Johannes Herrnegger 🚢

Now I’m in trouble.

While in the beginning all the good advice for the consistent publishing on the Ship30 community contained at least a bit of „prepare your articles in advance“, I still haven’t done it. That’s why today on our last official writing day I’m still on day 28/30 and that’s why now I’m writing this piece still hungover from the night before and after 3 hours of sleep in the train to my best friends birthday brunch.

I’m still happy about the choice that I took my laptop with me and that I’ll publish something today. And I will also finish the 30 pieces tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, I promise!

I missed the train on purpose.

For all my life I trained to walk out of my flat as late as possible to then run like a lunatic to the train and catch it on the last second. My brother and I even developed a game where we try to be as exact as possible – so if we don't jump into the closing doors we're practically too early.

This time it was different. I think I was almost there and had a good ten minutes until it drives. But then I saw a mother of a friend on the street, greeted her and walked on. I don't know why, but I had the feeling that I want to talk a bit more to her so I turned around and started a conversation. After all, there was still some time left.

I: "How are you?"

She: "To be honest, not so good, my husband died 1,5 years ago."

I've never really talked to her before — we only kindly greeted each other each time, so I did not expect this answer at all. But from that, a wonderful conversation about life and death started. In my surrounding almost no one talks about death and grief although this is such a normal aspect of life that everyone has to deal with at some point.

After some time, I saw my train leaving in the background and I did not care. I was very grateful for this conversation. In the end we hugged each other and moved on.

Have you heard of Will Smith? What a silly question, I guess everybody knows him. In November 2021 he released an autobiography that he wrote together with Mark Manson (the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck). I was not really familiar with his life and only knew him from the movies.

I think this was the first biography that I read. And I have to say - it was an incredible ride. To be fair — I listened to the audiobook. Still not sure if you can say "reading" there, but who gives a shit? And I would definitely recommend you to listen to the audiobook instead of reading the book because it's narrated by Will Smith himself and beautifully decorated with some rap music parts in between.

It's one of the first books in a long time that I was enjoying so much that I was sad it finished at some point. Also, if you read and liked Mark Manson's books you will recognize his writing style and also I feel like he brought in some of his wisdom.

And not to spoil anything here, but it this guy went through some really strong ups and downs and was able to take a lot of insights and lessons from those phases with a good portion of self awareness. Starting with discipline, failures, big life goals, relationships, his motivations and finally spiritual – there are so many good stories packed into this book. I highly recommend you to read (or better listen to) Will.

You are not important.

No no, please don't feel attacked. I just write down a thought that I had a couple of weeks ago. Right now this thought feels depressing also for myself, but I swear, it was a really uplifting thought.

Let me reconstruct. I listened to the Tim Ferriss Show with Tim Urban from Wait but Why. If you don't know it yet, I can really recommend. I want to take one particular example that he stated.

Imagine aliens read a book of the last 100,000 years of humankind in a book of 700 pages. The first 690 pages nothing much happens, then suddenly religions, countries, telescopes, discoveries, so much is happening!

Suddenly, on Page 700, we go to the space station. We have the moon. We have airplanes. We have cars just on Page 700. So, 699 pages, we only [...] have this kind of simple transportation, communication. Now, we have Face Time. We have telephone. We have the internet. Crazy. Less than a billion people for the first 699 pages. On Page 700 alone, we cross the one, two, three, four, five, six and seven billion person marks.

Somehow this made me realize how small we are. How in the great scheme of things we're absolutely not important. So liberating. No matter what you do, probably in 200 years no one will care about this. So don't beat yourself up for every mistake you made or every thing you did or did not do.

Two weeks ago a friend of mine told me about a challenge he faces. He has a very important exam that he needs to prepare for, but usually he does not start learning until a few days before when it’s almost too late. I just wrote an essay about accountability buddies at exactly that day, so I asked him if he wants to do some kind of accountability with me.

We made the deal that every day he will write me a message as soon as he has learned for 2 hours. He also added a workout every day.  An important note is that he’s allowed to have 2-3 skip days within the ~30 days of the challenge. With that it makes it easier to stick to it in the long run.

For me has been a great experience so far. You should definitely also help a friend with reaching their goals and here are the reasons:

Reason #1: It’s fun

Helping someone achieving their goals is a very satisfying experience.

Reason #2: It’s motivating

Because of his persistence, he also motivates me to stick to the writing habit. So by holding him accountable, he is unknowingly also holding me accountable which is a nice side-effect that I did not think of.

Reason #3: It’s fulfilling

You help your friends reaching their own goals. This is something really fulfilling and they also will be grateful for that.

Reason #4: It’s easy

Of course that also depends how persistent your friend is and how active you have to be. With this friend, I don’t really have to do much. I don’t even think about it and on the next morning when I turn on the phone I have his message.

Yesterday evening I was invited to a friend and we had some very interesting conversations. After talking about our deepest inner secrets like love stories, trips to America and Star Wars we also talked about sleep and podcasts. We found out that all four of us listen to podcasts while falling asleep.

I thought I might be one of the only people who need that. That's how it feels like — that i need this background noise to prepare my mind and my body for sleep. In the recent years, when I was alone and tried falling asleep there was always the feeling of something missing. I cannot really get to the bottom of what exactly it is, but it might be that I need it to distract myself even to fall asleep. As if TV, audiobooks and podcasts the whole day is not enough, I also need it to fall asleep. I mean, it makes sense. Another suspicion is that it's just a habit. Probably I don't really need it but I'm used to it so it feels wrong if I don't have a podcast while falling asleep.

Now that I think about it, I also listened to music with my brother while falling asleep when we were children. So maybe I have trained to do that for all my life. For me this is an interesting phenomenon. I will definitely explore more of this topic soon. Can you relate to that? Do you also need some music or podcast to fall asleep?

And it happened again. I just could not resist. Like the alluring Sirens singing their seductive song to Odysseus — only this time they sing about a new JavaScript framework I should try.

If you don't come from the web development world you have to know that this is a regular thing. The range of libraries and frameworks on the market is so huge that you probably need a few lifetimes to grasp everything. And it grows. Every day there are thousands of developers working on their own little new library or framework that fits exactly their needs and that they need to present to the world.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing, there is progress in the JavaScript landscape. But for us developers, one of our most important jobs is to refrain from this constant FOMO on new stuff. If you're constantly checking out on the latest things, there is no time of actually building your stuff.

I got pretty good at that. At goodbag they already had a working app when I joined so this decision was already made. And although I knew different options that I wanted to try more, I am very happy today that this decision was taken from me.

Over the last days I was finding myself again flirting with this new attractive framework. But this time I'll follow the voices of the Sirens. Sometimes it's just fun to play and get your feet into new fields. Who knows what can be found there? And maybe, just maybe it will be the perfect one. The one my heart was longing for such a long time. And then it will be the last one I will ever try.

Never ever would I do Analytics. It's the worst.

Can you believe what I'm doing here? I'm trying to recreate the format of my most "successful" post.

So here it is, do whatever you want and give me data!

I guess at some point in your life you've crossed the Pareto principle (or how it's also called the 80/20 rule). It "states that for many outcomes, 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes". Originally it stems from a study of the economist Vilfredo Pareto who discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. From this, he and other people found this to be true in many other areas.

For example in software development I can roughly plan 20% of the time for 80% of a feature that I want to implement. If I need to implement the 20% of edge cases and details to be perfect it needs 80% of the time.

I found that this principle can be applied in your daily life and it might make sense to ask yourself if 80% is enough. Do you really need to apply all the self development methods that you've learned? Do yoga, meditate, do intermittent fasting, be a minimalist, live vegan, drink no coffee… the list does not end if you want to follow every little thing you've read or heard on the internet. Try to focus on one or two things at a time that have the most impact.

Not only is this absolutely sufficient, it will also ease your mind and will support your mental health. I found that everything should be followed with some moderation. Sometimes it's just time to be compassionate with yourself and see that less is more.

Yesterday was the first day in our challenge that I did not write an essay. I allowed myself to do this because it was a special day for me. I had my first choir concert! Today I want to share this experience with you.

I joined the choir 2 years ago, in March 2020 – at around the same time when the pandemic started. That means I had one rehearsal before we all went to lockdown. From that moment on we only practiced over zoom. Shouting into your notebook was a pretty nice variation in those boring days (probably not for my neighbors though), but there was a lot missing. We could only practice one voice group at a time (so I practiced only with all the tenors) and also I did not really know the people yet and that was also a pretty strange feeling.

This semester it was the first time there was the realistic chance of a concert, so we all were really excited, although you could feel that also in this semester did not have enough time. One day before at the dress rehearsal you could feel many insecurities and it made me a bit nervous. Our conductor said that this will be a "spot landing" — and now I'm happy to say she was right. We just started singing and almost everything went perfectly well!

After 2 years – finally – my first concert. Such beautiful feelings – excitement, pride, relief. Sticking it out through the tough phases of the whole pandemic thing paid off.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting thought. I think what many people don't understand is what people really mean when they want to take care about our environment. That we don't want to pollute the planet earth if it's not absolutely necessary and that we are willing to change our behavior in our best knowledge to protect nature and the earth.

Here is my thought: The Earth does not care at all about "the environment". What we care about is that in the future we still can live on this planet with all of its wonders and resources we need. If we can't manage to change and take care about "the environment", at some point we humans won't be able to exist here or at least a lot less humans than right now. Earth does not care about that, it will be probably regenerate pretty quickly after that.

What we really care about is us and our children. Humankind. So let's all work together and do our part in that.

PS: I know this is a very simplistic description of the problem and the solution. I just wanted to write down one thought and maybe provoke some thoughts about it in you.

Imagine walking for hours and hours and still the top of the mountain is not in sight. You don't even like hiking but your parents force you every time to walk with them, right? How can they be so mean every time? You did not want to go in the first place and now you just can't walk any further. It's over.

That's how I often felt in my childhood and youth. My parents loved hiking. Not only the small hills we have around Vienna — every few months we visited my relatives in the Alps and there are the real mountains — the huge ones.

So here I was standing and complaining to my dad and with his wisest parenting he told me one sentence:

Just one more curve.

Okay, I gave in and slightly motivated to get behind the next turn I continued walking. And there it was — finally — no hut, no cross, no top? Just the path continuing. He blatantly lied to me! I was upset. But then he said it again: "Just one more curve". That kept me going until finally we reached the top and I was really happy that I continued walking so far.

We developed this inside joke and at every hike my brother and I started to saying the sentence to each other. Somehow it helped to imagine the goal is right around the corner and that kept us going.