These are notes for myself. Your mileage may vary. But I will refer to myself as “you”, because…mah site, mah rulzzz.

1. Your time is very, very important. Spend it very, very wisely.
2. Consume less, create more.
3. You get what you deserve, not what you want. Manifestation works only when you do.
4. Give a deadline to every task and decision, no matter how important. Otherwise, it might never get done. You will keep on looking for better options or optimizations. Do optimizations later when you have more information and know which optimizations in which areas will create the most impact. For example, selecting an idea to execute. Just commit to one and execute it. Have decent idea filtering criteria and pick one from the ideas that make the cut.
5. The primary reason to work every day is so that you don’t want to kill yourself. And if you still get that thought, change your work. You don’t like what you are working on. It’s a good filter to know whether you like what you are working on or not.
6. Meditate whenever you feel overwhelmed by too many things happening around you and/or running through your mind. It will help you calm down and find the best way possible to solve the issue(s) at hand. It lets the mind to actually work on solving the problem rather than just worrying about it.
7. If you are not feeling good (no mood to work), just force yourself to sit and work. Once you start working, your mood will improve. It’s a tricky deadlock. Or meditate. Or play with the kid. Or do something else that gives you happiness. Don’t consume (social) media. Another strategy is to work on something that is very exciting and does not feel like work at all. Like reading a good book. Just get yourself to sit at your work desk and do something productive.
8. When you don’t have time for distractions, they don’t distract you. Keep yourself busy by giving yourself difficult and tight deadlines, preferably daily. Allocate so much work to yourself every day that you don’t have time to slack off. If you don’t spend all the available time on the tasks for the day, you don’t get to do the things you love, like playing with the kid or talking to your partner.
9. Your head should hurt at or before the end of your workday. If it does not, then either you did not work enough or you did not use your brain enough (you were doing easy stuff). The brain is also a muscle, and like other muscles, it should hurt when you exercise it up to a certain level. Try to reach that level every day. That can be reached by volume (more work) or intensity (hard stuff).
10. Only reading books and not applying them makes you sad and lose momentum. Don’t make reading the primary task for the day for more than a week. Your primary task every day should be to create something — writing, thinking, coding, etc., with on-demand learning.
11. We are truly alive for a very few moments in our whole life, and yet our biggest fear is death.
12. Happiness comes from the struggle and hard work, not the outcome.
13. Things become easier once you start doing them. The more you just think about them, the difficult they seem.
14. Not having a 9-5 job lets you give the required time to find out the things that truly matter to you and spend time on them. It’s difficult to do it after work and at weekends. The mails and sprints don’t let you breathe enough. You don’t have the necessary amount of the luxury of leisure.
15. Celebrate your wins and successes. Especially, the small ones.
16. I like functional programming a lot! So, one good career option is to become a freelancer or get a job in Phoenix (Elixir), Clojure, or Haskell, if nothing else works out.