Readit NewsIt took me a week or so to start having a healthier breakfast and it become part of my routine, and I've been trying to have healthier lunches for years now (and still regularly fail, normally because at lunchtimes I'm tired, stressed and yearning for comfort foods like sandwiches and snack bars).
I think anyone who believed exactly 21 days was the magic number for all habits, for all people, was grossly naive.
But what I do find is that after 21 days it's no longer novel, it's just what you do, if somebody asks you what you do about X, you no longer say "I'm trying this new thing around X, and...", you tell them your new habit. Identifying that habit as part of who you are is key to it being sticky. For some people, and for some habits, that might be true after a week, or it might take a year, but it's an important step, and if you want that habit to stick you should get to it as fast as you can.
This has always been key to me. I've succeeded to identify myself as a runner, as someone who speaks French, as someone who reads books. But my identification as someone who has meaningful programming side-project, who has a garden and so on is to weak to succeed.
I wonder if companies would do that today without heavy incentives. I can’t imagine for example a VC backed company doing that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2025/01/28/the-data-...?
reason according to wikipedia:
> Vasa sank because she had very little initial stability—resistance to heeling under the force of wind or waves acting on the hull. This was due to the distribution of mass in the hull structure, and to the ballast, guns, provisions, and other objects loaded on board placing a lot of weight too high in the ship. This put the centre of gravity very high relative to the centre of buoyancy, thus making the ship readily heel in response to little force, and not providing enough righting moment for her to become upright again.
My memory of vasa museum: At that time, ship designers not necessarily calculated center of mass and center of buoyancy.
Yes, this was in the microservices-heyday.
If you buy the lowest quality, it is composed of "particle board" (AKA pressed sawdust) and "corrugated cardboard" (https://youtu.be/24F5JlKkxR4?t=76). This furniture is incredibly easy to break and it will often not support being screwed together twice.
If you buy the higher quality furniture, which is often soft wood like pine (which is still incredibly low quality compared to traditional hard wood-based furniture), it will stand up a little better. It still scratches easily, because it is soft wood, but at least you can reassemble it after it has been disassembled.
Does Ikea sell any traditional hardwood furniture that is made out of things like maple, oak? I think not. Did they ever? I think they might have early one, but I could be wrong.
To be honest, it is likely a net environmental win that Ikea uses these cheap and low quality woods and sawdust and cardboard. Pine grows so much faster than hardwood, and reusing sawdust and cardboard is really low impact on the environment. I guess you have to balance that against the shorter lifespan of its furniture.
The reality is that few people have the mental and psychological constitution required to do the job of CEO at any decent sized company. You don’t need to look further than startups to empirically know that most people, even when self-selecting, can’t do the job of CEO even when playing the easy mode of a small company.
Getting to that point takes many years, to be sure. But the language is simple enough, and changes slowly enough, that it is not an unrealistic goal -- the way it would be in C++, or Rust, or just about any other mainstream language.
Anecdotally, programmer colleagues that view themselves as artists are generally harder to work with than those that identifies as craftsmen. It's generally much easier to have a sound argument about someone's work if they don't view it as their art.