My mother told me to not care what other people thought. She also told me that words can't really hurt people ("sticks and stones..."). She also believed its "mean" to have any preference about people, calling it a version of "keeping score". In fact, "keeping score" was one of the worst things you could be accused of in my household.
Her advice fails to accept the reality of social and emotional needs. It also fails to address the (sometimes severe) downside of non-conformance. This advice made me an Outsider whether or not I wanted to be. I now believe that these were tools she formed to get her through her own family and social trauma, which she falsely assumed would be generally useful, and did her best to arm her children with her best tools. I also believe there are upsides to the approach, but the trade-offs are real and cannot and shouldn't be swept under the rug. I imagine others had similar experiences with religious parents.
Advice is dangerous. It has built in moral hazard. Advice is too often given in well-meaning ignorance and pride - but ultimately advice gets someone else to test your hypothesis for you. So if you've not gotten any life-changing advice, be glad!
I have some similar stories. The issue of generic advice is it assumes a social context or a specific mistake that may not be relevant.
In a gang of violent ruffians, "be less violent!" is great advice. A gang of extremist pacifists being beaten up by outsiders probably needs "be more violent!" as advice.
Your case particularly hits a nerve with me because "do not care what other people think!" is good advice to someone who makes decisions based on where they think the crowd is going (which is the normal way) but may as well be the kiss of death to the typical engineering mind. Engineers do not need any advice that encourages them towards independent thinking. They already have lots of training in making decisions based on objective or internalised criteria. Engineering types usually need advice on how to read body language and make decisions using social techniques.
When dealing with smart, numerate people it is better to discuss scenarios or statistical frequency of mistakes rather than "give advice". Generic advice is often useless without context.
I wish I'd had some training on how to care what other people think when I was in my teens. Would have done me the power of good.
I had to re-read the post, because I misunderstood the opening statement.
<<Generic advice is often useless without context.
I agree. Some of the advice we are imbued with is in 'not great' category. The more annoying thing is that it does not get better ( I got ridiculously bad generic advice looking back in my 20s, but I only had enough knowledge in my 30s to know how bad it was ).
<<I wish I'd had some training on how to care what other people think when I was in my teens.
To be fair to your mother, this particular advice and view was rampant when I grew up in the 80s/90s. My experience was that this is quite backwards. Physical altercations at school didn't hurt that much, but the name calling, social shunning and constant verbal put down was very painful and has affected my whole life.
Most people have never come anywhere close to being beat sufficiently to have a bone broken. I guarantee you words come nothing close to that experience.
Being beat to that extent can cause both physical and emotional pain for life.
Not dismissing physical abuse at all. That’s not a stick, nor a stone. I’ve had numerous bones broken. Some because of me. Some because of others. Some from my parents. One from my child (technically my fault).
Both forms of abuse hurt. When the abuse goes on for a long time it feels like it takes 10x as long to heal.
I could not disagree more. Words are meaningless. They are sounds. They only matter if you choose to give them meaning.
The proof is incredibly simple. I speak multiple languages, one of them is Spanish. However, it is South American Spanish and not any of the dialects spoken in Spain. A common insult in Spain is "gilipollas". It means absolutely nothing to me, even though I know what it means ant that is an insult. Someone could call me gilipollas all day and I would probably die laughing; frankly, it really sounds funny to me.
What if you are insulted in a language you don't understand? Same thing. Meaningless. At that point it really becomes just sounds. And that's the point. The only process that gives words meaning and can attach them to negative emotions is in your brain.
Put a different way: Nobody can force you to interpret words as an insult or something to get emotional about except for yourself.
I got my kids used to not caring about insults by actually insulting them. Things like "You are a moron!" quickly became the subject of jokes at our home, with them being free to call me anything they want in response. At first I had to do this because one of my kids ran into verbal bullies at school. It is amazing to see just how much power one gains by removing meaning from words used to deliver insults. At the limit they become nothing less than a joke.
Verbal insults, at the end of the day, are signs of weakness. The person who has to resort to diminishing someone else verbally in person or --as is often seen-- online, has to resort to such nonsense because, well, to be kind, they have nothing else to offer. Why give someone like that the power to interpret those words as they wish you would interpret them? The best approach is to turn those words into irrelevant noise. To go from that, to have words affect you for life? No, that's a big mistake.
I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement.
> I got my kids used to not caring about insults by actually insulting them. Things like "You are a moron!"
I do that too, although just because its fun rather than for any other reason. But your kids know that is friendly banter with you. It's quite different to your boss calling you a moron and insulting you all day.
So you might say, well if my boss did that then I'd leave, fuck them. And I'd be the same. However, not everyone is in a position to be able to just get out and quit.
And that doesn't even address the far more insidious ways people use words to hurt you. Telling other people you're a moron, building up an undeserved contempt. This is what bullies do and it's not so easy to shrug it off. When they get a significant number of people in on it then you can't escape it and feel like a fool. This is the source of my shyness and anxiety about talking to people. Even though I try to push down those feelings I still feel awkward and on guard because for a few of my school years ANYTHING I said unguarded would be pounced on and I'd be laughed at.
Then there's gaslighting and other verbal lead ons where you're sweet talked into believing you're a moron. I don't have any experience with this.
> The best approach is to turn those words into irrelevant noise. To go from that, to have words affect you for life? No, that's a big mistake.
I wish this were the case. Toot toot for you if it is, but for many it's not possible, I think perhaps you could take a more sympathetic view - what has worked for you does not work for everyone and perhaps others had a difficult time when they were more vulnerable to it and that left an unshakable impression on them.
> It's quite different to your boss calling you a moron and insulting you all day.
I can definitely understand that. At the same time, I know, without a doubt, that this approach has worked for at least one of my kids. He told me this much a few times after being bullied and pretty much viewing it as a laughable event rather than taking it seriously. And, in fact, the bullying stopped very quickly because he did not engage at all.
> I think perhaps you could take a more sympathetic view - what has worked for you does not work for everyone and perhaps others had a difficult time when they were more vulnerable to it and that left an unshakable impression on them.
Yes, of course, I understand everyone has different life experiences.
I am simply sharing my, our, experience. The perspective might be useful to some or not one person. At the very least someone might have seen what I had to share and, perhaps, understood they might have the power to change the way they interpret what they are experiencing.
It's like being afraid of heights. All else being equal (circumstances, balance, physical condition, health, age, etc.) the only difference between a person who is afraid and one who is not, is in the way the brain interprets reality. That's it. Nothing else. Train the brain to modify that interpretation and going up a tall skinny ladder goes from a horrific paralyzing event to no problem at all.
Bottom line: I really think we need to understand that these things are only real if we make them real. Easier said than done, of course. I don't see that as a reason not to try to, carefully, slowly, go up that ladder and see things differently.
I mean words only hurt if you let them in so that’s why we think of things this way.
It sucks to be in a relationship with someone who can’t forgive or forget. Mean vindictive people who will twist words and who are suppose to love you unconditionally.
Something to consider, as more and more people say things to you, you start to understand the different ways in which people are terrible, which isn't all that bad because nobody is perfect. But then you start to understand the ways in which all people are flawed, that's when you really lose faith in humanity. So words might not hurt, but they offer more and more reasons to disengage, not just from terrible people, but from otherwise "normal, friendly, would-never-commit-a-crime people"
FWIW, meditation (Vipassana after a few years of Samahdi), really helps with this because it shows you your own inconsistencies and faults. You're part of that sometimes nasty group, too. This may well lead to a short depression at times but overall, a much more positive outlook. "Them's just how it is, and good things still sometimes happen."
> So words might not hurt, but they offer more and more reasons to disengage, not just from terrible people, but from otherwise "normal, friendly, would-never-commit-a-crime people"
I’d agree. I was hurt by bullying enough that if I had ever made it big I would have found the most outrageous bullying case I could find and try to sue a school district out of existence? Maybe if teachers thought they could lose their pension maybe they would put a stop to bullying.
I'm sorry that happened to you - I was bullied early in life too, and it's horrible.
It's frustrating that people downvoted your comment. It's a failure, from a lack of empathy, to understand that the reason you want to make an example of the school district is because you were one of the victims of bullying.
Does raise an interesting question, though: Is it the teachers' or the parents' responsibility to teach manners to a child? Isn't this something that you'd pick up at home first, before ever stepping a foot into an institutionalized pedagogical setting?
Perhaps instead of suing the entire school district, GP should rather sue the parents of the offending child? /s
To remove the tongue from the cheek, though, and provide some anecdata in the same breath, let me say that I have a number of close friends who are teachers; their constant complaint is that the children reach school already too spoiled (in the rude and egocentric sense). Which apparently gets worse every year.
It's easier to make a case for a society-wide pandemic of negligent upbringing by parents who - goes without saying - are under-educated in child rearing, lack the traditional support networks ("it takes a village to raise a child") and generally overburdened by life's other demands. The children then get passed over to underpaid and overworked teachers (and overflowing classrooms), where the egos of the little cute monsters clash, occasionally loudly and physically, more frequently in passive-aggressive, bullyish manners.
An old guy's perspective: It's not this or that lesson or parental intent that matters, it's the sheer amount of one-on-one interaction with the parent(s), that matters most. IIRC, that's about twenty minutes a week for most kids. Nomads (See the book The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshal Thomas) don't have the same behavior problems at all; but the kids are getting an incredibly high amount of one on one interactions with their parents (mother in particular, while gathering, say berries, with them.)
I think you're spot on with this. Contact affects manners, and also gives opportunity for bad manners to be weeded out early.
Definitely not something that twenty minutes a day is enough for. And perhaps such a lack not only allows for bad patterns to emerge and fester, but also traumatizes the child. Modern city life, and its discontents, I guess.
Eh, look at PaulHoule's statement with some empathy.
I got bullied by a teacher, probably more, starting in fourth grade. I've written about it on this website. It can develop authority issues, trust issues, or both. It's a lifetime of work to undo those things.
Similar to people posting their stories with names with the hope for justice in some form or fashion, suing someone puts the details out for bare. He would likely never get the state government to actually repeal pensions, but he would get to tell his story in a media that people would definitely be paying attention to.
There's a valid question of whether any of the approaches above are healthy for a society. I'd venture to say no, but that is the way our society is.
> Wars happen over words. Marriages and divorces too.
Words are not the cause of these events. They might, in several ways, trigger them, of course. After all, a declaration of war is nothing but words and so is a legal divorce filing.
However, for these and other conflicts, if we dug down to root causes, we always find a lot more than just spoken or written words. Two that come to mind would be, in the case of war, strategic/national interests and, for divorce, infidelity or serious lack of agreement on matters the couple deem to be important.
Fists fights are great. Quick resolution of said problem and emotions. One of my best friends over the last few decades was a person I hated till we physically fought each other in our 20s.
Another example is American parents. Since you can’t spank your kids you have to resort to hurting their feelings with words to discipline them. No wonder teens in this country hate their parents.
My mom enforced clear consequences based on what I valued and she valued. Break rules, I lose computer time. Trespass on someone’s property, I write an apology letter and deliver it to them. Etc
Not caring what others think doesn’t mean you can’t “fit in.” Of course it sure doesn’t sound like that’s what she meant, but it’s still solid advice, I think.
I do lots of things that basically boil down to “social lubricant.” I really don’t care what most other people think, but I still “play nice” when it’s low-cost and easy because makes everything easier. I won’t go out of my way or expend too much effort to please others though. I’ll make socially acceptable small-talk but I’m not going to bother with designer clothes and fancy cars to fit in.
"I don't care what others think" always sounds like a coping mechanism, a last resort, an out-of-balance response to past insecurities and people-pleasing, as evidenced in this comment by dated references to designer clothes and fancy cars.
If I have a boss, shouldn't I worry about what they think of me?
If I have a spouse, a partner, a child, shouldn't I worry about what they think of me?
Now, I know, the usual clarification is about "not worrying about what people who are not your spouse, your child, your parent, your boss think about you" or "not changing our habits to fit in." Which, of course, is about as unfair as it gets.
Sure, if I'm invited to a fancy restaurant, I can show up in shorts and espadrilles because "I'm not going to change my comfortable clothes anyway, if they don't like them they can go for a hike," or maybe I could change my ways to fit in because I care what they think of me, not that they boss me around like a dog, but I understand that I live in a society, other people occupy the same space as me, we share what ecologists call a "niche." And I have opinions about other people.
Between being a sheep, a formidable animal by the way, and looking like an obnoxious "I don't care what other people think of me" character, there is a huge space in which one can live a life of independent thought and social awareness. It was called elegance.
> as evidenced in this comment by dated references to designer clothes and fancy cars.
I think you ought to reevaluate your ability to read people from such limited comments and remarks. It’s not as honed as you might think, as evidenced by this comment.
I do not care what other people think about me. I can not control what others think, nor can I ever know it. Instead, I care about the things I can control: how I behave with others, what my relationship is with them, what I think of them, what I do.
I don’t waste my time imagining what others might be thinking about me, because I can’t know. All I can do is listen to what they say, watch what they do, and choose my response accordingly.
Caring about what others think is a fool’s errand because you can never know what they think. And you can’t know if what they say is what they think.
> "I don't care what others think" always sounds like a coping mechanism, a last resort, an out-of-balance response to past insecurities and people-pleasing, as evidenced in this comment by dated references to designer clothes and fancy cars.
You are so far off the mark. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I think. Don’t try to guess.
I'm having trouble seeing where the two of you actually disagree. You're both arguing for a middle approach, what the Greeks would call "moderation"; neither of you care about every detail about what others think, but both of you do track their possible responses in order to fit in at least some of the time in "low cost" situations. Both of you go your own way when the stakes seem higher to you. I think it's more the word-tags you tend to prefer when describing boors that divides you, which is to say, semantics (of a kind.)
I think we pretty much agree (and I thank you for your "moderation"), but I go further. There is a fairly strong correlation between the thoughts and actions of others, including ourselves.
I care what others think of me, in part, selfishly, because I care what they do with those thoughts. And yes, sometimes being loved and being feared, just as an example, can cause others to give us money or attention, thus two distant feelings can have the same consequences.
I think this should also not be seen as free-reign to be an asshole. I live by a similar creed, but it is more nuanced.
I like to tell my children that they should not care about what other people think about who my children are as people, but that they should comport themselves in society with kindness and sincerity because that is the right way to behave.
Like, I literally could not care any less about what people think about who I am. I am just me, and I am fine with that. But I try, for my own sake, to be trustworthy, honorable, kind, and just.
The problem is when people take this mentality and justify it to act like a total dickbag.
I always interpret the word "think" in the phrase "Why do you care what other people think?” to mean "Feel free to ignore others' conclusions", and never "Feel free to ignore others' knowledge or data." By all means find out why others think X (if you think there is a reason they are capable of enunciating, and that they might be conscious of it, which is not nec the common case.)
> Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia: dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.
I, like you, grew up with religious parents who tried to equip me with the tools that helped them navigate their lives. As an adult, I try to be extremely skeptical of unsolicited advice, but I absolutely seek advice from people who have been in situations similar to mine.
> Advice is dangerous. It has built in moral hazard. Advice is too often given in well-meaning ignorance and pride - but ultimately advice gets someone else to test your hypothesis for you.
I've become somewhat convinced of "it takes a village to raise a child" thinking on the back of similar observations. It seems to me that it's a horrible thing to do to a child to force them to learn and absorb from only one to two people. Variations between people, even between parents and their children, and between social and economic needs, even over single generational spans, are too great, especially in the modern age. Which is to say nothing of when a child's parents just happen to be broken people. It feels like a travesty that children, such as yourself in your story, aren't given the opportunity to get different perspectives on how to live and be and to benefit from multiple guiding hands.
Marx would be proud of you, alienation from village, extended family etc was a very specific, central concern for him when looking at how capitalism had changed life in his time. He wasn't the only one to recognize this change or be appalled by it, of course.
Not to nitpick, but the words have no value. The value comes from what you or me assign to them. Certainly there are things in your past (or mine) that we heard and effectively ignored. But if heard again we'd laugh or cry.
The point is, the meaning we attach to the words are literally in our heads. We determine the worlds they create. It's not the other way around.
Completely disagree. The "heaviness" of an insult is determined by various factors: how much you value the person holding that opinion, how much you want to be accepted, how many rejections you got through... We are not robots that can automatically choose to not care: in the past I was in the stoic camp, red Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and so on but now I recognize that that philosophy brought me lots of pain: even if I cannot control something, like others opinion, it doesn't mean that I should not try to change it. Humanity get by by dreaming of something better: being through religion, riches, wisdom and so on; stoicism (and in part meditation) destroyed that impulse to improve.
I'm no philosopher but my understanding is the stoics didn't simply choose not to care, they were selective about what they cared about.
When someone insults you are they responsible for how much you value their opinion? Are they responsible for how much you want to be accepted? Are they responsible for how many rejections you have had in the past?
The insult is a signal that something is wrong in the world, and may require effort and attention, even if you aren't suffering because of the insult.
But no this isn't particularly useful to actual humans who are still (easily) overwhelmed to madness with reactive pain, and the stoics compassion feels like that shown by the (non-hysterical) passengers in that one Airplane! scene [0].
(It occurs to me that expressing cruelty toward those suffering from hysterics is more than mere sadism; it may be a legitimate coping mechanism with their own fear. Focusing the mind on something, even hatefully, can save the hater from their own fear that the world is completely out-of-control.)
> We are not robots that can automatically choose to not care:
We are not robots. We are human. And while we cannot be automated, we survived due to our ability to adapt. Where we channel your attention, what we choose to focus on, and what we choose to value *is* something we have control over.
The idea that someone saying something to me and those words control me, my mind, and my world...that's silly.
Your comment is very vague. Words cause an involuntary reaction that cannot be turned off. You cannot stop understanding English at will. You cannot stop being hurt if you're rejected at will. In that sense the statement "words don't hurt" is simply false, and contradicts the direct lived experience of every human on earth (except those who train to not let words get to them, such as lawyers and politicians).
But over decades, almost every human being has far more moderated "involuntary responses" to words. Life trains us that most of the time its better to just move on, and choose our company more carefully, if nothing else.
Because you're fourteen, those randos are your peer group, and you're stuck with them all day. Also, you're fourteen so you haven't quite figured out whose opinions should be important to you, and also you're wildly insecure about your position in your world.
I'm frankly not a fan of hyperstitious social pessimism. Everyone needs to understand that this isn't knowledge, it's justification.
It's justification for being an asshole to people under the guise of 'helping' them. The people who end up believing it are rubes who do the same to others. Making someone tougher is survivorship bias by another name. It fails to account for the people who don't have supportive family members and friends. It's solution to this is saying, "it sucks, but they just couldn't take it," which does nothing to make things even slightly better for the next person. We're left with those who survived.
Abuse doesn't actually make people stronger. What helps people become stronger is overcoming adversity. You want people to challenge you and to run into obstacles to overcome, but people who are routinely abused just end up far more likely to have mental disorders later. Nobody is better off or "stronger" for having PTSD.
Toxic bosses, colleagues, brutal job interviewers are no where near as violent or persistent or inescapable as childhood bullies and if those toxic people did half the things kids do to each other they'd be quickly arrested and thrown behind bars.
Fascinating. I'm finishing up "Art of Possibility" by R and B Zander. They make a case for not keeping score, and for creating - and believing in - a construct beyond traditional bounds. And then walk through examples.
I'm not doing it justice. And yes, it's a bit abstract. But it might be worth your time.
I think your mother's advice was well-meaning, for sure. I would qualify it as follows:
FOR WHAT OTHERS THINK:
You shouldn't care what most people think of you. Ones that matter: your boss, your spouse, (if you are religious) your Maker.
The others don't get the same weight.
FOR "STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES...":
This one doesn't work. Words can (and do) hurt, and we should be careful what we say to others. But having the framework of the previous piece of advice, helps take the sting out of it if someone says something to you that is harmful/hurtful.
> You shouldn't care what most people think of you. Ones that matter: your boss, your spouse, (if you are religious) your Maker.
I agree, but even those can be limited. I care about my boss' opinion when it comes to my work and what I do while paid.
For a spouse, there are limits as well, hard to think of specific examples, but I guess it depends on the couple.
For my creator, he wouldn't care whether I prefer Angular over React, or .Net over Java. As long as the choice is not made out of malice, for example I pick Rust for a greenfield project with a deadline even though I don't know Rust and hoping to learn it.
Not that I disagree with you, but what does "keeping score" actually mean? I don't understand how it's related to being mean or having "preferences" about people...
"Keeping score" was primarily a charge used by my mother against people who questioned her or charged her with wrong-doing. She used it to avoid responsibility and put the focus on the victim. This mixed with her brand of extreme egalitarianism into a general dictum "it is wrong to dislike people".
This is very poor advice. It's not wrong to dislike people! If you believe it is, then other people are wrong to dislike you. If being wrong is bad than you have no basis to like them, and they are not good people, not worthy of being friends with. Furthermore, that they are not being punished reflects on the failed state of authority (the school teachers and admins). Her advice was untested and didn't take into account basic human social or psychological needs.
I've seen a few psychopathic parents and aduts in action and this fits the pattern awfully well. There are books out there for children of narcissists and psycopaths, might be worth a look. It's tough starting the race to full adulthood when others begin that race far out ahead of you due to a more appropriate upbringing.
My own interpretation: this person said something negative about me. I now like them less and don’t want to spend time with them. That is not okay, because I’m keeping score (remembering their past actions and using it to decide future outcomes) and I’m preferring not to spend time with them.
Combined with the other comments, you’re also not allowed to change your own behavior based on what other people say (sticks and stones, outsider).
Sounds like a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma from a family member. Your parent is horrible to you, but you want a parent to love and be loved by, so you decide keeping score is immoral. You also don’t want to feel responsible and lessen the impact, so you decide words don’t hurt.
It’s horrible advice for a kid. You won’t mold yourself to fit into the group (also called socialization, totally normal and healthy) and you won’t cut ties with people that are awful to you. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find another kid who accepts you. Much more likely a bully will latch on.
Also, advice that works perfectly well for one individual can (for various possible reasons) turn out horrifically bad for some other individual person. Some of the best advice I ever got was from my gran'pa; "Take the advice of others with a grain of salt…" ;~)
1. An estimate is better than a guess. An measurement is better than an estimate.
2. It's never the money. (They will always say it is, but it's not.)
3. Never let anyone eat your lunch.
4. The best time to turn it on is before it's ready. You'll get plenty of data to finish it faster.
5. The only good Powerpoint slide is evergreen. If it's not, it's already obsolete.
6. Your positive mental attitude makes up for most of your shortcomings.
7. Learning the difference between an issue and a detail is half the battle.
8. Avoid introducing new jargon. It's already hard enough to understand.
9. Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.
10. If it's not written down, it's not.
11. The reason everyone we work for sucks is because those who don't suck never call us.
12. If you set aside something urgent to go to Happy Hour, how will our annual report differ? (Hint: It won't.)
13. What's the good news? (No matter how bad things are, never hesitate to answer.)
14. A degree in business is a degree in nothing.
15. The answer to any question is "Who wants to know?" (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084127)
16. No project ever dies but many are abandoned.
17. Self praise stinks.
18. If someone can do something once, they can do it again.
19. Almost anyone can do almost anything.
And my favorite: 20. Ultimately, go with your gut.
Yes, that's part of it. It has to speak deep (sometimes elusive) truth. People will be engaged. They will learn. They will use it.
And you can use the slides forever.
Kinda like stand-up comedy. Ever notice that there are 2 kinds of comics, those who riff with the drunks to get the cheap laughs and those who work at an act to speak evergreen truth, getting deep laughs (and even a few tears). We should be like the latter.
I could see that working for presentations for a general audience like a TED talk or maybe intro/closing slides, but otherwise many presentations are context-specific, and trying to frame the content as a "deep truth" might not fly with the audience.
Yes, you are correct that specific situation require specific numbers.
I think the difference is that you can add evergreen content to the specific numbers.
But I guess if it is a daily 15 minute sales meeting for something like the number of sales made yesterday, it isn't going to require anything but numbers.
But maybe once a week or once a month, the sales meeting could address bigger issues. The "why's" and "wherefores" that are evergreen. These types of meetings can keep people engaged at a deeper level, rather than only look at numbers, where people can become disengaged and not motivated as much.
Yes, I agree it’s good to sprinkle them in, but not for every slide, like the OP advises. I think the challenge is that evergreen content, by its nature, is general and can come across as irrelevant to the specific topic at hand (and easily trend towards cliche). The OP describes all other slides as obsolete, but I think that’s okay in many circumstances.
> I especially like that one. Me, as a newbie in the industry: "Customer X is a bunch of idiots." Boss: "If they weren't idiots, they wouldn't need us."
As a former coworker of mine put it:
"if IT was easy we wouldn't get paid decent money for it"
I'm too lazy to write a blog post about this at the moment, so here's a quickie reply:
1. An estimate is better than a guess. An measurement is better than an estimate.
Feedback from my mentor at a silly presentation of mine that convinced no one. I added data (as suggested) and it killed.
2. It's never the money. (They will always say it is, but it's not.)
I had trouble selling software. The customer said it was too expensive. That wasn't the real reason. This comment from my mentor taught me to find the real reason.
3. Never let anyone eat your lunch.
From an early mentor who kept noticing others take advantage of me (easy when you're in I.T.) without me fighting back. He taught me that sometimes, going along is worse for everyone in the long run.
4. The best time to turn it on is before it's ready. You'll get plenty of data to finish it faster.
I.T. (in its typical "pass the buck" mode) refused to turn on the Production Work-in-Process module of our ERP system because the base data (standards, routings, recipes, etc.) was so inaccurate and incomplete that "the shop reports would be worthless". To which my mentor responded, "What better way to fix them? The people responsible for fixing the data will be much more motivated because they want better reports." Great advice I've used 100 times since then.
5. The only good Powerpoint slide is evergreen. If it's not, it's already obsolete.
Powerpoint presentations are almost always boring and "powerpointless". UNLESS they're real truth (like most good comedy). The best truths are evergreen. And the slides can be used over and over again.
6. Your positive mental attitude makes up for most of your shortcomings.
From a mentor who saw something no one else saw (including myself). Once I knew "I had PMA", everything changed forever.
7. Learning the difference between an issue and a detail is half the battle.
Almost every corporate dick fight I've ever witnessed was over nothing. Asking the question, "Is this a detail or an issue?" refocused 90% of my attention to what really mattered. And helped me help others do the same thing.
8. Avoid introducing new jargon. It's already hard enough to understand.
I got fancy with new terminology in a sales presentation years ago. It failed miserably. This was why. I'm glad I asked. I've never failed because of that again.
9. Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.
First mentor, our tech lead, about debugging. VERY evergreen.
10. If it's not written down, it's not.
From another mentor. So obvious but so elusive. Born of a stupid argument about building something where no one remembered anything vocalized before.
11. The reason everyone we work for sucks is because those who don't suck never call us.
My cofounder's remark when I was super frustrated dealing with so much suckiness at our customer. Really set me right.
12. If you set aside something urgent to go to Happy Hour, how will our annual report differ? (Hint: It won't.)
My mentor wanted to talk about very important stuff over beers. I resisted. This question was how he got me to see things differently.
Urgent is short-term and tech based. Happy Hour is long-term and people based. Both are necessary.
13. What's the good news? (No matter how bad things are, never hesitate to answer.)
My mentor and boss always focused on the positive, no matter how elusive. I've adopted this philosophy. Sometimes I think that might have been the best thing I ever did.
14. A degree in business is a degree in nothing.
From a professor in my MBA program. Put everything into perspective before I encountered all those silly suits over my career.
15. The answer to any question is "Who wants to know?" (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084127)
See the link. I've been talking about this for years.
16. No project ever dies but many are abandoned.
One of my mentors liked deadlines for simple urgent projects but hated them for complex important projects. Took me a while to grok this, but has become much more important over the years.
17. Self praise stinks!
From my mother when I did my touchdown dance after building something. Great advice (although I still dance once in a while when something works the first time. Sometimes I just can't help myself.)
18. If someone can do something once, they can do it again.
The underlying principle (provided by my mentor) for a cost absorption system I wrote and implemented in a human based production shop. If they're not doing what they have done before, there must be a reason. Our job is to find that reason." This applies to all of us. I've even used it to "debug myself' many times.
19. Almost anyone can do almost anything.
Hard to grok, but so true. The main reason people fail is that they just give up before they succeed. Again, provided by a mention when I was frustrated by junior programmers weren't coming up to speed fast enough.
And my favorite: 20. Ultimately, go with your gut.
Really important for a right-brained person like me. It reassures me that left-brain thinking is not only OK, but often essential.
Thank you greatly for sharing and updating with examples and context, though I would like to gently suggest an alternative to one piece of wisdom.
> “17. Self praise stinks!
From my mother when I did my touchdown dance after building something. Great advice (although I still dance once in a while when something works the first time. Sometimes I just can't help myself.)”
In contrast, in the book Tiny Habits by Stanford psychology professor BJ Fogg, self-praise is actually described as critical for making new habits and behaviour change stick, as it allows for positive reinforcement [1]. Anecdotally, I’ve observed friends who never celebrate major positive improvements in their life, and they seem to have depressive symptoms.
Though on the other hand, it’s quite possible that people view self-congratulatory celebratory gestures as negative. Perhaps it’s good to celebrate your achievements, but mostly in private or just with close friends to avoid attracting competition or challenge from others (I wish it was less risky to celebrate in public or among coworkers, but in practice, not everyone is celebratory of others’ success).
Thank you, makes more sense and some for me to think about there.
Some one once told me another version of your No. 3 - "A pocket full of thankyous is nice, but won't pay your bills".
On No. 17, I think it's important to get a little fist pump in sometimes. It make's up for the other days when I call myself an idiot for silly mistakes!
And on going with your gut, I do this much more these days. Unfortunately I don't get to find out if I was right on the oppotunities I let go.
Appreciate your generosity in typing the OG 20 and then expanding upon it when people were curious.
Personally I am very surprised you think some of these held up: pos mental attitude, writing things down, value of mba, and - most especially - almost anyone can do anything.
Personally I am very surprised you think some of these held up: pos mental attitude, writing things down, value of mba, and - most especially - almost anyone can do anything.
OK then please allow me to give you a recent example of ALL 4 OF THESE that made my (Fortune 50) employer hundreds of millions of dollars in real profits...
I built specialized supply chain software that did what nothing else (including SAP and JDA) could do. It supported 10,000 daily orders in 240 warehouses.
Our Big 4 Accounting Idiots spent 9 months and $2 million to conclude that it could not be done. I knew better because my users knew better. (I had already earned my own worthless MBA and had worked as an employee for the same Big 4 firm years prior and knew their weaknesses, which were not hard to spot.)
3 different divisions could not agree on anything. I just pulled them together in the same room at corporate headquarters until they got to know each other and hammered out a good design.
I built the prototype in 6 weeks because I knew I could. I got buy-in from the people that mattered because it's what they wanted in the first place.
12 offshore programmers built production ready software in less than a year. Everyone else had given up on them and their giant firm because of previous failures but I knew better. I never met any of them, in person or online (because of the time zone difference). Everything was written down. That's the only way this could have been done.
The 20 items I presented in my original post are solid gold. Not because of me. But because I learned from brilliant mentors.
Personally I am very surprised that you are are very surprised. The tech only takes us so far. I was lucky to have mentors who taught me the soft stuff too. Their advice changed my life much more than any tech advice.
Thank you for your politesse. Human language is a crude tool. There are always tradeoffs with the words we choose. "Anyone can do Anything" is a good mnemonic (the alliteration really helps) which takes away any excuses (not a bad thing, in my case.) Still, it does sacrifice literal truth. There are no four-year-olds in the NFL, for example.
"If you think you can't do something, you can't." Is another way I've heard the same thought expressed. Maybe even more semantically respectable would be "Almost everyone who decides they can't do something, is wrong."
The native american expression is one I like a lot: "If you don't know how to do something, that's because you don't want it enough."
This still assumes a level of human equality that is belied in reality. Most people that are living good and healthy lives do not do so as a result of basic aptitude + wanting + grinding (1) it out. They are more like a particular type of seed that moved about different soils until it found one it could flourish in. Anyone can do anything-ism implies that a watermelon seed can flourish in a rice field if it “wants enough”.
(1) grinding is a particular type of experience that deserves explanation. It is not merely working at something- it is the subjective personal experience of the work. I can code for an hour and be psychologically rejuvenated by it and my cousin could feel like she was in a prison for months. You will never grind your way to a satisfactory life; grinding is a symptom that you need to change the “soil” and that the “want” you have was memed into you and is unsuitable for you.
I"m over 65, I don't think you'll ever get to a truly satisfactory life without some grinding at self-introspection. Meditation is nothing if not a very deliberate grind. You can grind badly and not get a result from meditation, but you can't get a good result from meditation without grinding. A lot.
Otherwise, I think we are agreeing, neither I nor the guy I'm in effect defending think that soils (privilege, fer instance) don't matter, or that humans aren't unequal. Four-year-old blocking not equal to 24-year-old blocking. I think I covered that. There are sometimes advantages in not being fully literal, which is lucky because language cannot but be vague (it's just a matter of degree.) Hence the tradeoffs, impressing the message firmly matters because the temptation to give ourselves excuses is difficult to fully elide.
can you explain why? i read thru the linked post and it seemed kinda obvious that differnt people care about different things so you must adapt your value proposition accordingly. i must be missing something
After you've been lying or sitting and you get up and go for a wee, once done press up just behind your balls. Oftentimes that pushes out a big drip that was otherwise going to come out later once you had your pants done up.
The best abstract advice I've been given is to say "I don't know" when I don't know. No waffle, no bullshit, no trying to save face. Saves a lot of time.
The "I don't know" advice is great, and has done the most to enhance my technical credibility of anything. If you admit freely what you know and don't know, it helps people believe that you do know. By contrast, people who are afraid of admitting that they don't know something are always treated with skepticism.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to have been told to never show weakness by admitting that they don't know something.
I had a professor who gave 20% credit for answering "I don't know" for a question on your homework (plus a little extra if you explain what you do know and why you don't know), and I stole that rule for my own class. One of my students became the VP of a chip company, and told me that the "I don't know" homework rule helped him gain a lot of confidence and save the BS.
> After you've been lying or sitting and you get up and go for a wee, once done press up just behind your balls.
Related to this, I "recently" (as in years ago, but already as an adult) discovered a method that, at least for me, performs the same capability without needing to manipulate my testicles. However, it may only be practicable for non-circumcised penes—I don't know.
The process is the following.
After you have finished your urination, even if (you think) you have shaken and squeezed out all that was left, you pull your foreskin back even further so it is behind the glans. Then, you use your thumb and index finger to pinch the foreskin on one side and use it as a handle to stretch your penis by pulling the glans away from you VERY lightly (no pain or discomfort please!), slightly bending the penis diagonally at that point until, usually a second or two later, you start feeling the need to pee again. Then you let go and... voilà! There's a whole new stream of urine that you wouldn't even believe was there when you "finished" peeing a few seconds ago.
I don't know if this is common knowledge, as I have never searched about it or talked about it (not out of any embarrassment or anything, it's just something so trivial). This also means I don't even know if it would work on any equipment or whether it is limited to specific internal wirings or anatomical features.
Personally I say "I don't know" when I don't know.
I also try not to express my opinion in absolutes – I tend to tell that "I think that...", "I believe that", "as far as I know", etc. It is, in a way, a philosophical position – I am aware that I do not know about many things, that someone may be more expert in a given field than me. So, I am trying to keep an open mind, be open to discussion, and not impose my own opinion on others just because I feel that I am right.
I have been living by these principles for years and I feel good.
However, I would not advise anyone to take similar stance. It depends on the company culture, probably it differs from country to country too... Still, from my experience, it may hurt you career. In most places where I worked, that kind of behavior was perceived as a weakness.
Hell, I remember being told that I will not become a manager, because there is no place for "don't know". But it was quite toxic workplace anyway.
I was in a fraternity in college. Part of the pledging process was learning all kinds of information about the fraternity, its history and philosophy, etc. One of our "rituals" for pledges involved being put into a situation where you would be asked questions you didn't know the answers to. It was a high pressure thing, and since you'd been memorizing all this stuff and being tested on it, you _really_ wanted to be able to answer these questions.
The lesson, in short, was "if you don't know, say you don't know." Admitting you didn't know the answers was required to "pass" the ritual. (It wasn't actually possible to fail per se)
Many of the things we did with initiates were stupid or pointless, mostly just designed to put them through the ringer. But this one has really stuck with me as a valuable lesson. If you're missing some knowledge, just say you don't know.
The advice "I don't know" sounds good, but without further qualification it just sounds good.
Examples are my boss and their boss, who instead of saying "I don't know," would sell you their plan for nuclear fusion despite knowing fusion only in the context of fine dining. Many politicians are also allergic to "I don't know," but they continue to get elected, many journalists have no clue but continue to write for major newspapers. They don't say "I don't know," they write while not knowing, but without mentioning it.
I have found that all the best advice I've received centers on how to focus your attention. As humans when we can give something our full attention it's almost impossible that what we are doing won't bear fruit. Here are some axioms around that idea that if you implement you will progress.
- Time is not your most valuable resource. Your attention is.
- Focus your attention only on things that have disproportionate returns.
- Multitasking is a myth. Pick one thing and do it with all your strength.
- Discern between Type 1 & Type 2 decisions. High vs low consequence. If high consequence apply scientific method. Everything else delegate to smart people.
- Prioritize everything systematically. See Eisenhower Matrix or T.R.A.F apply it to everything vying for your attention.
- Keep a distraction list. Write down every idea, review monthly but know 95% of this is going into the trash. You simply don't have enough lifespan to do them all.
- Discard all unnecessary things from your life. Half done projects, old clothes, shoes, ideas, cups, bowls, hackysack, cars. All that crap that's piling up in your basement, garage, closets, cupboards wherever. You don't use it, you don't need it and they rob you of your attention.
> Discern between Type 1 & Type 2 decisions. High vs low consequence. If high consequence apply scientific method. Everything else delegate to smart people.
What is meant by “everything else” here? All low-consequence decisions? That doesn’t seem to make sense (e.g. what to eat for lunch today).
@layer8 one thing to keep in mind is your future and past self are people you can delegate to. If today I prepare a tuna sandwich in a brown paper sac for tomorrow's lunch. Then I have delegated that decision to "someone else"... past me. Keeping my current self focused in the now.
Yesterday me's focus was on making the sandwich.
But here's another piece of advice. Don't think in absolutes! Sometimes you'll have to use your gut on a Type 1, sometimes you'll be making the Type 2 decision. It's just advice not the law of Moses.
I was mostly referring to “delegate to smart people”. My today’s self preparing a tuna sandwich for tomorrow probably isn’t smarter than my tomorrow’s self eating the sandwich ;). So, the “low priority” = “delegate to smart people” doesn’t make sense to me, and I suspect is not what you meant. If anything, I would want to delegate the “scientific method” stuff to people smarter than me.
These terms are relative. Low priority doesn't mean not important or even not difficult. As an executive I delegate parts of the scientific method to my team when analyzing Type 1 decisions however the final go/no-go decision is squarely on me and I have to answer to my share holders and my employees if I get it wrong. You should never ever delegate blame.
Type 2 simply means low consequence, again relative. Because everyones appetite for consequence is different. For example a Type 2 decision for me is Health Care. I delegate to my spouse to pick the plan. If a bad decision is made worse case is my out of pocket is higher than I would like but it can be remedied in 12 months. It's an important decision and difficult one but for me personally it's a Type 2. For someone else that might be a Type 1 and they must really pick the right plan.
So apply the advise to your life in the way that makes the most sense. And for me personally what I eat for lunch is always a Type 1 ;)
You won't find it on Google. It's a technique from a book for executives from the early 80's. The last chapter is on how to use a personal computer to manage your files instead of a file cabinet! No internet.
T.R.A.F stands for (T)rash (R)ead (A)ction (F)ile
The idea is everyday you, "along with your secretary" lol, Go through each item in your inbox and mark each item with either a T R A or F. You don't read or contemplate on the item you simply categorize it and move to the next item.
Mark T - to TRASH item like junk mail, unimportant, not worthy of a response
Mark R - to READ later ie articles, memos, letters, etc.
Mark A - to take an ACTION on this item. Phone call, pay a bill, etc
Mark F - to FILE this item away receipts, tax return, etc.
You are to do this exercise at the beginning of each day. The idea being your action pile is the items you need to work on. Schedule a time daily or weekly to go through your read pile and catch up on reading. Trash all the garbage and file away things you need to keep but don't need to look at.
Whatever you didn't complete from your action & read list you put back in your inbox for the next day. Each day mark a dot in the upper right had corner of the item. Once the item collects 3 dots. Force yourself to handle it that day. No more delay.
This system was designed in the days before computers but apply it to your email inbox and it works very well. I started by just using flags on the email messages. Green flag action, Blue Flag read, Red Flag trash, Orange Flag file.
I have since evolved into a custom system that is a blend of TRAF and Eiesenhower Matrix. I'm actually designing a mail client around this idea. It has greatly improved my ability to handle the onslaught of material that comes my way.
A Type 1 decision is a decision with high consequences if you get it wrong the results could be catastrophic. Alternatively a Type 2 decision has low consequences, if you get it wrong you can undo what you did and try again.
Let's say you're starting a new software project for your job. And it's up to you to decide what language/framework to build it. This would be a Type 1 decision, if after 6 months of development you realize you picked the wrong stack. It's going to be very difficult or impossible to go back on that decision. Alternatively within that project deciding where to place a button in the user interface is of low consequences. If you put it in the wrong place and realize conversions are down you can just undo it and put it in a better place.
For Type 1 decisions it's important to apply the scientific method. The purpose of which is to use facts to guide your decision and not your gut. Your hypothesis may be software framework X is best to build this project but you should do everything you can to disprove that with evidence. If you can't disprove it then you're probably making a good decision. If you find you have a lot of evidence it's a bad decision then you need to find another path.
You only need to apply scientific method to Type 1. For Type 2 / Low Consequence just make an educated guess or delegate to someone you trust to make the educated guess.
Not really an advice, but just a phrase: “Can you show me something you have done?”. My brother was introducing me as a developer for a project he was responsible and the supervisor wanted to meet me first. I was prattling about all the stuff I know about and I was real proud about it. He interrupt me with this. That’s when I realise all the things you know don’t really matter to people if you can’t actually solve their problems and they aren’t confident that you can. I switched my methods after that. And instead of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, I make sure, I actually practice and build thibgs instead of just be satisfied with “I know this”. 2 years later, I started making money on gigs and contracts as a programmer.
Talking about me: I'm very much abstract and academic and do not really care about practical applications. I went into Physics and realized how much I hated the lab and the more experimental oriented subjects: I love the Math sequences, love Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics, loved Special and General Relativity but hated Laser and Optics, hated Electrical Circuits, hated Nuclear Physics (prof was an experimentalist who talked endlessly about detectors).[1]
Nowadays the tendency remains: I love study Philosophy, Theology (even if I'm not religious), History, Math, Theoretical Physics and I love speculative or fantastical literature like Sci-fi, Fantasy, Occult, Conspiracy Theories... not because I believe them but because let me explore my own thinking.
Sometimes I wish I were more building oriented: it would help me in the working world. Projects, results, metrics, outcomes are all so tiresome.
[1]Thinking about it I should have done Math instead of Physics.
That’s interesting. I began as a Physics major, and loved Laser and Optics, Electrical Circuits, Mechanics, all the labs really. But then I got to upper division Quantum Mechanics and I hated it. I was pushing around Schroedinger equations all day to get the correct answers but I never had a firm mental model on what was actually going on behind the math. I ended up switching my major to Mechanical Engineering. In hind sight I should have jus stuck it out because I ended writing software for a living anyway :)
Always take sides. By not taking a side you are automatically wrong. This doesn’t mean you should engage in identity politics, etc. but when faced with a choice take the time to make an informed decision.
If you say something “should be a thing” you are automatically now in charge of creating it or convincing someone to create it. Do not tell people who are working on things that they should realize your idea if you are not willing to put down what you are doing and work on it yourself. This advice prevents you from being the annoying ideas person.
Don’t get married. Tax benefits are minor, divorce headache is major. Separate public declaration of love and commitment from your government and financial affairs. You can still have a commitment ceremony and a big party.
Learn how to properly ask for consent. You are likely very bad at this.
The most important thing about a job is not what you work on but who you work with. Pick people, not projects.
Plumbing is easier than you think. Learn to do it yourself.
Related to the above, read Heinlein’s quote on specialization. It is for insects. Learn to do everything.
Stress kills. Get sleep.
Don’t take advice from strangers on the internet :)
I've heard and read this advice numerous times, and it is even very old advice.
"Rulers must never remain neutral. If neighboring rulers fight, you must take sides, because if you do not, the winner will threaten you, and the loser will not befriend you. Whether or not your ally wins, he will be grateful to you. However, if you can avoid it, you should never ally with someone more powerful than yourself, because if he wins, you may be in his power."
-- Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513
There certainly must be something to it, but in my opinion sometimes there is a place for neutrality. If it is expressed without any nuance as above, I don't think it is good advice.
> Always take sides. By not taking a side you are automatically wrong. This doesn’t mean you should engage in identity politics, etc. but when faced with a choice take the time to make an informed decision.
This is a good way to piss away incredible amounts of time on irrelevant things. You are definitely not “wrong” by choosing to ignore an argument about which Kardashian is better looking.
It involves grokking the arguments from both sides and if it’s anything non-trivial it will take hours to actually give it due diligence. “Taking a side” without being some political hot-head dipshit is a massive waste of time.
You don't necessarily need to be right, either, but the point is to take a stand so that there's something substantial to discuss. Put another way -- allow yourself the opportunity of being wrong. The assumption is that good faith dialectic follows, though of course that is an assumption made only on good faith.
Nope, that’s still a massive waste of time. There is an endless pool of deep nuanced disputes in a world with billions of people.
Look at just the US elections coming. There are probably 10,000+ seats of significant municipal, state, or national power up for turnover in two weeks. You cannot form a meaningful opinion on even 1% of those and it will be out of date almost immediately.
> Plumbing is easier than you think. Learn to do it yourself.
Yep, same with electrical work around the house. Obviously not for everyone, but once you get past the initial hurdle of getting comfortable and safe with electricity, there's great pleasure to be had from knowing that you can fix any issue, with minimal cost.
I think “the office” is the best example of this. It seems like it would be a terrible job to sell paper but it still seems like a really fun place to be.
And some states marry you even if you don’t get married. It’s called common law marriage and you can end up with all the divorce stuff without even having had the wedding.
3 years of cohabitation and joint finances where I live
only difference from marriage is that to get out of a marriage you MUST have a divorce; ending common law relationships leaves a 2-year window where a proceeding can be filed, and will behave like a divorce if filed. but it doesn't have to happen.
This is really important. Addendum: pick the right spouse if you can, easier said than done. It's better to be single than have a dysfunctional spouse.
I was one of the people who implemented Google's top-level domain system. One day in the microkitchen I met Vint Cerf and told him what I worked on. He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers, and ICANN should have been focusing on making .com / .org / .net better instead. It surprised me when I learned that I'd spent the last four years of my life working on a project where Google had bet big on gTLDs without the support of the father of the Internet. So I got a job on the TensorFlow team instead.
Consumers also hate paying for things. I've always thought when Google came along that it was a shining beacon for being the one corporation that gives everything away for free.
As a consumer I am totally fine paying for things. But I hate being interrupted with ads for irrelevant shit I don’t want or need. Google and every other online advertiser is hilariously bad at guessing what I might be shopping for at the moment. Amazon comes close by remembering what products I looked at last. But Google is worse than dogshit when it comes to this.
I’ll give you a typical example where Google could be great but falls so short: I deliver to it on a silver platter a search query for a specific product “MRCOOL DIY 4th Gen 12k btu”. This is a very specific ductless mini split heat pump that retails for about $1750. I was looking to see if anyone had a cheaper price. Well Google Shopping mostly showed me results for either the 3rd Gen or a different BTU rating, in an apparent attempt to not show too few results. No a 36k btu unit isn’t a substitute. No, just the air handler isn’t a substitute. I have my credit card out and ready to go, buy Google is too busy showing me ads for window units!
You know where I found my answer? Eventually I gave up on Google and went to the manufacturer’s website, looked through the list of authorized dealers and saw that Costco was on the list. I then looked there directly and found the unit at $300 cheaper than elsewhere. Bad search engine, no cookie!
Slightly off topic but salutations to a fellow mini split owner, I have a Senville unit in my garage (which has been converted to an office/gym/also still a garage).
I really love the thing and installing it was my first big DIY project in many ways. I did all the work myself and the results have been awesome. It can make my garage absolutely frigid (although it's not quite as good at heating, I've got some work to do around shoring up the existing insulation).
They really do seem wonderful. I am building a separate building on my property that will be my backyard office and hopefully this unit is going up in a few weeks. Can’t wait to try it out.
If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.
I think that's a very narrow interpretation of what a search engine does. Or a narrow interpretation of what the GP was doing. Probably both.
You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've learned about modern search engines is that providing more query details nets you less applicable results.
It's like every search engine takes all keywords with an "OR" mentality when it really should be an "AND".
And a lot of this does come down to the advertising model. I wouldn't be surprised if this benefits google because having to try 3 or 4 search queries to find what you want puts more advertisements in front of you, and increases the odds you'll click on one.
Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.
The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.
Google is an ad company that produces a search engine, rather than a search engine that features ads. Although it may have been the latter in the olden days
I’ll give you a typical example where Google could be great but falls so short: I deliver to it on a silver platter a search query for a specific product “MRCOOL DIY 4th Gen 12k btu”. This is a very specific ductless mini split heat pump that retails for about $1750. I was looking to see if anyone had a cheaper price. Well Google Shopping mostly showed me results for either the 3rd Gen or a different BTU rating, in an apparent attempt to not show too few results. No a 36k btu unit isn’t a substitute. No, just the air handler isn’t a substitute. I have my credit card out and ready to go, buy Google is too busy showing me ads for window units!
> Consumers also hate paying for things. I've always thought when Google came along that it was a shining beacon for being the one corporation that gives everything away for free.
All of Google's offerings do indeed have a price, just not a financial one in most cases.
"One day in the microkitchen I met Vint Cerf and told him what I worked on. He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers, and ICANN should have been focusing on making .com / .org / .net better instead."
You're lucky you didn't meet Stanislaw Ulam, who, when anyone told him about a project they were working on always responded with "What is that compared to E=mc^2 ?"
That's totally not the same thing though. Vint Cerf wasn't telling me I was but a mere footnote compared to his invention of TCP/IP. He thought gTLDs were actively harming the Internet.
I will hazard a guess. Cerf liked the top-level organization scheme com/org/edu because he worked hard on it and it carries meaningful information about the owner of the domain. E.g. identifies the domain-owner as either a for-profit corp, a non-profit org, or a school. By contrast new tlds like "app" or "website" imply absolutely nothing about the domain or the person/org that owns it. So there's a net loss in meaning. Effectively the domain variability has leaked into the tld.
Originally the hierarchy was supposed to be much more defined. But domains are so cheap nobody bothers. You see it a bit in .gov and .edu where subdomains are actually delegated somewhat sometimes.
My executables end with .com and my website ends with .lol so I disagree with him, even though he's right. My work doesn't target consumers though. What matters is that he's not just speaking only for himself and I would have liked his views to have carried more weight in ICANN's vision. Perhaps they would have addressed the domainer problem rather than simply making new digital land where the same problems would once again take root.
Ulam picked a strange place to stop zooming out. After all, E=mc^2 will be forgotten, too. Even now it is "forgotten" in the sense of not being understood by most of humanity. There is no static human achievement (scientific, artistic, or political) that survives into Deep Time. Consider that our most durable artifacts are the religious ones - some humans truly believe them to be otherworldly and precious beyond measure. Yet even those artifacts eventually get lost in the couch cushions and forgotten. Science text books will fair worse, in the long run.
You talk about E=mc^2 like it was some kind of Mayan idol waiting for Indian Jones to uncover. In a way I guess that's true. But Einstein wasn't the one who placed it there, so if the knowledge is forgotten then that just means someone else will eventually get the thrill of discovery.
It’s less that it gets forgotten and more that it’s not really useful to the vast majority of people. Most people who “know” E=mc² have zero use for it.
But something like geometry has practical applications that continue even if people don’t know it by that name (most builders know the 3-4-5 triangle right angle trick, for example).
At some point I came across this quote which has been credited to Mark Twain:
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
I recall taking it to heart and trying to imagine the kind of regrets I would have as a 40 year old me. Shortly after this I sold everything I owned and traveled the world for years. That experience gave me even more confidence to follow my gut and make the most out of my life. I've tried to keep this mentality still as I am about to turn 37. It keeps me moving forward and trying to achieve my goals.
Before spending the last money I had on a coding book, the cashier could see my hesitation and said "don't worry, investing in yourself is never a waste of money".
Reference books are the one thing it's a good idea to spend money on, because flipping back and forth through a digital copy is still a miserable experience
If they can make flipping a finger pinch worth of pages somehow doable that would be killer. Some sort of wide-pinch gesture with a semi transparent overlay of the page you are going to flip to with your current pinch width.
A foldable reader with readable panels on each sides when you open it. You can flip pages either way. Pen for annotation if possible. Create/edit your own documents. An icon tap to overlay another document (a note, book page, research paper) so you can add to it or copy from it to the underlying panel.
A reader mode (distraction free) when simply reading. A document mode when you are doing something that requires writing (including simple annotations).
I like books and flipping through them. However if you can blend a book reader with a great note taker that would be ideal.
Funny enough VCRs had this decades ago, the double-fast-forward skipped forward a few minutes. Why e-readers can't do this with a similar symbol to skip forward 25 pages is a mystery to me.
Idk I got a grasp on programming because I spent a summer in the library with books on programming and a hard rule of not leaving for even a coffee until i have done at least a full chapter and all exercises.
I kept the phone turned off and only touched the laptop once I was ready for exercises and after 2-3 hours was too terrified to lose focus if I didn’t go straight into code.
Would have never happened with MOOC, as there would have been all kinds of drifting away. I owe my ability to hyper focus to that time
Well yes and no. Spending money on something, especially when you’re short on money, makes you value it more and overall for me this would make it more likely to actually go through that book. But that’s me.
For me it's totally irrelevant how many money I spent in how much I value something. I have numerous overpriced textbook in my shelf that I've never read, on the other end my libgen textbook are used constantly and got me through university.
Also library suggestions are great too if you can wait a few months. I usually suggest a bunch of books not just for me, but other people that might be on the same career path as me.
A personal finance author I follow (Ramit Sethi) has a book-buying rule where he has unlimited budget when it comes to buying books because if even one line resonates with you / changes your life then it becomes much more valuable than the $10-$20 you spent on the book. I presume it's aimed towards non-fiction books, but some fiction books can profoundly change your perspective on things, and that's worth the investment too.
I mostly follow that rule, but with the caveat that I must begin reading/skimming it immediately after I buy it (otherwise it will just end up in the list of books "to be read"). Yes this means that I have an embarrassing amount of started books.
Then again, the most valuable book in the world isn't the Gutenberg Bible or a first folio of Shakespeare or a handwritten draft of Principia. It's the one you need at 2 AM on a Sunday morning but don't have on your shelf.
Could be an employee/non-shareholder. It sounds like this is always good advice though unless youre on your last penny. The cashier didn’t know that though.
Time is the greatest resource, but energy management is your greatest goal. You will always run out of energy before you run out of time.
If you have a life where you pursue autonomy, the development of your capacities, and a sense of meaningfulness in what you do, you'll be able to withstand and enjoy much more than you think. If you don't pursue these things, everything will be harder.
Simply spending your time with more intentionality and being conscious of each moment changes so much.
It's easier to find satisfaction in goals outside of your own self, because they introduce a finite boundary whereas the self is infinite in its desires
Try to picture what a confident and well-adjusted person would do in the same situation, to determine if you are currently acting out because of trauma or fear.
If you have a habit, ask yourself what it will look like if it continues uninterrupted for decades. Conversely, try to picture what a habit you don't currently have could do for you over the same timespan.
My most significant piece of advice came from my uncle. It was simply this "how would you feel if your grandmother died tomorrow?". It had an immediate effect. From that moment on I began to respect and honour my grandmother.
Up until then I was not exactly the nicest grandchild, a lot of anger, a lot of confusion reigned in my childhood and my grandmother was the last in the chain. She ended up getting most of my frustration. But that piece of advice had a lasting impact, it has been with me for about forty years now.
I try to always remember that when dealing with other people not because I think I want to improve their lives, I simply don't wish to have a guilty conscience if they do die tomorrow. Of course the effect is the same as if I were to be motivated by altruist ideals.
For most people reading this it might be a nice ideal but not a good piece of advice. The reason this was a very good piece of advice for me was that a few years before my uncle said this to me, my father had died. He died without me being able to say goodbye, to be able to talk to him, nothing. I was left with a mighty large hole.
And that is the second piece of advice: some advice only works if you have had the experience. And some advice makes sense later after you have had the experience. Be open and listen to others, especially those older than you. Be polite, be reflective and be thankful for being the survivor of a long line of ancestors, not everyone gets to survive.
Never quit e really got that one. If I were to die tomorrow, I’d spend most of my money and do too much drugs.
But what if I don’t die tomorrow? Then I’m broke and have a substance abuse problem. I don’t think that’s a particularly good way to make life choices personally.
It's what if, not a certainty. Most of the decisions rely heavily on the certainty of living tomorrow. Which can be highly probable, but not 100% certain. So, that makes it possible to reconsider some decisions.
Like, should I pay for this expensive dinner or travel, or should I save the money? Sometimes saving the money makes sense, sometimes it does not. But you should never rely on the fact that you will be there to use the money you're saving instead of enjoying a nice experience right there.
I guess it's more about what if they die tomorrow ... if I died tomorrow, dunno I guess I would a little sad that I didn't have a substance abuse problem - but would depend on the substance.
The value of advice comes from arriving at the right moment to the right person, not some platonic, universal “goodness“.
For example, I wanted to drop out of college to work on climate change, and an adult in that community who I respected immensely told me “calm down, it won’t be too late by the time you graduate“.
Not too many people needed the advice to worry less about climate change (especially 15 years ago), but it was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment so that I could focus on actually learning the fundamentals of engineering before throwing myself in
I've heard a similar story about a young man that wanting to become a monk, went to the monastery and one of the old monks there told him: "Go get a doctorate, then come back and choose if you really want to give up everything to meditate." or something along those lines.
The best piece of advice I received was 'slow and steady wins the race'. It's something I heard a 1000 times before and 1000 times after, and it never meant that much to me. When I heard it, though, at just the right time and it made just the right amount of sense that it totally changed my perspective on everything radically since then. It's totally changed the way I operate and the way I look at things. But I can't really communicate to other people what _exactly_ it means to me, because when I say it to other people they just hear 'slow and steady wins the race' the way I did the first 1000 times.
That is a totally fair question, and I have to admit I did not - nuanced stories don’t fit in an online comment!
The Great Recession hit and Obama’s climate push failed[0], so I went into healthcare (as another thing that needed fixing, and which there was political will to do something about).
The lessons of all of those twists are more complex, but I still firmly believe that I got the right advice given what everybody knew at the time.
There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. "You lack the fire," he said.
Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. "You changed my entire life," he explained. "It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgement. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I've had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?"
"Oh, I hardly listened when you played," the old master said. "That's what I tell everyone who plays for me -- that they lack the fire."
"But that's unforgivable!" the businessman cried. "How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz--"
The old man shook his head again. "You don't understand," he said. "If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me."
With respect to comparing oneself with other people, "Better at, not better than" -- can't remember when this was given, want to say 8th grade from some counselor interviewing me for something or another (career guidance? I remember him asking me about a phrase I liked back then, "Through knowledge, power"). I don't really agree , but I mulled over it then and still remember it, and it's not terrible as far as generic advice goes, especially if it can help someone avoid a superiority complex, which I'm sure back then I looked like I might develop.
A HS teacher had "Pay yourself first", which I still like, and is especially useful for people who might otherwise help others too much at their own expense (and ability to help a lot more in the future).
I think the real lasting advice that I still think about and would like to more perfectly follow is ch 9 of the tao te ching. One translation goes:
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Another translation:
Brim-fill the bowl,
it’ll spill over.
Keep sharpening the blade,
you’ll soon blunt it.
Nobody can protect
a house full of gold and jade.
Wealth, status, pride,
are their own ruin.
To do good, work well, and lie low
is the way of the blessing.
> Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.
Apparently the tao never spent days as a kid running around the house putting pots under the ceiling when it rained, raised multiple kids with severe birth defects, being beaten at home and at school, kept getting shocked by the dryer, or had a wife whose meds cost $50K a year. I did, so I will cheerfully continue my chase for money and security!
There’s a chapter on the mind in the book Discourses and Sayings by Abba Dorotheus.
I suppose it can be summarised as “stop lying to yourself”.
There’s some subtlety to what this means. For me a big part of that is not living in my imagination. I used to have lots of imaginary conversations with people, predicting what they would say in those situations. This is dangerous since you end up building mental models based on (unfounded) mental models, instead of on reality. Your emotional responses also get coloured by these imaginary exchanges.
OTOH, if you can separate that fantasy from reality, it can help you calm down and produce a good result in the real situation, instead of going in blind. I often run through potential conversations in my head before dealing with bad situations, and I think it's been incredibly helpful.
This one is really hard to combat. The overthinking brain imagines every scenario ever, really hard to tune the noise down. I've gotten better at it lately but it's still difficult sometimes.
A technique that can be very effective at breaking patterns of cognition is to every time you find yourself doing it, name it and let it go. Don't try to resist or get angry or attach any emotion to it, just say "I'm just simulating a discussion" and drop it.
Doesn't matter how many times you have to do it in the beginning, every 30 seconds, whatever, as long as you persist in doing this, it will relatively quickly stop the thinking pattern.
> There’s some subtlety to what this means. For me a big part of that is not living in my imagination. I used to have lots of imaginary conversations with people, predicting what they would say in those situations. This is dangerous since you end up building mental models based on (unfounded) mental models, instead of on reality. Your emotional responses also get coloured by these imaginary exchanges.
Another important point about this is that if you're in a heated (imaginary) debate with someone, your body reacts as though you are in a heated (real) debate with someone.
This pattern can be a pretty significant source of stress and anxiety.
From GTD methodology if I could remember only one simple thing it was "if ypu can do xyz in less than 5 mins do it now".
You’d be amazed how many things you can do in even ONE minute.
It helped me when depressed to come out of immobility and stop postponing even the simplest tasks : take out the garbage literally doable in under 60 seconds including going up and down the stairs, reply to some small emails, do some simple housekeeping tasks.
I remember a study from ages ago about the people who were able to stay focused on tasks though of the stuff they had to do, and committed to doing it in 15 seconds or less after thinking about it. Especially if it was simple, quick, or easy stuff, like a 3-liner email.
First class I got when I got to university, freshly arrived to the capital for my studies, still a kid. The calculus professor walks in and proceeds to do the "1/3 times 3 isn't 1, but it is" shtick, blowing everyone's minds. Continues doing this for 40 minutes and at the end he says:
"You're not competing with the people in your town anymore, you're not even competing with the people here, from now on think of yourselves competing with every engineer across the world. Aim high."
For a kid from Portugal that came from a smaller town, it changed my whole perspective. I loved that guy. Was an excellent professor for the rest of the semester as well. Can't say I met any other student of his that didn't walk away thinking fondly of him. Manuel Oliveira Ricou, you the man.
The point went past you. The core of the message is that you should not limit yourself to those you see around you in your small country, and keep a small country mentality. It's telling young people they are as good as anyone else, and that they should aim as high as someone that grew up say in the US and went to Stanford, because they are no better than you. I thought it was a great message.
I've got a few that definitely had an impact on how I act, or perceive a situation.
"Why did you do that?"
"I don't know"
"Then if you don't know why you're doing something, don't do it."
I've heard this convo when I was a teenager, and I believe that it nudged me into having a bit more self-reflection and thoughtfulness than I would have otherwise.
"When people say something to you, most of the time it means either 'I need help' or 'I love you'"
And, closely related: "Don't forget that the person in front of you might just have a bad day".
Those have been immensely useful when dealing with common annoyance from family and strangers alike. It doesn't mean that you have to accept everything, but it certainly help in avoiding getting angry as the default reaction.
Your ego and your conscious mind are the source of most of your problems. Meditate to delve deeper and find out who you truly are. (Or more accurately, who you are not.) If you can tap into and sync up with this inner self, your problems will melt away and you will find happiness without needing much.
This isn’t to say that you must get rid of your conscious mind or ego. Simply understand why they’re useful.
Your conscious mind is a focusing tool, like a coach, and your subconscious mind is like the players in charge of the doing. The conscious mind shouldn’t be the one trying to solve everything. The ego cares too much about things that don’t matter like pride, greed, and ruling the universe. It is just trying to protect you from harm and death.
Let go of these feelings and thoughts, and stop trying to be the supreme ruler of the universe. You cannot control nearly as much as you think you can, including yourself. You can only influence.
Be still, let life happen and flow with it like water. Translation: Be perceptive of what’s happening around you and within, then act appropriately by gently guiding everything toward the desired outcome without using force and striving. Patience is key here. Striving makes you use up your energy too quickly and potentially burn out.
When you achieve this state of mind, it feels like you can solve any problem using your mind and ingenuity, and nothing really bothers you anymore. You’ll only spend time on what truly matters to you and your life will become one that’s truly worth living.
Been recently struggling with health and having a lot of time on my hands, I have gotten more into meditation. I like the way these thoughts of yours are going. While learning who 'I' am and who I am not might be a part of our introspective journey, are there any books you could recommend looking into as to support the practice of mindfulness and meditation?
For this hands off way of thinking, I highly recommend the Tao te Ching and the Book of Leadership and Strategy (Tao te Ching part 2), translated by Thomas Cleary. I am a big fan of Taoism and Zen Buddhism.
Alan Watts is also a good resource to check out on YouTube for mindfulness meditation, though he’s not for everyone. You can find a few lectures about meditation and Zen Buddhism if you search around. For understanding who you are not, try Learning the Human Game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SsU9UUtELkw
The point of learning all this is because there’s a lot of stuff happening when you are meditating or being mindful in everyday life. It’s difficult to discern who is the real you. The big questions is: WHY are you behaving a certain way? What do you get out of it and who taught you? Where did it come from?
If society taught you so that you can be proper and fit in, it isn’t you. If you learned it through trauma or for the sake of pride/ego, it is not you. Pay attention to your emotional reactions to things. They are telling you that you want something to change. Then simply do what it takes to move that direction. No need to get mad or sad or wish it were different. That is all a waste of energy. (Avoid saying shoulda, woulda, coulda)
We are not our thoughts. Pay attention to when those arise and let them go. Your true self will have tons of energy and motivation, and you will not have any resistance in doing it. Let that energy carry you till you feel diminishing returns or fatigue, then figure out what you want to do next in the same manner.
When I was a new developer just a couple months out of school, and was very eager to be a part of my company and fit in, an older developer told me “remember that your interests and your path are your own.”
Over the years, I’ve suffered from “company man” syndrome and look back to his guidance as a reminder that I should own my skills and interests, and bring them to an employer if and for as long as the job suits them. I shouldn’t go with the job wherever it takes me simply because that’s my employer’s wish.
Not always easy advice to take, but extremely important advice to me.
Thank you for contributing this. I'm 22 years into my career, mostly spent in mundane engineering roles compared to the deep research I worked on as a hobby but really wanted to do professionally. After pushing very hard for many years, I finally landed that deep R&D gig and am well compensated.
My skills and interested are more hardware oriented in a company that brought me in is much more software and math. I've felt obligated to become much more software and math capable, spending very late nights and weekends studying. It's not a bad thing to expand one's mind, but at the heart, I know I'm really doing it more so to 'fit-in' better and less to communicate with my peers better.
I will take this advice and double down on bringing my hardware skills/passions to the table, which as my wife has repeatedly told me the past several months is really why they brought me on. They didn't bring me on to mold me into a clone of researchers they already have.
In art school I had a professor tell us something like,” when you’re sick you say you’re going to appreciate all these small things, like smelling the flowers after you had no sense of smell, and make all these changes but by the time you’re better you never do “, it’s something I think about pretty regularly two decades later. I think that telling a bunch of young people they would never do something made it a really great thing to “Rebel against”. Like, at some of my lowest points it’s been the thing that always replays first. How am I going to learn from this crap and find more enjoyment and humility from it.
An easy way to increase the value and enjoyment of a conversation is to say a lot less and listen a lot more. This applies obviously in cases where the subject is something you're not an expert on, but can also be extremely valuable in those exact circumstances. Obviously there are limits to this advice, but they are probably much further away than you'd dare believe.
Also, people tend to assume that you share more of their opinions so you can make friends quicker too. You can't put your foot in a closed mouth.
> An easy way to increase the value and enjoyment of a conversation is to say a lot less and listen a lot more.
I've found this often leads to people who you don't really want to listen to spend most of the time talking. This advice does apply to learning from people, sales, and dating though
My operating systems professor liked to engage his audience during lectures, so it was commonly more of a dialogue than a lecture. At one point he gave us some problem to consider, we didn't know what to make of it, so we started asking how to approach this. His reply:
"You're asking me? Soon enough you'll be engineers. You're the experts people will come to for solutions."
More of a reminder than advice, but it affected my approach.
Other, unrelated, but also life-changing, even though I don't remember who gave it:
Hm, I wonder what context you use this in? My experience has been different, that succinctly telling people about your motivations and thoughts, and truly being vulnerable, is an important part of forming relationships and preventing misunderstandings. And everything is relationships.
I've worked really hard to figure out how to be clearer with everybody in my life, which has improved things greatly. It's hard to understand other people's experiences and misunderstandings are rife. It doesn't mean that I'm asking for approval. I'm being more authentically myself. Relationships are weak without that vulnerability and shared understanding.
This has been a life-long challenge - in a good way. Whenever I feel boredom approaching, I try to change the situation or come up with a more creative way of viewing the moment. Not always successful, but it's a good practice.
"Don't beat yourself up about your failures and failings. There are loads of people out there who will do that for you."
"Get over yourself."
"Don't choose to make enemies"
My big one for anyone reading is that life can be short and difficult. You must balance enjoying your time now with investing in yourself and your future. I have had several friends who died young without living their lives while they could. All of them would have had a better death if they had swapped some of the self sacrifice required to have material and professional success later in life for some enjoyment earlier on. Remember, what we see of life stories is full of survivor bias - many of the dead will tell you that you need to take a break and see the world while you can.
>I have had several friends who died young without living their lives while they could.
What does it matter though? To the secular, when you're gone you're gone. What does it matter what you did or didn't do in the end anyways. To the religious, well the fun you had while living doesn't matter because this life is temporary anyways-- the only consideration is that you could have done more good in the world before going to one much longer.
The natural philosophical extension of this is to say it doesn't really matter whether or not you 'lived life'. Wanting the perception of 'a live well lived' is just another desire that creates unhappiness in you when it's not fulfilled. What if it's enough to spend your whole life working? You'd have still spent a whole life as a unique being with unique experiences and perspectives.
I mean what does the past matter at all really? All we have is what we experience now. Ok I see now I might be getting a little too esoterical for 8am lol
You are right about the past not mattering, but I think that people sometimes discount their happiness now too much in favour of expected future happiness and rewards.
The fellas I knew invested their time in unhappy activities hoping for a reward in the future. They didn't get any of that reward; what they did was only rational if they could access some of the expected reward in their lives. They would have been better off if they had missed some paper deadlines and gone on a few more hiking trips or gone to a few more wild parties.
Sure - if working on something is what floats your boat... go for it! Sure - invest something in the future (at least!) because it's likely you are going to live to see 75 winters, but only likely.
> You must balance enjoying your time now with investing in yourself and your future.
That is, to me, one of the most difficult things to apply in life, and I feel like the rest of your post doesn't exactly provide an answer on how to achieve this. There are so many things that I want to do in life but that I cannot afford to do now, and which I always postpone to later. And it feels like I'll let a great deal of things unachieved because I'm already too busy on things that are consuming my time right now.
The same applies to budget. I try to save as much money as possible for the future, and thus I restrain myself from doing things that I may consider too expensive for what they are worth, or choose not to do/purchase things which I do not consider essential as much as possible. I think I managed to do quite well up to this point (I'm 22 and have 20K in savings, starting from barely zero), but I'm still questioning on the utility of doing all of this. Even if I lost all my sources of revenue tomorrow, I wouldn't survive for a very long time with my savings. And if I wanted to launch some business in the near future, I doubt such an amount of money would take me very far.
You’re young. You could die early, but it’s statistically unlikely. There’s a balance.
With 20k (and if you’re really lucky no debt) and a job that most people on this site have, you are lucky and will be able to do some things others can’t.
I’ll give you one. I spent about $2,000 in 2014 to take my wife to Paris and London (part of the trip was covered by my work, so it was a little less expensive). At the time we had debt, we were young (mid 20’s) and could afford it but the more prudent thing to do would have been to throw that money at debt or invest it. The S&P 500 was roughly 1900 at that time. Today it’s 3900. So invested I would now have $4k in the bank. As someone in my mid-30s, no amount of money can bring me back to my 20s with my wife in her mid 20s, without the responsibility of kids, for a week in Paris and London.
And playing that further out - if that money even 20x’d by the time I’m 80, at that point I’d still give it up to have had the experience with my young wife.
Not sure if that makes sense - but recognizing these tradeoffs while you can and making the decision to take the action is a tricky thing to get right. You can always make more money but you can’t make more time, and you won’t get your youth back again. So have fun. But everything in moderation and recognize that you need to take care of your future self as well (e.g. don’t take two years off around Paris and London and lose your job, etc…)
> Even if I lost all my sources of revenue tomorrow, I wouldn't survive for a very long time with my savings
But you will survive longer than not having those savings at all. Or even worse, having debt. The extra burn down maybe the difference between accepting a shitty job or being able to look around for a better one.
I've recently experienced a family emergency and I was glad I was in position to fork out hefty some of money without even thinking about it, thanks to saving agressively.
> And if I wanted to launch some business in the near future, I doubt such an amount of money would take me very far.
Again, at least you will have _some_ run way to try something different. Savings give you options.
I feel like what you are doing is reasonable. Once you have savings (and arguably you already do), maybe take a big adventure!
One story I have that I think agrees with you is from when I was looking after my first child.
I was left alone to care for her, my wife needed a break and so went away for a night off. Btw, this is a good thing to arrange if you have a fairly new baby in the house - it gives the person getting the night off something to look forward to and provides real respite.
Back to the story, the baby (unusually, for she was a sweet little thing) would just not stop crying. She sensed mummy was away and was not happy (probably a commentary on my skills). I spent what felt like half the night with a howling baby, but in hindsight was probably a lot less than an hour. During that time I suffered a deep, deep trough of despair. I was under pressure at work, we were frankly bust financially, I wasn't all that physically well at the time and I was a shitty dad. I felt like I could see my life rolling out in front of me like no man's land in the European first world war (think, mud bath/moonscape/wilderness).
The thing that helped me was the fact that I could think back to evenings spent on tropical beaches, weeks in the mountains of different continents and meals in restaurants designed by Michaelangelo. I thought "Well, if this is what life is to be then that's ok. It was my decision and I have had a great time already, there is nothing I regret" and that really helped. Without that I don't know what I would have done, probably gone downstairs and drunk the contents of the booze cabinet, it's terrible to even write it. But, I understand why people in similar situation take drugs or go crazy.
Of course, 1 hr later my daughter was asleep and my mind set altered back to the reality of my privileged middle class existence. My problems didn't go away, but they were of course minor in the scale of real problems (as we all find out eventually). Some people end up in the literal no mans land of a european war, some people end up homeless, some people have their babies taken from them. None of this happened to me, thank whatever deity.
Go take that big adventure, it will give you a perspective that may prove priceless.
It led to me staying faaaaar too long in an unhealthy relationship, trying to cure problems that I imagined myself responsible for causing. Sometimes you need to forgive yourself and move on. The Pottery Barn Rule and the Boy Scout Rule apply to things, not people.
I once took a golf lesson when I was a kid and, in learning about the divot removal tool, was told a similar one about the way to operate on a golf course:
"Leave it better than you found it."
I couldn't care less about golf, but this one stuck with me because it speaks to environmental stewardship. It's like a constructive riff on the mantra for when you're out in Nature: "Don't leave a trace."
Yup, great advice for a lot of contexts but not for relationships. This has been a hard lesson to learn and I've wasted 5 years of my life because of this.
...that most people don't really spend their time thinking about you so don't worry too much thinking negatively about this, do your best and that's about it. It's such a simple advice but it was life changing, both personally and also professionally.
Meta-advice: When reading advice collection posts such as this one, find the first one that really resonates with you, then stop reading. The brain can't absorb several life-changing concepts within a few minutes of another. After stopping and thinking deeply about one bit of advice and ideally doing something else for a while, you can come back if you want.
alternative: copy-paste the ones that speak to you into a document or something, and the review it every few years.
i've got an internal, personal 'wikiquote' doc of stuff that I like, and i make a point to review it, add to it, and meditate on its contents periodically.
I’m in my 30s and I could fill up hundreds of pages with all the crappy advice I’ve been given over my life by well-meaning people. Yes, some advice is helpful, and it is helpful to know when you’re stuck and need some new ideas, but I think in most cases advice is overrated. Try things out yourself, make your own mistakes, figure out what works for you, and what doesn’t. You will learn more from the struggle, and the lessons will be cemented much deeper. Don’t be afraid to fail.
Overall, I agree with the spirit of the post, but there is a benefit to let others fail and report results to you. If you manage to distill wisdom from their failures, you may be able to avoid those yourself and save yourself the trouble that could result.
The trick, naturally, is spotting bad advice and unreliable advice giver.
In my startup we had a customer who said they weren't going to pay us.
I was upset and pissed as I had given them another chance after a previous payment issue to help them out of their hole. It felt personal.
My lead salesperson asked
"do you know what a sunk cost is?"
"no"
"it's an accounting term for money that can not be retrieved, and going after it will probably only cost you more money, so you just have to write it off"
"your being upset is compounding the loss. Let's spend that time and energy creating new sales instead of being sad about old ones. You need to write this off"
Felt 10x better, we then brainstormed and invented.
It's easier to build muscle mass before the age of 30 and the muscle you gain during that time will never go away (with a minimum of training).
The earlier you start exercising, the less difficult it will be to maintain your body as you get older. Someone who has never exercised but wants to lose weight by their 40s will have a much harder time than someone who started exercising early.
More than that, working out has a significant impact on my productivity, mood and psychological health. It changed my life.
This needs to include not getting injured as well. I worked out plenty in my 20s, but was also reckless as hell, and lost most of my 30s to severe spinal degeneration. It's not too late in your 40s, though. It took about six years, but even after spending most of a decade unable to consistently put my own shoes on and ending up with ten screws in my spine, I'm still lifting just about everyday and putting up lifetime PRs. To be clear, I'm not saying those are huge numbers, since I was more of an endurance athlete in my 20s and only lifted to have a solid strength base for longer-duration activity, but even so.
Granting here, I'm sure it's definitely easier to resume old habits after injury recovery than to start completely fresh, so yeah, still start young if you're young. But if you're not, it's never too late until you're in the ground.
Yes! I figured this out in my mid-20's and it wasn't too late. I had gone to the doctor with the complaint that I just did not want to eat. He prescribed some substance, which of course didn't work. I was working from home, and my girlfriend had a back injury and a car so I had essentially no exercise.
I prescribed myself a bicycle, biked hard while singing every night until I couldn't breathe, and very soon I was regularly hungry and fit.
What did I need to learn? I'm not just a brain on a stick.
This sounds like a universally good advice. Sometimes, it's really hard to put projects and work aside and devote time to excercise and health. It's not that amusing when you do it alone and really hard to make it a habit in the beginning.
I started with 100 situps and push-ups over an hour while watching tv and cutting dessert. One month later I looked in the mirror and was inspired to do more. Little things add up. Try something small, daily for 2 weeks.
100 situps is a lot for a beginner. Actually, after 3 years in gym I did ~80 in 4 sets. Not because I can't do more but 1) it is a high stress for a spine and 2) there are other exercises to do.
Sit ups can be really hard on the spine, even if done "properly". You slip a disc in your neck even slightly while working on your abs, and you won't be working on your abs or anything else for a long time. Slipped discs can cause an astonishing amount of pain.
Not an exercise guru, just someone who slipped a disc.
After doing an internship at Daimler in autonomous vehicles, I planned to achieve my long-term plan to go work for the US auto industry in 1993.
A Ford engineer who had interviewed me implored me to go do anything else (at a Ford reception for college applicants). “Look, you’re going to get an offer from all 3 of us (US automakers) and you should go do something else for 5 years and if you still want to work in SVT or Motorsport (the two divisions I wanted), apply directly to them.”
If I had that guy’s name and address, I’d send him a Christmas card every year as tech was way better than working on glovebox handles and seat belt buckles.
When I was at university, one professor of electrical engineering would refuse to answer any student who asked whether their answer to a circuit theory problem was correct.
When asked why he would refuse to answer, he would say: "If you aren't confident that your answer is correct, then I would like to mark you as wrong even though you may be right. You are the expert. You should be telling me that your answer is right, not asking me whether it is right."
He would also say that another acceptable answer occasionally might be "Your question is wrong" (along with an explanation as to why it is wrong).
This professor's attitude bothered me at first when I was on the receiving end of this advice, but I have come to regard it as some of the best advice I have received.
Especially in a professional context, I have found that it pays to convince myself that my recommended solution is a good solution, perhaps by confirming it using a few independent methods, and also by anticipating the responses of detractors, and coming prepared with answers to likely objections that others might offer.
Yeah the road to confidence involves some intermediary steps where you begin to understand that your answers are correct, and walking that path brings you to confidence imo.
I don't know why this antididactical bullshit is tolerated in STEM or even praised. Every single research in the field show us that feedback is one if not the most important part of learning, that's why self teaching is so difficult, but problem sets without solutions, no guidance on how to approach problem solving and, my favourite, fear of memorization and firm knowledge are the rule in that world. They were just annoying, frustrating, full of themselves and generally poor teachers.
“Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are.”
I started reading Hardcore Zen out of interest after seeing it recommended in a twitter thread. Still deciding about the book but this one stuck with me, that (physical causes aside) unhappiness can be a choice that you make moment to moment and that you can decide to change your mind
The things that annoy you the most about your partner will be the same things that you will miss the most when they are gone.
I try and reflect on this advice when I am struggling to communicate with my wife. Having been divorced once I feel that a positive living relationship is always (well, usually maybe) within our own control.
That's the difference between pain and discomfort. Learning that difference physically and emotionally had been one of my biggest awakenings as a person.
Does advice I didn't take count, I was in my first year of college and living with a family that took in students. I went for a pint with the Dad who would have been in his early 40s and he told me start your pension now, even if it's only €10 a week. Really wish I took his advice. That was in the mis 90s.
one was "if you want someone to like you, become a person they would want to like." turns out there's lots of reasons why someone might like someone else. I just assumed they only liked people for the same reasons I did (like vanity).
another was "women don't owe you just because you're a nice guy." took a while to accept that I had been telling myself a lie, that I would naturally attract women just from being nice, and was getting subconsciously angry at women when my presumption didn't pan out.
and another was "is this what they want, or what you want?" works in a lot of situations. I think it helped me have more compassion/empathy, but also avoid situations where one of us would have been unhappy.
If you put effort into something, you’ll get better at doing it, and it will result in something good, or at least in something tangible. If you do nothing, you get nothing in return.
From:
A Summary Of The Best Life Lessons From Movies: Or, Everything I Know So Far
"Life is too short to waste your free time being somewhere that you don't want to be."
Then again, you might be surprised at who you meet when you're somewhere you don't want to be.
Too many people are shut-ins and never meet anyone, so never get the chance to meet someone who might change their life, help, or stimulate them.
I'd err on the side of meeting more people and giving them a chance, unless you're already a social butterfly with way too little time for yourself or the people you care about.
"Don't be afraid to become the Editor of a document" is along the lines my ex-boss told me.
It changed the way I think about contributing to just about anything. When you become the editor you take responsibility and you're in a much better operating position, even if you don't know everything about the subject matter of the document.
I was working in a small firm. Just killing it. My billable hours were twice what my colleagues were doing.
I asked my boss (who I didn’t have a great relationship with)
“Where do I go from here? What’s my promotion path?”
He said “the top of the company is full, if you want to go up, you’re going to have to go out”
I was astounded. He’s telling his most lucrative employee to quit. But, boy was it the right thing for me. I’ve never looked back and I’ve acted on that advice twice since then to achieve more upward trajectory.
Thanks Ben, I know you didn’t mean it in a positive way but it was just the advice I needed.
- Compare yourself with your previous version and not with others. (Taught in school to us to not compare grades with other students but with yourself. This stuck with me for life.)
- Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential of power. (Brought me out of the false sense of comfort that reading book or completing course/training will automatically benefit me or is progress towards actual work. You need to apply the knowledge else it is useless.)
- You don't have to complete the book you are currently reading. (First heard from Naval)
- Arrange documents alphabetically and cross reference if required. Any other system will fall apart.(From GTD)
I was due to be in a meeting and was super anxious about it due to having to report out on some stuff I'd been working on. That morning, before the meeting, my dad texted me with the line "there is fear in all of them". Had a profound impact on me and reminded me that we are all human and are all prone to worrying about stuff.
I'm happy to see some of the examples here are of bad advice.
The worst, specific piece of advice I received was when I was choosing a major in my senior year of HS, which informed where I went to college. For some paths like engineering you need to know before you matriculate at some schools.
The bad advice which was handed out in 2001, was that CS as a career had peaked and all those jobs created during the dotcom boom would be outsourced, so there was no point in majoring in it anymore.
I unfortunately took that advice for a few years, before realizing it was bunk and having to spend extra time in school to enter a career in software.
> The bad advice which was handed out in 2001, was that CS as a career had peaked and all those jobs created during the dotcom boom would be outsourced, so there was no point in majoring in it anymore
Hah I got a similar advice. My father even got his friend who graduated with a CS degree to tell me not to get that degree which managed to convince me at the time. I still ended up as an engineer though :)
Definitely was solid advice at the time. It was scary times.
I knew fellow software developers working at sears, driving buses. It was unreal. It looked like software was dead. Silicon Valley. And offshoring was happening big time.
I went to law school, and I was already a software developer. Hard to see the forest when one is in the middle of it.
Context: I was leaving a startup (so as to avoid getting asked to leave), and I had a final lunch with a member of the C-suite. He had not exactly been my friend at work but at that point we were in the same boat. I expressed concern about how the whole thing was going to look to future employers, and he said:
“This is tech. Nobody cares how many times you’ve been fired.”
He was dead right. Nobody even really asks. I just say we had a good run and then the company changed significantly after a difficult funding round and afterwards I wasn’t as good a fit.
I should let him know that his remark was prophetic.
A long time ago I was in a fairly desperate technical situation, that to my and my lead’s minds required a stop the world, must fix or all’s lost approach.
Product wasn’t having it, and I couldn’t negotiate my way through. In the end we ignored them for the ~4 months needed to get back to systems health. We produced a retro of our findings, before and after states, etc. and consensus, from clients and even from product leadership, was that we did the right thing.
My PM ended up quitting and I permanently broke that relationship.
The best advice I ever received was: you were right. Was it worth it?
We’re still talking about (remembering) Solomon, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to this day. Every Christmas people remember the 3 wise men. You’re getting your advice from a time when history barely existed. Of course nobody remembered people back then. Times have changed though. Your entire life can be online and people will remember your wisdom or folly forever and forever.
I have two mantras that I heard at some point early in life and they have immensely helped me over the years:
1.) "Just remember that it's a grand illusion." - Dennis DeYoung.
Human society is a made up thing job titles and heirarchies or castes, companies, governments, money, opinions, labels ("gay", "straight", "married", "healthy", "insane", "impossible")... the whole lot of it - all made up by humans. There is no difference between you, your boss, your CEO, the leader of your country. The truth is, we are all humans living on this earth, eating-feeling-surviving. The rest is something humans just made up.
2.) "...all it takes, really [is] pressure and time." - Red (character in movie Shawshank Redemption).
This montra has never steered me wrong. Something I truly want to achieve may take months or many years, but if I stick to it, it eventually tends to come to fruition. Interestingly, the opposite is true, when I've given up on some opportunity or idea I thought was particularly worthwhile, but I ultimately gave up on and succumbed to the pressure of naysayers and my own weariness, I have seen others succeed on these same ideas/opportunities. It's not a garuntee, but a very strong trend I've observed over my 40+ years on earth.
As a child, I wanted to be a scientist (I've always been an inventor and explorer at heart) but was guided towards enlisting the military due to lack of money and honestly, I did not do well in grade school. After maturing, I've pressed on to course-correct and after 20 years I am finally a well respected research scientist in the field I'm passiknate about. It just took pressure and time (years of pushing through grad school rejections, arduously learning concepts that didn't come naturally to me, ignoring naysayers, etc.).
Sometimes, you won't break through, but I contend that the journey is still worthwhile. I have a HARD math problem that I've been picking a way at for over 10 years and I've made peace with the fact that I may never solve the riddle by the time I'm dead. However, with persistance I've made incremental progress - and I can see that I'm on a road that is being revealed in front of me inch by inch as I apply continuous pressure. Even if I don't know how long that road actually is - if I could live long enough, eventually I know I would solve the puzzle. This montra has helped me keep pushing ahead, despite not truly knowing when a break through will happen, and simply walking the path has led me to observe what feel is great natural beauty. The journey itself can be very rewarding.
Very true. The fabric of society is much more permeable than one would think. Many rules are not as hard as you think. Things that you’d think can never happen can actually happen, and will, if you just ask. Not asking is like the elephant that allows himself to be tied down by a flimsy string, simply because he never dares to pull and test its strength (which seems to be the prime metaphor of learned helplessness).
One thing I read on HN a couple of month back and really clicked with me is:
"If you really struggle to decide between two options and you begin to waste time by postponing the decision, this often indicates, that both options are very similar in expectable outcome"
At least in situations, where you can't access more info about path A or B, indecisiveness may indicate "go flip a coin"
Sounds simple, but made me aware and helped in a few situations not wasting time already.
This is like that one on Bezos - if a decision is "revolving" door type situation, make as many mistakes as possible. If it's a concrete wall and disappearing door type of situation do feel free to ponder.
What you have been told by mainstream media and society about the topics of romantic relationships, sexual attraction and the like between male and female humans is mostly a lie.
Advice is: swallow the appropriately coloured pill and wake up in the real world.
I always have to Google which of my bike pedals is reverse threaded. It's a bit embarrassing, as I always think I should be able to figure it out from the whole angular momentum - torque thing.
With the crank in the position closest to the front tyre (horizontal and forward), put your allen key in the socket while aimed at 12 o'clock (ie, upward) and rotate toward the rear of the bike.
The rule is basically: rotate against the direction of the crank's rotation to undo.
Comfort is a drug. Once you get used to it becomes addicting. Give a weak person consistent stimulation, good food, cheap entertainment and they will throw their ambitions right out the window. Comfort is a graveyard of dreams.
For a shit ton of my teens all I did was chase comfort until this hit me earlier last year. Now I wait for pain to make sure what Im doing goes against the current to bend the resistance to my will.
Goggins sums it up: if you like running what you learning? If you like boxing well what are you learning? People say double down on your strengths. Fuck that triple down on your weaknesses.
Jordan Peterson in one of his lectures: if you expose people to what they fear they get stronger and we don’t know the upper limits to that.
In short: fk comfort, chase pain. That is the 21st century’s killer instinct.
I couldn't talk properly in certain situations. I was too self-conscious. That meant my communication was poor at workplace. I was too nervous presenting in front of execs and senior leaders.
On the other hand, my friend was fluent and smooth. We both had same roles. After another poor presentation, my friend gently told me "Everyone wipes their butt the same way."
well, not really true. there are huge cultural differences in personal but hygiene. the end result is more or less the same, the process differs widely.
"If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It's that simple." I have no idea where I saw that quote for the first time but it had a huge impact on my ability to comprehend people around me. Both in the private and work setting. Be kind to those around you even if their behavior does not make any sense to you.
1. learn to firmly say "NO", no matter how difficult it sounds.
2. If YOU think "what will world think", then what will world think? (it sounds way better in my mother tongue, but basically don't care about what will people think about you)
3. You don't work for the company, the company works because of you.
1) "You should develop a thick skin." - advice provided by Jeff Bezos. I think it's one of the least obvious, and most important, things especially if you have a bit of ambition in life, and you need to swim with the sharks. I mention the advice here [0].
2) "Is this what you want to be remembered for?", not sure where I've read it, but it's a powerful question.
3) "It's sunny in Venezia today, stop reading HN and go for a walk". Me, just now. Half kidding... But walking is one of the most powerful things you can do to help yourself. In fact, I'm closing my computer now, and I'm going for a walk. Can't wait to see other comments when I come back later tonight.
I had an awesome math instructor while in college named Gamal. I was in a linear algebra class with literally three other students, and at first it was a traditional lecture style class. Soon though Gamal tired of this and said "Look guys, you're going to take turns teaching these lessons". One day it was my turn to teach the lesson. I opened the textbook, started reading out of it and working an example problem on the board.
Gamal raised his hand and started asking questions about the example. I, not understanding the concepts very well, answered by reading out of the book. Gamal said "Daniel, to hell with that book. Don't tell me what the book says. Tell me what YOU know. How can we explain this with only the things we understand?"
Use what you know to figure out what you don't know. Use your own understanding instead of trying to borrow someone else's.
It isn’t advice, but my Dad told me that when you love a woman you see her as that age when you fell in love with her for the rest of your life. And I have found that to be true.
Doing good enough is generally good enough. I always used this maxim in education to get just enough marks to pass with a high enough grade to study ratio. Today's perfectionists are tomorrow's procrastinators.
Almost always can you afford taking the time to observe and think through a proper solution, instead of rushing in and doing the first thing that comes to mind. Especially if it seems urgent.
Sometimes when you just observe, the problem will go away by itself!
On the same note, I always think that any change or action leads to unforeseeable results in the future. Literally, you stepping in a shit yesterday could lead to you becoming president in 10 years. The butterfly effect is real and continuously acting on an enormous scale, this is why you should never be too sad or angry about any event, as it is neither good nor bad because no one knows what effect it will have in the long run.
"Act like a dumb-ass and they'll treat you like an equal."
(However, that's not universally applicable.)
- - - -
My dad said, over and over again until I got it:
A fool never learns.
A man learns from his mistakes.
The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
(I retained the gendered pronouns to keep the flow of the English, no offense intended folks.)
You can't avoid making mistakes, not completely, but you can avoid a lot. Stand on the shoulders of giants, eh?
- - - -
Last but first, Love
Love is our obligation, our responsibility, our duty; it is our right, our riches, our panacea and cornucopia; love answers all things. Even time itself falls before love.
Don't sit on creative ideas waiting for the skills to apply them. The ideas you come up with developing those skills will be so much better, and you'll have a lot of noob stuff to look on fondly. Applying the noob ideas is how you get there. I see too many writers, musicians, etc holding on to some idea they've always wanted to work on until they somehow develop the skills with ideas they don't, so they never do anything.
And then they finally get to it, work through it, look back years later, and realize the idea they sat on was far below what they were capable of once they finally worked through it.
When I was a young teenager I was very interested in model rockets. One summer day I had completed a model rocket and my father took me to the highschool football field to set it off. I got concerned because there were no trespassing signs. My father said the following:
"Josh, what's the worst that could happen? Someone will tell us to leave and we will."
This thinking, "what's the worst that could happen" has had a long profound impact on my approach to life and to risks in general. Always ask yourself in a situation of fear: what's the worst that could happen?
The point is more that it doesn't matter in the way the person wanting to be remembered would want it to be, or in the way the person wanting to be forgotten fears it to be.
If you’re Newton, Einstein, Gates, Elon or some other important figure, then I agree with you. But for the vast majority of all the rest of normal people (~99%), no one is going to remember us, no one is going to remember what we said or did and for sure our actions are going to have almost zero impact on the course of this timeline.
It’s true that some individuals will play a very important role in the continuation of our civilization, but these are just a few compared to the billions of humans.
"""
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith—or not faith—I don’t know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
"""
There have been many times in my life where I have reflected on past behavior and things I've done and have been disappointed in myself. Yet no matter how much I try to change certain things, there are certain aspects that are just fundamental to who I am a person and I can't change. The best I can do is keep pushing forward and trying to be the best person I can be.
"Don't waste your time on beaming people up or down. Instead, consider gravity waves as advanced physics of the universe that could be used to travel interstellar distances."
If someone asks you how to do something or your opinion, give them a thoughtful answer. Many times I would say, “I don’t have a strong opinion” or “whatever you think is best”. It took a friend to tell me people value my advice and they are truly interested in what I have to say. When someone asks, they want to know what I think. Answer them thoughtfully. Ever since that moment I always give a thoughtful answer when someone asks for my advice.
It seems there is a plenty of motivation material like this, but nothing sticked with me. Isn’t that a book that saturates you with willpower and then it fades away in a week? What’s different with it?
I’ve watched another SEAL(?), Jocko Willink. He really charges you with “get up regardless, just do it”. And you get up and effing do it, but the next day comes and the game is over.
It also changed my life, not because of all the motivational stuff, but just because of the advice to do stretching exercise. I think it's been over one year now since I started doing some stretching every morning and it drastically reduced the injuries and discomfort I have after physical activities.
I created a random one. I play table tennis so the focus is also on the joints/muscles used there.
I start with head rotations, than some arm rotations and stretching, then torso rotations, then stretching the legs by doing lunges (I think they're called), then doing 2 sets of 25 squats with a very wide stance and also stretch my wrist for the last 5 squats of each set, then 10 squats with legs together, then stretching the legs and back by bending forward and reaching for my toes when standing, then some balance, standing on one leg and lifting the other backwards in the air and arms wide apart (this doesn't do anything, but I like improving balance in that stance).
Overall it takes like 3-5 minutes, sometimes after I do some crunches for some core strength and to get the heart pumping.
The squats are the hardest part, and require most motivation, but doing squats in the morning is really good for blood flow (to the brain especially).
I always do the stretches as soon as I wake up, after going to the bathroom but usually before washing my teeth.
This landing page roast I found years ago completely changed how I think about marketing:
Don't believe for one moment that 5 hours on Product Hunt or anywhere else for that matter represents a serious marketing effort.
If you want to run a business rather just create stuff, your work has only just begun. In the light of Facebook and other social media revelations, the idea of a truly disposable email address which means your entire life is not analysed and spammed to death has to be worth something.
You haven't told anyone about it though. And I mean you shout from the rooftops every day and everywhere you can think of. You market. People are not going to come looking for you. You have to start approaching influencers, be seen and be heard everywhere you think your potenial users might lurk.
And, by the way, everyone sees a million new ideas a day so you have to be consistent, appear to be permanent and appear to be solid. No-one is going to entrust communications with you if they think you are a small, one-man band with an idea and little else.
Time to start reading marketing articles and strategies and applying them.
And expect it to take time.
Added bit : I've just watched your video. No, I won't be using your service and nor will anyone else. I have no idea how good it is and I am not going to find out. And nor is anyone else.
Why not? Because you uploaded a silent, technical video. You have made the classic mistake of trying to show me how something works before I even know if I care. This is a technical video, not a selling one.
You need a voice.
You need to tell me what my problem is and make it resonate with me.
You need to tell me how to solve it.
You need to tell me it is simple.
You need to tell me what it costs.
You need to tell me to link right now to the place I can sign up.
You might need some other things but these are the basics.
You need to sell your idea to me, not explain how the software works. I do not give a damn about the bloody software until I give a damn about the bloody problem!
Tell me where I'm hurting, sympathise and then magic-kiss it better. You know - just like Mummy did when I was small!
Happiness is a choice. « Have you choose to be happy ? » That’s was the question a mentor asked me. Since then I have made it a priority in my life, and I am much more happy 7 years after. It so basic but since I meet so many people who don’t know what they want in life; have no purpose, never asked them selves what do they want and fell like shit. I think having the honest goal to be Happy, it is a good starting point.
Every person has a choice in their life: Comfort or growth. If you are comfortable you are not growing. If you are growing it won't be comfortable.
The corollary is that you must choose to feel pain (pain of studying, pain of exercise, pain of rejection, pain of focus, pain of chance of failure, pain of being unsure) to get what is good in life.
So the Advice: Choose pain so that you can experience growth.
The fact that I am a "scanner" personality type and that I should accept that about myself rather than try to change myself to fit more conventional lifestyles. A scanner is someone who finds interest in a wide variety of topics but often becomes bored with it once you understand it sufficiently.
Rather than taking the advice that I need to focus on one thing or else I'm going to fail at life, I've come to realize that I can keep progressing on my "main thing" (in my case, tech), and continue to dive into whatever topics tickle my fancy without guilt. Right now it is energy and power, maybe next it'll be astronomy, and then accounting after that.
In the end it means my mind will be able to make more connections and I'm more "well read", and more importantly it means my enjoyment of life goes way up.
It seems this personality type isn't super common, though I imagine many of you here are the same way. So if you, like me, always felt guilty about these "phases" of interests, don't! Embrace it and you'll live a happier and more interesting life.
If I can define advice as lessens that I've learned over time and would give others, it would be to always say hello or acknowledge an acquaintance's presence when you get the chance, even if you don't have the time or necessarily want to chat. You never know when they won't be there anymore.
Another one would be to try and measure your success at something if what you want is measurable improvement, but try not to measurably improve everything, because you become hollow. Don't let "passion" for something overcome the needs that should be met by it, whether it be a lover or a company.
Likewise, don't do for an employer (and maybe any other entity) what they wouldn't do for you, don't think of your employer as anything more than that, and don't make sacrifices for them if you have no clear pathway and control over how you can be rewarded for it. Promises are bullshit.
Also, one that might just be for me, but I would share with someone else if they were interested, is to not bother trying to learn something unless you can close the feedback loop of practicing it. That means being able to deliberately allocate ongoing time to it and treat it like a hobby rather than just reading or just listening. I used to think that I could just read article after article and technical book after technical book, or listening to podcasts during every piece of downtime, but it more or less ended up being worthless and now I think of it as basically stupid. There has to be an output to match the input, and for you to allocate the time to that, it probably needs to be sufficiently fun or rewarding rather than arbitrary.
Lastly, building on that previous one, taking vacations away from the computer and work. Take the downtime, otherwise you'll be forced to, and you might as well enjoy it before burning out.
My dad told me, when I was 7, that school (as institution) will do everything to force me to fit into the same frames as everyone else and that I should not let that happen, that I should always think out of the box and not what teachers expect me to think. This stayed with me for my whole life.
The world doesn't need fewer people, it needs smart people.
This piece of advice started me on the path to deciding to have children. I was fairly adamant about being childless. This advice was given to me by a friend and it made me slightly less sure. It didn't convince me straight away but it was a start and I've never forgotten it.
Completely changed my life in the end and much for the better.
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
Happiness is a state of mind. You don't find happiness hiding under a rock one day, you have to make it for yourself.
Also, don't get all of your validation from other people, because it can be very inconsistent; instead, get your validation through things you are good at (like hobbies, skills, etc.)
> get your validation through things you are good at (like hobbies, skills, etc.)
This is a double-edged sword, some say that you should be happy with what you already are and not base your happiness on what you can do. What do you do if something happens to you and you lose the ability to perform that certain skill? Does that mean you are constantly unhappy now?
"Much of what you do today (or don’t do) was decided by the person you were years ago, a person with less life experience and less insight into your values." -- David Cain
Re-evaluate your opinions constantly. You won't come to the same conclusions you did 10 years ago.
Most people will use time to save money. However, your time on earth is limited unless the Silicon Valley weirdos happen to be right.
Money is infinite in that you can earn more or get a second job or get a better paying job or whatever. (Obviously only to a point but stay with me).
Also: your time does have value or it should since it is limited.
What would you pay for an hour of your life "back"? Or an hour to do whatever you wanted?
The truly smart play is trading money for time.
I've been a freelancer for a while but there was a point when I got laid off from my full time job so I ramped up to make ends meet. And I was fortunate enough that I was basically able to work for myself full time...
But when you are doing that, especially in the early stage...like I know that if I burn a couple hours at my billing rate of $50 an hour trying to save a few dollarydoos on a TV by standing in line for a big sale, am I really saving that much money when I effectively paid $100 to stand in line for two hours, something I don't like doing anyway, instead of just paying a bit more and getting a TV right away and not having to do that?
Another example. Changing the oil on my car. Could I? I'm pretty sure I could. I know the process. I'd probably want to watch some YouTube videos and there's tools I'd need to pick up, but I could be a real manly man and change my own oil and not get screwed by the shop.
But...
Let's say it costs me $40 at Autozone for oil and filter.
Let's say it costs $80 at the shop. A real shop not a jiffy lube. PFFT THOSE GUYS ARE SCREWING YA JUST DO IT YOURSELF.
I'd save $40 doing it DIY.
Most people would be on their way to Autozone...but on the other hand, I am not a mechanic that does 20 of these a day. Between watching videos and trying to figure out where everything is and inevitably covering myself in oil and whatnot.
Let's say it takes me 2 hours and the shop 1 hour. Doesn't matter, I saved 40 bucks! Whadda ripoff!
Would you pay 40 bucks for an hour of your life back? Maybe you like tinkering on cars and thats legit. Satisfaction is another benefit.
But for me, I am effectively paying some other person $40 to get dirty and bang his knuckles and whatnot while I sit in the AC and watch cable and dick around on my phone (which I enjoy much more) AND a lot of places will check and top up your other fluids and top off your tires and do an inspection to see if anything else will need work, which I don't know how to do and obviously they know what they are looking for.
AND because the guy knows what he's doing, it's done faster.
So effectively, yes, I will absolutely pay 40 bucks to hang out and watch basic cable in the air conditioning and make sure my car is good to go and all my fluids are topped off and also I get a whole hour of my life for doing whatever I want.
While I broadly agree with this, you have to be careful you don't slide too far into this mindset. Vacations become hard to justify if you view them as both the price of the vacation+lost income opportunity. It's easy to find yourself in a place where it's hard to justify doing anything but working.
Well I looked at it like this. A good two week vacation in Paris costs at least $10,000. I could instead bill out approximately $12,000 during that time. Therefore, the best thing to do is for me to pay a Parisian $2,000 to have my vacation for me. I stayed at home, and earned a lot more money. I can then spend that on another vacation. You can thank me later for this gem.
Even better - you can hire a Parisian and a Roman and a Londoner to each have a vacation for you at the same time! 2 weeks of work and 6 weeks of vacation in just two weeks of clock time. This is the way.
View flipped after that. Do your chores yourself as much as your time allows instead of jumping to pay someone to do it. There are other benefits not discussed here beside the time cost factor.
I went back to changing my own oil when I realized it took a lot more time to go there and wait for them to change it vs doing it myself in less time than it would take to drive to the oil change place. And I know I it is done right.
Same with more important stuff like brakes. It does take some knowledge but I’m more motivated to get it right than any given pro.
> Would you pay 40 bucks for an hour of your life back? Maybe you like tinkering on cars and thats legit. Satisfaction is another benefit.
You're missing your opportunity cost. Would you be doing utility during that hour to make 40 bucks? If not then to maximize your profit to time then you want to do it yourself.
I agrée and it’s a bit of a maxim of mine, but the extreme of this is absurd. There’s lots of life that is worth doing for the pleasure of just doing. Sometimes that might be learning how to do an oil change (to follow the thread!) but sometimes that’s the exact absurd trade off you’re talking about
I think that's his point. The point in life isn't to have money, it's to spend time on things you liked. Thus, trading time to save money is a bad trade, but trading money for time that you enjoy is what you should do. Which in his case means spending time on your phone instead of changing oil, but it might look different for you.
And my point is if you pursue that thread too aggressively, without knowing what you want to do - and I’ve seen quite a few friends do this especially after moving to the valley and getting into ‘always be optimising’ mode - they don’t actually take the time to make mistakes
Agree. It's not just the medium sized things either. It works for the little stuff too.
Give yourself the permission to burn say $25/week on lifestyle. It means you can splash out for the more expensive parking, snack or item without feeling like you have to shop around to go somewhere so you aren't "overcharged".
An example might be if you want a can of coke but the vendor in front of you is charging $2 whereas you know the convenience store 3 minutes walk away would have it for $1. Just buy the thing.
> But for me, I am effectively paying some other person $40 to get dirty and bang his knuckles and whatnot while I sit in the AC and watch cable and dick around on my phone (which I enjoy much more) AND a lot of places will check and top up your other fluids and top off your tires and do an inspection to see if anything else will need work, which I don't know how to do and obviously they know what they are looking for.
While I understand the point you're trying to make for people wandering by:
I've done my own oil, brakes, etc for as long as I remember. As long as you're not working on a supercar an oil change should take you less than an hour. Ideally inside of 30 minutes. 99.9% of vehicles are simple: place oil bucket under car, open oil cap on engine, gently loosen the oil pan bolt, drain oil. While the oil is draining you can get a second bucket and undo the filter. Reverse the process being careful to not strip the oil pan bolt, fill it up with the manufacturer recommended amount, and you're done. At least in America most AutoZones, Pep Boys, O'Reilly's, etc will take your used oil off your hands for free. As for tire inspection, fill up, etc you should also be doing this yourself. It's another 10 minute job with a $5 tool. I'm of the opinion every home should own an air compressor. It is one of the most universally useful things a person can have.
Why is this important? Oil shops are rife with fraud. The quality of your oil can dramatically influence the life of your car. I've had quick lube places rip me off so many times, leave parts off, etc. For what? I saved 30 minutes but gained another expense. Most of the time unless the shop is very reputable "premium" oils aren't actually royal purple. It's just the same crap they put in everyone else's car. By not paying dealer/etc premiums I save hundreds of dollars and get far better quality oil and service doing it myself. This is a skill I picked up being extremely broke before I got into tech and I've dedicated a small portion of my life to being able to fix (most of) my own issues. To the point I only show up to a shop when I need work that requires an engine crane or transmission lift (I've done transmission work myself before but its worth it to make it someone else's problem).
Do your own oil. You do it once or twice a year, you understand your vehicle better, and you get better oil and filters for the money. Moreover, the average tech connects an ODB-2 alarm checker to your car and then writes you an invoice. Cars are not difficult. If spending 2-3 hours a year is too time-expensive for you I'm not sure what to tell you. I just hope you don't run into a situation far from home where a tow truck is 6 hours away and understanding your car could get you home safe and fast.
I went to a Vipassana retreat [1] for the 4th time in my life (over a 10 year period). It has been a while, last time since 2016. It's hard to keep up a practice, but I'm in a position to do so now that's must better suited than before. I can't go into that, since I want to keep this comment short ;-)
I've noticed a few things:
- I experience pleasant, neutral and unpleasant feelings more intensely.
- I am better capable of not reacting to my feelings (I have more choice in it). This is both needed with pleasant and unpleasant feelings as both types of feelings can come from (un)wholesome places. E.g. pleasant/unwholesome: alcohol or watching YouTube for way too long. E.g. unpleasant/wholesome: you're noticing work is boring you at the moment. You realize that you're a bit tired and could use a nap in order to feel more sharp.
- I react more intuitively to people their body language, without realizing it much myself
In short: it makes me feel more alive (quality of life has gone up) and it makes me feel more at ease around people.
There's a reason I nicknamed myself mettamage. This is the reason. Meditation (metta meditation being one of them) has changed my life so much that it has become my pseudonym on HN.
Note: the practice is awesome. I'm not a fan of that they dive into Buddhist scripture that much. Fortunately, whenever they have their videos on, you can just meditate through it. More fortunately, they do mention at one of their last videos that the practice is what is important: understanding the theory that is unrelated to the practice is not important.
Examples of what I don't / do believe: I don't believe in water, fire, earth and air being the core elements of the world. I don't believe the Buddha was able to notice subatomic vibrations. However, I do think that the craving/aversion framework is a useful one. I do believe that meditation can teach you a thing or two about addiction and how to overcome it.
This should come with a warning. Vipassana and other meditation retreats have also caused profound psychosis in people. Be warned about an irreversible mental breakdown. Your mind is unnaturally put in a hyper insensitive environment that it is not meant to be in, nor is it designed to from an evolutionary standpoint. It is designed to stay alert with its environment and defend you from threats, seek mate/food. There were a bunch of posts about this on HN.
I was complaining to a friend about someone who "didn't know shit about what I was working on" and they told me "You can learn from everyone you if you listen to them".
My first reaction to that was thinking "No, some people are just annoying and clueless" but after a few days of pondering that I realized that me being dismissive would get in the way of proving him wrong.
Just a few days later the person I was complaining about did suggest a different way of doing something that I had been doing for years and that advice saved me a lot of time, which made me a lot more money, and was a big improvement over how I'd been doing it.
Once, when facing a great personal crisis, I found some wisdom that helped me reframe my worries and fears: "Why do you spend all your time worrying about the blizzard on top of the mountain? Go around the mountain."
Secondly, in grad school I was upset that other students appeared to be cheating during exams, to the point that I could hear messages pinging in the classroom. A friend told me, paraphrased: "You can't control what other people do. You'll just have to do well enough that it doesn't matter." I didn't want to hear it, but once it sunk in, he was right and accepting his advice was the best path forward.
I am not sure where I read this or who told this to me, but my favorite piece of advice (prior to having kids) was "don't waste your time with people that don't give you positive energy". It's really easy to get brought down by other people's negativity, be at work or in your personal life. Staying away from people that bring you down is key to being happy and successful.
The most important piece of advice I can give to any new parent is
"You have between 6 to 10 years where your kid(s) actually wants to hang out with you - take advantage of it, you'll never get another chance"
Stop listening to advice so much and learn to cultivate a life of curiosity, failure, and iteration. Advice from others suffers from the inevitable ambiguity of language. Too much advice is given by people who themselves do not fully understand their situation and how they got where they are.
Take everything with a grain of salt and prioritize the building of your own inner understanding of your situation. It's just like the scientific method: make a hypothesis, control vars, test, analyze and repeat. It takes time but you will arrive where you want to go.
My first boss told me that if I can figure out an answer without asking somebody for help but I should try to figure it out first.
I took him at his word and sort of made it a contest with myself if I could figure something out without asking somebody first even when asking somebody was clearly way easier.
It has served me very well in my career. It has caused me to learn things that nobody else knew. To figure out something without someone telling you, you kind of have to become an expert in whatever you're looking into. This is only served to boost my credibility in the eyes of my peers.
You absolutely can. We do it all the time by paying others to do simple jobs for us. When I pay someone else to mow my lawn I am buying time. If I didn't mind spending time mowing the lawn I would just do it myself.
About 15 years ago, Christopher Celeste gave me a life-changing piece of advice. I wanted his advice because I had been coordinating all these different projects and I was struggling to figure out which to focus on. He told me “you seem to be good at doing lots of different things. Why choose? Why not just do all that you want?”
Wow. I’m not saying it was good advice for everyone but it changed my life. But, I run 2 different successful businesses, have an academic career and 3 kids. And I still have tons of side projects (which I love).
Don’t be afraid of seeming vulnerable by asking questions if you’re stuck or unsure. This is easily one of the biggest life skills and soooo many people hurt their own progress by avoiding it.
An interesting question. A bunch of seemingly important advices on my mind right now, but none of them actually changed my life. This is probably one the of things that you never notice because most of them are in the form of “never”. Did “never stick a fork into a socket” change my life? Probably so.
One that I could call ~practical is “there is no eternal friendship, only common interests”. And a related one is “never do business with friends and relatives”. I’ve seen enough lifes “changed” by not following these.
As a male, sitting down to pee at home keeps the toilet and floor significantly cleaner. Even with perfect aim, you don’t see the micro droplets until they build up.
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. -- Charlie Munger
- if it has a deadline, it’s not your most important work.
- if you’re at your desk, it’s not your most important work.
- if you’re a contractor or consultant you’re delivering recommendations. Doesn’t matter what form it takes, it’s still just a recommendation. (And it likely matters little to the ongoing business relationship if they’re fully accepted/implemented or not)
- You are, and will always be, your biggest problem
A few years ago, I received a series of "class rules" through an instant messaging group. The list describes how everyday things are interpreted, depending on your social class.
At that time, I was part of an executive master program at a very prestigious university, it cost me a third of my yearly income and had a huge impact on my personal life and finances.
Reading that list made me realize in just a few seconds that I had been studying there for four years for a completely different reason than those around me. I felt heavily depressed first, then I realized it was actually possible to switch my expectations. I focused the last few months on building and strengthening connections, it completely changed my relationship with this university and the people there.
Earlier in the poem he says that the two roads were equally worn. But looking back on it he remembers the chosen one as less worn. Unclear what is the meaning. Self-delusion maybe because our memories change?
I read about a very capable young woman who was advised,"You should never work for a boss." She then decided to become a lawyer and eventually became a highly regarded judge. Young people should at least be aware that they might not be suited for "normal jobs" in organizations even if they are academically successful.
"Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer.
From this moment on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now."
The best advice I ever received was never compare yourself to anybody else. As a person who came from a humble family, in Africa, that advice got me going. I would see children from privileged families having better opportunities but I worked hard and was happy every time I looked back on where I have come from.
Just one note: very likely that all the advice here is heavily biased and resonating only with the like-minded people browsing HN.
My advice: There is not a single correct way to live life. Everyone finds their own meaning in life and you shouldn't judge someone that found a different meaning than yourself.
The best advice I’ve got was an advice from myself to me
— don’t trust anyone’s advice, nobody has ever been in your shoes,
nobody really knows anything,
and nobody really cares about you as deeply as you should care about yourself
So be brave to think for yourself, trust and learn from your own unique judgements
Thinking critically is a finite process, and creativity arises from the vast space of permuting those elements of knowledge, processes, and information.
Breaking things down qualitatively into concepts is a good first step to speculating and hypothesizing about the details and full taxonomy when there are unknowns.
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” - she always called me Elwood - “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.“
Don't let others who talk rubbish about you affect your life. Not everyone will like you and that's fine. They are not even "extras" in the movie that is your life.
Shinzen Young, in The Science of Enlightenment, posits a strong time dilation effect from regularly meditating. After experimenting, I found this to be true, and have at least doubled my subjective life span.
“Say Yes more. The people without passion are the ones who always say no. But the happiest people are the ones who understand that good things occur when one allows them to.”
From the brilliant book “Yes Man”, by Danny Wallace.
Sorry, but awful advice. Being afraid of saying "No" and feeling compelled to say "Yes" all the time and trying to make everyone except yourself happy is the worst way to life your life. Been there, done that, won't go there again.
I don't think it's a question of "feeling compelled to say yes", or even being afraid to say no.
To me, the advice is more like "be open to new experiences / be willing to take a chance on the unknown". That doesn't mean you should always say yes to everyone because you're afraid of what they might think of you / might not like you / you owe them anything / etc.
You’ve misinterpreted the advice :) It’s not about being compelled to say yes all the time to make others happy, it’s about saying yes _more_ to make yourself happy.
As an example, a work friend of mine invited me to a house party once at their shared house, there were a lot of people going but I didn’t know any of them except her. My instinctive reaction was to say “thanks, but no thanks”, but I decided to take a gamble and say yes.
I ended up having a really good evening, and I met some really great people who I now consider to be friends of my own. All because I took a gamble and said yes to something I’d typically say no to.
Floss.
A hygienist told me all my teeth were going to fall out if I didn't start flossing. I started that day and have been religious about it every since. Haven't lost a tooth yet :)
Life lesson from 4 hour work week, news just isn't an important thing to keep track of, if something is really important, you'll hear about it eventually.
We are deceived into thinking news is important because we need to be “informed” to be “responsible voting citizens” but if nothing on the news would change your vote who cares? Ignoring that statistically the lottery makes more sense than national voting …
"Poor Dad, Rich Dad" was eye opening to me growing in a developing eastern european country. It is probably this book more than anything else that made me want to be an entrepreneur.
This is some advice I wish I received as a teen/young adult: good sleep is more important than you think, for your quality of life, longevity and achievements.
Each app on your phone serves a useful purpose but also as a distraction. Make an intention each time you pick up your phone, execute it and put it away immediately afterwards.
A business owner neighbour told me that marketing is the first chapter in all business books. No marketing, no business. Applied to my career, that advice changed my life.
Take as much responsibility as you possibly can. Continually increase the amount of responsibility you take. - mediocre paraphrase of mine taken from Jordan B Peterson.
“Isolation is the gift” - Bukowski. This quote has given me the reassurance to continue down my own unique path “less traveled” (a quote from another great poet).
As a teenager and twenty-something I just ate everything, all the time, and often far too much. I was thin so there was no issue. But one day I started to put the weight on, not much but it was there. Then I need some medication for something unrelated and the weight really went on.
Changing my eating habits was hard. I was so used to eating all the time that not eating for just two hours and I felt hungry when clearly I wasn't I was just used to it.
I spoke to my doctor who referred me to a specialist who instructed me to do time restricted eating for two months. It changed my relationship with food totally. I've never been one to sit and enjoy some fancy meal at a posh restaurant. I am a very basic person when it comes to food. But I ate too much and often very shitty food.
Restricting when I could eat was very hard for the first two-ish weeks but after that it was like flipping a switch. I didn't feel hungry anymore and when I sat to eat I ate normal amounts, not going back for a third or forth helping.
I am now down to a healthy weight, I almost never feel hungry (even after not eating for 20 hours I don't feel hungry I just know I should eat something) and I have more mental and physical energy than I have had for at least a decade. I am in my late 30s now and honestly wish I had started doing this years ago.
I don't know nor really care about the science behind it, sometimes ignorance is bliss and I actively avoid reading about "intermittent fasting" and such because there is a little industry popped up around it in recent years wanting to make money of it selling "exceptions" and such. As my doctor put it "you just don't eat between this time and this time, it isn't rocket science".
If you do try it I suggest you ignore all of the "science" online when you research it. You can have water, tea, and coffee (without milk) during your restricted eating window. You don't even need a fancy app just have a fixed start and end time and you're good to go, although you may find one helpful for the first month or so. After a while it became automatic for me so I don't bother with timers anymore.
It works for some and not for others like many things in life. If you need to lose weight I suggest you try it after having some blood work done to ensure you can do it safely. If it works awesome, if not then seek further guidance.
Don't start trying to find exceptions like diet soda (honestly that shit ain't good for you, cut it out of your life anyway with the exception of a glass of coke/pepsi when you go out for some fast food) or "bullet coffee". Just give it two weeks of water/tea/coffee and see how you get on.
I have settled on a 17h non-eating window so I generally eat between 1pm and 8pm each day. What I mean is that I have lunch around 1pm, usually something small to "break the fast". Maybe a little snack around 4 or 5pm and then dinner around 7:30-8pm then I start fasting after dinner until 1pm the next day.
I usually do this every day but if I am going out for a meal one evening I just give myself a day off, it isn't a big deal. I can make it up the next day if I wish or just forget about it that one day. I don't go out for meals late very often so it isn't something I worry about.
So often I hear people say "oh I couldn't do that, it would wreck my social life!". Honestly it has never been an issue for me. Just the other week I went out for a nice meal with some friends until around 3am so just decided not to bother fasting that (next) day. It isn't like "falling off the wagon". You just start again the next day and continue.
I don't calorie count per day but over a week. If I do go out and consume a bigger than normal meal I automatically adjust what I eat the rest of the week to keep my weekly calorie consumption roughly the same.
Like I said it isn't rocket science and I feel people really over think time restricted eating mostly because of all the crap in the media about it in recent years.
Not just advice, but a series of events, some books I read and a change in situation:
1: In my early 20s, I worked as a junior sysadmin during the mid 90s. My manager sent me to a interpersonal skills course after telling me that people thought I was basically a jerk. That shocked me because of course who thinks that about themselves? But I reacted by resolving to be nicer to people, and the course I took introduced me to thinking about how others perceive me and how their inner worlds are vastly different to my own. As an introverted and neglected child, I hadn't been taught many lessons that I needed to learn. I grew up long before social media, so I escaped its toxic influence.
You need people who will call you out and tell you to improve, and more importantly teach you how to improve.
2: I moved out and escaped my mother and her stifling negativity. By striking out on my own, however uncomfortable I was, made me grow. This one isn't very easy these days, I was privileged to live in a time where it was pretty easy compared to today. Even if they love you, your parents/guardians/friends/hometown/job may be subconsciously holding you back.
You have to grow beyond your childhood.
3: After being told I lacked interpersonal skills, I got interested in just what those skills were. I read a lot of books on the subject, but these stood out to me: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, How to Practice by The Dalai Lama, and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You have to find your own lessons from these books, but what I took away from them was that you can choose your reaction to situations, that you're often controlled by your amygdala's fight/flight/fuck/food reactions and you have to be able to recognize that and act accordingly.
You have to be aware of why you think and feel things, and that you can control your reactions to those things.
4: I spent time at parties, going out to the pub, having fun with people in real life. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it takes a party to raise an adult.
Learning to be an adult is best taught by being physically around other adults.
5: Knowing that I wanted to be a good person, to try to treat other people with respect. Helping people without the expectation of anything in return is a wonderful feeling that I deeply enjoy. This leads into all sorts of things, like leadership is serving others, not controlling them. That being cut off on a road is just something that happens.
Treat others with kindness.
6: Learning that everyone else in the world has their own complex set of wants and needs, that most people are just trying to live their lives with a minimum of fuss. That you yourself are just one of billions doing just the same as everyone else.
You are not the main character.
Those situations, books, changes all set me on a path that I'm still working at today 25 years later. I was recently described by some coworkers as Ihsan, previously I've been referred to as a Mensch. Those moments make life precious to me :)
Hm. Wouldn’t call that lack of self awareness. Thanks for the source. Quote:
> Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping
solve technical/product design problems.
What I hear is that he doesn’t like playing the boss. And that he would very much prefer a company to work like interconnected computers in a network, with no hierarchy. He aspires to having engineering decisions solved on the basis of first principles, not on the basis of social hierarchy. The part where he deems management necessary, however, is making sure that all the vectors inside a company are aligned towards a single goal. Because he knows from experience that, without that, a company will die. so he does that out of necessity. But deep in his heart, he would really prefer to just do the work of an engineer. I mean, to me, that very much fits in with his INTJ personality type.
Oh my wording was bad I did mean that he has self awareness, and that self awareness matters little compared with the power held
There’s nothing necessary about subjecting people to boss-control and even if he knows that, it’s more favorable to him personally. It’s a myth that doesn’t fit the evidence that it’s the only way to productively structure society/orgs at scale
I remember Graeber making the point that some of the indigenous cultures of North America differed from us in that wealth did never mean power over other people. Whereas, in our society, many people seek wealth precisely as a means to that end. That’s what your quote reminded me of, and it seems to me that Elon Musk, even though he’s the richest person on earth, actually cares surprisingly little about power over people, and that that’s a thing many people don’t “get” about him.
sorry tapping out of this thread but the short of it is that I think people act to serve their own class interests and that that trumps whatever one might know about anthropology
Her advice fails to accept the reality of social and emotional needs. It also fails to address the (sometimes severe) downside of non-conformance. This advice made me an Outsider whether or not I wanted to be. I now believe that these were tools she formed to get her through her own family and social trauma, which she falsely assumed would be generally useful, and did her best to arm her children with her best tools. I also believe there are upsides to the approach, but the trade-offs are real and cannot and shouldn't be swept under the rug. I imagine others had similar experiences with religious parents.
Advice is dangerous. It has built in moral hazard. Advice is too often given in well-meaning ignorance and pride - but ultimately advice gets someone else to test your hypothesis for you. So if you've not gotten any life-changing advice, be glad!