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How Will I Measure My Life?
- tomcooks 9y agoTock tock Who's there? Facebook cryptocurrency.
- thisacctforreal 9y agoJavaScript free version: https://mbasic.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-will-i-measure-my-life/1792902224075967/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/how-will-i-measu... I shudder to think about all the data Facebook manages to suck up when you give it the ability.
- twoquestions 9y agoI didn't know about that before, and it performs so much better on a phone!
- randcraw 9y agoThanks, but is there a facebook-free version as well?
- curious_guy 9y agoI cloned the page and you can see it here. http://whatisee.co/95714489.html http://whatisee.co/95714489.html
- enkid 9y agoThis man is quantifying his life into two things, money and freetime, nothing about quantifying the quality of your time at work, nothing about happiness, and nothing about being an ethical person. What's the point of having all the money, and all the free time in the world if you're an unhappy jackass who hates his job?
- sjcsjc 9y agoHow can you have a) all the free time in the world and b) a job you hate?
- mathgeek 9y ago"All the free time in the world" is a figurative statement -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_languag....
- terminalcommand 9y agoI don't know if it is good to love your job. Anything that you do professionally has a tendency to get boring after a time. If you're working for someone else, that also constitutes a blow to your happiness. I think finding a sustainable balance should be sought after when looking for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does this job affect your career? If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job. I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am always free to look for better opportunities. Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym. Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You are free and nobody's slave.
- welly 9y agoHow about those in the arts as a profession? I don't think they'd have a successful career if they didn't love their job. I think they'd produce pretty abysmal art.
- ealexhudson 9y agoThere are a few metrics other people have considered that he seems to have overlooked; daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee are all highly quantitative. Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.
- nmyk 9y agoYou left out the most quantitative measure of all: 525,600 minutes.
- ourmandave 9y ago^This. Whenever I whine on my b'day about turning-a-certain-age, there's always some older person in the room who gets all wistful and says, "Ah, to be N again..." Oh thanks! Way to mellow my harsh man! (I gotta stop inviting that guy.)
- fimdomeio 9y agoI measure my life in a very abstract way. How much my existence is positive or negative to the world and to the people around me. Can I make people around me happier / have better lifes? How much of an environmental footprint am I creating? These are all impossible things to measure and I know that I might even contradict myself in how a feel about some of the things that I do but for me it's good enough for me to know what direction I would like to be heading.
- ljoshua 9y agoThe book, "How Will You Measure Your Life," by Clayton Christensen is easily on my list of Top 5 Most Important books, I cannot recommend it enough. Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them. Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.
- rayxi271828 9y agoWhat are your 4 other top books?
- chatmasta 9y agoFor those unaware, the author (and HN submitter apparently) is Kent Beck [0] who wrote Extreme Programming Explained and was one of the original signatories of the "Agile Manifesto." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck
- dsschnau 9y agowhy did he post on fb lol
- osteele 9y agoRelated: Paul Graham's “The Top of My Todo List” http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html “A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. […] “I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands “Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”
- yesenadam 9y agoInverting the first 2 into positive form would be better: maybe "Pay attention to your dreams" or "Listen to your dreams". I'm not finding the second one so easy to invert...
- igorkraw 9y ago* Pay attention to your dreams * "Take time to spend on leisure" or "allow yourself to 'waste' some time" * say what you think * cultivate friendships * be happy
- sgentle 9y ago"many of the things that make life worth living aren’t measurable at all, or if they are measurable then they aren’t comparable. How many dinners with family equal one random act of kindness?" I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not and cannot be such a measurement. For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of the two, which would I choose?" Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand. Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon? Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things that are most important to you.
- dasil003 9y agoYou seem to have an axe to grind with mysticism, but rationality != measurement. Here you are totally constructing a straw man from whole cloth: > "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" The article implies nothing of the sort.
- hyencomper 9y agoThat would still be quantifying values against the tangible axes of time and/or money. There are still various other intangible factors such as happiness, goodwill etc which are immeasurable, yet contribute to the overall picture.
- nathan_f77 9y agoI'm surprised no-one has mentioned "financial independence" yet. Check out the subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence, and the blog called Mr. Money Mustache: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ Many software engineers get paid a lot of money, so it's not too difficult to retire at 35 if you can keep your expenses down.
- lg 9y agothe spiraling cost of healthcare makes this very difficult in the US.
- titzer 9y agoWhen I look at the things that I am most grateful to have experienced in my life, none of the decisions that would have been motivated by optimization processes would have led to them coming about. So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"? Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the optimizer and let life unfold.
- tinymollusk 9y agoA standard explore/exploit model can work here. Perhaps it's semantics, but I consider that strategy an optimizer, although it's non a linear or deterministic one. Optimize the things I know are working; add semi-random decision making for some percent of my decisions to explore new spaces.
- harlanji 9y agoGood summary, thanks. I'd come to a less clear version of the same tradeoffs, thinking in terms of commitment level and capacity over time. Eg. 70hr week might be okay once a year but not 60hr for several weeks in a row due to draining personal reinvestment, which stunts the capacity growth that also would happen with the reinvestment time. "Vetting (commitment)" is the title of my freestyle lecture on YT. Your post is much more to the point; thanks again.
- irrational 9y agoI think I would measure my life by how many people come to my funeral because they will miss me due to the positive impact I have had on their lives.
- lcall 9y agoI believe the purpose of life is joy. It comes from growth (ie learning, developing abilities, raising a happy family etc), and service to others (helping them grow or have happier lives), and from knowing one's life is pleasing to God (which can be personally known, it's not all that complicated nor needs to be argumentative). The things you'd want someone to talk about at your funeral. This belief is connected to a strong belief that life has a background, a purpose, is eternal, and growth can also be eternal (I'm a Mormon). I think much about maturity models for the various aspects of life, and how to use/share them. I have written some things about that (more to be added later I hope, just haven't got to posting it), somewhere buried under the features descriptions at http://onemodel.org http://onemodel.org . This life is hard, but very good, and the best is yet to come.
- eow328yhehj 9y agoI believe it's about something far different. From two perspectives; one that discuses why humans exist at all and the other from my own perspective as an individual consciousness. Humanities existence provides no inherent meaning. That we exist is a result of physical laws of nature. From the perspective of an individual consciousness, my goal is not joy, but contentment which I'd describe as something like "reducing existential dread." I think humans have invented a number of ways of achieving that; religions, philosophy, technology. Some are more valuable to all than others, but no one should be behooved their personal spin on things outside the achieving of utilitarian good for the masses so they can partake in the investigation of those personal things with a clear head and as able a body as possible. I dunno why I'm so certain of this; I think it's due to two car accidents, and an emergency surgery leading me to "black out" and lose time. I'm fairly certain it all just goes dark in the end.
- fencepost 9y agoSomething I still have bookmarked to likely get is a "Your Life in Weeks" poster (https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html). This would not be so much for planning as for keeping a sense of scope and proportion.
- sjg007 9y agoHis chart is Freetime vs Money Options.. How about a more generic name: Time vs Money.
- ielfkd 9y agoYou will need a unit of life. If you have figured out what it is then you can measure life. Could unit of life be money? time? number of pizza's u ate? number of babies u had? Or are they binary in nature? Happy or Unhappy, Satisfied or Unsatisfied, Enjoyed or Not Enjoyed. Fulfilled or Unfulfilled? What could it be?
- lafar6502 9y agoEveryone measures and compares oneself to others all the time, why spend even more energy and time on that? Just try to not make stupid moves and all the rest should be fine
- collyw 9y agoMeditating on it I realised that this is where a lot of suffering in my life comes from - comparing myself to others. I can't think of much positive that comes from it.
- jonjonBoy 9y agoIt's all measured in the total instagram likes and reddit tips..
- collyw 9y agoWhy would you want to measure your life? You will only end up comparing your life to others, (which is not a particularly good thing to do in my opinion).