Obviously, some decisions demand more thought than others. Life isn’t

8 min readDec 5, 2020

Nevertheless, if you’re under the age of 25, you’re especially lucky. Learn from my regrets, then take advantage of these opportunities. You’ll end up in a better place financially in the long run, and I guarantee you’ll be grateful for it.

Many people want to be better — they want to be able to exercise, feed their curiosity, read more books, maintain a healthy lifestyle, embrace meditation and wake up at the crack of dawn in the name of getting an early start.

The format was simple enough: I made one column each for name, age, how we met, and profession. I also added columns for positives, negatives, and “lessons learned.” I included anyone I’d ever gone out or had a significant “thing” with….[It] led to some interesting conclusions. The phrase “lacked the confidence to pursue his dreams,” or some variation of it, appeared a whopping seven times in the Negatives column.

I gathered everything I thought I would someday want to see or hear again, memories of Greg at his worst as well as at his best — photos, text messages copied into a Google Doc, copies of voicemails — and dropped them in a Google folder.

Another one set in Sweden, but this time, set in a small, rural community. The story is told through a range of inhabitants and at the heart of it, is the portrayal of how unbeknown communities can be subject to corruption at every level. In defence of community spirit, many residents jump to defend the horrors of one event that has the potential to write the town off altogether.

Eventually, Mohamed got to a place where she could delete the folder altogether, she wrote: “Within the framework of Google Drive, alongside shared documents and photos, there was also space for healing.”

Set in Stockholm, Sweden, the story is told mainly through the perspective of Mikael Blomkvist, a well known investigative journalist who is hired to look into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, part of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families. Mikael eventually crosses paths with the infamous Lisbeth Salander to uncover the rife corruption at the heart of one of Sweden’s most influential and formidable families. But it doesn’t end there.

There are thousands if not millions of resources telling people how they can be more productive, more creative, do their best work, optimise their lives, be more successful and be better at everything they do.

It’s in many ways a historical novel with its in-depth analysis of the long term effects of living through the Holocaust, but also a coming of age one, filled with the blossoming of a new relationship and the hopes of youth.

I named it something deliberately innocuous: ‘2014’, the year we’d been together….For a while, I opened the 2014 folder a lot. Then, a few months in, I deleted the first thing for good — a copy of an email he’d written. It wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, but seeing it gone felt strangely good. And that’s how it started. Little by little, I chipped away at the folder as some memories faded or others solidified, or I became less angry at fights never resolved, or more accepting of the fact that there was no good ending to this story.

What you should be doing is experimenting and sticking to what doesn’t make you worse. If you can’t wake up at 5 am, don’t beat yourself up. If meditation for half an hour does not work for you, try 5 minutes or better still go for a peaceful walk.

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any significant financial decisions.

The bad news is you can easily fall into a well of self-improvement and things can suddenly get dark fast. The pursuit of “better” can drag you into a life of exhaustion if you don’t take back control.

In short, Malcolm’s father was a “Hamlet was wrong” kinda guy. And if you’ve read Malcolm’s book “Blink,” which is based on the idea that spontaneous decisions are often as good as — or even better than — carefully planned and considered ones, it’s clear his father’s actions impacted the way Malcolm leads his own life.
Now, this is a hard book. Hard because it’s based on the truth and not something to read if you’re looking for some gentle escapism. But, it is one of the most powerful and gut-wrenching books I have ever read.
Set in New York and told through the perspective of Stingo, a 22-year-old aspiring writer, this novel combines many things. Stingo falls in love with Sophie and soon learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Through flashbacks, he learns about her harrowing story and experience of Auschwitz.

But here’s the truth — if you are pursuing all these for the wrong reasons — keeping up, because it worked for someone you trust or an expert says it’s the right thing to do, you will get worse in the process.

The demands of life in the fast lane come at a price: stress, fatigue, burnout and depression are few effects of aiming for change without deliberate purpose. Pursuing self-improvement at all cost will make you worse.

Most distributed tracing systems enforce sampling policy at the request ingestion point in a microservice call graph. We took a hybrid head-based sampling approach that allows for recording 100% of traces for a specific and configurable set of requests, while continuing to randomly sample traffic per the policy set at ingestion point. This flexibility allows tracer libraries to record 100% traces in our mission-critical streaming microservices while collecting minimal traces from auxiliary systems like offline batch data processing. Our engineering teams tuned their services for performance after factoring in increased resource utilization due to tracing. The next challenge was to stream large amounts of traces via a scalable data processing platform.

Backman writes in an atmospheric and chilling way but reveals something far more sinister than the initial premise of a story about a rural town in Sweden. Gripping, beautifully written and a masterpiece of in-depth character studies.

Obviously, some decisions demand more thought than others. Life isn’t

Written by Debdulal Chowdhury