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Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become
- _hcuq 4y agoAnd today is the first day of rest of your life…..
- edmcnulty101 4y agoI hate philosophies like this. It acts like humans are machines that need to be doing things. I like to relax and binge netflix occasionally to decompress but that doesn't mean I'm voting for myself to become a lazy bum. I also like to play music but I don't want to become a working musician. Life is more than ACTIONS there's also experiences and things you enjoy that have nothing to do with future planning.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoI think you're interpreting the advice overly agressively. You can take it as chill advice in chill situations. It's okay to want to be the kind of person who enjoys a show and watches it enthusiastically. It's great to be the kind of person who relaxes and takes care of themselves. It's wonderful to want to be musical without pushing yourself to do so commercially. Take actions to be the kind of person who enjoys being you.
- ProAm 4y agoThese blog posts are such low effort too it makes me cringe. 1) Read $popular_book 2) Have it tell you what to do 3) Blog about chapter, quote, section of said $popular_book 4) Keep you in the loop for SV/VC/Hacker/Founder-sphere because if you don't have a presence your startup doesnt matter. I'm overly generalizing a bit, and I think the blogger probably had good intentions (i.e. me overreacting) but I feel like these types of posts are more virtue signaling and a waste of time vs smart people wanting an online book club.
- mcbutterbunz 4y agoHaving a mechanism to express your thoughts, whether publicly or privately, can be beneficial to the learning process. You try to express your ideas to others and see if you really understand it, sort of like the Feynman technique. Beyond that, if its cringe to you or not worth your time, just ignore it and move on. Just because it's not worth your time doesn't mean its not worth the time of the author.
- ProAm 4y agoI totally agree. Im not saying he shouldn't blog as for its good personal expression, similar to a diary. Just surprised to see it on HN as for it seems more that the author is someone seeking validation vs discussion.
- robcohen 4y agoI don't see these as mutually exclusive philosophies. You can choose to make an action out of relaxing by voting to not be a strung-out stressed person that is pressured to do things all the time. That person isn't fun at parties. You can vote to de-stress for a few hours or a whole day on occasion. I personally find this philosophy useful and follow it myself. I intentionally choose what I spend my time on. I make a list of priorities, then I allocate time to those priorities on a spreadsheet. If I run out of time, I drop priorities and make more time. I factor in social time where I can choose to go out or stay in, depending on how I am feeling that day. What I don't appreciate it the philosophy that most people seem to embrace which is "externalize everything but my job and what feels good". I feel like it's important to hone a variety of skills, and sometimes doing that isn't exactly fun. I think it's more justifiable to delegate once you know how to do a job well. There are exceptions, but there really are not a lot of them.
- ravenstine 4y agoIt's not entirely wrong, but yeah, we aren't always making highly conscious decisions. There should be no shame in living a low-key yet morally integral existence and not always being intentional with every single action we take. My contention with that philosophy is similar to that of all the messaging we get on social media about success and how our lives are supposed to be. No, I don't travel and dine out as much as other people, and perhaps I'm not as conventionally successful as most others in my cohort, but I have enough life experience to inform me that I am both content and not really "missing out" on things like others might. To "live like you'll die tomorrow" seems stressful and unsustainable to me. I much prefer the chill feeling of knowing that I'll wake up with a new day and that I don't necessarily need to be hustling or achieving to be a human.
- DubiousPusher 4y agoUnchained of any social responsibility, void of compulsory passions, maybe. I'm not going to run anyone down for the way they organize their life and I do take on conscious actions to form habits. However, these kinds of aphorisms do give me the willies a bit.
- sdoering 4y agoExactly this. I just can't deal with this (I call it) SEOfication of the world. Content like this always rubs me the wrong way. Not genuinely written because it must be said, because of a deeply felt need to express oneself. But to present oneself in a very specific but essentially superfluous and artificial way. Maybe it is me being more and more disillusioned by all this kind of superficial content. Maybe it is just me having a different opinion was I could regard as deep content.
- robotnikman 4y agoI feel the same way. It seems like a good chunk of content online is published just for an ultimately superficial purpose. One just has to take a quick look at LinkedIn to see many examples, but by no means is it limited to just there.
- tspike 4y agoThanks for the reminder.. I vote to stop reading bland, boring tech blogs for today.
- glitchc 4y agoSeems like a new form of humble-brag to me.
- macspoofing 4y agoStrictly speaking that's not true. Much of our day is not a series of thought-through decisions, but rather cruise control without much conscious input.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agoi would say the past has far greater bearing than the future on your actions... you might want to be confident and outgoing, but your ability to vote for or express that action, is constrained by your life experiences and even biological things.
- jensgk 4y ago"... The tl;dr of this book is a set of strategies to get 1% “better” each day..." So after 10 years you will be 1.01^3650 = 5929448572069177.9 times better than you are today.. Good luck.
- birdyrooster 4y agolmao, the author doesn’t explain how we naturally become 1% worse everyday so 1% daily improvement is just like an equilibrium point of net 0 improvement.
- thenerdhead 4y agoTODO: - Survive
- nicbou 4y agoThis kind of content is better suited for LinkedIn. I'm not a machine. I need rest and recreation to function properly. I sometimes get sick or sleep poorly. I sometimes get bursts of inspiration. There's no telling what condition I'll be working with on a given day. But perhaps you're right. Perhaps I'm casting my vote against being some sigma grindset, 4 AM cold showers, audiobooks at 3X speed kind of guy. The other guy seems more chill.
- pineconewarrior 4y agoYou're voting for the You that takes care of themself. Good!
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoWhy would this perspective not be compatible with rest and relaxation?
- p_j_w 4y agoDid you see the list of what the guy did? At no point did he include rest and relaxation. He's clearly fetishizing productivity.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoNot everyone needs the same amount of rest and relaxation though. Some folks just have what it takes to spend almost every waking moment maniacally focused on their chosen pursuit all the way until a ripe old age. These are the folks that usually end up putting a dent into the universe.
- pen2l 4y agoWoah I didn't know doing audiobooks at 3X was perceived as some kind of a virtue. I do it out of pure laziness. Particularly, all youtube things (with 'Video Speed Controller ' extension) at 2 or 3x because I just can't can't can't put up with normal speed.
- 4y ago
- coding123 4y agoThis reads like post of a teenager bragging about stuff they did - in a thinly veiled notion that it's about casting votes about the person they want to be. lol
- cortesoft 4y agoNo, it reads like a LinkedIn post trying to promote their personal brand.
- zuzuleinen 4y agoI think I heard a similar quote: "Don't practice what you don't want to become". Sometimes trying to not be stupid is easier than trying to be smart. Maybe that's another quote I read from somewhere else.
- adamdusty 4y agoI think the author might be missing the point of the book. Nothing on that list anything to do with forming habits. I suppose the mentoring bullet point could be a habit, but it's bit vague.
- Apocryphon 4y agoYeah, that's the most annoying thing about this article. It's fine to make a recap about what he's working on and be all intentional about it... but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Atomic Habits at all. That entire list is projects, not day-by-day little patterns.
- kodah 4y agoI feel like the author is moralizing something in order to make it more gratifying. > firm believer that structure dictates behavior So every action you take is a vote and structure dictates your behavior. This sounds oddly familiar.
- mattgreenrocks 4y agoThis is insightful. Would the author do these things absent the post-hoc moralizing? Maybe we are seeing what it looks like when we concoct narratives to order our life, and it hits a bit too close to home. After all, how coincidental is it that the thing that brings ultimate fulfillment (career) is also the thing that we’ve been told all our life to put so much into.
- kodah 4y agoI'm not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I tend to agree with you. I might expand this farther than work though. You can find this any human activity that has very passionate people: religion, politics, self-help, tech (apparently). Ultimately, humans are susceptible to posturing ourselves compared to our peers. To me, the byproduct is morality of which a major component is judgement.
- rexpop 4y ago> This sounds oddly familiar. Can you spell out your associations plainly for those of us who haven't made the conceptual leap?
- kodah 4y agoReligion, politics; really anything people get fanatical or self-righteous about. I do wish I had the background and vocabulary to express the commonality in the language and ideas from these camps, but it's not limited to them. Also, the reply above goes a tad deeper.
- xwdv 4y agoOur lives are not a democracy, they are dictatorships. You don’t have to “become” anything, you simply are what you are at any given moment, and that’s all you’ll ever be. Just try not to be someone that makes other people want to punch you in the mouth.
- causi 4y agoThe tl;dr of this book is a set of strategies to get 1% “better” each day. Yeah, you can keep that. I'm focused on getting 1% happier each day.
- chrsig 4y agoYeah. I've personally been on a mission to throw 'bad', 'worse', 'good', 'better', and words to those effects out the window. They're meaningless and lazy at best. They need to be defined in every context, so it's easier to just skip to saying the definition. At worst, they sound incredibly judgmental, presumptive, or pushy. It irks me to no end when others try to decide what good is on my behalf.
- cammil 4y agoEverything begets itself
- cortesoft 4y agoOh man this is such a perfect example of productivity porn. Every action you take isn’t a vote for the type of person you wish to become, it is a vote taken by the person you are. I hate this mindset of “I am constantly working towards becoming someone else”. When do we spend time as the person we are? When do we enjoy the fruits of our labor? I feel like some people who take this mindset see their lives as being two distinct phases… the building/growth phase where you grind and learn and work non stop, and then a later phase that comes after where you enjoy what you built. I don’t think life works like that, and you will burn yourself out if you do it. Life needs to be built and enjoyed together, through your whole life.
- dchuk 4y agoI think the point is that if you aren't mindful and deliberate with your actions, you'll descend into behaving according to habits and desires instead of what is in the best interest of your future self. Without being mindful, you'll just have another handful of chips instead of remembering you're trying to be not fat. Without being mindful, you'll watch another Youtube video instead of doing something on your todo list. Without being mindful, you'll jerk off instead of reading a book or interacting with another human being. It's not that doing any of the above is inherently bad in isolation, it's that if you aren't mindful in the aggregate and just default to impulse, you'll find yourself drifting much farther from what you think you will eventually become than you otherwise realize. We live in a world where distraction and dopamine hits are so accessible (sometimes even out of our control) vs even just 50 years ago, so we find ourselves needing to be more deliberate in our actions.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI think you made a false dichotomy between thinking of the future and mindless indulgence. You can be mindful of who you are and what you want now. A life of always suffering for tomorrow is arguably as bad as a life of mindless indulgence. You can get to the end without ever enjoying it. It is better to not want chips than always want chips and restrain yourself. It is better to enjoy exercise than suffer through it.
- 4y ago
- swader999 4y agoBeing born well helps too.
- Eupraxias 4y agoThis sentiment has always made it through my brains like this: "you are what you do" ..which evokes the deepest ontological question - does being doing?
- johnchristopher 4y agoWhat are these votes author says he's casting ?
- coffee_beqn 4y agoLet’s see.. work, work, work, work, work.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoHumans do not have the capacity to be perfectly consistent with their long term goals. Therefore, as you take actions through life you are also voting for the person you don't want to be simply through failure or randomness. Luckily there is a REPL for human behavior: feedback from the environment that the decision you made did or did not support your long term goals This REPL allows you to iterate toward increasing the percentage of your effort that goes to long term goals. This assumes you have measurable long term goals.
- synu 4y agoI find it a little strange that it seems like so many people are working so hard, all the time, to run away from the person they are today. I’m ambitious as anyone, but some of this stuff is too much.
- swatcoder 4y agoWhy is this getting upvoted? Even if you find the headline thought provoking, the article puts no effort into sharing it or exploring it. It’s just a list of self-enrichment things the OP is proud of having done lately. This is effectively just resume spam.
- tailspin2019 4y agoGiven the sentiment in the comments, the article upvotes are curious! Perhaps people are just instantly expressing an opinion on the title alone...
- remram 4y agoThe headline is wrong too. Actions you take might be a vote for who you WILL become, but not who you WISH to become. In other words, one can fail to become who they wanted to.
- the_omegist 4y agoExactly. This is not even worthy of being called an "article" : just some self-promotion thrown without any effort.
- Errancer 4y agoI really dislike this type of thinking insisting that everything we do has some importance to it. I used to think like this in moral terms, my every action has consequences and I should be mindful of those consequences. And if anyone watched "The Good Place" then they know it is not a good way to live. I am paraphrasing but microoptimalisation is the root of all evil. I find it much better to just get a good understanding of what I wish to be and set a long time goals around it (Like a decade or lifetime long). Then every now and then I can asses if it is working or not. Since life is not a race and I am not competing with anyone I can settle for slow progression towards the good. I am the judge, the executioner and the audience of my life and therefore every aspect can be adjusted independently.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIt's great when a person finds something that works for them, but evangelists are annoying at best and creepy at worst.
- mcguire 4y agoOk, so let's see here. 1. Got a meaningless certificate. Also expanded his "wildly successful business leaders" network. 2. Added people to a project in order to get it completed faster. (The ghost of Fred Brooks is making it hard to type here now.) 3. Proposed re-orging Red Hat engineering. 4. Had a meeting. 5. Wrote strategy doccies. 6. Mentoring. (1 out of 7 isn't bad.) 7. Had a meeting about advertising copy. I'm afraid I absolutely, positively, do not wish to become whatever sort of person this is, thank you very much.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hparadiz 4y agoSeriously. How boring.
- Jaygles 4y agoFred Brooks is still around I believe
- dogcomplex 4y agoRolling, without a grave?
- imwillofficial 4y agoThis post makes me want to watch The Hustle again until I level up my life. https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U
- tailspin2019 4y agoI don’t have a comment on the article. But if I was the author, it would be pretty rough reading the comments here. I guess it’s worth remembering that for every blog post out there that perhaps we don’t like, there are a million that are never written in the first place for fear of being exposed to criticism. So maybe there is virtue in just having the courage to put yourself out there and invite the world to cast their judgement on you, if nothing else!
- Apocryphon 4y agoThe author was right and brave to put himself out there and express what he wants. (Even if the intention behind the post might have been to create vapid SEO content for the sake of furthering his Brand and to grow his Clout.) But others are right to criticize the blog post for its failings, as per their opinions. Everyone is just doing the best they can.
- tailspin2019 4y ago> Everyone is just doing the best they can. I can get behind that :)
- UncleEntity 4y ago> So maybe there is virtue in just having the courage to put yourself out there and invite the world to cast their judgement on you, if nothing else! Poor guy…I’m voting to take a nap and not join in on the dog pile.
- mattgreenrocks 4y agoI don’t disagree with some of the comments here, but they fall into the “doesn’t need to be said” bucket for me. Yeah, I can’t say I’ve done as much as this guy, but the quote is helpful in framing small actions when building toward habits.
- caycep 4y agoFor some reason this reminds me of that whole deep reinforcement learning / "policy" algorithms
- mb_72 4y agoNo mention of 'voting' to spend time with friends or family, getting outdoors, giving to charity with one's time or money, painting or trying to learn how to? Perhaps the author does these things or perhaps their context was restricted to work, but this kind of life seems a little hollow to me.
- bluetomcat 4y agoIf anyone is familiar with the quoted book, how does one quantify and measure the amount of “betterment”, or even define static “goodness”? Life is a complex affair on many simultaneous tracks. Prioritising one track often impedes the performance on another track in the long run. If you define the “perfect state” of yourself as having gone through thousands of tickets, bullet lists or redundant self-help books, you will certainly suffer in other areas.
- number6 4y agoIt's about atomic habits. Like do it 1% better and you will be 100% better in 100 Days. Expand all areas and so one. SMART Goals. He does also sell a journal to track everything, so this is this. I liked the book and the mindset. Reminded me of Arete [0]. But for me it's more like an ideal and a reminder. A bit of fake it till you make it and what would a person who already obtained the goal do or did do in my stead. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete
- braingenious 4y agoI have a relative that has fallen into several pyramid schemes and is perennially addicted to so-called “self help” books, spending hundreds of dollars on them per month, every month, for about two decades. I won’t mince words. It is an embarrassing addiction. I often feel secondhand embarrassment when I interact with them. The level of naïveté required is astronomical, but somehow there it is. It is also one of the funniest phenomenons to see on this website, because it’s not just acceptable here, or even just popular here, but apparently a critical part of the culture to the extent that weird articles about dealing with ~Being super smart~ or ~Optimizing your life~ make it to the front page on a nearly daily basis, beating hundreds of submissions every day. I am happy to see that people are being critical of it today though!
- nashashmi 4y agoEvery "choice" you make is a vote ... ???
- Gooblebrai 4y agoIf someone wants to read some science fiction related to this topic, I recommend: "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" by Ted Chiang
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoI ate cereal for breakfast this morning. I'm sure I could analyze this decision, judge my future self, and change what/when/how I eat. But I'm not interested in that much introspection or self improvement. I'm just trying to get through the day.
- LanternLight83 4y agoPeople who practice intermittent fasting often report that their body's hormonal rhythms adjust to their eating habits over time, so it's only by skipping the meal and bearing through the hungar that one can become the type of person who simply doesn't think to eat before 10-12 (leaving out a lot of debated science, personal variance, and assorted nuances for the sake of time and contrarianism). Edit: Ah well, you've edited your comment now, can't argue with just getting through the day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- neuroma 4y agoHonestly thought this was going to be about making small momentary alignments to love, courage, presence, gratitude.... Nope! Big career fireworks instead. Props to this guy anyway, sounds like he's enjoying whatever he's doing.
- paulcole 4y agoThis guy's never going to list his "bad" votes lol.
- patientplatypus 4y ago
- dudul 4y agoGo touch some grass
- hsavit1 4y agoSo every single action you take is supposed to be rational and conscious? This is peak neoliberal thinking
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- felizuno 4y agoI've always thought that trying to optimize life is the ultimate denial. In golf we have these people who spend hours on the range optimizing their swing but they seldom play a round because of course their score is never as "optimized" and that make them feel bad. They can max out point data but never in a way that changes the aggregate, which based on the invested effort turned into a feeling of defeat. Life is mostly out of your control, if you think that the solution is to try and assert more control you're the reason the myth of Sisyphus is popular.
- paulcole 4y agoThere’s nothing more real about playing a round of golf than hitting a ball on the range. It’s all just made up anyway. Maybe they feel bad about their golf game but feel even worse about the rest of their lives? Let them have a couple hours on the range, it doesn’t particularly matter anyway.
- coffee_beqn 4y agoLocal maxima
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- molsongolden 4y agoOnly tangentially related but I think about "choices are votes" frequently when choosing where to spend money. Every dollar spent at a business is a vote for that business to continue existing. This framing pushes me to support more local businesses, even if it's a couple $ extra. Same with attending the local events that you want your community to continue offering.
- colechristensen 4y agoRidiculous. If every action you take is for something else as a means to an end, you are doing nothing because of the value of the doing the thing itself. That sounds like a pretty shitty life regardless of what you end up "becoming".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ambivdexterous 4y ago
- bravoetch 4y ago'Wish to become'? WTF. You can't become someone. Just be.
- grecy 4y agoIf a younger person trains and practice and puts in a ton of early mornings and late nights, they can become an Olympian. If they sit around and do nothing, they can't.
- black_13 4y ago
- teleforce 4y agoI bought two self-help books this month, one is "Atomic Habits" mentioned in the article, and another is "I Took the Only Path To See You". There is one insightful short story about "The Tale of The Two Wolves" right after the Table of Contents of the latter book: "One evening, an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My Son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all." "One is Evil. It's anger, envy, jealousy, doubt, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” “The other is Good. It's joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, forgiveness, truth, compassion, and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
- nswest23 4y agoI think a lot of people need to relax. It's just a little nudge to help remind you to think a little more about the actions you take.
- WhyDoIThink 4y agoThis is gaslighting. A child born into poverty with innately low intelligence and health issues didn't choose their genetics and social class before birth. Not all actions are caused by free will. Sometimes they are caused by genetics and social class.