24 ms·

Follow boring advice

207 points by poushkar 5y ago

amelius 5y ago
Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?
- drekipus 5y ago
  Because it's hard to follow any advice, let alone boring ones. I'd probably say it's hard to do many things.
- WJW 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I agree. Boring advice are usually pretty simple. But simple does not mean it's easy.
- _zamorano_ 5y ago
  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.
  - DomenicoMazza 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.)
  - PebblesRox 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.,)
      - gonzo41 5y ago
        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.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    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.
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    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.
- melomal 5y ago
  Most people lack the 'hustle' needed to action any advice let alone boring advice.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Are you asking this question yourself or are you suggesting that the author should have added this to the article?
- tux3 5y ago
  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.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    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.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    It might not be the sort of thing amenable to measurement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- GDC7 5y ago
  > 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.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    Agreed. This purely materialistic definition of success is a very western concept. Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older. Western traditions will eventually catch up.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
      - 5y ago
- poniko 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    [deleted]
- roland35 5y ago
  Just because it is simple doesn't mean it is easy ;)
  - amelius 5y ago
    Sounds like there is a business opportunity there.
- onurcel 5y ago
  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".
- sopooneo 5y ago
  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.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  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.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  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.
- mehwoot 5y ago
  Because the hard part isn't knowing what to do (the advice), it's actually following it day in, day out.
- kamaal 5y ago
  They are. 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.
smoyer 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
darkerside 5y ago
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.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      I do agree.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    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.
tomhoward 5y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
- clambordan 5y ago
  Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?
  - hexis 5y ago
    Paul Graham, the creator of this website.
  - 5y ago
cudgy 5y ago
Maybe luck also had something to do with success?
xupybd 5y ago
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.
AlbertCory 5y ago
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.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Reminds me of all the trick advice on how to do well on the SATs. My advice is simple: 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
WalterBright 5y ago
I'll add another one that I repeat often on HN but is profoundly unpopular: 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.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  So, can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life? 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." https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life? 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.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >Not buying that. So, you are not changing your opinion. But you could if you wanted to. You could change your mind about something that you believe to be false, without any outside influence, through pure will. >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. The link is to a well known essay by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, mediocrity and failure. It goes into the consequences of such beliefs at great length.
ElectricMind 5y ago
I wonder these days if it was good idea to let everyone "write" on internet. Blogging seems like a plague these days... Look at me I am tech guru
agumonkey 5y ago
one thing that my last decade taught me (with examples from .. trading) related to his mention of acting and compounding, with a bit of dusty spiritualishness 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).

207 points by poushkar 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

drekipus 5y ago
Because it's hard to follow any advice, let alone boring ones. I'd probably say it's hard to do many things.
WJW 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I agree. Boring advice are usually pretty simple. But simple does not mean it's easy.
_zamorano_ 5y ago
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.
- DomenicoMazza 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.)
- PebblesRox 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.,)
    - gonzo41 5y ago
      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.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  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.
- RealityVoid 5y ago
  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.
melomal 5y ago
Most people lack the 'hustle' needed to action any advice let alone boring advice.
Zababa 5y ago
Are you asking this question yourself or are you suggesting that the author should have added this to the article?
tux3 5y ago
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.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  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.
- afarrell 5y ago
  It might not be the sort of thing amenable to measurement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
GDC7 5y ago
> 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.
smitty1e 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  Agreed. This purely materialistic definition of success is a very western concept. Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older. Western traditions will eventually catch up.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
    - 5y ago
poniko 5y ago
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 5y ago
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roland35 5y ago
Just because it is simple doesn't mean it is easy ;)
- amelius 5y ago
  Sounds like there is a business opportunity there.
onurcel 5y ago
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".
sopooneo 5y ago
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.
jodrellblank 5y ago
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.
cercatrova 5y ago
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.
mehwoot 5y ago
Because the hard part isn't knowing what to do (the advice), it's actually following it day in, day out.
kamaal 5y ago
They are. 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.

smoyer 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

darkerside 5y ago

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.

throw1234651234 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I do agree.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  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.

tomhoward 5y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

clambordan 5y ago
Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?
- hexis 5y ago
  Paul Graham, the creator of this website.
- 5y ago

cudgy 5y ago

Maybe luck also had something to do with success?

xupybd 5y ago

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.

AlbertCory 5y ago

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.

WalterBright 5y ago
Reminds me of all the trick advice on how to do well on the SATs. My advice is simple: 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

WalterBright 5y ago

I'll add another one that I repeat often on HN but is profoundly unpopular: 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.

perl4ever 5y ago
So, can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life? 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." https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life? 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.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >Not buying that. So, you are not changing your opinion. But you could if you wanted to. You could change your mind about something that you believe to be false, without any outside influence, through pure will. >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. The link is to a well known essay by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, mediocrity and failure. It goes into the consequences of such beliefs at great length.

ElectricMind 5y ago

I wonder these days if it was good idea to let everyone "write" on internet. Blogging seems like a plague these days... Look at me I am tech guru

agumonkey 5y ago

one thing that my last decade taught me (with examples from .. trading) related to his mention of acting and compounding, with a bit of dusty spiritualishness 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).