Oh, you mean _in_ the tech industry? I'd probably spend a fair amount of time working on space tech and real time software. There are untold lessons in reliability, efficiency and know-how that I'd like to at least glimpse before I'm gone - I've had enough of the mess that the Web has become in any of those regards.
I would say goodbye to web development and start working on a sustainable farm. I started gardening this year and it's the most enjoyable thing I have done in a very long time. being able to do that on a larger scale seems quite wonderful.
I'd spend my days on outdoor activities. Hiking mountain biking. Skiing. Just getting some rays and fresh crisp air. I'd spend my nights on making a real change in the world. I don't know how but I'd try to use my skills in business and software to find ways to build software for those areas that desperately need it, but aren't a target customer of any modern startups.
I've had the same pet project rattling around in my head since ~2007. It makes me sad that someone hasn't stepped in and done the work to make it a reality yet.
There would be a lot of luck involved in a project like this. If you can't get it to go viral, you can't source the crowd; if you can't source the crowd, you can't get the content you need; etc...
I'm not actually sure how to get over the "no content" moat, to be honest. Maybe build the basic framework and then market it as a stackoverflow alternative at first? This would, of course, involve mapping more than just conceptual and procedural masteries. I was thinking of including versioned systems as well (since versioning is the one thing that stackoverflow sucks at).
While a mapping of conceptual and procedural masteries to occupations could be used for syllabus creation (by teachers or autodidacts), it could also be used for performance evaluations and for improving learning systems.
If I had known that a general mapping of masteries required for web development with Ruby on Rails looked like [0], then I probably would have approached the subject with a more focused mindset.
I've been past this point for about a year now, living on the profits of my business stuff, all of which is ticking away well enough that I can get away with a 10 minute or less "work day" most days.
As others here have predicted, I spend a lot of time outdoors (having moved to France specifically for the rock climbing) and building tree forts in the back garden for the kids. Pretty much any day can be a day off, so if the sun is shining you probably won't find me at the computer.
I also find I still work quite a bit (which translates to a few days a week for me). Partly because I realize that products come and go, and that these ones will eventually plateau then fade away, so I'd better have another one in the pipeline to replace them when that happens.
But partly because it's fun. This has been my hobby since I was a kid, and it's only an accident that somebody decided that we should start paying computer programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the 90s. Had that not happened, I'd be an Engineer who programmed in his spare time. I used to spend most of each year traveling, and I'd find that the thing that brought me back to the "world" was never money, but the need to use my brain again.
I bet that even if this next thing [1] takes off and leaves me idle again, I'll probably find another fun project to work on.
Fitness, I lived a 5 minute commute to work last year and I spent over an hour a day in the gym. My body and mind thanked me for it but unfortunately old habits die hard.
My passive income streams take care of the necessities, this is what happened to me:
- I took 1 month off. Seriously. No computers, just reading, playing games and swimming. I needed a break.
- I spent 3 months leaning Deep Learning from the fundamentals - learning without an urgency of time meant I could do things like: I couldn't remember the chain rule in calculus, so I could just stop my lessons there and go and spend 3-4 hours learning that, then resume lessons - this ability to stop and research as required was immensely powerful to getting a deep understanding.
I have spent the last 6 months building SignalBox - a Deep learning platform. I now have 15 large customers, and I'm scaling up -- I cant keep up to be honest, but automation is helping me scale this out a lot.
I am now focusing more on computational chemistry and molecular exploration with Deep Learning.
I really think Universal Basic Income is a good thing, because although a large part of the population could piss it away, I am by no means unique, and there must be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of other "me"s out there that would benefit from having the necessities paid for so that they could just produce great work.
Absolutely a meaningful way of living a life. Forget about hundred of thousands, even few thousand radical thinker can change the world in a significant way thus reducing poverty, diseases and social inequalities.
1. As a ex-biologist and ex-scientist I wonder how the deep learning can be used to leverage that can put direct dent into certain fields such as drug discovery for genetic diseases and cancer thus saving many lives.
2. How it can be used to collect social data in a larger scale from different social networking sites and analyzed to predict criminal behaviors and prevent future criminal actions.
3. On natural disasters and climate related warning etc.
4. Searching for extraterrestrial lives.
5. And the most thrilling impact on mankind will be using AI and deep learning, can we preserve the entire neuronal network mappings of a human brain and able to simulate its thought process and mental action after he/she is gone?
Spend a year or so learning woodworking, specifically furniture making. Then spend a couple years building the home I really want on some land in the mountains, specific location TBD.
Then travel the world with my girlfriend, eventually our family.
