Nothing is everything!

Back in my high school days I had a friend. He has had quite an annoying feature. Sometimes when I asked him a question – instead of replying right away – he just repeated the question, and after repeating he was pondering for some seconds before reply…
It was very annoying. And every time I was thinking: “Why you are so slow… Can you just stop to do it?”

If fact my friend was so slow that he managed to skip the last year in high school (he spent in high school 1 year less than all of us) and entered one of the best universities in Russia – NSU.

He was so slow that he didn’t care about classes on physics and math in school because he was studying physics and math by the correspondence course.

I shared a table in a class with him for one year… He did participate in math and physics Olympics and ones asked if I would be interested to participate too. I said no – because despite math was very easy to me – I was dreaming about the career of an actor… So participating in a math Olympiad was just way pointless.

Young Albert Einstein has a very annoying feature too…

“Normal childhood development proceeded slowly,” recalled his sister, Maja Winteler-Einstein, “and he had such difficulty with language that those around him feared that he would never learn to speak….Every sentence he uttered, no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips. This habit persisted into his seventh year.”

The young Einstein was slow in speaking not in thinking.

He was late in learning how to speak, so late that his parents feared that he might be retarded. But when he finally did speak, he did so in complete sentences.

Speaking is important. But there’s a times more important thing – THINKING. Skip thinking and you just starting to compete with a parrots. A parrots can speak too, you know…

I love to think. In fact this is the best thing I love in life. I love to be alone and daydream. I love to focus on one thing at a time. I don’t connect to internet for days, sometimes for weeks. I don’t need to. I have much more fun trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong – and how to fix it.

The best month during coronavirus was when I was trying to refresh my coding skills. I was coding in bash. This is one of the most easiest programming languages. In fact it’s called not a programming but a scripting language.

I tried to build a replacement for Google Keep. I was using Google Keep for a long time but at some point I’ve got fed up with its shortcomings. So I decided to explore if I can build a replacement using bash.

I had in my disposal only some books. I disconnected from the internet and was coding for the full month. One of the most interesting thing I discovered is when I was stuck – the best way to deal with it was just switching my attention for something else. Stopping to code and starting to daydream instead was the best way to solve the biggest difficulties.

Whenever I have a problem – I’m trying to solve it by myself without googling or asking for help. This way I start to understand how much I know, and what of my knowledge is really important. After that process I can google but in that case my googling is much more effective – because I focus only on things that really important.

Thinking is crucial for learning. Memorizing facts without thinking is useless. I don’t do it. So being a monomaniac, a one task guy – is the best way to learn and deal with the biggest problems.

Albert Einstein, Warren Buffett, Derek Sivers are monomaniacs. Me too. Join the company!

One of the most prominent philosophers of all times Winnie the Pooh said:
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day!”

Do more nothing.
Nothing is everything!