In recent months (and throughout its history…) there have been huge fluctuations in the prices of cryptocurrencies. There are two intriguing aspects about the recent price changes (Jan-Feb 2018):

• The prices have decreased for a longer period (not a flash crash like many before)
• The prices of individual currencies have decreased in very high correlation with the overall market

It was very interesting to see participating investors being very vocal on picking the right coin that was going or had gone “to the moon” during the rapid increase of prices in 2017. …

Everyone (especially on Medium) talks about success, but few talk about what the term stands for. I find that alarming since running after the wrong goals does not get us any closer to what makes us tick every day. When everyone around you talks about how to run faster, it is very easy to take the current direction as the correct direction for granted.

A new opportunity comes along, a new project jumps up.

You ask yourself, “Should I do it?”

You ask other people “Should I do it?”

Even when the feedback you get is a resounding “YES” it…

People tend to be generally either extroverts or introverts. Some people get energy from socializing with others and other people feel like any social interaction drains them completely.

When it comes to creative work then the work environment is essential.

Some people like to work in big groups and get lots of external input and others like to have long and lonely work sessions to produce their best work.

I have personally experienced that both environments are equally important and it is very hard to produce the best output only using one of the options.

Social environments are best for problem definitions.

When you are around other…

Rewind to yesterday evening.

The biggest party of the college year was to start at 8.

At 6 I am sitting at home and thinking whether to go or not. Come an hour later and I am still contemplating. Classic case of FOMO:

What will I miss when I do not show up?

Then it is already 9. FOMO gets the best of me and I take a shower, dress up and open the door to leave. One foot out of the door, I realize:

“This is not you, Heiki.”

I step back inside, close the door, make myself comfortable…

Think about all the interactions that surround us throughout most of our day. It could be helping out colleagues at work, helping out your loved one to cook dinner or agreeing to watch after your friend’s kids while he goes out. We do most of these things out of free will, but we still expect to get something in return. Even when not immediately, then the thought is in the back of our heads.

What if that’s the same reason why those small tasks often feel so exhausting to us. …

The market for personal assistants was created by Amazon when they launched Amazon Echo just two years ago in the summer of 2015.

Right now, there are currently around 12M Echos (all products combined) sold. It currently holds around 70% of the total market share for all personal home assistants.

Besides the original Echo, Amazon recently also launched Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Echo Look:

Y Combinator has uploaded all of their “How to build a startup” course materials online, that took place a couple of years ago. At the moment they are also running an MOOC and uploading new videos each week, but as the videos are quite long and not always too content dense they are not easy to follow.

I watched all of their previous class videos and made notes from each of the videos from most relevant pieces of information. …

I remember listening to a podcast where one of the hosts said that stress is the achiever’s word for fear. I agree that some levels of stress can be rather motivating and often gives me energy to keep on rolling, but burnout is a whole other animal.

Today (and during a lot of recent days as well…) I felt like not doing absolutely anything. And it’s not that I did not do anything useful. It’s I found everything that I did very forced. Forced in a really bad way. …