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Awareness of Self:
Mind Over Matter
Kenneth Reitz
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Welcome.
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@kennethreitz
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github.com/kennethreitz
• ~18 serious projects.
• 100+ experiments.
• OSX-GCC-Installer: 56TB of downloads.
• Requests: 45 million downloads.
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Requests
HTTP for Humans
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Other Interests...
• Street Photography
• Synthesizers and Music Production
• World Travel (~150,000 miles last year)
• Public Speaker (29 events last year)
• Classic Video Games!
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Bad Habits
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Two Years Ago
• Evangelism at Heroku (travelled to 47 Cities)
• Worked on Open Source 24 hours a day.
• Addicted to caffeine (3–5 Red Bulls daily).
• Drank alcohol often at tech events.
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Miami
Austin
Santa Clara
Montpellier Zurich
Twin Cities Hobart
San Francisco
Arlington
Paris
Omaha
Columbus
Los Angeles Sydney
Baltimore
Washington DC
Little Rock
St. Louis Asbury, NJ
Philadelphia
Dublin
Raleigh
Prague Lille
Toronto
Brno
London
Stokholm
Las Vegas Brussels
Tel Aviv
Jerusalem
Istanbul Portland
Pittsburgh
Amsterdam Groningen
Warsaw Boston
Cleveland
Bangalore
Nashville Nashville Montreal
Singapore Tokyo NYC
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My Addictions
• Addicted to travel.
• Addicted to open source.
• Addicted to caffeine.
• Addicted to social pressures.
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Burn-Out
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Remediation
• Took a month off of work.
• Cancelled all upcoming travel events.
• Re-established my sense of home and family.
• Focused on my arts.
• Back to work!
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Migraine
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The Migraine
• Shortly after returning from work, I woke up
one day with a persistent Migraine that
couldn’t be cured.
• Nothing I could do would make it go away,
day after day after day…
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The Migraine
• Saw a neurologist, started taking anti-
epileptic medication.
• My entire life became about optimizing for
removing migraine triggers.
• Perception of everything was the trigger.
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Wellness
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Blessing in Disguise
• Migraine forced me to re-evaluate every part
of my life—physical, emotional, social, &c.
• Removed social stress from social-media.
• Stopped addictions caffeine, alcohol, sugar.
• Paleo, elimination diets, hydration, etc.
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Blessing in Disguise
• Opened myself to deep meditation, healthy
living, and spiritual awareness.
• Meditation was the cure for my headaches.
• Migraine: completely controlled (242 days).
• Total weight lost: 110 pounds.
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Lessons Learned
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Lessons Learned
• The things you put into your body effect you.
• Includes: food, hydration level, social media.
• Caffeine is a hell of a drug.
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Lessons Learned
• It’s better for me to listen to my body,
making constant adaptive (intuitive) changes
to my lifestyle in the moment.
• Having a friend to discuss your wellness
experiments with is extremely helpful.
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Lessons Learned
• Excluding everything seems to be
detrimental. It’s much better to cure an
addiction than to distance yourself from it.
• Gluten makes me exhausted, but only when I
remove it from my diet.
• Sometimes, you just need time & space.
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Direct Experience
• There are many intolerances that others have
harsh opinions about — working from home,
gluten sensitivity, requirements of space.
• Your direct experience is the only data you
have to go off of.
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Live Life, Love Life.
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Live Life, Love Life.
Don’t dismiss your
experience — hack it!
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Also, you’re dehydrated.
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