Coney Island
9 April, 2019
3 minute read
What am I working on?
I’m mostly back to the school grind this week with two exams and a quiz to prepare for. Throughout this past week I touched up my wireframe for an app I’m working on to include design. You can check it out here. There’s room for improvement design-wise but it works for now. Let me know what you think! I’ll be touching up the Adobe XD prototype on that this week as well. On the development side of things, I got a repo set up for the app and the basic navigation built out using React Navigation. My plan for this week is to get a rough layout going on the home screen that links to other screens besides the bottom navigation and read up on authentication in React Native. I’m also reading up on APIs for my internship this summer and working with Symfony again. Look out for a post in the future about my internship!
What am I reading?
To be honest, I’ve still been all over the place with what I’m reading (surprise I know)👻. I like picking up a different book each day to read and continue where I left off. I find it helps keep the information fresh in my mind and I’m better able to relate things I may have read in one book to another. For me – that helps solidify the ideas in my head and keep things interesting. I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks including Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, but found those work best for long drives or workouts. That being said I’ve continued Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson, and William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. I also finished MAKE: Bootstrapper’s Handbook by Pieter Levels and plan to review it in another post.
One of the key points I took away from last week’s readings was Irvine’s discussion of Epictetus’s “dichotomy of control”. He interprets the quote “Some things are in our control and others not.” from Epictetus’s The Enchiridion to really mean: > “There are things over which we have complete control and things over which we don’t have complete control. Stated in this way, the dichotomy is a genuine dichotomy.”
This dichotomy can easily be rendered a practical Stoic “tip” as there are, and will be things in our own lives that we either have complete control over or little to none at all. I’m sure you could think of something right now that fits this description👻. As an aside, it seems fitting that a similar idea is echoed by the great Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (who drew inspiration from Epictetus’s work) in his Meditations: > “What are Alexander [the Great], [Julius] Caesar, and Pompey when compared to Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? For these latter [were wise and free]. As to the others, consider how many cares they had and to how many things they were enslaved!”
Quote I’m digging…
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” ~ Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
What am I listening to?
“People Floating” by Renny Conti