

The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself - swapspace
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2008/05/18/the-single-most-important-career-question-you-can-ask-yourself/

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bprater
I went through a nearly identical phase as the author. Obsessive reading,
hours in the library, ordering everything related to business, becoming a
Kaiser & Blair rep when I was 17. A blur of success and failure.

But always moving forward.

After thinking about it plenty, I think it boils down to this: some folks just
weren't born with the fire. Often, this fire looks a lot like insanity.

Your a genius if you succeed, and an idiot if you don't.

I play with fire because it makes me feel good, plain and simple. I hack
because I love it. I sell my own software because I love marketing, too.

And everyday, I'm confident that if I give folks enough value, in one way or
another, they will give me enough money to eat. And my devious little plan
hasn't failed me yet!

~~~
dominik
I find irony in "your a genius."

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rw
False dichotomy. Interesting, anyway.

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bryarcanium
This article makes me smile because I am a Hacker News groupie.

People can passionately follow art or music or movies and no one thinks them
odd for not producing some of the same- that's how I feel about programming. I
just like following it, especially the underlying philosophies. I'm an
armchair hacker- oh, I've put a few things together in my day but they're the
programming equivalent of Harry/Draco slash.

I guess this means Y Combinator's Hacker News has an official fangirl ;)

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albertsun
A good kick in the ass.

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bprater
I'm both a consumer and creator.

I consume large quantities of non-fiction, but would prefer to write fiction.

I'd rather create video games than play them.

I don't think consuming and creating are mutually exclusive.

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kajecounterhack
Haha I feel like him, except I had ebay when I was 13 (I'm 18 now) -- what a
difference time makes!

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jaytee_clone
I want to point out that most producers also consume a lot. But it's not
necessary true the other way around.

There's also a difference between mindless consumption and focused
consumption. People who produce a lot do the latter.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Ouch. Time for me to get a move on. Time's a-wasting!

In my favor, my stick-it-in-your-ear conversation takes place tomorrow. It's
on the docket and everything! :)

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indiejade
Previously on the idea of "consumer" vs "producer" roles:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164014>

A lot of that is fluff, but the basic premise was that the Internet could
probably be built more effectively with some sort of built-in gauge to
determine the actuality of a person's "productivity" versus their
"consumability."

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alecco
This is the old giver/taker argument.

IMHO the interesting part is even though both are highly related you need
extra parts of the brain for the former. For example reading vs. writing. This
pattern tends to repeat from reading about fMRI studies (completely reader
there myself, not my science.)

I find [pure] takers to be incomplete and get close to be social parasites,
even if harmless.

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Timothee
If you stop reading in the middle of his blog post, does that answer the
question?

I think time has come for me to read less and do more.

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dgordon
I won't be the first to say here that producing and consuming, as this post
uses the terms, are not mutually exclusive (and are probably orthogonal.) But
I believe we choose how much of each we are.

Now I need to prove this to myself. By my recent activity, I am a great
consumer and not much of a producer.

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Jebdm
Huh, that's me. Time to code, I guess.

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jroes
Everyone wants to be a producer. The author intends to incite people into
taking action and becoming producers, not stagnating as a consumer.

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bprater
Take. Action.

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time_management
I agree with the general spirit here, but the fact is that most of us
vacillate between producer and consumer roles, and fill both to varying
degrees.

The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier
to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more
psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that
society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the
producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging
people to consume.

Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context,
is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need
an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which
means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the
only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money
take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85
percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than
watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.

~~~
drinian
The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of
information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something
I'm pretty familiar with personally, and I can tell you that it can be a
cognitive drain that actually reduces your desire to produce. And news is
addictive; it's easier than producing something new, and, at least to me,
seems to hit the reward receptors in the brain pretty hard.

This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up
with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can
go back for another hit.

~~~
time_management
You've hit on one of the major reasons why the Internet is worse than TV, as
far as time-wasters go. TV gets old after a while and is unfulfilling. The
Internet devises new ways of hitting new reward receptors every second, and
the possibilities are infinite. Sick of reading? You can write. (Comments,
blogs, Wikipedia).

I've often thought of Internet addiction as being more like an overeating
problem than a drug problem. You can give up cigarettes or opiates cold
turkey, but no one can stop eating. In order to be productive as a programmer,
you must daily engage your vice.

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schammy
Rob, have much of an ego there buddy?

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revelude
Damn, I guess I'm not making money every second of the day.

My life is meaningless. I am weak.

...all you need is love?

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travisjeffery
I usually check to see how many comments there and if there are quite a few I
can count on you guys to have a good discussion going and I can't help but
check what's going on.

