I’ve had the privilege to work with some extremely smart and successful people. Very quickly I came to the conclusion that these people know something others don’t, and they do something others don’t do. The real question was, what’s that?

It took me some time to understand what this thing is.

But I finally found it, and I‘d like to share it with you.

You see, there’s a huge difference between knowing something, and benefiting from it. Just knowing is simply not enough. Knowledge in action is the only thing that actually brings results. Did you miss it? Let me repeat it: Knowledge in action is the only thing that actually brings results!

That was the “secret” these successful people knew. No one told me about it. I came to it myself. But knowing this wasn’t enough. I had to experience it. And finally, I truly understood it.

I thought that reading a lot of books would make me smarter. From 2015 to 2018 I’ve read around 300 books. Somewhere along the way, I started to feel good about sharing with my friends the number of books I’ve read.

Soon enough, for me (for my ego, to be precise), it unconsciously became important to have read a bigger number of books. Yes, it’s a mistake that I’m not proud of. And I share it so that you don’t make the same one.

The faster I went from book to book, the less knowledge I actually acquired.

But that isn’t the worst thing. What’s worse is that I had completely stopped adopting the new knowledge. I didn’t apply it in my own life. So all of that reading had become pointless.

There’s a quote saying: The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who never learned to read.

And I would add: „The man who doesn’t apply what he learns, has no advantage over a stupid lazy slacker.“

Read, learn and apply new knowledge to improve your life! That’s what I call effective learning. That one skill that makes all the difference.

If you want to become an advanced learner, you have to make sure you have the right mindset for it. If you love learning and you enjoy reading, you’re halfway there. The other half is a bit trickier. In order to improve your life based on what you learn, you must be action oriented. You have to take action, as I already mentioned in the previous section.

Only when you apply the new things you learn in real life, you really make a change. Whenever you’re learning new things, always think of ways to test your new knowledge. Look for the ways to put it in action.

Here are few quotes from Jim Rohn, an American entrepreneur and author, shared in a Foundation for Success video course. These should give you a better idea of the mindset I’m talking about:

“For things to change for you, you have to change.”

“Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better.”

“Don’t wish for [fewer] problems, wish for more skills.”

“It’s not [fewer] problems that make you successful, it’s more skills that make you successful.”

“Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. You’ll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action, you can become wealthy.”

You get the point: read, learn, and take action to apply your new knowledge. It’s easy to say this, it’s much harder to actually follow through.

You just read this, and maybe learned something new. If so, take some action! Share this blog post on social media, tell someone about it, etc. There are many possibilities. Just take action!

Sooner or later you’ll notice that, when you edit files, Vim creates files named like .filename.swp in the same location as the file you’re editing. These files are called swap files.

Swap files

Swap files store changes you’ve made to the buffer. If your Vim crashes, a swap file will allow you to recover those changes. Another important role of swap files is to act as a lock mechanism: if you open a file, which is already opened in another Vim session, you’ll be warned. That can be useful, especially on a system with multiple users.

Disabling swap files

You can disable swap files entirely by adding set noswapfile to your .vimrc. However, I’d recommend you not to disable them, unless you really know what you’re doing. Instead, you could organize swap files better.

Swap files organization

Usually the most annoying thing about swap files is that they’re created all around your file system, wherever you edit your files. To solve this, you can save all the swap files in one location.

First, create a directory for storing swap files, for example: $ mkdir ~/.vim/swp

Then, put this snippet in your .vimrc: set directory=$HOME/.vim/swp//

The directory option contains a list of directories where Vim will try to store swap files. The // at the end tells Vim to use the absolute path to the file to create the swap file. This will ensure that swap file name is unique, so there are no collisions between files with the same name from different directories.

Backup files

Vim can make backups of files you edit, so you’re safe from losing data. I don’t use this Vim feature personally, and I would suggest you set up a better backup solution for your work.

Of course, this feature can be useful. Backups are controlled by the settings of two options: backup and writebackup. If interested, look these up in :help.

Just like for swap files, you can also keep backup files better organized, by creating a directory and adding it to your .vimrc:

set backupdir=~/.vim/.backup//

We all need to use passwords. Everyone should use password managers. Most of us don’t. This guide will give you the framework to create many strong passwords which are easy to remember.

## Step #1: The Base password

First you need a base password.

Think of 3 of your favorite things. Choose something positive.
For example, I like to read, eat pizza and listen to Nick Cave.
So that gives me: KindlePizzaCave

Now separate each word with your favorite special character. Let’s say I like money, so I’ll use that for this example. And I get: Kindle$Pizza$Cave$

Now add a familiar number which you’ll always remember.
Your postal code, birth year or something similar.
Whatever it is, just remember that method.

For example, if my postal code would be 113355, I could use that, and get: Kindle$Pizza$Cave113355

This easy method gives you a pretty long password. It also satisfies all of the requirements of a strong password: stuff like upper and lower case characters, numbers, special characters, etc.

And you get all of this without even thinking about it really.
This can be your BASE password. It a pretty strong password.

Now, the worst thing you could do is to use this awesome password for all of your accounts. Just trust me, and don’t do that.

There’s a better solution.

## Step 2: Self explanatory passwords

So let’s say, I use a password Kindle$Pizza$Cave113355 for my primary email account. That’s easy to remember. I use it only there, and that’s it.

Now, you can make your strong password unique with a special identifier for each of your accounts. It sounds complicated, it’s not really.

For example, I use Twitter. I could use TW or something like that. I can add it at the beginning, end or even split it up. So, my password for Twitter could be: TW$Kindle$Pizza$Cave113355

For Facebook, I could have: Fb$Kindle$Pizza$Cave113355

You’re really just typing things you like, and remembering a method you chose.

## Step 3: Time to change passwords?

Most of the cybersecurity professionals will tell you that updating your passwords regularly is a good practice. Well, that’s not really true anymore. But that’s a topic for another post.

So, whether you’re forced to change your passwords at work, or you just think it’s time for you to update your passwords, this framework makes it very easy.

All you need to do is to change your method. So, for example, if I’d be really lazy, I could just shift things around, and from my old password for Twitter TW$Kindle$Pizza$Cave113355 get to new one: 113355$Kindle$Pizza$Cave$TW.

And that’s usually good enough.

But it’s recommended that you change the key words of your password. You can use your favorite quote, or pretty much anything easy for you to remember. Then just follow the same method.

## Further steps

You might wonder, “what if an attacker gets my password and sees my method?”

Yeah, that is a risk for sure, which we could analyze.
You’d need to figure out your threat model.
I will teach you how to do that in one of the next posts.

But for 99% of people online, this is a really great way to have long, unique passwords.

Here’s one last thing you should do today:

Step 1

Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords and type your password. If you see a message like “Good news — no pwnage found!”, you’ll know that your password is not among the list of currently known breached passwords.

That’s good. It means that your password (and your method) is not leaked, and it’s still a secret known only to you.

Step 2

Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and type your email. This way you can check if your email was leaked in some of the big, known data breaches. If yes - change the passwords on the breached accounts immediately.

Also, once you sign up, if your email ever appears in some of the breach known to https://haveibeenpwned.com - you’ll get an email notification about it, which is awesome.