Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), an albatross starts to follow the ship. Being followed by the large sea bird was seen as a sign of good luck. Then some idiot sailor shot the bird with his crossbow and everyone got mad at him because...
For 40 years he did the same thing every day. He woke up and wrote for 3 hours, then he lectured at the same university for 3 hours, then lunch at the same restaurant, usually with the same friend. Followed by a long walk around the same park, taking the same route, leaving, and returning at the same time every day. His neighbors joked that they could set their watches by when he left his house...
I’ve always heard that a good diet is based on 2,000 calories. If you want to lose weight, one way is to eat less than that. If you want to gain weight, eat more than that. Whether you gain fat or muscle depends on what you eat. It even says a diet is based on 2,000 calories on the nutrition label of my Honey Nut Cheerios. I didn’t really know how much 2,000 calories was and what I...
This year for lent my wife and I decided to wake up an hour earlier to see the sunrise. Every day for 40 days. We had been missing the beautiful tropical sunrise and wanted to take advantage of living by the sea in Puerto Rico. If we were getting up an hour earlier that would mean we should go to bed an hour early. For us, that’s 10 pm. That’s a pretty early bedtime unless...
Eating out at a restaurant is usually a pleasure unless you live on the outer edge of a tropical island like I do where there aren’t many restaurants. Those that we do have are not any better than Applebee’s. Before moving here we didn’t eat out that much, but now we rarely eat out. So why don’t we eat out? Because eating out is triple bad for you. I’m not going to...
Hey hey. I'm Trajan. I'm a minimalist entrepreneur who loves exploring the world (42 countries), learning new things (7 languages) and trying to get better every day (working on my backsquat).
I write about entrepreneurship and building an optimized and happy life through systems, good habits and scientific research.
Join me and we'll discover how we can build businesses we can be proud of.