I haven't been traveling quite as long as GP but here's my two cents. Even as an introvert getting social interaction improves travel so much.
In a new city try to find a 'social hostel' (not a party hostel, unless that's your thing) with organized walking/food tours. Go on said tours and chat with everyone. After the tour see if anyone wants to get dinner/drinks/sight-see together.
Basically everyone in common areas at a hostel will be open to conversation at least. Be the initiator, chat with people, organize a group to go get dinner, etc.
If you aren't good at being the initiator, try to find someone who is and befriend them. Add people on whatsapp/messenger and setup a hostel group chat.
Befriend people who are also traveling longer term, they're usually more open to change plans a bit.
Socializing takes more effort and most relationships will be fleeting, that's the nature of the beast. But nothing makes a trip like organizing a small group of friends to travel together to a few different cities. You can create much stronger bonds and even some life-long friends.
This is probably my prejudice but 'social hostel' to me suggests under 30yrs old. I find at my age while I have no trouble hanging out with people in their 20s there are issues. For example having to eat at the cheapest places because none of them are financially secure yet. Or listening to their 20 something issues and feeling far outside of that time. There's also probably getting use to more comfort as in the comfort of a nice private room with a nice bed and nice private bathroom instead of a cot and shared bathroom. You could say that's being spoiled but the older you get the more likely you have back problems or bathroom problems that the comfort helps with.
I feel like you're way too defensive about your viewpoint! This seems 100% understandable. This guy is just talking about what's worked from his experience.
If anything, I can't imagine having more money making things harder. Wouldn't you be able to join a travel group? I guess the main issue there is people would probably be coming with their families, though.
There's gotta be some way to meet other bachelors who are decently well off.
The effects of this are easiest to see with online recipes; the highest ranking recipes are all thousand word ramblings with a recipe tacked on at the end. Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'
I noticed this too and made a plugin that saves me a lot of time; it copies the recipe into a container and puts it in a modal at the top of the page with original formatting intact.
> Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'
That seems specious. By that reasoning we could predict long form articles would triumph over short ones, but that doesn't bear out.
It seems just as plausible that there's a population of readers that do like those terrible rambling stories and tend to be more loyal to a site if they do, vs a large population who will just click on whatever recipes show up at the top of the search results with a reasonable sounding recipe name.
Recipe sites also rip each other off all the time, and it would be difficult to tell where the authoritative source of a recipe was. The personal story part is harder to rip off without being caught as a scraper (and may then boost your SEO prospects).
That was an explanation of why long articles that don't have recipes at the end aren't consistently ranked higher than short articles that don't have recipes at the end.
You don't care about how that cookie recipe that only uses four ingredients changed their whole live and how their children just love it and the whole office goes nuts when they bring them in?
Yeah I don't either, I just wanna know how to make the damn cookie.
Previously I would save notes and never use them. Now my notes are set up in a way that I get more projects done. Having reference material progressively summarized makes collecting ideas and shaping it into a deliverable way easier. Loading context for a project is way easier with a system like this, it makes an interruption much less painful.
The other benefit of taking the course is the forum, plenty of smart people to meet, discuss pkm and other ideas.
Derek's book notes inspired me to post my own [1]. Making the effort to clean up my notes and go through them strengthens the lessons learned.
However, I'm not sure how valuable these types of notes are for others. Often I find a passage that resonates with me falls flat for others, and vice versa. It depends on other books you've read, life context, etc.
I do try to indicate who might find the book helpful, or who should probably skip it.
I've been using focusmate for months, it's surprisingly effective (I figured since they can't see my screen I'd go on hn/twitter anyways, but I dont). Not only is it good for staying on task, I find the biggest benefit is committing to be in your chair at a certain time.
Commoncog has a nice general overview [2].
[1]: http://teachtogether.tech/en/ [2]: https://commoncog.com/blog/teaching-tech-together/