4 ms·

I am somewhat surprised and taken aback by the level of negative comments in the thread... However, I suspect that the article “touched a nerve”. In my experi

I am somewhat surprised and taken aback by the level of negative comments in the thread... However, I suspect that the article “touched a nerve”. In my experience, the “stronger the reaction” the more likely something is there (think Lean Startup). The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. That said, I will echo/slightly modify some of the positive comments I read: it isn’t about being “abnormal” in working 20 hour days. It is being abnormal on where you spend the time you have. Most of the extremely successful people I know personally dont accept “reasons” for why “x didn’t occur”. I think one of the famous quotes from Steve Jobs at Apple was that once you reached a certain level (VP?), no reason is good enough, it all lands on you. Or to paraphrase my advisor: “How do you know someone wanted something (past tense)? They got it.” Not everyone can be abnormal. By definition, 95% of folks can’t be. The question is: What do YOU want for yourself. What is important to you that you will fight for? For me personally, it has meant to have a meaningful family life AND a meaningful career. It hadn’t been easy. It took many short term sacrifices and focus on the long game. But in general, I have what I wanted. Examples of sacrifice: taking a “lower paying job” so I would have more freedom to pursue what I thought was important. Going “part time”/passing up opportunities so I can be with my kids while they are super young. Taking “risks” in jobs that weren’t really “sexy” on the face of it, but had the potential for long term impact. I mention the above to say it can work (but even now my life is far from perfect). The key however (Per the original article) is to adopt a mindset where you are in the driver seat and conversely are responsible. By focusing on what you can control, and not wasting energy on what you can’t, you free up resources that compound over time. To make this concrete for folks: let’s say you spend 10 mins a day on thinking how “awful” <insert pain point> is. In the course of a week, you would have spent an over an hour unproductively. Over the course of a year, over a full work week. What could you have done with an extra “week”? It doesn’t take much, done repeatedly to make a profound difference on your life in the long term. The question is whether you are willing to. Edited for clarity/succinctness

logicchains 6y ago
>In my experience, the “stronger the reaction” the more likely something is there (think Lean Startup). The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Arguing that people have the power to significantly change their lives is a challenge to many people's egos. If they believe something like "I haven't achieved X, which I'd like to, but that's fine because it's out of my control", and somebody else comes along and says "actually it is in people's control", then their ego doesn't hear that as an uplifting statement of empowerment, instead it hears it as something negative, because acknowledging that X was achievable would require acknowledging that they had failed to achieve X.
haihaibye 6y ago
Lean startup is great at finding a profitable niche, but that may lead you down a path where you're running a chat app for Furries.
Traster 6y ago
I think "touched a nerve" should be a last assumption. If you can't point to any obvious things wrong with the article maybe people are reacting to it negatively for emotional reasons. But I think it's uncharitable to just jump to that straight away. So let me lay out for you a reasonable alternative that we can prefer as an explanation for why people are responding negatively: Because it's a fundamentally bad article. I'll make that case. The first point that the article tries to push is "Don't make reasonable excuses". To justify that point he tells a story about a woman that was successful despite facing incredible challenges. Here's the problem with that though: She succeeded, but that's got nothing to do with reasonable excuses. Did she make reasonable excuses? I don't know. Why are we taking the message from her story that we should not accept reasonable excuses? Surely a story to justify not making reasonable excuses should actually involve someone succeeding because they didn't make reasonable excuses. And this underlines a fundamental issue with the article - it's true that by definition the most successful people are abnormal. But it's not useful. The least successful people are abnormal. The important bit is how you're abnormal. This is exacerbated by the fact the article is so basic and formulaic in its structure. It's the old 7 habits of highly effective people. You make a pithy statement, you write a little bit explaining the claim that doesn't really justify the statement - it justifies a very specific reading of the statement to the point of the pithy statement being meaningless, and then it tells you an anecdote. The anecdote doesn't justify the claim whilst simultaneously wildly over-stating the importance of the claim. John Wooden won basketball games because he stopped worrying about things he couldn't control! Great! Firstly, that's not abnormal, and secondly I'm fairly certain practicing basketball had more to do with his success. All I'm saying is that the structure and style of this article is bad. You can argue about the merits of the things he's proposing, but they're proposed in such a 1990s self-help way of presenting these things, and it's not even well executed. As a result it's really easy to bash.

logicchains 6y ago

>In my experience, the “stronger the reaction” the more likely something is there (think Lean Startup). The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Arguing that people have the power to significantly change their lives is a challenge to many people's egos. If they believe something like "I haven't achieved X, which I'd like to, but that's fine because it's out of my control", and somebody else comes along and says "actually it is in people's control", then their ego doesn't hear that as an uplifting statement of empowerment, instead it hears it as something negative, because acknowledging that X was achievable would require acknowledging that they had failed to achieve X.

haihaibye 6y ago

Lean startup is great at finding a profitable niche, but that may lead you down a path where you're running a chat app for Furries.

Traster 6y ago

I think "touched a nerve" should be a last assumption. If you can't point to any obvious things wrong with the article maybe people are reacting to it negatively for emotional reasons. But I think it's uncharitable to just jump to that straight away. So let me lay out for you a reasonable alternative that we can prefer as an explanation for why people are responding negatively: Because it's a fundamentally bad article. I'll make that case. The first point that the article tries to push is "Don't make reasonable excuses". To justify that point he tells a story about a woman that was successful despite facing incredible challenges. Here's the problem with that though: She succeeded, but that's got nothing to do with reasonable excuses. Did she make reasonable excuses? I don't know. Why are we taking the message from her story that we should not accept reasonable excuses? Surely a story to justify not making reasonable excuses should actually involve someone succeeding because they didn't make reasonable excuses. And this underlines a fundamental issue with the article - it's true that by definition the most successful people are abnormal. But it's not useful. The least successful people are abnormal. The important bit is how you're abnormal. This is exacerbated by the fact the article is so basic and formulaic in its structure. It's the old 7 habits of highly effective people. You make a pithy statement, you write a little bit explaining the claim that doesn't really justify the statement - it justifies a very specific reading of the statement to the point of the pithy statement being meaningless, and then it tells you an anecdote. The anecdote doesn't justify the claim whilst simultaneously wildly over-stating the importance of the claim. John Wooden won basketball games because he stopped worrying about things he couldn't control! Great! Firstly, that's not abnormal, and secondly I'm fairly certain practicing basketball had more to do with his success. All I'm saying is that the structure and style of this article is bad. You can argue about the merits of the things he's proposing, but they're proposed in such a 1990s self-help way of presenting these things, and it's not even well executed. As a result it's really easy to bash.