
How Will I Measure My Life? - KentBeck
https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-will-i-measure-my-life/1792902224075967/
======
osteele
Related: Paul Graham's “The Top of My Todo List”
[http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html)

“A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest
regrets of the dying. […]

“I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes
you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults.
But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes
happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I
inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands

“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate
friendships; be happy.”

~~~
yesenadam
Inverting the first 2 into positive form would be better: maybe "Pay attention
to your dreams" or "Listen to your dreams". I'm not finding the second one so
easy to invert...

~~~
igorkraw
* Pay attention to your dreams

* "Take time to spend on leisure" or "allow yourself to 'waste' some time"

* say what you think

* cultivate friendships

* be happy

------
ljoshua
The book, "How Will You Measure Your Life," by Clayton Christensen is easily
on my list of Top 5 Most Important books, I cannot recommend it enough.

Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors
more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is
more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to
be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the
book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and
more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.

Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun
engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a
subset of the book.

~~~
rayxi271828
What are your 4 other top books?

------
enkid
This man is quantifying his life into two things, money and freetime, nothing
about quantifying the quality of your time at work, nothing about happiness,
and nothing about being an ethical person. What's the point of having all the
money, and all the free time in the world if you're an unhappy jackass who
hates his job?

~~~
terminalcommand
I don't know if it is good to love your job. Anything that you do
professionally has a tendency to get boring after a time. If you're working
for someone else, that also constitutes a blow to your happiness.

I think finding a _sustainable_ balance should be sought after when looking
for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to
you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does
this job affect your career?

If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable
less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job.

I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't
appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am
always free to look for better opportunities.

Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also
worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym.
Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before
committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives
would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the
middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at
any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good
money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All
notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with
me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You
are free and nobody's slave.

~~~
welly
How about those in the arts as a profession? I don't think they'd have a
successful career if they didn't love their job. I think they'd produce pretty
abysmal art.

~~~
tjr
I've produced music for others (as a job, if you will), and I've produced
music for my own enjoyment and satisfaction.

While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it
may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain
criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that
duration, or whatever.

A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever
I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a
programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or
may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the
work for the satisfaction of someone else.

But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or
whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the
satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for
them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am
pleased that they like it!

------
chatmasta
For those unaware, the author (and HN submitter apparently) is Kent Beck [0]
who wrote _Extreme Programming Explained_ and was one of the original
signatories of the "Agile Manifesto."

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck)

------
fimdomeio
I measure my life in a very abstract way. How much my existence is positive or
negative to the world and to the people around me. Can I make people around me
happier / have better lifes? How much of an environmental footprint am I
creating? These are all impossible things to measure and I know that I might
even contradict myself in how a feel about some of the things that I do but
for me it's good enough for me to know what direction I would like to be
heading.

------
titzer
When I look at the things that I am most grateful to have experienced in my
life, none of the decisions that would have been motivated by optimization
processes would have led to them coming about.

So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't
actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"?

Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail
on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the
optimizer and let life unfold.

~~~
tinymollusk
A standard explore/exploit model can work here. Perhaps it's semantics, but I
consider that strategy an optimizer, although it's non a linear or
deterministic one. Optimize the things I know are working; add semi-random
decision making for some percent of my decisions to explore new spaces.

------
nathan_f77
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned "financial independence" yet. Check out the
subreddit:
[http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence](http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence),
and the blog called Mr. Money Mustache:
[https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/)

Many software engineers get paid a lot of money, so it's not too difficult to
retire at 35 if you can keep your expenses down.

~~~
lg
the spiraling cost of healthcare makes this very difficult in the US.

------
ealexhudson
There are a few metrics other people have considered that he seems to have
overlooked; daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee are all highly
quantitative.

Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.

~~~
nmyk
You left out the most quantitative measure of all: 525,600 minutes.

~~~
ourmandave
^This.

Whenever I whine on my b'day about turning-a-certain-age, there's always some
older person in the room who gets all wistful and says, "Ah, to be N again..."

Oh thanks! Way to mellow my harsh man!

(I gotta stop inviting that guy.)

------
lcall
I believe the purpose of life is joy. It comes from growth (ie learning,
developing abilities, raising a happy family etc), and service to others
(helping them grow or have happier lives), and from knowing one's life is
pleasing to God (which can be personally known, it's not all that complicated
nor needs to be argumentative). The things you'd want someone to talk about at
your funeral. This belief is connected to a strong belief that life has a
background, a purpose, is eternal, and growth can also be eternal (I'm a
Mormon). I think much about maturity models for the various aspects of life,
and how to use/share them. I have written some things about that (more to be
added later I hope, just haven't got to posting it), somewhere buried under
the features descriptions at [http://onemodel.org](http://onemodel.org) . This
life is hard, but very good, and the best is yet to come.

------
harlanji
Good summary, thanks. I'd come to a less clear version of the same tradeoffs,
thinking in terms of commitment level and capacity over time. Eg. 70hr week
might be okay once a year but not 60hr for several weeks in a row due to
draining personal reinvestment, which stunts the capacity growth that also
would happen with the reinvestment time. "Vetting (commitment)" is the title
of my freestyle lecture on YT. Your post is much more to the point; thanks
again.

------
fencepost
Something I still have bookmarked to likely get is a "Your Life in Weeks"
poster ([https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-
weeks.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html)). This would not
be so much for planning as for keeping a sense of scope and proportion.

------
ielfkd
You will need a unit of life. If you have figured out what it is then you can
measure life.

Could unit of life be

money? time? number of pizza's u ate? number of babies u had?

Or are they binary in nature?

Happy or Unhappy, Satisfied or Unsatisfied, Enjoyed or Not Enjoyed. Fulfilled
or Unfulfilled?

What could it be?

------
lafar6502
Everyone measures and compares oneself to others all the time, why spend even
more energy and time on that? Just try to not make stupid moves and all the
rest should be fine

~~~
collyw
Meditating on it I realised that this is where a lot of suffering in my life
comes from - comparing myself to others. I can't think of much positive that
comes from it.

------
irrational
I think I would measure my life by how many people come to my funeral because
they will miss me due to the positive impact I have had on their lives.

------
sgentle
"many of the things that make life worth living aren’t measurable at all, or
if they are measurable then they aren’t comparable. How many dinners with
family equal one random act of kindness?"

I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable,
incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason
about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult
still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness
measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not
and cannot be such a measurement.

For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask
questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a
family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is
there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford
family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of
the two, which would I choose?"

Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is
the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better
understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot
be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's
nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.

Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational
thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason
about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful
confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?

Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands
ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things
that are most important to you.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable,
incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement.

In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?

It's actually kind of an interesting philosophical question, I linked to some
background reading at the end of this post.

>Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-
intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to
stop trying to understand.

It's not anti-intellectual, it's a _different_ intellectual viewpoint from
yours.

>Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever,
but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's
embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?

This isn't an anti-rational viewpoint.

[1]
[https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAI-2.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAI-2.pdf)

[2] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-
incommensurable/#Va...](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-
incommensurable/#ValInc)

[3] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-
theory/#Inc](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/#Inc)

[4]
[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674447561](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674447561)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _It 's not anti-intellectual, it's a different intellectual viewpoint from
> yours._

It is anti-intellectual, in the sense that it posits a separate magisterium of
things "too complex to reason about" (or sometimes, "too profound to dare and
reason about") and asks to give up the attempt. That way lies supernatural.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
Do you think humans can gain omniscience using the scientific method?

~~~
TeMPOraL
No. Though I am implying that we can get asymptotically close to omniscience
(to the extent it's allowed by physics; full omniscience would probably have
infinite energy requirements anywy) through the systems we build - which
include mental frameworks, organizational structures and computing devices.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
So then if we will always fall short of omniscience, why should we always seek
it in everything we do?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because it doesn't matter that you can't walk a hundred million light years,
if your goal is 5 meters away from you.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
Except our goal here is how to measure the worth of your own life. That's a
lot more like "a hundred million light years" than it is "5 meters away."
We've literally been trying for millennia to evaluate what 'the good life' is
and are probably not that much closer than when we started.

------
sjg007
His chart is Freetime vs Money Options.. How about a more generic name: Time
vs Money.

------
jonjonBoy
It's all measured in the total instagram likes and reddit tips..

------
collyw
Why would you want to measure your life?

You will only end up comparing your life to others, (which is not a
particularly good thing to do in my opinion).

------
dsschnau
why did he post on fb lol

~~~
nappy-doo
Probably cause he works there?

~~~
dsschnau
he does? he's gonna measure it poorly then because lol at working for
facebook.

------
thisacctforreal
JavaScript free version: [https://mbasic.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-
will-i-measu...](https://mbasic.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-will-i-
measure-my-life/1792902224075967/)

I shudder to think about all the data Facebook manages to suck up when you
give it the ability.

~~~
randcraw
Thanks, but is there a facebook-free version as well?

~~~
curious_guy
I cloned the page and you can see it here.
[http://whatisee.co/95714489.html](http://whatisee.co/95714489.html)

------
tomcooks
Tock tock Who's there? Facebook cryptocurrency.

