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I feel like this depends on your priorities. Growing up, my mom was super busy acting as a single parent much of the time - waking us up, taking us to school, g
by Woberto 9y ago
I feel like this depends on your priorities. Growing up, my mom was super busy acting as a single parent much of the time - waking us up, taking us to school, going to teach, picking us up, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, etc. And yet we had a lot of good, quality time with her in the moments in between and on the weekend and summers and so on.
She didn't go to an expensive college, own a company, make tons of money, or anything of that sort. But she wanted to spend time with us and so she found ways to do that. Of course, I think she's a very strong and smart woman and I've wondered if I could do the same; but I see more and more examples of this every day from people who follow similar guidelines as what PG recommends. If you have an achievable goal (I think spending time with kids can qualify as such depending on the circumstances) and you try to cut out the bullshit along the way, it can be done.
- thiago_fm 9y agoyou don't need to be a genius to discover that. your mom did, just like mine, and father, working a lot, whenever they had time left off the day(which was rare), they would spent time with me or my brother. and this is the same for a lot of middle-class or any class individual. for really 90% of the parents I know, they would love to have more time to spend with their kids, and it is usually their top priority, it just that they can't ofc, that's because they didn't go to stanford or sold their company. in the economy of nowadays, you can only get rich if you do this in the US(in the tech sector), or is born rich. with to me, he got actually both this advice in the essay is as good as you can get if you talk with a random person, yet, people admire it and 'PG recommends' it just because he has plenty of money and is some kind of geek inspiration. this is very interesting, whenever he is talking about a random subject which isn't startups for very priviledged people, you can see that his 'wisdom' goes as far as what your neighbour probably also know yet that's so smart
- projektir 9y agoI find it rather depressing how you got downvoted. That PG is speaking from a privileged background is kind of obvious, even if there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But most people don't get to manage their time much.
- Woberto 9y agoI don't know much about PG except what's been mentioned here, but I do know that I don't come from a privileged background and yet his article still was useful to me in reevaluating my current priorities. Additionally, I would reiterate that I think this could indeed be applicable to many people. PG's example of a time-waster, "arguing online," could easily be substituted with "watching TV" and then apply to the average household in America. For example, if my dad had done like my mom and tried to reduce bullshit, he wouldn't have been an alcoholic who was either working or watching TV and never spending time with us.
- thiago_fm 9y agoI got actually +20... but on HN, the algorithm is probably some intern deciding on which posts go first and which ones go last. There is a lot of cases of people speaking around the web how HN is manipulated.