Hard work does not always lead to success. Most of the time, it just leads to more work.

Don’t trust any corporation. They will change their values when their stock goes down.

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

You can do everything right and still lose, still face heart break, and still face setbacks.

Don’t put up with abuse. I let a woman take advantage of me and abuse me, mentally, emotionally, and physically, for almost 4 years. I was determined not to hit the 4 year anniversary, but I feel stupid letting it go on at all. She still tries to reach out and every now and then but I’m over it. I let her have a ton of control over my life back when we spent time together.

It was hard dealing with it and it was hard getting over her.

conflict-avoidance often leads to lying, and lying will lead to greater conflict. The truth will set you free.

HR doesn’t work for you and is never on your side. They exist to cover your employer’s ass.

Sometimes you don’t get a chance to say what you wish you had.

Be prepared to be able to rely on nobody while knowing how to fend off against everyone.

Don’t stick your dick into crazy.

Interpret ‘hardest’ however suits you

I’ll just scope it down to yesterday. I intentionally short-circuited a 36v battery to see if the battery is still functional or not because my multimeter is out of power. I did this intentionally or otherwise usually in 12v environment to either test out quickly if the wire is connected, or when i accidentally shorted the terminal. The spark are weak on 12v so no big deal with 36v right?

It’s the brightest spark i’ve ever witnessed in a semi-controlled environment, second to welding spark, and it leave a blind spot in my vision for about 10 second. The terminal melted a bit, and the wire bit that touched the terminal disintegrated. Also almost start a house fire with that.

Note to self: wait until you get your equipment in working condition before you work with electric.

You don’t have to forgive everything.

You can’t just pretend that you’re “driven by logic” and ignore your “weak” emotions forever. If the foundations upon which you build your personality are rotten, there will be point where it all comes crashing down. Until that moment you just waste time pretending to be someone you aren’t.

That there is no silver bullet, no quick fix, no “Eureka” moments that happen without work. “Progress” is less an exciting event, more a rhythm made by the repeated struggling against entropy; when you’re doing it well, you’ll come to hardly notice its beat until one day you look around and everything’s different.

You’d think that recognising this progress might be motivating, but it’s often demoralising because it demonstrates how unglamorous the work of self-improvement is. You hardly get time to enjoy your achievements, because as you grow, you become aware of how much more there is to do; the burdens on one’s time and energy tend to expand as our personal capacities do, so even if one makes incredible progress it can feel like you haven’t moved at all — in both your “before” and “after” snapshots, it can feel like you’re still barely staying afloat in life, even if objectively, you have massively improved your coping skills.

And the worst part of it all is knowing that it’s okay to be feeling like this. You’re tired because it’s a lot of work, and you’re demoralised because the work doesn’t end. You’re not the only one who has the stake in your life and your wellbeing, and as you grow, this will be underscored by a greater sense of duty towards the systems and people that depend on you; When I was young and very depressed, I stayed alive for my family and I resented the fact that they cared about me because it bound me to life. (Un)fortunately(?), over the years, my attempts to stick around to avoid hurting the people I care about has led to a bunch more people being invested in my wellbeing and I ended up loving those people too. How privileged I am to have such wonderful people in my life, who give me hope for the world and embolden me to keep fighting. And yet, I resent these people too. I have to allow myself that, at least a little bit, otherwise I’d collapse under the pressure of a duty to a world so much larger than I am. The worst part of it all is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So here I am, still plodding along, despite everything, hoping to make my existence a tiny little monument to resistance, as I stubbornly push back against all-consuming entropic decay. I know that in the grand scheme of things, nothing I, as an individual, does will matter, nor will it last, but I don’t care. Well, I do care — the enormity of it threatens to swallow me whole — but I don’t care that I care, because what difference does it make? The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that everyone feels this way, to an extent, and I’m nothing special. In that truth is terror, but also the comfort of solidarity. I may be scared and exhausted, but I know I’m not alone in this. For better or for worse, my life isn’t just for me.

Nothing matters, but neither does that fact.

Growing up in a population with lots of spirituality, it felt like a requirement to have some higher meaning to your life. And me deciding one-by-one that I didn’t believe in the spiritual stuff, it felt like I was missing that higher meaning.

What I didn’t realize for too long, is that if I don’t believe in the spiritual stuff, then I necessarily also don’t believe that the spiritual people have a higher meaning to their life. And that it’s not a requirement. A regular meaning or even no meaning is just as fine.

To keep my mouth shut more than it’s open.

Still working on that one, actually.