Awareness of Self

Transcript

1. Awareness of Self: Mind Over Matter Kenneth Reitz
2. Welcome.
3. @kennethreitz
4. github.com/kennethreitz • ~18 serious projects. • 100+ experiments. • OSX-GCC-Installer: 56TB of downloads. • Requests: 45 million downloads.
5. Requests HTTP for Humans
7. Other Interests... • Street Photography • Synthesizers and Music Production • World Travel (~150,000 miles last year) • Public Speaker (29 events last year) • Classic Video Games!
8. Bad Habits
9. Two Years Ago • Evangelism at Heroku (travelled to 47 Cities) • Worked on Open Source 24 hours a day. • Addicted to caffeine (3–5 Red Bulls daily). • Drank alcohol often at tech events.
10. Miami Austin Santa Clara Montpellier Zurich Twin Cities Hobart San Francisco Arlington Paris Omaha Columbus Los Angeles Sydney Baltimore Washington DC Little Rock St. Louis Asbury, NJ Philadelphia Dublin Raleigh Prague Lille Toronto Brno London Stokholm Las Vegas Brussels Tel Aviv Jerusalem Istanbul Portland Pittsburgh Amsterdam Groningen Warsaw Boston Cleveland Bangalore Nashville Nashville Montreal Singapore Tokyo NYC
11. My Addictions • Addicted to travel. • Addicted to open source. • Addicted to caffeine. • Addicted to social pressures.
13. Burn-Out
17. Remediation • Took a month off of work. • Cancelled all upcoming travel events. • Re-established my sense of home and family. • Focused on my arts. • Back to work!
18. Migraine
19. The Migraine • Shortly after returning from work, I woke up one day with a persistent Migraine that couldn’t be cured. • Nothing I could do would make it go away, day after day after day…
20. The Migraine • Saw a neurologist, started taking anti- epileptic medication. • My entire life became about optimizing for removing migraine triggers. • Perception of everything was the trigger.
21. Wellness
22. Blessing in Disguise • Migraine forced me to re-evaluate every part of my life—physical, emotional, social, &c. • Removed social stress from social-media. • Stopped addictions caffeine, alcohol, sugar. • Paleo, elimination diets, hydration, etc.
23. Blessing in Disguise • Opened myself to deep meditation, healthy living, and spiritual awareness. • Meditation was the cure for my headaches. • Migraine: completely controlled (242 days). • Total weight lost: 110 pounds.
24. Lessons Learned
25. Lessons Learned • The things you put into your body effect you. • Includes: food, hydration level, social media. • Caffeine is a hell of a drug.
26. Lessons Learned • It’s better for me to listen to my body, making constant adaptive (intuitive) changes to my lifestyle in the moment. • Having a friend to discuss your wellness experiments with is extremely helpful.
27. Lessons Learned • Excluding everything seems to be detrimental. It’s much better to cure an addiction than to distance yourself from it. • Gluten makes me exhausted, but only when I remove it from my diet. • Sometimes, you just need time & space.
28. Direct Experience • There are many intolerances that others have harsh opinions about — working from home, gluten sensitivity, requirements of space. • Your direct experience is the only data you have to go off of.
29. Live Life, Love Life.
30. Live Life, Love Life. Don’t dismiss your experience — hack it!
31. Also, you’re dehydrated.