Ben Nesvig's Blog, page 8

Not For Everyone

Last night I watched the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I happen to enjoy subtle dark humor. If that’s your slice of pie, this movie is a masterpiece. It is perfect. In terms of being subtly hilarious, I can’t think of a better movie example. It’s also dark in that it deals with the end of the world, but chooses to focus on the trivial complaints and worries people have. That is the human condition, to avoid the serious and focus on the trivial. We focus on the trivial as a way of c...

Why Is The Dentist Such An Awful Experience?

Out of all the things to not look forward to in life: loved ones passing away, failing health, and broken relationships, etc… visiting the dentist has to be very near the top of the list.

I’m amazed going to the dentist is such an awful experience. So much of an experience is the expectations you have going into it. The expectations between walking into an ice cream parlor and the dentist are completely different. The dentist arguably has the lowest standards possible. There is nothing but fea...

French Bulldog vs Cupcake

If you write down enough ideas, it’s like some invisible magnet in the sky pulls you into doing something with some of them. Below is a video I put together last Sunday afternoon. In total, it probably took around 5 hours to make and gave me an excuse to perpetuate my cupcake addiction.

I’m only half-kidding with that last sentence. While transferring photos from my phone to computer, as well as organizing all of my photos, I came across a disturbingly high number of cupcake photos. Even the o...

Find An Outlet For Your Ideas

I have ideas. Lots of them. I don’t want to say “too many” ideas even though it sometimes feels like it.

I blame having an abundance of ideas on James Altucher. He wrote a blog post about building his idea muscle that motivated me to start writing down 10 ideas a day. It took more than a year after reading that blog post for the idea habit to stick, but for the last 4 months or so, I’ve been able to write down 10 ideas a day. They’re mostly mediocre ideas, but a few good ones slip in occasiona...

Random Observations: Mostly Food Edition

Below are a few of the daily observations I’ve been collecting this year. Some might end up in a book, others remaining in Evernote.

What kind of psychopath eats at Subway at 7am?

Companies can stop spelling out their phone numbers now. Once it’s in the phone, it’s out of the memory. It takes more work to figure out where the letters are than it does to type in any random numbers.

Americans would have stronger antipathy toward increasing national debt if it was called tofu-barrel spending.

It’s w...

How To Write 75,000 Words In 100 Days

A few months ago I signed up for a site called 750 Words. At the time I figured it would be an easy way to write in a distraction free writing environment and make sure I was hitting a daily writing target.

Then the subtly gamification hooked me…

The website reminds and encourages you to write every single day. At the top of the screen you see how many days you’ve written 750 words in a row as well as an X on the days of that month you’ve completed.

Once I started building the chain, I was hooke...

Move Like Water

I’ve seen the concept of having fluid thinking across several books, blog posts, and most recently the documentary Like Water (trailer).

The pillar or rock used to be the ideal of power and strength. A company would stand tall and steady with a solid foundation and business. They might slowly adapt if new competitors entered the space, but generally the larger the company, the more they tried to maintain the way things are, keeping the market predictable. They’d much prefer to buy up competito...

The Time Paradox

I haven’t read this book yet, but I stumbled on this quote from it today. One of the many paradoxes of life is that time is one of the least valued yet most valuable asset you own.

“Death is the end of a lifetime. Denial of death is a denial that time will end. If you deny that time ends, you are likely to treat time much differently than you would if you felt time to be scarce and of limited duration. If you imagine your life as infinite, you are unlikely to value time as more precious than g...

Good or Bad? It Depends

While cleaning out the garage this weekend I found my graphing calculator from high school. I believe it was a TI-83+. Some serious math was attempted on that, though more often it was a poor mans Game Boy. Before every high school student had an iPhone and other gadgets, this was the most sophisticated device anyone would bring to school.

One day in math class, after mumbling a wise crack at the expense of someone next to me, in retaliation he attempted to take my precious TI-83+ away from me...

One Second Everyday – February 2013

My journey of taking one second of video every single day continues…