It doesn't matter that you know what you have to do, eat well, do exercise, how to prioritize, what's good for you and what's not.
Unless you steer your emotions in the right direction, you won't be able to achieve anything, because resistance and stregth of will won't get you very far.
And changing your emotions is really hard, because they're mostly formed in your youth, and doing so need a systematic approach, consistency, and strengh of will... and that's precislesly what you lack; a vicious cycle.
This is a exaggeration of course, but I've been struck by just how many sticky problems have an emotional component.
I have a tendency to ignore emotions in favor of (what seems to me like) the main content, but I limit myself when I do this.
Enthusiasm, despair, excitement, fear - these are too powerful to ignore. But naming them and uncovering the deeper values they reveal helps me make better decisions.
For example, I value minimalism and getting rid of junk but routinely put off doing any decluttering.
I realized that what I call "decluttering" is really better termed "making difficult decisions about my identity."
To get rid of <hobby supplies> that I never use involves confronting the fact that I'm not a <hobby> person. It's painful to realize that I'm not who I wish I was.
Getting rid of something I spent a lot of money on reveals that I wasted the money. I'm not as wise and frugal as I wish I was.
I put off minimalism because I don't have to feel those bad feelings if I don't force myself to evaluate and make the decisions.
And this scenario plays out in a lot of different areas of my life.
I don't take action toward a goal because I don't want to get excited and then fail and have to face the disappointment. Easier to coast along content with the status quo.
So rather than just facts, you have networks of facts and experiences that need to connect for things to make sense and you to truely know something.
See George Lakoff’s work on cognition and decision making.
Currently, it's rendered in gray font, and it has five answers.
I think it's the sort of question that's annoying to think about. It's not a complex technical question with a clearly defined answer you can look up on Wikipedia. It's not even obvious where you should start if you wanted to answer.
There is plenty of boring advice out there, but dispensing advice doesn't reliably help people. And yet, it feels like it should. Well-meaning people keep writing more of it.
Can we improve that?
How do you measure advice? Track compliance? Subjective ranking? Score outcomes?
I feel like there's plenty of science we're not doing, data we're not taking, that's applicable even to simple questions like "how do I make my advice more helpful", "what makes people not stick with it", "does following boring advice actually improve outcomes"
It's not particularly expensive to measure these problems. They could have a high impact, multiplied by a whole lot of people.
I'm not sure why the response today was to hide the question.
Sometimes it's obvious: they (or I) posted on the political/politicized intersections of a subject. Downvotes are likely a mix of people who are aggressively opposed to the apparent tilt of the comment and people who are ideologically opposed to anything they see as politics.
Most times, it's no different from any comment I've made that merely sat at 1.
I think there must have been an influx of people in the last half year or so who are more prone to downvote or flag something they disagree with or just don't like. Only someone with access to the vote database could run a more objective analysis, but my anecdotal impression is that HN is getting more downvotey.
A low stress, high joy life is preferable to these Really Famous Names we could drop.
Sure, they may go on rocket rides, but do they know any peace?
Maybe.
There is certainly a price to pay for greatness, and some are willing to give it a shot. It seems so condescending to look down on poor them, not knowing peace when perhaps that is not the thing they are searching for.
Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older.
Western traditions will eventually catch up.
"talk to your users" brings "you can't make the decisions" with it. Tech people love to talk about "lusers" and deride anyone who thinks differently as dumb sheep. If your users want the Office Ribbon and you hate it, are you going to build it? If your users hate the command line options are you going to change it or sneer at them to go back to babyworld and stop wasting your time?
"keep typing and don't die" means keep working when it gets hard, boring, goes wrong, feels unrewarding, competitors show up, people quit, your market dissipates, people are jeering at you and telling you it won't work, when your money is running low or your debtors are banging on the door, or you need to do a pile of admin paperwork, when you doubt yourself. "keep going" might be boring, that doesn't mean it's easy.
(cough) selection bias, lots of people want things for free, lots of people don't know what they want and just want a chat, lots of people grind for a long time and still get nowhere - consider how many other investors there have been over the past 70 years who tried as hard as Buffet and didn't become him because they didn't read the same things, come to the same conclusions, think the same way, have the same patience, or hit the same companies to invest in at good times, or were forced out for other reasons.
Regardless the definition of success, we tend to consider it as being in the top <50%. So even if everyone was more succesful (regardless the metric) in today's standard, only the best ones would be said "successful".
> everyone can follow boring advice
No, they can't. This article was written solely to show that fact, that most people actually _cannot_ follow boring advice; they often want the quick and easy way out. This leads to their downfall, or at least, lack of progress. As an inverse, if everyone could follow boring advice, this article would need not have been written at all.
It's just that successful doesn't always mean famous, and its not always glittery.
Most people getting rich are not start up founders. Or SV job hopping tourists. Most are people who work one job for long periods of times, max out on 401Ks, invest in IRA/RothIRA, index funds, real estate etc. They have stable families, and good health.
This kind of stuff doesn't get profiled on Techcrunch.
You can't defeat power law. It's something that happens everywhere.
Natural phenomenons, our universe, social interactions, romantic interactions, business etc.
Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in debt.
"Spend less money than you make" can translate sometimes into "don't search for medical advice that you need right now and fall for scammers that offer cheaper fake solutions"
I'm not saying that those were not good advice but, well, sometimes things get complicated.
Also, CICO seems to be actually incorrect from what I read on it. Body's more like a thermostat than a steam engine and will work against you such as burning calories slower as you eat less.
If you really want to save money, then you need to think in terms of emotions and how to combat that rather than attempting to brute force it with willpower.
The advice is so simple, it's hard for a lot of outsiders to believe it's worth anything. "Make something people want." "Talk to your users." "Do things that don't scale." "Keep typing and avoid dying." People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that.
My company got into the Winter 2009 batch of YC, the same batch as Airbnb. They weren't around for many of the dinners; they spent a lot of their time away from the Bay Area doing exactly those things that PG advised, mostly in NYC, where many of their most active users were. They just did that stuff, over and over, for several years. Now they have one of the most successful companies out of Silicon Valley in the last 15 years. (I saw PG tweet a couple of years ago that he'd recently dinner with them, and Brian would still write down PG's suggestions in a notebook.)
During that batch, I was flailing about trying to find some magical trick to make our company work. I remember one office-hours session with PG, excitedly telling him some buzzword-filled story I'd dreamed up about how our company could be a brilliant success. "Just make a good website" he replied.
It took me a while to work out how the Airbnb guys were able to follow the advice so effectively whilst we and so many others got stuck in the weeds, but looking back now it's pretty obvious. They were just very comfortable in their own skin. They didn't have ego issues around needing to seem like geniuses, needing validation all the time, fearing rejection or embarrassment. "Talk to your users" was easy, as they were sociable, likeable people who put on cool parties and who were naturally able to make everyone in their company feel welcome and valued, and everything else emerged out of that.
When reddit started out and had almost no user base, they had employees each impersonate a handful of different users to give the site a sense of a pre-existing community. When Dwarf Fortress was starting out, their sole developer would create custom ASCII-art scenes to send to every supporter above a certain dollar threshold.
It is counterintuitive at first but when you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. When you're getting started you should focus on doing things to get started. Worry about scaling when you're scaling.
You can work on automating it and hooking various payment providers.
Integration with payment providers is a lot of hassle and engineering work. So when you have 5-10 customers it does not make sense to automate that.
Sending invoices manually does not scale of course - but that advice is given in specific context of company. Where you should focus on working on your product and not on automating invoices "because somewhere in the future it will be needed."
Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company?
That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.
I thought you gave away 7% of your company for the big pile of VC money that YC hooks you up with, so you have a few years of runway to find an intersection between "an idea you had" and "an idea people are willing to collectively spend a lot of money on".
We went to YC because it seemed like the best place to learn how to build successful companies and to be around others doing it.
I don’t dispute that there are negative externalities to what they do and that their existence and growth are not without controversy, but my comment has nothing to do with that controversy, it’s about the useful advice in building a financially successful company.
For example: "Challenge HN: build pg-bot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 (148 points | May 30, 2011 | 39 comments)
I never meet him, but apparently he repeat this kind of advice a lot, and someone of the first batches of YC made an image of a fake action figure of pg that repeats the advice when you press a button. I can't find the link :( .
Yes, you are, if you're using the site he created (not to fault you for not knowing but often many HNers will reference Paul Graham by his initials so it's useful to know).
Exercise regularly, drink water, don't eat too much, mostly plants, get lots of asleep, avoid drugs and alcohol.
Now that I do so well with all that advice, I can't quite remember why that all sounded so hard or "boring" before.
The same applies for finances, dating/socialization, and business. Everybody knows to save/invest money (maybe not exactly how to invest), to not be afraid of failure, to ask questions and take initiative, to talk to users and make customers happy. Our simple animalistic brains don't like to do those things if we don't have to. It's uncomfortable for many people.
2. Exercise regularly - what is regularly? What kind of exercise? You never had over-work injuries? Injuries from muscle / postural imbalances? Etc.
I concede that most of this advice is available for free, but unless you have a GOOD coach, you will get injured before you get results. Then there is plain doing too much.
Again, you can come back with "Well, I am just talking about not being obese" - in that case, yea, it's much simpler since you don't have to worry about getting enough protein and balancing that against becoming over-weight.
If I can play with my kids (as in, actually run around on the playground), play sports at a casually competitive level, hike for several hours, and help my friends move heavy furniture, that enables a pretty full life. I don't think you'd disagree it's pretty simple to get there.
Besides, you can probably still gain a ton of functional strength while on a plant based diet anyway.
For me, the biggest problem was meeting caloric needs. It's very hard to get to 3000kcal+ eating non-processed plants.
PDCAAS, DIAAS or similar "bioavailability" measurements are standardized on pigs bowels and are targeted towards malnutritioned individuals that border on starvation or suffer from kwashiorkor.
As for weightlifting, you can do rounded back (inefficient form) deadlifts smartly (not overdoing the load) and get strong enough.
There are impressive vegan athletes even if it's hard to say whether they built more or their muscle on a vegan diet or not.
That said, I agree with your message, getting stronger is not always easy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian [1] https://medium.com/four-pursuits-ventures/worlds-strongest-m...
You might argue that it means the advice isn't simple. I would counter that in the average case, it's simple enough. We are surrounded with material, examples and non-examples of the advice being followed to the point of it being tiresome.
For cases like injury and plant protein sources the information and talent is so readily available for someone of sufficient means to take action with, that the "complexity" won't matter after six months.
My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive.
This is definitely not true, whether the general form you led with, or in the specific minimum you mention.
Contradictions to this rule are so widespread that we have an aphorism for it. ("No good deed goes unpunished.")
I love my life by this and it has already paid off with dividends.
The crabs in a bucket formula points out an important fallacy. Even incredibly generous help in every send line a zero sum hand can end up being bringing huge ventures to both parties.
It's one of the main lessons that people from high scarcity societies need to internalize when moving to a post scarcity society.
I think they're well intended and can be useful to think about but beyond something like "these are useful things to be aware of or to keep in mind" it's hard to apply things in life.
Perhaps it's reading too much into what's intended by the authors of these sorts of pieces, and maybe they're just trying to communicate some help, but this particular piece is "advice about advice" so in that regard I think these issues are relevant.
Take responsibility for your situation in life. Stop blaming bad luck, other people, fate, your parents, etc.
The advantage stems from if your situation is your responsibility, that means you can better your situation. A common thread I've found with happy and successful people I've encountered is that all of them have this attitude.
If not, then it proves you have not even control over your own mind.
"Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences—solely. He originates nothing, not even a thought."
Yes and yes.
But there are consequences to the opinion you choose. If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure.
> "Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences—solely. He originates nothing, not even a thought."
Not buying that.
It's this: know your subject inside and out, plus the answers to all the questions you're likely to get. When you're speaking, remember: you know the stuff, they don't, you want to communicate it. That's it.
You'll forget everything else with all that adrenaline roaring in your ears, anyway.
1. take all the math classes your school offers
2. read lots of sci fi books
That's what I did, and I got the SAT results I needed.
The other day I picked up a book on building vocabulary for the SAT. Flipping through it, I knew essentially all the words. I've never studied vocabulary in my life. I just read a lot.
"13The lazy person [who is self-indulgent and relies on lame excuses] says, “There is a lion in the road!
A lion is in the open square [and if I go outside to work I will be killed]!”
14As the door turns on its hinges,
So does the lazy person on his bed [never getting out of it].
15The lazy person buries his hand in the dish [losing opportunity after opportunity];
It wearies him to bring it back to his mouth."
The link between fear and laziness is something I'd not realized until I read this. I thought my low tolerance for risk was wisdom but it was simply fear that lead to laziness. It seems that humans had similar struggles thousands of years ago.
if you find yourself in total chaos, try many small things, and don't bother with negatives and failures, just take what's nice, drop what's bad, repeat. it requires a very strange mindset.. feels almost like religious faith, but fear and self imposed negativity can be such killers .. being a tiny bit blind and hopeful is often great (hence the small things, don't hope to become usain bolt tomorrow and smile while waiting).
