
If I Knew Then - ca98am79
http://hbs1963.com/
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hammeringtime
" _﻿My one big mistake in life has been providing a trust fund for my five
children. I’m very comfortable paying for an education for as long as they
want to study in a reputable university. However, providing additional funds
so they could have a lifestyle beyond what they have achieved on their own was
a mistake._ "

This is one I've actually thought a lot about. Having gone to an Ivy League
school, I'm not sure that it would be worth sending my kids to any university.
The quality is going down, the tuition is going up. The cost of establishing a
household after school is going up, so giving that 250k and 4 years to a
university is a huge opportunity cost. It seems like there should be a lot
cheaper and more efficient ways of building a network and developing career
skills.

But I also don't want to just hand a 20-year old a trust fund of $250k instead
of college tuition. So my current thinking is that I'll say: "We've saved up
$250k to get you started in life. You can either spend that on a college
education. Or you can get a scholarship or get a job directly, and we'll give
you the money for one of the following activities: 1) starting a business 2)
going to grad school 3) buying a home to raise a family in 4) Up to 6 months
of travel or independent artsy work. The money will remain in the investments
accruing returns until it is disbursed."

~~~
btilly
Find a copy of _The Millionaire Next Door_ and read it. Particularly the last
third about what happens inside of families where the parents have money.

Long story short, the "one big mistake in life" quote is exactly right.

~~~
endymi0n
I'd be glad for a short TL;DR... care to provide one?

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andrewstuart
Wisdom is the comb they give you when you're bald.

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chrisacree
I always enjoy reading these bite-size bits of wisdom, but in the end I think
that most lessons are only learned the hard way. Still, many of the ideas and
stories here are truly inspirational.

~~~
andrewstuart
For the most people aren't able to absorb the message until the have made the
mistakes that lead to the insight.

~~~
pp19dd
Some of these are harrowing, like the guy who hit a kid with his car.

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msane
Advice always seems vapid when you ask someone to create a quip or an aphorism
and attach their name to it so it can be displayed in a public place.

~~~
mattlutze
_For a successful marriage, don 't eat crackers in bed_

Some of it's pretty practical.

~~~
josephmx
If that's the sacrifice for a successful marriage I'm not sure it could be
worth it...

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ilzmastr
for epub addicts like myself:
[http://cl.ly/1t0y1I0C0s1C](http://cl.ly/1t0y1I0C0s1C)

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RyanMcGreal
"The greatest gift you can give your children is to love one another."

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lazyant
“Be kind. Soon we’ll all be dead.”

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MichaelCrawford
If I had installed a lock on the door of my office, I expect Bonita and I
would still be married.

~~~
jacquesm
That's got to be the most cryptic comment ever.

~~~
kelvin0
Well from my perspective, either: a) Bonita went snooping in his office and
found something she perceived as 'incriminating' or b) He needed to better
insulate his 'work' time from his 'home' time, which is not easy for work at
home folks

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Bonita was quite phobic about my cables, and so kept insisting that I find
some way to hide them such as running them through conduits.

What I was never able to make her understand was that I needed those cables
for my work, as well as to pay her art school tuition; to me it was very
hurtful that she demanded I hide them. I never complained about her stone
chisels.

More to the point, what I wanted - and really needed - was a place in the
house that was mine, and mine alone.

~~~
kelvin0
We all need our 'dens' I get that. Wish you well on your new sentimental
adventures.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
For a few years I've been searching all over for the woman I was with during
the summer of 1985. The reason we didn't stay together was that her
grandmother did not approve of me.

I'm not dead certain but I may have found her street address. She usually goes
by her full name - with her middle name - but the woman I found is listed only
by her first and last.

Today I bought a blank greeting card with the intention that I would
immediately write her a nice letter. Given that I don't know it's really her
it's not going to be dripping with romance but more casual, just to say I'd
like to be back in contact.

But all afternoon and into the evening I've been dwelling over what we could
have had, had her grandmother approved, or had I found some way around her
grandmother.

She would be too old to have children by now. That's quite difficult for me to
accept but even so I want to see her again, hopefully find some way for us to
be together again.

~~~
messedthat1up
I can understand that. About 20 years ago I briefly dated a young lady that I
got along with extremely well. The kind of relationship where we were
comfortable enough with each other to casually discuss very personal matters.

The problem was that she had a boyfriend. One day she asked me if I would be
her boyfriend if she broke up with the other guy. I told her not to do that
because I would always have trust issues with her, knowing that she was a
"cheater."

I know that it's easy to idealize what might have been, but to this day I
still think about her and that rejecting her was probably the biggest mistake
of my life. Shortly after we went our separate ways, I met my future and
current wife of 18 years (it's been a difficult marriage, and probably won't
last much longer... and should have ended over 10 years ago).

For various reasons, we never had any children, while my ex-"girlfriend" met
someone else, and had two children that I know of. Even after all these years,
I still think of my ex at least weekly, and imagine what might have been. I've
casually tried to locate her over the years, hoping that she might be single
again, but without luck.

Anyway, I know this isn't the proper forum for this, but it's something I've
never told anyone about and your comment resonated rather strongly. Good luck
with your situation!

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branchless
Feels like hacker news is drowning in touchy-feely stuff. Can we get more
posts on computers and stuff?

~~~
pp19dd
I can definitely see things your way. We're overdue for some kind of a
multiplayer game experiment demo thing to be shared, like that multiplayer
orbiting game. Hell, here's my nodejs-powered webgl doodlepad:
[http://faye.pp19dd.com/index2.php](http://faye.pp19dd.com/index2.php)

But there's a common thread here. This particular collection of thoughts on
this site reflect life and career arcs. Parallelism to us is that plenty of us
developers are burning out (like eeve), seeking changes, having epiphanies.

That's obviously because we're growing older and maturing like everyone else,
computers and stuff are changing drastically, competition and proliferation of
tools is high, and we're caught up in middle of it all. Hell, I have a fantasy
of becoming a woodworker and am a tool away from having a decent set (router).
Maybe I'll try my luck at flea markets.

It's definitely easier for me to center some divs and write a fractal
compression algorithm than work 10-hour shifts doing backbreaking labor. I
know this because I did it for a couple of weeks replacing all my floors, and
I did a pretty good job of it. The part that sucks is that it was more
satisfying than programming, but it'll never be sustainable for me to do that
kind of labor in the long run. :/

~~~
Qantourisc
Your body will adapt/strengthen + you need to work out some better ergonomics.
Also maybe a 10 hour shift for physical labour is not a good idea :D

~~~
pp19dd
Sure, and that's happened. I'm in better shape than I was, and there's more
work to be done. My hands are now crazy strong, fingers thick as sausages.

But decades of typing and this kind of work aggravated my carpal tunnel and it
was not pleasant. I'd wake up in the mornings because of crippling pain in my
right hand. It would take me hours of ice to get it to subside. There's only
so much you can do with ergonomics though in flooring, and I did the best I
could. The ten hour shifts were deadline-oriented and I won't go into that
since I had no choice. But,...

Few weeks after I finished installing my floors (and demolishing what was
there before, and carrying 3,000 lbs of material in beforehand) I had my A/C
serviced. The guy was in his mid-50s, and he complimented me on the job. "You
did this yourself?" Then he asked some more questions. He said my long lines
(25'+) were straight, which was a big deal for me since I spent an entire day
brooding over the starting line and re-measuring over and over again with a
chalk-line and laser levels. "This looks like professional work" he said.

After he left, found out from his supervisor that the guy worked in flooring
for 23 years, running his own business, and he watched it die during the last
market crash. In the end it was him and another guy doing a job a day, which
sq-ft for sq-ft was basically them working 5-6 times faster than me, and
better.

The man favored his both knees the entire time he was working here, and had
menthol/wet wraps around his hands that he kept renewing. Evaporative cooling
does only so much to reduce swelling. Anyhow, I can't imagine working that
hard for decades, and my 10 hour shifts were nothing compared to what he did
day after day after day.

