Author: Paul Garay

  • The Wisdom of Slowing Down

    Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down by Eknath Easwaran This book is repetitive and is longer than it needs to be. Nevertheless, it has plenty of gems especially for people with Type A personalities. I remember reading this in 2018 when I felt paralyzed and overwhelmed by all the goals that I have…

  • Don’t be married to your ideas

    For a long time, humans believed that the earth was the center of the universe while the sun, stars, and other planets revolve around it. Copernicus challenged the idea in the 16th century by stating the sun was the center. Surgeons have been killing patients with their own germs until Ignaz Semmelweis introduced hand washing with chlorinated…

  • Fooled by Randomness

    It is difficult to describe the level of depth and wisdom that Fooled By Randomness brings. On one hand, Nassim Taleb takes me into the world of trading, finance, and economics, and shows me the weaknesses (and irrelevance) of their math, models and theories. One cannot scientifically measure risk. Tomorrow is unknown and trying to…

  • Learning is non-linear

    When I turned 30 in 2019, I took up tennis. I had too many injuries playing basketball over the years (e.g. partial MCL tear, grade 1 and grade 2 ankle sprains, rotator cuff tendinitis) that I decided to switch to a less physical sport. I could have opted for swimming but my 45-minute laps were…

  • On Chris Dixon’s climbing the wrong hill

    Okay folks, I have been in the crypto and blockchain rabbit hole lately. So far, the best podcast that I have listened to about this space is Tim Ferriss episode 542 with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant. It has added to my confidence on the future of blockchain, decentralization, and peer-to-peer money. A portion of…

  • The Inner Game of Tennis

    The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey could be described in multiple ways. It is a philosophical book using tennis as a tool to explain his thoughts. Or it is a tennis book with philosophical underpinnings. Either way, this book has high reviews on Amazon and Goodreads because it goes beyond tennis. I play…

  • 1,000 true fans

    I read 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelly in 2017 and ever since I could not stop telling fellow entrepreneurs about this concept. Although the article was originally written in 2008, the theory is more feasible now than it was then. An artist/creator who sells $100 worth of merchandise in a year to 1,000 true…

  • Washing machine and social media

    The washing machine, what an invention. I was hand washing my favorite shirt earlier because the machine could not remove some dirt on it. This got me thinking. What if I washed all of my clothes manually like the good ol’ days? I probably would spend 2 to 3 hours washing and hanging them. By…

  • WordPress, I’m back…

    I have been developing websites in WordPress since 2015. I wanted to learn something new so I tried building this blog using static site generators Jekyll and Hugo. While I find Jekyll to be okay, I encountered numerous errors installing some of their gems. After successfully building a Jekyll blog on my local server, I…

  • Slow down, no need to rush

    I decided to learn the guitar last August 2020. I needed another outlet from the monotony of home life during a pandemic.  I gave myself 6 months to “learn” the guitar. Obviously, I was in for a rude awakening as the first 2-3 months alone was literally painful. Fretting the strings to play basic chords…