Enjoyment Work

---

— a Digital Garden 🌱

First Heading Words words words… Words words words… Second Heading Words words words… Words words words… Words words words… Third Heading (h2) Tiny words! Forth Heading (h3) Bigger words! Going Back Up Final Test Real Final Test

An argument to find the strength to begin, all over again. For a moment, imagine if — for whatever reason — everything you’ve worked on up to this point, whether professionally or personally, in your life suddenly disappeared. Would you be upset? Would you know where to begin again? Of c...

Taking a novel approach to life and breaking routines. Okay, let's be real. I've found myself totally trapped in the habitual daily acts that've sprung up thanks to COVID-19, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in that. The lack of travelling different places, meeting new people,...

The only thing we have is the present moment. There’s truth that these words are easy to dismiss. That the gravity of this sentiment can be instead seen as a shallow platitude, or cliché. But it’s in fact the most important principle you could live by. Now is now. It doesn’t matter how badly yo...

First Heading Words words words… Words words words… Second Heading Words words words… Words words words… Words words words… Third Heading (h2) Tiny words! Forth Heading (h3) Bigger words! Going Back Up Final Test Real Final Test

The past is just a story we tell ourselves. Productivity is a scam. My entire life is a constant, never-ending struggle. I suspect this is the case for many. Scientifically speaking, we are hard-wired to be lazy. To survive while expending as little caloric energy as possible — to take the path...

Information is probably the single most addictive substance, even more so than heroin in it can give you the kick even before you have consumed it, let alone waiting for the system to digest it. And what is more interesting is, the quality and the content(in chemist-speak, the composition, and th...

An attempt to find peace with who I am. “These actions are not essentially difficult; it is we ourselves that are soft and flabby.” –Seneca The Human Distillery When you take a step back, the greatest of people in history are a distillery. The most talented and hard-working of people often...

Simply Jekyll is a highly functional jekyll-based theme that combines the best of different worlds (atleast tries to 😅). It is a minimal and distraction free theme that strives to provide maximum value all without holding back on any essential features that a user would benefit from or would desi...

Introduction Essentiality is the heart of any good software, and this theme is designed to ensure that I don't add things that I won't use on a daily basis or not have things that would be important for my personal usecase. It has been designed carefully to get rid of all the feature cre...

This is going to be a super simple post about how to setup and use this theme for your own website. Usage Q. What will it look like when I am done setting it up? This is what it should look (minus the exact essays ofcourse): Now without further ado, let's get started! Setup Prerequi...

Getting back on your horse, no matter how many times you’ve fallen off. Project Journal Bar In my last post, I talked about the struggles and failures I’ve faced the past few years. I’ve been thinking about how to tackle my short-comings and problems to solve a single, relatively-simple issue t...

A post-capitalist critique on boiling frogs, minimum-happiness, harmful-easy things, and lists. Beeminder 2.0 Over two years ago, I wrote The Tao of Bees, where I dutifully explained the differences between commonly-used to-do lists and the more long-term, uncommonly-used system thinking as a m...

Welcome to this feature usage tour. This is going to be another short post that describes how to use all the fancy features we saw in [[Exploring the features of Simply Jekyll]]. So without further ado, let's get started. The default features All the default jekyll markdown features are mad...

This is intended as a quick reference and showcase. Table of Contents [[Headers::#heading]] [[Emphasis::#emphasis]] [[Lists::#lists]] [[Links::#links]] [[Images::#images]] [[Code and Syntax Highlighting::#syntax]] [[Math Expressions:#math]] [[Tables::#tables]] [[Blockquotes::...

6 Weird Ideas Which Could Actually Change Things “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” Chinese Proverb SUMMARY: Take Stock of What You Have — Be Grateful & Grow Start From Zero — Radically Eliminate the Non-Essential, Shake the Dust ...

Living on fire without putting yourself out — and cherishing the heat. “May you live in interesting times.” English translation of a purported traditional Chinese curse. A message is written in graffiti on the campus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in Hong Ko...

Happiness isn’t the Meaning of Life It is time for me to grow another year older, and since I wrote last year’s birthday thesis late, I decided to write this one early. Sometimes you have thoughts going through your mind so strongly, you have no choice but to write them down at that very moment....

Why you should create — even though there’s already far too much in the world already. Six years ago, when Medium was first starting out, it was invite-only and was created by one of the founder’s of Twitter to simply publish thoughts longer than the then-limit of 140 characters. Oh, how so much...

There’s a superior method to ensure ambitions are fulfilled. Summary: Change your mindset when it comes to ambitious goals — break them down into tangible and practical daily routines. Author’s Note: This article is an expansion of two articles I wrote for Beeminder: The Tao of Bees The S...

Organizing & Boosting Your Written Content with a Purpose-driven Schedule Summary: As a freelance writer, it can be easy to think only in the short-term — Start utilizing a calendar the way big-name publishers do in order to consistently produce high-quality content for a more engaged au...

New Office | Source Stop being easily swayed by anything that’s in front of you. Start living a value-based lifestyle. When you wake up in the morning and get out of bed — or even before you get out of bed — what’s the first thing that grabs your attention? Whatever it is, it’s go...

Desk Notebook | Source [](https://medium.com/@brennanbrown) Making Better Content & Reaching More People Summary: The beginner on Medium must know that there are three things essential to a good piece of writing: 1) Purpose. 2) Visuals. 3) Community. The new year has just a...

Interior View of Drafting Room in ERB | Source Focusing on only the important stuff is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself. Summary: This article details why failure is a powerful tool for reflection, and necessary part of life. It then goes on to outline a powerful method to...

Currency, Money, before Euro. | Source Yes, You’ll Have to Pay to Read This — And Here’s Why. Trying to understand why you should make people pay to read what you create is about letting people pay you to fail, DRY writing, time frugality, plunging into ice-cold waters, and adding true value. S...

Source Minor Thoughts & Trying to Figure Everything Out It is very late on a Sunday night. I’m tired but I want to write. I want to write something good. I don’t want to merely churn out something formulaic that would satisfy the daily word counter. My expected goal is ~8,300 words, an...

Desk Auditorium | Source Trying to Understand the Democracy of the Internet Obligated Preamble By the fourth day, you come to get into a sense of flow. There’s less pressure to put your best foot forward, and more pressure to just put *anything at all* forward in order to not derail. There’s ...

Antique Blank | Source Five Steps to Go From Brainstorming to Completed Work Let’s get down to the bare bones to start with: Prepare yourself and focus. Brainstorm and allow yourself to have bad ideas. Outline a thesis. Draft and edit. Cut the non-essential. Now, let’s expand on these ideas… T...

Writing Hand, Black & White | Source Death, Meaningless Ideas, Timeless Work, and Paper Perhaps the first thing that I’d like to write after the obviously required navel-gazing of yesterday is more navel-gazing today — but of a different flavor. Perhaps a bit more morbid. I enjoy the m...

November Dreaming | Source An Act of Rebellion Well, it’s officially the first day of NaNoWriMo. Exciting stuff, huh? Like with my personal monthly writing challenges, I’ve signed up year after year, only to fail. And here I am on Medium, writing this blog post instead of a story. People love ...

Source Solving Web Design Problems in a Clever Manner. For the past week or so, I’ve been working on a blog theme for the popular platform Tumblr from scratch. It’s been a (mostly) fun experience, and I thought I’d share some things about web development that I learned along the way. Now, to s...

Type Typewriter | Source Past and Future Writing WHETHER WE WANT TO OR NOT, we leave our footprint on the world — particularly a digital one. We leave a legacy scattered across the Internet. And I believe this is a truly marvellous thing. As I’ve written in the past, I believe the Internet is s...

Outcast | Source Create Your Own by Filtering Out Everything Else The only thing common in the routines of every supposedly successful person is that they’re all different. You have to figure out what works for you. The worst outcome is trying to duplicate the schedule and habits of somebody fa...

Notebook Beside | Source Publishing More Often Write today, and write every day after that — but how should writing be published? As a creator, the responsibility for what you put on display is in your hands. While that responsibility is one that has extensive freedom, but still requir...

Top Left: Total Productive Hours | Top Right: Total Miles Travelled | Bottom Left: Total Blog Posts | Bottom Right: Total Duolingo EXP What I’ve learned using Beeminder religiously for a month. For roughly the past thirty days or so, I have been experimenting on myself. I’ve attempted to dilige...

Untitled | Source Understanding discipline for doing difficult tasks. Awhile has past since my last post on Medium, I’ve been contemplating what I think is important, and what’s important to write about. This post is more of a reminder to myself — a reminder of why I do what I do, especially wh...

The Ascent of Mont Blanc | Source Using Momentum & Mindfulness to Work Harder THERE’S A BATTLE within all of us. I try to detach for a moment, and recognize the duality — the two distinctive wants that battle for majority attention: The want of difficulty, and of seeking betterment ...

Technician in a Bangladesh Laboratory | Source Working Towards Something Better THE INTERNET IS a remarkable utility that has changed humanity forever. Never in history has information been more freely available. Past generations wouldn’t have been able to fathom the amount of personal freedom ...

Window and Clock, Musée d’Orsay | Source “It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” — Seneca**, **On the Shortness of Life Time is all we have — and it ...

Person Making Clay Pot | Source How to effectively go about doing what’s truly important. **PART ONE: HAVING FAITH IN GRAND DREAMS ** Understanding the why of the work is the most important thing that’s needed when starting out. It’s so easy to become discouraged when you’re in the the thick of...

Evolution of Atomic Models | Source Musings on privacy, disruption and mindfulness. Note: This is my second Year-in-Review, check the link down below for the first. https://medium.com/@brennanbrown/becoming-an-adult-10fd7135ce3c This post was meant to come out on my birthday, but that was ove...

Arrow Inside Black Case | Source Idea → Prototype → Product When you’re creating anything, it can feel daunting to try to go from an initial idea to a finished product. We think we have these fantastic ideas for things in our work or personal life, but they suddenly become vague and murky when ...

Compass Align | Source Using the Internet and Bees For quite awhile now, I haven’t posted anything to Medium. There are eighty different posts in my drafts, sporadic and eclectic ideas waiting to be posts. And I always think I have epiphanies late at night when I’m trying to go to sleep — or in...

Navajo Students Studying Mathematics at Day School | Source How to unlock the full potential of a new era of education. For the past few years, the world of MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) has become a fiercely large phenomenon. Across Medium and Reddit you can find great, comprehensive li...

A Forest Clearing**, from **_In Darkest Africa_ by H.M. Stanley, published 1890. Wandering Musings on Meaning Creating a legacy is important to me — I would go as far as to say that creating meaningful things is my highest priority in life. It’s a fairly elusive task, though. You can’t really s...

The loss of a lonely man never makes much of a sound. | Source How lucky it is — to not be victorious. The Door Closes There’s an old saying that when one door closes, another opens. It’s an eye-roller — an idiom that people scoff at — and for good reason. I’d like to expand on this metaphor. ...

Untitled | Source — And Getting There Often, I find myself wondering about the secret to happiness. Plato asserted that only those that live morally virtuous lives were ones that were happy. Aristotle wrote that happiness — human progression — was the only thing that could be valued in isolatio...

Fireworks | Source 17 Changes that I’m Making Around a year ago, I wrote my first real post on Medium. Coincidentally, it was also about New Year’s Resolutions: https://wandernotebook.com/the-best-time-to-start-a-new-year-s-resolution-is-right-now-ffdd389fbf01 The essential message that I was...

Emptiness | Source Sometimes, you disappear. For while now, I have been in hiding. It has been a long while since my last post here on Medium. Since I began my first semester in college in September, I decided that my personal writing was to become a lower priority. I’ve had a near month off, r...

Notes | Source Stepping back and reflecting on it all. Time is Money A lot of the time, when I’m browsing Medium, I look at the articles that are circulating, the ones that are popular and current, having gained an audience. I ask myself, why was this written? I don’t think it’s an unfair ques...

Boy Running | Source Talent doesn’t exist, only hard work does. It should be no secret that, in order to get good at something, one must work hard at it. There are people, though, that will use the excuse that they’re simply not genetically or psychologically fit for things that they find diffi...

Adventure | Source We can all be explorers. Daydreamers can often be those that are unsatisfied with their life. They search and share motivational posts from social media, they look up the diverse cultures of the world and yearn to travel and interact with them. They might see it all, sure, bu...

Citizen Kane Microphone | Source Is it a Rose by any other name, still? On Medium, and other social networks, I go by Brennan K. Brown because when I first joined Facebook years ago, I’d get messages from total strangers thinking that I was Brennan Brown, the American actor. This never really b...

Pinot’s Palette | Source An argument on doing work for free. Author’s Note: This is an extension to a previous post, How to Blog. If you ask most artists, writers and other creators, they will stress the importance of not doing work for free, particularly for others. They will tell you not...

Stendig/Vignelli Wall Calendar | Source Writing For the Challenge One of my favorite — and most popular — vloggers is Casey Neistat. Not only are his videos entertaining and well-produced, but there’s also a new one put out every day. There are quite a lot of people who are inspired by such a ...

HES on an IBM 2250 Mod 4 | Source Attempts at Online Writing. Most often, what I see when I visit a blog with an exciting premise or topic, what I find is an introduction post that was written months or years ago. If I’m lucky, there’s also a second post apologizing for not writing more frequen...

Time is Running Out | Source Recently I’ve been reading some time management literature by the likes of Brian Tracy and Stephen Covey. I thought I’d share the notes I wrote while studying. Psychology of Time Management The four D’s of effectiveness: Desire — Have a burning passion to a...

Untitled | Source To be sincere and to have passion. If there’s one thing that I sincerely yearn to see more of in my life, it’s people that openly and excitedly talk about things close to their heart. I think there’s no easier way to become a person who is genuinely interesting than to be genu...

Hardangerjøkulen | Source Different ways of thinking about the past and writing. I don’t remember when it started, but I’ve come to the realization I live a life of frustrating contradictions. How lazy I feel, after being tired from working all day. Or how the pressure of optimism feels harsher...

Solitude | Source Being happier with less. The world is too full of clutter. Our physical world is bombarded with things and people that want to distract us enough to leach time or money. Our mental world is often filled with the useless white noise of overthinking things that don’t actually ma...

Books to be returned… | Source An open-source guide on how I try to live my life. Preface There’s no escaping ourselves. I’ve been trying to improve myself for awhile, now. I remember when I was 13 years old and I would read Tony Robbins or Stephen Covey —my Mom’s basement is filled with hand...

_Kaijo no Fuji | _Source Forty-four Ways to Live Like a Samurai When I was younger, I had a developed a keen interest in the feudal time period of Japan. I mean, what boy doesn’t think, at one time or another, that Samurai are really cool? But the reality was that I wasn’t actually interested i...

Wall of Skulls | Source Death from a UX Standpoint When I die, delete my browser history. — Anonymous As it stands, the large majority of the internet — and services that operated based on it — run under some contradictory principles. On one hand, everything you use is rather fragile —doma...

Kitchen Sink | Source Life as a kitchen sink. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” — Xinxin Ming Since last August, I’ve worked casually as a housekeeper. I’ve been assigned to clean in a variety of environments such as hospitals, lar...

The Birthday Cake | Source Turning Twenty is Weird. From a pragmatic — perhaps arbitrary — point of view, birthdays are really weird. To celebrate the day you began to exist on your own, with balloons and cake. We enumerate ourselves, systematizing our time spent surviving by the rotation of th...

Kids Running | Source My peers — and a multitude of others — attempt to create an incredible life, from a list of incredible things. The Bucket List, as it’s usually called, is well-established as various fantastical objectives that you’d want to accomplish before you die. It’s an understandable...

Morning in Pine Forest | Source The detritus of the forest had already begun to cool down in Nelson. Autumn had bled throughout the coast, leaving a film of frost on the leaves of fallen trees. Branches the shade of crude oil littered the trails; more clutter was left flailing aimlessly in the w...

Impression, Sunrise | Source Finding the Middle Way and unlearning anxiety. Soria Moria | Source It’s a balmy Saturday afternoon, the hottest it’s been in Calgary so far this year. My 20th birthday is only eleven days away. I don’t know if this is a milestone or not — but I do know that I ...

Placid Death | Source There are a lot of online writers I’ve seen that post about the fact we can only make so many choices throughout the day before becoming fatigued. One recently reached the top stories of Medium. As much as I sincerely appreciate the sentiment behind the message, and true...

The Rainbow | Source “Every artist dips her brush in her own soul, and paints her own nature into her pictures.”  — Henry Ward Beecher The sunrise had just stretched out to the tip of the horizon, the pink of the sky complementing the red of the apples that were across Lilith’s cottage. She...

Untitled | Source It has been barely seven days since I’ve decided to let go of my fears and begin writing my thoughts publicly. (Well, not exactly. I wrote a few pieces in the months before, but I’ve been lurking Medium for a few years since it went public.) Writing has been a gratifying exper...

Untitled | Source This article is a response and expansion to Buster Benson’s writing: https://medium.com/p/2546b44b9804 Studies show that longer commute times cause a number of negative physical and mental effects in some people. This makes sense — what feeling is worse than the excruciat...

Untitled | Source Writing for the Non-Writer Writing has been a passion of mine since childhood, but like a lot of people, I’m not currently entrenched in the corruption of a national government or dazzling celebrity. I’m just a regular person, going to school and working part-time. I could as...

Helping Hands // Source While I definitely think it’s healthy for people to have dialogues and get into disagreements — sometimes passionately — I also think those who constantly and solely bicker about the current state of affairs aren’t actually providing anything meaningful themselves. https...

Solidarity // Source An Open Letter to People I’ve Wronged Looking back, I wasn’t a good person for most of my teenaged years. It seems as though there was almost an endless amount of time when I acted reckless and immature. I disappointed my favourite teachers and betrayed the only people who ...

Medium new logo development sketches. That title is bothersome, isn’t it? It instinctively goes against all of the advice that’s out there. The advice about how you’re supposed to be succinct, yet descriptive. Or that you need to have a sort of qualitative quality. But then, where do we draw th...

Darkness // Source “Perfectionism” is an excuse used often. When we have to ask ourselves why we still haven’t put anything out there yet, we say it’s because it’s not good enough. We pander — hesitating to tell our beloved others about what we’re up too. When we keep all of our messy drafts to...

Writer Friend Caught in Action | Credit A Case Study First off, full disclosure that I personally love the idea of personal journal-keeping. In the field of writing, I don’t think it gets nearly as much recognition as it should. Though I’m going to try my best to avert my bias and presume I’m i...

What’s the purpose of the blog? Ultimately, this is an experiment. A sandbox for me to write—hopefully even edit—thoughts about subjects that I’m passionate about. But that doesn’t give a satisfying answer. In order to properly understand, I’ll need to explain a bit of embarrassing history. ...

“Apparently I am pushing a jinx about the streets. I am certain that I can do better with some other wagon. A new cart, a new start.” –John Kennedy Toole, Author Here I am, writing my first blog post inside my cozy bedroom. Outside is the typical Canadian winter that I can luckily avoid by stay...

Image Credit Today is not your enemy. There’s no need to complicate today (as in right now) with the uncertainty of the next five years. Every day when you get out of bed in the morning, you have two options: Do what you want. Don’t do what you want. That’s all there is to it. You’re tri...