The Tim Ferriss Show, #222: Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year

Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache) on his process of consumption and its relation to happiness (46:33):

Usually I try to start with, “No you weenie, what do you think? What kind of consumer are you?” Just a little bit of a mental beat down to shut off the easiest things. That’s what keeps me from buying a Tesla Model S or something like that. Because even though I think it’s a great car — I support it — I know for sure that wouldn’t make me any happier, because I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t drive, really. So obvious stuff gets shut off.

Separate novelty from actual desire.

But then when you get in things that you’re pretty sure you want, then you just think about it for longer. Procrastinate a little bit. See if that desire goes away a bit.

Does the desire wear off after a little time?

And then consider how much space that thing will take up in my limited space — my studio for example. And then imagine how I would feel if it broke because a lot of stuff does break, even if you have high quality gear. And it’s really annoying to deal with things that break, and if you have to warranty fix it.

The burden of ownership is real. Things will take from your mental/physical space and time.

And finally I ask myself, “Is this removing a negative in my life?” Because it’s pretty well studied that happiness is not very much affected by adding positives to your life. Especially in a rich world environment like we live, it’s mostly accomplished by removing things that are strong negative to every day. So getting myself a remote control photography drone is unlikely to make me happier because my life doesn’t currently suck due to the absence of photography drone quadcopter thingies. If there is something that every day I’m like “Dammit I just wish I didn’t always trip over this broken dishwasher” then replacing your dishwasher is probably a happiness boosting proposition.

Removing negatives versus adding positives.

The process:

1. Filter out novelty — is there an actual desire?
2. Wait — after a week, for instance, do you still want it?
3. Consider the burden of ownership.
4. Does it remove a negative?

I decided to part with an old Mac mini that I had upgraded with a solid state drive (SSD). It wasn’t until I had erased the partition with Disk Utility that I realized I should have turned on FileVault encryption before attempting to erase it. This would have saved me hours of work trying to figure out how to securely erase an SSD. By encrypting the drive first, it would have been impossible to read any data off the drive after an erase.

There is no Secure Erase option in Disk Utility for an SSD (which I was hoping for):

With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not available in Disk Utility. These options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption when you start using your SSD drive.

I didn’t feel totally comfortable without a true secure erase of the drive. After some searching, I came across an answer on Ask Different about ATA Security Erase, which is a command that can be issued to the drive to erase all its data.

In order to accomplish this, I purchased a copy of Parted Magic and downloaded the ISO file which could be used to create a bootable CD to load a copy of Linux to be able to run Parted Magic and then finally run its Erase Disk utility.

If you are thinking of securely erasing your Mac’s SSD, save yourself some time by enabling FileVault. If you hadn’t already done so, it will take hours to encrypt your drive, but it’s probably the the most secure way to set the data up for deletion (short of physically destroying the drive).

Some rabbit holes I went down to avoid:

• Apparently booting Linux off of a USB drive is not an easy thing to do on a Mac (it seems you have to set up an alternative boot manager). Just create a bootable CD, if you are able.
• Burning a disk image to a CD is no longer an option in Disk Utility. This must be done through the Finder instead.

Two types of praise:

When a kid does something amazing, you want to tell her so. You might tell her that she’s very smart. You might tell her that she’s a very special kid. Or you might say that she must have worked really hard.

On the surface, they all sound like the same compliments. But according to Brad Bushman, a communications and psychology professor at Ohio State University, the first two increase the child’s chances of becoming a narcissist. Only the last one raises the child’s self-esteem and keeps her ego in check.

And the effects of narcissism:

Bushman is particularly worried about narcissism because both he and other researchers have linked it to aggressive and violent behavior. He thinks it’s partly because narcissists are less likely to feel empathy toward others.

John Saito

When I tell people that the ellipsis (…) is the most amazing character ever, most people look at me like I’m crazy. Before you label me a lunatic, let me try to explain

For decades, interface designers have been using the ellipsis to communicate all sorts of important details to users. As you’ll soon see, these 3 dots can pack quite a lot of meaning in just a little space.

This grouping of three dots—worthy enough to have its own Unicode character (U+2026)—is used to indicate that there is something more. And this something can indicate status, more action, or a prompt to write something. Saito boils it down nicely.

One Thing

Building quality things of substance takes time.

While methodologies and systems arise to handle our ever increasing to-do/priority/work list, perhaps the only real solution is to simplify and thereby narrow focus. Depth over breadth.

It’s the start of 2017 and now I’m starting a blog. Why? Two reasons:

First, from the micro.blog Kickstarter campaign:

In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.

I want to own my content and to be able to take it wherever I want. Even with the popularity of centralized services (and increasingly shorter form writing), I’m going to bet the traditional blog will be here to stay.

Second, I want to create a time capsule of sorts for my child (or children). I want them to be able to look back to understand who I was when I was younger.