things. As I said: the laziness makes me easily forget that which I don’t really care about.

The laziness thus brings up two clear disadvantages in my life. Sometimes I need to be very focused for long periods of time and sometimes I need to remember things that aren’t necessary to my immediate survival and happiness, like meeting with my mother or other recreational and social interactions. It makes me happy but my brain doesn’t always deem it important enough to remember.

The remedy for loosing focus was very hard for me to track down, but I think I have found it. I found it trough experiencing real pressure from school and work where focus is crucial. The solution, while taking around 20 years to find, is really very simple and can be expressed in the word Extremism. Do everything to the max. Need that report written? Spend 15 hours straight writing it. Now this sounds very much like the reasonings of a procrastinator, and in part it is. To me, procrastination and laziness are synonymous. The difference is that the word procrastination suggests that the task is not one the procrastinator wants to do. I want to do many things but am just too lazy to actually do them.

I’ll give you an example of something I would not have accomplished without extremism and that is not, in my definition, procrastination. I managed to exercise daily for three months in 2009 because I did it to the max, making a challenge of it and working out an hour a day. When I’ve tried working out before with the regular twice a week schedule I end up breaking the schedule and finally quitting after just a couple of weeks. My laziness sort of pushes it out of my mind and makes me forget that it’s important to me, effectively making it unimportant for me. Extremism makes me accomplish things I would otherwise not pursue at all.

People tend to call me disciplined recently, which spurred this post. If they could see the real me, the 13-14 year old Fredrik that still lives inside me, or just see my room, they would realize that discipline is the wrong term to use. I am anything but disciplined. When you see someone spending 12 hours in school 7 days a week, discipline is usually the word that comes to mind. Extremism is the word that comes to my mind. I just know it has to be done and the only way I can do it is to the extreme or it wouldn’t be done at all.

Extremism also helps out with diversity. I have tried combining school and work in an effective manor, but I can’t do it without starting to feel worn out and like I’m not producing good enough results in either thing. But by doing things to the max I’m able to finish one thing in half the time, way ahead of schedule so that I am subsequently focused on the second thing. Extremism makes me in this case be able to do two things instead of just one.

Extremism is what keeps my life going sometimes, shutting of my brain except the one part that needs to focus on the task at hand.

I could continue this post for another thousand words just defining the difference between extremism and discipline. But then no-one would read it, so I wont. I hope I’ve managed to get some sense across of what it is that makes me be able to stay focused even though I’m lazy, and that the laziness actually helps me to unfocus and live.

Extremism is what makes me tick, not discipline.

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First off I can just let everyone know that I’m going to be leaving Sweden at the start of July, so I will still be here for almost a half year more. There are some paperwork to be done but the institute through which I’m taking this education makes things quite a lot easier so it’s not that bad.

I said in my previous post that the whole thing was kind of scary; it is! I find that whenever I am moving forward and big changes are happening I’m a little scared. But it’s a good kind of scared. If you’re doing things right in life you should always have a small, small sensation in the back of your head that you might have taken on too much, that you’re changing too quickly, that kind of feeling. Progress is a little scary but you shouldn’t live without progress. Scary is good.

I will be leaving Sweden entirely for a year, the visa won’t allow me to leave Japan without going through a bunch of paperwork to get back in. This of course means that I’ll leave friends and family behind entirely, and I’m sure I’ll miss them. There’s not much to do about it though and it’s something that just has to be dealt with when the time comes.

Before I leave there are some things I want to get done, which leaves me unable to just completely phase out and dream about Tokyo for 5 months until the time comes; I suppose that might be a good thing. Stuff I want to do is get my motorcycle drivers license, I’ve been wanting this for over a year but last year it was hindered by Japan and work. My good friend Jonas has been living in the US for a year come summer and he’s planning a cross-country road-trip over this summer which I’d really like to join in on for a week or two. The plans will be released on his blog this Friday (the 12th) so we’ll see if there are any suitable points for me to get on and off the trip that would have me being there for the right amount of time in the beginning of June. Other than that, I obviously have 4 months of school left, and I’ll have to add some Japanese studies to my ordinary curriculum to be able to have a foundation to stand on when I get there.

All in all, I’ll be going to Japan, but there’s still a lot of stuff to do and to think about before I get there. It seems like a journey in itself.

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While I was showering afterward I was thinking.
- “I have so many cool things I could do. There are so many awesome ideas to pursue and fun things to do. Why am I standing here in the shower instead of doing them?”

I am not entirely sure I can come up with a reasonable answer to that question.

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Another very awesome thing is that I have now been officially approved as an iPhone Developer, meaning I can develop apps on my own phone and if they get good enough I can start selling them in the App Store. The entire application process took only 6 work-days which I have to say is very impressive! I’ve heard of people having to wait months for their licenses so that was pretty awesome. The first app up for development is essentially a phone version of DHG, which I hope can get quite awesome.

There is in fact so much awesome, that I can’t stop thinking about all of this awesome, resulting in me not getting any sleep. The upside of this is that it will result in tomorrow being very much less awesome and hopefully I’ll be able to get some sleep then.

I can’t wait till Christmas break when I’ll actually have some free time!

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To manage to do it at all and still have time to eat and read news and like, be human, I had to cut back somewhere. I decided to try to cut back on sleep.

As you might be able to tell from this blog post, a weeks worth of sleep deprivation haven’t exactly been good for me =P
The first couple of days it worked really nice and it felt awesome to get a couple more hours of awake-time each day. But now toward Thursday and Friday I feel pretty trashed.

The weirdest thing is that in high-school I usually didn’t sleep more than I did this week, quite often I slept less. A lot of weeks during high-school I got 4 or 5 hours of sleep on average and some days I didn’t sleep at all before going to school the next day. Sure I wasn’t 100% okay after one of those weeks back then either, but I’m sure I felt quite a lot better than I do now.

I’m getting old :/

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Creativity:

the process by which one utilizes creative ability

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creativity

I’ve been keeping quite busy lately. As a sort of surprise, school is becoming more work. It’s not necessarily harder, but just more work. I have to spend a lot more hours. Which leaves me with a very few amount of hours to be home before I go to bed.

This is a stage in life which… strangely enough; I kind of like. Maybe not being in school all day, but at least being busy. I think Emanuel explains it very well in his latest post (including a hand-drawn graph!) over at eferm.com.

He comes (with the help of the notorious _why) to the conclusion that a person who creates things, have private projects running and actually produce something real is defined by their creations instead of something as, to me, extremely non-defining as school or music taste.

To tie together with my quote from the dictionary. Creativity is something often used for artistic people and people with huge abilities to inspire emotion by way of expressing themselves through creation. I would not call myself a creative person, but after reading “the process by which one utilizes creative ability”. I must say that I am quite familiar with this process, so perhaps I am indeed a creative person? I don’t know. I just know that I like to create, and I would much rather be defined by my creations than by my age and preference in clothes.

While you ponder this bit of philosophy, I shall leave you with my latest bout of creativity – which will be put up on location at the DreamHack event:

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I just noticed on Facebook though that one of my coordinators has started studying in Tokyo. Reading his blog I get extremely home-sick. I want to go back there and I just want to be there! I want to eat lunch at Design Festa, I want to go to Akiba to look at figures and check out new cameras, I just want to do all the stuff, I just want to be home.

I’m meeting with the international department (the department handling exchange programs) on the 30th, but it seems I misunderstood what the double-exam thing I talked earlier about really was. The information is really unclear, everything you can find online and in brochures indicates you take your masters degree there, but when I spoke to the head of the international department on the phone, she said the program was to extend your education by 2 years to take another masters degree – something I’m not very keen on.

Maybe I can get into one of the programs that my coordinator got into. Maybe I can survive here for 2.5 more years and then get a job there. Maybe.

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