[HN Gopher] Follow boring advice
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Follow boring advice
Author : poushkar
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-09-05 06:37 UTC (16 hours ago)
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| amelius wrote:
| Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so
| why aren't far more people successful?
| roland35 wrote:
| Just because it is simple doesn't mean it is easy ;)
| amelius wrote:
| Sounds like there is a business opportunity there.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Your premise is incorrect, therefore your question answers
| itself.
|
| > 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.
| drekipus wrote:
| Because it's hard to follow any advice, let alone boring ones.
| I'd probably say it's hard to do many things.
| Zababa wrote:
| Are you asking this question yourself or are you suggesting
| that the author should have added this to the article?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Those things have other sides to them; "make something people
| want" means that you probably can't make the thing you want. If
| you want to make a text editor and people don't want that, you
| can either please yourself (fun) or do something you don't
| really want to do (useful to others). It's much rarer that the
| two things overlap, but I guess more powerful when they do.
|
| "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.
| WJW wrote:
| The advice for dieting is also boring (exercise more, eat less
| and more healthy foods), but there are still many overweight
| people. The answer is straightforward: it is actually pretty
| difficult to follow boring advice.
| arvinsim wrote:
| I agree. Boring advice are usually pretty simple. But simple
| does not mean it's easy.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Because emotions rules.
|
| 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.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Everything is a feelings problem.
|
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| My solution to these feelings is to remind myself that my
| hobbies don't define me, whether I do them a little or a
| lot. And it's OK to save some unused stuff until a season
| when I can use them. (Assuming that's not too far off.,)
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I recently dusted off an ambitious hobby project I
| shelved years ago and "finished" it. In the three years
| that the project sat, my relevant skill set and the
| available open source software improved to the point that
| the project took days rather than months, and ended up
| better than I originally expected. It was very satisfying
| to pick up again.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I have another technique for this. I like to paint, and
| I'm ok, generally what I paint now is recognizable. But
| I've given myself a really long time line on getting
| good. Like 25 more years of practice. If you have a
| desire for a hobby there's no reason you can't think of
| it like golfing in retirement, or something similar. I'm
| ramping up to doing it more over a really long time.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| In my case I kept the core supplies but got rid of a big
| stash of stuff that I was keeping in order to be able to
| "go make something on a whim" after realizing that right
| now it's the lack of time more than the lack of supplies
| that has been keeping me from creating. If it's going to
| happen, it will have to be a deliberate effort for a
| particular project and in that case I can also make the
| effort to go out and buy what I need.
|
| But coming to terms with the fact that I don't have that
| kind of time in my life right now is hard, even though
| it's my own choice to prioritize other stuff. We're
| putting extra time into work right now with the goal of
| early retirement within the decade. This fact combined
| with the number of small children in the house means
| time-consuming hobbies with lots of small pieces are off
| the table for the next few years. I'm definitely looking
| forward to coming back to it in the future though!
|
| I think the sacrifice is worth it but it's still a
| sacrifice. Usually I'm caught up in the busyness of life
| and don't think about it, but spending time on big-
| picture stuff like minimalism really brings the feelings
| to the surface. So no wonder I keep putting it off!
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Very true. And as I reflect on why I used the identity
| language, I'm realizing that expressing my irrational
| feelings in an exaggerated form also helps to reduce the
| impact they have. By announcing dramatically to my
| husband, "I'm not a sewing person anymore!" I'm able to
| see just how silly it is to have that thought as a
| subconscious burden holding me back.
| DomenicoMazza wrote:
| You can consider emotions as a compass. I have found it
| useful to listen to them, to figure out their cause. We will
| carry emotions our whole lives, 'changing' them doesn't bring
| about the insight to actually deal with them. I recommend
| looking to resources like 'It's Not Always Depression' by
| Hilary Jacobs Hendel
| PebblesRox wrote:
| I started paying more attention to emotions when I realized
| that they show me the truth about _what I value._
|
| Strong feelings are typically a sign of a strong desire or
| fear of something.
|
| "Why does this bother me so much? It's not that big a deal.
| Oh, because I _really_ want... "
|
| Knowing what I really want makes it easier to take action
| to get it, especially when the feelings are getting in the
| way of the goal. (Bad feelings and the fear of bad feelings
| are often obstacles to making things better.)
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think there is also a difference between knowing and
| _knowing_ - as in internalizing the information and relieing
| on it. There are many things that have been taught in school,
| for example, but made little sense untill I got the tools to
| truely understand them and be able to play with them.
|
| 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.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| We think we make our choices rationally but in fact we don't
| - they're based on emotion and are mostly unconscious.
|
| See George Lakoff's work on cognition and decision making.
| tux3 wrote:
| I like this question.
|
| 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.
| afarrell wrote:
| It might not be the sort of thing amenable to measurement.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I've noticed a lot more grayed out comments in general,
| including my own.
|
| 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.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > so why aren't far more people successful?
|
| You can't defeat power law. It's something that happens
| everywhere.
|
| Natural phenomenons, our universe, social interactions,
| romantic interactions, business etc.
| onurcel wrote:
| This, I suppose, is implicit in the word "boring". I think the
| premise is: People could follow boring advice to become
| successful but they don't, precisely because it's boring.
|
| 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".
| smitty1e wrote:
| Who owns the definition of 'successful'?
|
| 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.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Maybe peace is overrated?
|
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| My question was "Do they know any peace?"
|
| Possibly they do.
|
| It's not known to me either way.
|
| Clearly I'm skeptical of whether materialism can deliver
| peace, and clearly I'm saying peace is worthy of pursuit,
| but falling just short of judging others' level of peace
| achieved is prudent.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Eat less calories than you burn. Spend less money than you
| make.
|
| Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in
| debt.
| kiba wrote:
| They're not really advice, so much as goals?
|
| 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.
| borroka wrote:
| In fact one of the very common risks is to mix up goals and
| boring advice. Say, you wanna score in a soccer match: just
| receive the ball, get rid of defenders in case, and kick
| the ball in the net----which is both true and useless.
|
| Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It
| means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy
| of life for many people. Exercising means committing to
| spend time in an environment and doing an activity that
| many do not like at all----it thus means going against
| their desires for months, years etc.
|
| And I am writing from the position of someone who is in
| shape, fit, does boring things that work, but had, like
| many, very limited success in persuading others to follow
| boring advice.
| alexslobodnik wrote:
| There's the white knuckle approach to life. Grinding
| through the pain. Alternatively, you can search for
| things you actually like.
|
| In business, finding work that you like.
|
| In fitness, finding workouts that you enjoy.
|
| In health, finding foods you like that are good for you.
|
| Lastly, you can't make people want to change. You can
| only guide them once they show that they want to change.
| This is different from wanting a result. Someone who
| wants to be more successful is very different from
| someone who wants to learn how to work more effectively.
| Focus on process over end goal.
| tekromancr wrote:
| CICO is just physics; but you need to work BOTH sides of
| that equation. If you ONLY try to shift the balance to
| deficit by limiting intake, of COURSE your body is going to
| react to the new starvation environment. That's why you
| should moderately reduce intake while ALSO moderately
| increasing output (i.e. do physical activity)
| pvaldes wrote:
| People don't live in a vacuum. The first advice is simple but
| in the real life easily will spiral into "fight all the time
| against the partner that insists into overfeeding you" or
| "move to a less contaminated area free of substances
| mimicking hormones" or "drive more time to reach a better
| restaurant near the workplace and now you have five minutes
| left to eat".
|
| "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.
| melomal wrote:
| Most people lack the 'hustle' needed to action any advice let
| alone boring advice.
| poniko wrote:
| Humans are hard wired to look for quick fixes and shortcuts.
| That's why instead of eating less calories they jump on some
| new revolutionary diet or put their money into meme stock
| instead of just playing the index. Every one wants to be
| smarter then the average Joe.
| [deleted]
| sopooneo wrote:
| Perhaps because boring things, and often even _simple_ things,
| can still be extremely difficult. They can be exhausting. It 's
| very tempting to believe that more exciting and/or complicated
| approaches, will be easier.
| xupybd wrote:
| Speaking of ancient advice, I found this recently.
|
| "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.
| tomhoward wrote:
| I've seen PG [1] say/write versions of this: "The Y Combinator
| founders who followed our advice succeeded. The ones who didn't,
| didn't."
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
| Angostura wrote:
| Could someone expand on "Do things that don't scale." - that
| seems somewhat counterintuitive.
| coder-3 wrote:
| It means doing things that you can do when you have 0 to a
| few users but that would not work beyond that. For example,
| Doordash validated their idea with posters and manually
| taking orders and delivering them themselves, no app, no
| drivers.
|
| 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.
| bulletsvshumans wrote:
| When you only have 10 users, the easiest ways to please all
| your users is to do things by hand that make the experience
| of those users excellent, rather than worrying about creating
| systems that will only pay off when you have 100,000 users.
|
| 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.
| rajangdavis wrote:
| http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| egypturnash wrote:
| _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._
|
| 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".
| cudgy wrote:
| AirBnb provides a platform for people to break laws and
| covenants in their community. Maybe they got lucky that they
| were not shut down before they got big enough to fight back?
| tomhoward wrote:
| This is mostly tangential to my point, but for what it's
| worth, they've been engaging with local governments from very
| early on in their history, and they got to the position of
| being able to work with governments by starting out focusing
| on building something people wanted and taking to their
| users.
|
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| Thanks for being so upfront and transparent. Very inspiring
| comment.
| clambordan wrote:
| Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?
| hexis wrote:
| Paul Graham, the creator of this website.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Paul Graham, the cofounder of YC, whose website you are on.
| betaby wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
| cercatrova wrote:
| > Am I supposed to know who PG is?
|
| 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).
| gus_massa wrote:
| He is one of the founders of Y Combinator and the founder of
| Hacker News. pg was the moderator here for a long time.
|
| 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 :( .
| jokoon wrote:
| Reads like standard survivor bias
| darkerside wrote:
| My favorite example of this is how to get stronger and healthier.
| There's no secret, and you actually don't have to do anything too
| extreme.
|
| 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.
| opportune wrote:
| As with many things the hard part isn't understanding how they
| work - most people, deep down, already know what actually
| works. It's hard because it requires working against the part
| of your brain that wants to conserve energy, eat energy-dense
| foods, and surf the web late at night. Everybody who hasn't
| already built good habits wants there to be an easy, secret way
| to get the results without the effort (and it is effort. Once
| you've been doing it for a while it's very easy. But I remember
| how hard it was to build up to that point).
|
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| 1. Because you actually need protein to gain muscle mass, so
| there goes your "mostly plants" without a caveat about
| "vegetarian protein", which has its own set of problems.
|
| 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.
| darkerside wrote:
| There's a universe between being obese and being even an
| impressive weightlifter.
|
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I do agree.
| knuthsat wrote:
| I gained 25kg on a vegan diet through a span of 5 years. You
| just have to eat a bit more than comfortable but protein
| digestibility is a non-issue. Stuff that I ate - tofu,
| seitan, tempeh are very low processed soy/wheat products and
| can very quickly give you more than 200g of protein a day.
|
| 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.
| xupybd wrote:
| Don't things like rice and potatoes give you a quick path
| to high calories?
| redisman wrote:
| I find vegan protein powders to taste better than whey
| which is kind of gross to me. (I'm not a vegan). They
| usually have a blend of 5 or so protein sources to balance
| out the amino acids.
|
| If you need more calories then fat is by far the easiest.
| bordercases wrote:
| None of these are terminal criticisms, and in fact can be
| rectified with just a bit more information or expert
| advisement.
|
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I am personally unable to program my diet / workouts to
| effective result, even with significant effort and over a
| decade of experience.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Vegan proteins are not absorbed as good as egg / whey but
| it's possible to structure a vegan diet to gain strength (eg.
| vegan protein shakes). Personally, I tried briefly and gave
| up.
|
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I have one _really_ boring bit of advice (on public speaking)
| that many people refuse to believe is worth anything. Similar to
| what OP says, they imagine there 's some deep secret, like "power
| poses" and body language, or eye contact.
|
| 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.
| smoyer wrote:
| Nope ... there are a ton of 30-somethings writing "easy" advice
| like this and bemoaning the ignorance of their twenties. I'm a
| few decades older yet and can tell you that I'm still learning
| and integrating new ideas into my framework of how business (and
| the world in general) work. Creating a simple idea is easy but
| think about how many counter-examples there are to just this one
| rule (and you can find 100k more simple rules that together have
| complex interactions).
|
| 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.
| screye wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| My problem I run into with these sorts of things, and to some
| extent normative ethics, is that they frequently contradict one
| another in reality. So you might be in a situation, and one
| piece of the advice would suggest one course of action, and
| another would suggest the opposite, and there wasn't any way to
| reconcile them.
|
| 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.
| alexslobodnik wrote:
| Applying other people's rules (advice) to situations tends
| not to work out well. Using other people's advice to create
| your own framework and using that to live seems to work
| better.
| cxr wrote:
| > 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.")
| cudgy wrote:
| Maybe luck also had something to do with success?
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