5 ms·

Something that strikes me about the tone of both the article and comments here is how hard on ourselves we can be. The folks here are of a particular variety to

by cnity 2y ago

Something that strikes me about the tone of both the article and comments here is how hard on ourselves we can be. The folks here are of a particular variety too -- pulled in by grand stories of "achievement". The imperfection and the manner in which we reckon with it can be incredibly beautiful. Indeed it is probably the only thing we have, and the only thing we can really use to truly connect with others. It's all really beautiful if you let it be. On the other side, it can be torturous if you don't.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
accept, let go and surrender.
FredPret 2y ago
It's tough to be wired as an optimizer
- pants2 2y ago
  I'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.
  - ge96 2y ago
    For me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - abakker 2y ago
    I think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile. (Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.) While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".
  - ZephyrBlu 2y ago
    You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency. It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.
    - munificent 2y ago
      OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.
  - kirubakaran 2y ago
    What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?
- BoostandEthanol 2y ago
  Through the first half of 2024 I tried learning to drive, and my instructor drilled this mindset into me through how he spoke and reacted to errors. It’s taken me a long time to untangle that attitude out of my head, where I can think clearly, judging myself on my own standards for acceptable errors, and not the hypothetical standards of voices that don’t care about me. Being unable to do anything without doubting or questioning myself was soul destroying. People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out. There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.
iterance 2y ago
To provide a little grounding for the author's writing, most novelists don't publish until their 40s or later. Most young novelists who publish don't publish anything that sells until their 40s, too. Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.
- throwawayq3423 2y ago
  The 21 year old founder/CEO is largely a myth too. Not that they don't exist, but they usually aren't very good at their job.
  - raziel2p 2y ago
    ... but by being allowed to be bad at their job at 21, they are more likely to find success later.
    - abalashov 2y ago
      This is not just true of CEOs. As a precocious chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at age 19, I was allowed to fully administer things no sane company would allow a 19 year-old to touch: sophisticated ADSL aggregation equipment, BGP-speaking border routers, mission-critical core routers, ATM equipment, and so much more. Not everything I did with this power was smart. A lot of my understanding of what that stuff is was learned "improvisationally", and major local customers, including the county government, paid the price. But what I did do was very successfully parlay this experience into a big-kid job (and a mega pay rise) in the big city, which then begat more such jobs. I doubt I could have rocketed that high, that quickly, if the small-town ISP weren't willing to let ambitious but inexperienced people like me screw up, in exchange for paying them semi-student wages.
    - throwawayq3423 2y ago
      The purpose of a startup is not to supercharge the career of its founders. It's not usually the purpose.
xnx 2y ago
Good reminder that it's everyone's first time doing this.
- soperj 2y ago
  I believe in re-incarnation, so I've failed at this thousands of times.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    And what have you learned?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
A huge part of that has to be that in modern day society we're constantly bombarded with those one-in-a-million stories that are presented as if they're the norm. And don't get me started on things like sports stars with insanely rare genetic gifts who then write books that say "And I knew it would just take hard work to make my dreams would come true" - sure, you worked hard, but so did a bajillion other folks who didn't win the genetic lottery that you've never heard of. And in many places, like the US, it's also widely preached and believed that the US is a meritocracy, and that anyone can achieve greatness if they work hard enough. I don't really want to get into the "meritocracy" debate but I hope everyone can at least acknowledge that luck is a huge component of any exceptional success. Before global media, for the most part if you were comparing yourself to other people it was largely comparing against your friends, family and community. Sure, there may have been that one outsized success, but it still wasn't presented as the norm - you knew all the other friends and family that just had average lives. And for most of human history where social ranking was explicitly classed based, it's not like if you were a peasant you would think "Darn, if I only worked harder I could be a noble". If you want to feel "less hard on yourself", I highly recommend disconnecting from digital media. It's hard for our human brains to deal with the constant onslaught of stars/celebrities/moguls/exceptions and understand how rare those examples truly are.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Think about all the hours you've spent doing what we all do on this site which is, ultimately, nothing. Imagine if you had directed those hours towards learning or training some sort of skill. You would, almost certainly, be in the top percents of humanity by now at that skill. It's not just about innate inability but about dedicating yourself to something of value. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people choose not to do that. But the point I would emphasize is that this is a choice. It's actually quite the issue as well, because it's so enticing to choose to do nothing. Would Einstein in an era of endless entertainment, banter, porn, and so on have nonetheless chosen to spend his days wandering about pondering the mysteries and paradoxes with the speed of light? I mean maybe...? But there's a strong argument to be made that we haven't done away with meritocracy but rather made it fabulously enjoyable to do things of no real merit.

by cnity 2y ago

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

accept, let go and surrender.

FredPret 2y ago

It's tough to be wired as an optimizer

pants2 2y ago
I'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.
- ge96 2y ago
  For me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- abakker 2y ago
  I think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)
- card_zero 2y ago
  Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile. (Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.) While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".
- ZephyrBlu 2y ago
  You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency. It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.
  - munificent 2y ago
    OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.
- kirubakaran 2y ago
  What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?
BoostandEthanol 2y ago
Through the first half of 2024 I tried learning to drive, and my instructor drilled this mindset into me through how he spoke and reacted to errors. It’s taken me a long time to untangle that attitude out of my head, where I can think clearly, judging myself on my own standards for acceptable errors, and not the hypothetical standards of voices that don’t care about me. Being unable to do anything without doubting or questioning myself was soul destroying. People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out. There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.

iterance 2y ago

To provide a little grounding for the author's writing, most novelists don't publish until their 40s or later. Most young novelists who publish don't publish anything that sells until their 40s, too. Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.

throwawayq3423 2y ago
The 21 year old founder/CEO is largely a myth too. Not that they don't exist, but they usually aren't very good at their job.
- raziel2p 2y ago
  ... but by being allowed to be bad at their job at 21, they are more likely to find success later.
  - abalashov 2y ago
    This is not just true of CEOs. As a precocious chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at age 19, I was allowed to fully administer things no sane company would allow a 19 year-old to touch: sophisticated ADSL aggregation equipment, BGP-speaking border routers, mission-critical core routers, ATM equipment, and so much more. Not everything I did with this power was smart. A lot of my understanding of what that stuff is was learned "improvisationally", and major local customers, including the county government, paid the price. But what I did do was very successfully parlay this experience into a big-kid job (and a mega pay rise) in the big city, which then begat more such jobs. I doubt I could have rocketed that high, that quickly, if the small-town ISP weren't willing to let ambitious but inexperienced people like me screw up, in exchange for paying them semi-student wages.
  - throwawayq3423 2y ago
    The purpose of a startup is not to supercharge the career of its founders. It's not usually the purpose.

xnx 2y ago

Good reminder that it's everyone's first time doing this.

soperj 2y ago
I believe in re-incarnation, so I've failed at this thousands of times.
- card_zero 2y ago
  And what have you learned?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

A huge part of that has to be that in modern day society we're constantly bombarded with those one-in-a-million stories that are presented as if they're the norm. And don't get me started on things like sports stars with insanely rare genetic gifts who then write books that say "And I knew it would just take hard work to make my dreams would come true" - sure, you worked hard, but so did a bajillion other folks who didn't win the genetic lottery that you've never heard of. And in many places, like the US, it's also widely preached and believed that the US is a meritocracy, and that anyone can achieve greatness if they work hard enough. I don't really want to get into the "meritocracy" debate but I hope everyone can at least acknowledge that luck is a huge component of any exceptional success. Before global media, for the most part if you were comparing yourself to other people it was largely comparing against your friends, family and community. Sure, there may have been that one outsized success, but it still wasn't presented as the norm - you knew all the other friends and family that just had average lives. And for most of human history where social ranking was explicitly classed based, it's not like if you were a peasant you would think "Darn, if I only worked harder I could be a noble". If you want to feel "less hard on yourself", I highly recommend disconnecting from digital media. It's hard for our human brains to deal with the constant onslaught of stars/celebrities/moguls/exceptions and understand how rare those examples truly are.

ANewFormation 2y ago
Think about all the hours you've spent doing what we all do on this site which is, ultimately, nothing. Imagine if you had directed those hours towards learning or training some sort of skill. You would, almost certainly, be in the top percents of humanity by now at that skill. It's not just about innate inability but about dedicating yourself to something of value. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people choose not to do that. But the point I would emphasize is that this is a choice. It's actually quite the issue as well, because it's so enticing to choose to do nothing. Would Einstein in an era of endless entertainment, banter, porn, and so on have nonetheless chosen to spend his days wandering about pondering the mysteries and paradoxes with the speed of light? I mean maybe...? But there's a strong argument to be made that we haven't done away with meritocracy but rather made it fabulously enjoyable to do things of no real merit.