The Curious Engineer

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Nat Eliason

nateliason.com/blog

Articles by Nat Eliason

Essays / personalGeneralAI / MLCrypto / fintech

’15’20’25
Posts
334 from 15 Sep 2014 to 20 Jan 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://www.nateliason.com/feed.xml

2026 2

  1. The Birth of Paradise is Now Available!
  2. The Birth of Paradise

2025 19

  1. Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Story
  2. I Canceled My Family's Health Insurance (and joined CrowdHealth)
  3. To Be Useful You Must Risk Offending
  4. Don't Waste Your 20s Not Taking Big Risks
  5. The Past and Future of Vibe Coding
  6. Having Kids Has Been Far Easier and Better than I Expected
  7. The Little Kegel App that Could
  8. IT'S TIME! My Sci-Fi Thriller Husk is Now Available
  9. LAST CHANCE for the Husk Preorder Bundle!
  10. Only 1 Week Left for the Husk Preorder Bundle
  11. Quarterly Author Update: April 2025
  12. How to Outline and Plan a Novel
  13. Preorder My Sci-Fi Novel, Husk
  14. To Improve Yourself You Must Know Yourself
  15. Fast Cash vs. Slow Equity
  16. The Strange Fruits of Exploration
  17. Between Drafts: The Podcast for Writers and Aspiring Authors
  18. How to Build Your Own Software with AI (No Experience Necessary)
  19. Quarterly Author Update: January 2025

2024 25

  1. The Best Books I Read in 2024
  2. Why (And How) I'm Self-Publishing My Novel
  3. Don't Work Faster. Transition Faster.
  4. Quarterly Author Update: October 2024
  5. Avoiding the Prep Trap: A Key to Rapid Learning
  6. 7 Things I Learned Drafting a Novel in 26 Days
  7. 30-Day First Draft: Week 2.5 Report & Lessons
  8. 30-Day First Draft: Week 1 Report & Lessons
  9. The 30-Day First Draft Challenge
  10. The Most Useful Feedback Hurts
  11. Slow Habits
  12. How to Be (Reasonably) Hard on Yourself
  13. TODAY'S THE DAY!
  14. The Scariest Day of My Life
  15. How I Made And Lost Millions in Crypto
  16. My Masterclass on Better Storytelling
  17. 10 Things I Learned Losing 10 Million Dollars
  18. On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned from My Insane 2 Years of Study
  19. Harry Potter and the Secret to Learning
  20. How We Designed a FUN Nonfiction Book Cover
  21. Crypto Confidential Pre-Order Bonuses!
  22. Traditional Publishing is Great, Actually
  23. The Window of Opportunity is Here
  24. This Moment is Your Life
  25. A Map is Not a Blueprint: Why Fixing Nature Fails

2023 23

  1. Announcing my Book: Crypto Confidential!
  2. Softening Our Inner Critic
  3. Make the Commitment You're Afraid to Make
  4. How I Finally Found the Magic of Meditation
  5. Do You Want a Happy Life or a Memorable Life?
  6. Getting Too Good at the Wrong Thing
  7. Insecurity Screams, Confidence Whispers
  8. It's Still a Long Game
  9. You Can Handle Much More Than You Think
  10. Proof You Can Do Hard Things
  11. You Have No Idea How Much Better You Can Feel
  12. How to Get Over the Fear of Creating Things
  13. 40 Lessons from 30 Years
  14. The Bad Goal of $5m by 30
  15. I'm Writing a Book!
  16. Great Writing is Invisible
  17. Using ChatGPT as a Writing Coach
  18. Maybe Your Sleep Tracking is Killing You?
  19. Kickstarting TikTok: 55,500 Followers & 7m views in 6 Weeks
  20. Cope as an Essential Life Skill
  21. Make Big Money Mistakes Early
  22. Sapiens is Good You Silly Status Monkeys
  23. Permission to Slow Down

2022 81

  1. The Best Things I Read in 2022
  2. The Childlike Love of Challenge
  3. You're Not Struggling Alone
  4. De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
  5. The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas
  6. What AI Can't Write
  7. The Road to Helldorado
  8. What Would Happen to You in a Book?
  9. Known Costs, Unknowable Benefits
  10. Eternal Problems of the Human Mind
  11. Why Bitcoin Lightning is So Exciting
  12. Four Great Decisions per Year
  13. The Merge is Done! Now What?
  14. How to Get Insanely Rich in the Creator Economy
  15. Ask Me Anything #1
  16. Work Life Balance is Impossible
  17. We're Much Weaker than We Think
  18. Why the Ethereum Merge is a Big Deal
  19. Paddling Through the Wilderness
  20. Raising Your Ceiling
  21. The Perfect Work Routine
  22. Breaking Up with Productivity Advice
  23. Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases?
  24. Choose Your Table Wisely
  25. When the Money's Just Too Damn Good
  26. Understanding and Profiting from Crypto Hype Cycles
  27. Potential Future Crypto Hype Cycles
  28. In Praise of Giving Up
  29. The Great Books Project
  30. Most Afraid to Fail
  31. Book Review: The Odyssey
  32. The Locus of Entertainment
  33. Book Review: The Iliad
  34. My Crypto Investing Mistakes and Lessons ('20-'22)
  35. Philosophy, Not Science
  36. Rats, Levers, and Parks: Designing Better Choices
  37. What if You Have it Backwards?
  38. Democratic Authority
  39. One vs. Two Token Models in Crypto Gaming
  40. Leaving the Church of Science
  41. Welcome to Infinite Play
  42. Embracing Time Against Anxiety
  43. Addicted to Speed
  44. Crypto Gaming is Broken. How Do We Fix It?
  45. Can Sunflower Land Build Crypto FarmVille?
  46. Tokenomics 104: How to Launch a Token (Tactics, Questions, Wen, etc)
  47. Lazy Farming the Potential Optimism Airdrop
  48. Will STEPN Bring Crypto to the Masses?
  49. My STEPN Investing & Playing Strategy
  50. Tokenomics 103: Evaluating Token Utility
  51. The Best Ways to Earn Yield on Your ETH
  52. From PFPs to VIDs: The Next Step in NFT Identities
  53. Lessons from Year 29
  54. My Stablecoin Farming Strategy
  55. Tokenomics 102: Digging Deeper on Supply
  56. How JonesDAO Puts Options Trading on Autopilot
  57. First Looks: New Protocol I'm Watching
  58. How Dopex is Bringing Options Trading On-Chain
  59. Field Guide to the Curve Wars: DeFi’s Fight for Liquidity
  60. 2021 Year in Review
  61. Yield DAOs: Leveraging Web3 for Better Offline Living
  62. Can Ethereum Be Ultra- Sound Money? - DeFriday #10
  63. Tokenomics 101: The Basics of Evaluating Cryptocurrencies - DeFriday #19
  64. How Tokemak Automates Low- Risk Yield Farming - DeFriday #16
  65. Solana’s Fast & Cheap Answer to Ethereum’s Gas Wars - DeFriday #13
  66. Regulate Who? The Weird Legal World of DeFi - DeFriday #11
  67. Proof of Green: How Ethereum 2.0 Solves Crypto’s Energy Concerns - DeFriday #8
  68. I Was Wrong About Olympus - DeFriday #15
  69. Living Tax-Free off Magical Internet Money - DeFriday #14
  70. Goodbye Gas Fees: Hello Layer 2 Living - DeFriday #18
  71. Melting Iron: How to Lose $2b in One Day - DeFriday #5
  72. EIP-1559: Can Ethereum Replace Bitcoin as Digital Gold? - DeFriday #7
  73. Decentralized Exchanges: Why Crypto’s First Killer Apps are So Powerful - DeFriday #12
  74. Building Sustainable Web3 Games with Owned Liquidity & Tokenized Assets
  75. Antifragile Finance: How Hacks Make DeFi Stronger - DeFriday #9
  76. The Mind-Bending Magic of Self-Paying Loans - DeFriday #4
  77. DeFriday #3: How Arbitrum Solves Ethereum’s Scaling Challenges
  78. DeFriday 2: Polygon’s Surge & Ethereum’s Future
  79. DeFriday #1: May Market Meltdown Madness
  80. Creating a High Yield “Savings Account” with Crypto & DeFi
  81. Asset Allocation Autopilot: Earning 15%+ APYs in DeFi

2021 14

  1. The Life-Changing Magic of High-Speed Career Sampling
  2. How to Learn Solidity Programming (the Fun Way)
  3. What to Drink Instead of Oatly: Healthy Alternatives
  4. Schrödinger Claims
  5. The Founder Trap
  6. Why NFTs are Valuable
  7. Lessons From Year 28
  8. The Money Pile: When should you take money off the table?
  9. Tie Your Camels
  10. Seek Buyers, not Followers
  11. Be Yourself, Not a Niche
  12. My Goals and Guidelines for 2021
  13. Intentional Laptoping
  14. My 2020 Review, Reflection, and Key Lessons

2020 25

  1. Not a Full-Time Creator
  2. My Last Day at Growth Machine
  3. Personal Leverage: How to Truly 10x Your Productivity
  4. The Problem with Retirement Funds
  5. I'm a Stupid Monkey and You Are Too
  6. How to Train a Dog (or Human)
  7. My First Elk Hunt
  8. How I Spend 5 Minutes Per Day on Email
  9. The Mental Model Behind Every High-Performer I Know
  10. Announcement: I'm Also Posting on Everything!
  11. The 75% Rule for Lifestyle Creep & Early Retirement
  12. How to Eat Meat While Caring About the Environment
  13. How to Make Podcast Listening Productive with Audio Highlighting
  14. 30 Year Thinking
  15. How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life
  16. Improving Idea Flow
  17. College After COVID: How to Get The Best of Both Worlds
  18. Old Business, New Tricks
  19. 5 Lessons from Year 27
  20. How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide
  21. Money or Wealth
  22. Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It
  23. Making Money, Making Happiness
  24. The Best Things I Read in 2020
  25. The Procrustean Bed of Productivity

2019 13

  1. Beyond Happy Hour
  2. How to Use Notion to Set, Track, and Hit Your Goals
  3. Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 3: Getting Our Permits
  4. How to Make Passive Income
  5. 6 Lessons from Year 26
  6. Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 2: Finding and Leasing a Commercial Space
  7. The 6 Best Cheap Project Ideas for Learning Marketing
  8. Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 1: Why Would We Open a Cafe?
  9. Increasing the Difficulty
  10. No, You Don't Need a Budget
  11. How to Set, Track, and Reach Your Goals Using Airtable
  12. How to Start a Podcast in 2019: 8 Steps from Idea to Launch
  13. An Easy, Fast, Personal CRM for Making and Maintaining Friendships

2018 20

  1. The Best Books and Articles I Read in 2018
  2. Systems Without Goals is a Path to Mediocrity
  3. Maybe You Should Go Hunting
  4. How to Raise $25,000 in One Day Without Investors
  5. How to Play Liar's Poker (The Card Game)
  6. Growing Growth Machine: How We Went from 0 to $100k MRR in One Year
  7. Two Years with No Shampoo: My Results, and How to Quit it Yourself
  8. Webflow vs. WordPress: Why I Moved My Site to Webflow
  9. How to Be Really, Really, Ridiculously Productive
  10. The Need for Social Disobedience
  11. 16 Popular Psychology Myths You Probably Still Believe
  12. How to Start an Ecommerce Business in 3 Weeks: Launching Cup & Leaf
  13. My Delicious Bulletproof Tea Recipe for Fat Loss, Ketosis, and Energy
  14. Yes, You Should Delete Facebook. Here's Why.
  15. 21 Tactics to Help You Become a Better Writer
  16. 6 Lessons from Year 25
  17. How to Make Your Own Delicious Kombucha in 7 Days
  18. Forget Commitment: Invest in Something
  19. Easy Keto: How to Sustain a Ketogenic Diet with 5 Simple Rules
  20. Level 3 Thinking: A Unified Theory of Self-Improvement

2017 51

  1. The 12 Best Books I Read in 2017
  2. A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn
  3. Cultivating High-Quality Inputs for High-Quality Outputs
  4. The 18 Best Books for College Students to Read Before Graduating
  5. How to Be More Productive with a Daily System for High Output
  6. The Goal Setting Template for a High-Output Life
  7. Self-Education: Teach Yourself Anything with the Sandbox Method
  8. How to Break Through Any Learning Plateau and Never Stop Growing
  9. The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal
  10. The Article MVP: How to Test Business Ideas Fast, Free, and Solo
  11. Negative Exercise Might be Killing You
  12. How to Free Yourself from Facebook (While Keeping Messenger)
  13. The Destructive Switch from Search to Social
  14. The Spotlight Effect: Why No One Cares About That Thing You Did
  15. I Consumed Nothing but Water for 5 Days. Here's Why, What Happened, and Why it Was Awesome.
  16. The Best Articles to Learn about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrency
  17. How to Move to a New City
  18. Fake News is a Real Problem
  19. The 10 Best Marketing Books for Growing Any Business
  20. How to Easily Start Investing in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
  21. The Incredible Value of Mental Models in a World of Infomania
  22. How to Learn Digital Marketing for (almost) Free in 6 Months
  23. To Change Reality, Stop Denying It
  24. The Wiki Strategy: How to Grow Your Blog to 100k+ Monthly Visitors
  25. The Psychological Benefit of Not Planning
  26. 10 Books to Read After Discovering Stoicism
  27. The Problem With Putting Ourselves in Boxes
  28. Does Your Blog Need a Niche? Maybe Not
  29. How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field
  30. 45 Deliberate Practice Examples for Rapidly Improving Your Skills
  31. The Step-by-Step Guide to Go From Novice to Expert in Any Skill
  32. The Math and Strategy Behind Working Only 4 Months a Year
  33. Why I Sold My Index Funds and Quit the Stock Market (Mostly)
  34. 30 Image Composition Styles for Taking Good Pictures
  35. The Case Against Soap
  36. Use Direct Actions to Get More Freedom in Your Life
  37. A 5-Minute Hack to Stop Feeling Sad, Anxious, Annoyed, etc.
  38. Nat Chat is LIVE! College is Broken, So What Should Young People Do?
  39. GPA vs. Skills: How to Stop Worrying About Grades
  40. No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why.
  41. Could that Be Explained by Marketing?
  42. I Stopped Using Shampoo, and No One Can Tell the Difference
  43. 3 Tactics to Remember that Idea You Just Forgot
  44. Lessons from One Year of Nomadic Passive Income
  45. The Freedom Calculator: How to Retire in 10 Years (or Less)
  46. How to Reach Out to a Writer, Thinker, or Person You Respect
  47. How to get Slack-Style Emoji Codes Everywhere on Mac
  48. Killing the Lion: How to Turn Anxiety into Excitement
  49. Ephemerality vs. Value for Information, Social Media, Life
  50. The A Priori Diet: Extremely Simple Rules for Healthy Eating
  51. True but Misleading

2016 36

  1. Learning Through Layers of Abstraction
  2. The 12 Best Books I Read in 2016
  3. How I Put My Blog in Virtual Reality (Mostly)
  4. Escaping this Explosive Diarrhea of Political Outrage
  5. Why I'm Learning VR (And Maybe You Should Too)
  6. College Students, What Salary Do You ACTUALLY Need?
  7. Is it Risky? Or Challenging?
  8. Don’t Try to be Less Risk Averse, Rethink Risk Instead
  9. 9 Blogging Tactics for 2 Million Views in 2 Years
  10. Do You Want to Do It? Or to Have Done It?
  11. 38 More Projects till You Die: The Opportunity Cost of Focus
  12. I Built a 4-Hour Workweek... What Do I Do Now?
  13. Enjoy the Process: Your Intrinsic Motivation Happiness Machine
  14. Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems
  15. How to Block Annoying Email Popups in 2 Minutes
  16. Option not Obligation: How to Beat the Sunk Cost Fallacy
  17. Welcome to the Internet: Don’t be a Huckster
  18. How a Shallow Work Checklist Gives You Back Your Focus
  19. Entrepreneurial Personal Finance: A Contrarian Investment Strategy
  20. Fauxductivity: 8 Ways You Trick Yourself into Feeling Productive
  21. I'm killing most of my email capture. Here's why.
  22. $58,150 in 5 Months: How to Build a Lifestyle Business Step-by-Step (Emails, Tools, Everything)
  23. How to Get Lucky: Maximizing Exposure to Life Changing Serendipity
  24. Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading is a Waste of Time
  25. Productiva Negativa: 7 Tactics to Create More by Doing Less
  26. Make an Order, Not a Schedule (But Only to be Creative)
  27. Subconscious Sabotage: Why Friends and Family Clip Your Wings
  28. Savable Income: How to Earn 1/3 Less but be 3x Richer
  29. Life After Sumo, Being the Hydra, and What’s Next
  30. 15 “Pivotal” Books that Changed How I Think and Live
  31. The Runway Calculator: How to Travel for 6 Months and Come Back Richer
  32. Take an Afternoon AFK to De-stress, Recharge, and Refocus
  33. Tarnished Bullets: How Productivity Blogs Waste Your Time
  34. Why I Went Carless: A Financial and Moral Analysis
  35. Quantitative Life Goals: How to Plan and Finish What You Start
  36. What Life do You Want?

2015 12

  1. Second-Degree Dinners: The Best Way to Meet Cool People in Your City
  2. Parkinson's Law Isn't Just About Time
  3. What is Imagined Scarcity, and Why is it Making You Unhappy?
  4. How to Never Forget Books You Read
  5. How to Create Professional Growth
  6. How to Go to Sleep Early and Wake up Early (and Refreshed!)
  7. How to Become Smarter and More Rational (Yes, You Too)
  8. Making an Easy 2 Million, Personal Investing for 20 Somethings
  9. What to do if You’re a College Student Who Isn't Excited by 9-5 Corporate Work
  10. Don't Focus On Local Maxima
  11. Focus On Your Mental Operating System, Not Your Apps
  12. How to Read More: Finish 100+ Books This Year

2014 13

  1. Don't Make a New Year's "Resolution"
  2. The News is a Waste of Your Time
  3. You're Not Stuck That Way
  4. How to Start Working Out So You Don't Quit
  5. Why I Don't Drink Coffee: My Caffeine Overdosing Adventure
  6. FratBoxes: How to Start a Company This Weekend for $25, and do $150 in Sales
  7. Exhausted by Options
  8. Your Brain on Nitrogen
  9. The Source of Knowledge
  10. A Minimalist Set of Apps for Getting Things Done
  11. Here's What I Learned Eating No Gluten for One Month
  12. Easily Memorize 80+ Names in a Few Hours
  13. How to Make Anyone Your Mentor... Without Asking