Today’s Coding Horror, Nobody’s Going to Help You, and That’s Awesome, is about how generally useless self-help books are. Now, self-help books are about as American as Apple Pie and the Pursuit of Happiness, but most of them are drivel (see Sturgeon’s Law).
I’ve been taking steps to climb out of a rut that I’ve dug myself into. I’ve been exercising regularly again, I’m coding recreationally—and not just in World of Warcraft—and now I’m going to take the concrete advice of that blog post, and write a short little email to myself every day about what I’m going through, as taken from 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. The key is to take what is implicit, abstract and unformed in your mind, and make it explicit and concrete.
Some of my recent troubles have been caused by implicit abstractness taking a life of its own, and this exercise was just what I needed a long time ago in order to stem this off.