4 ms·
>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. following this advice would have made most of my professional life imposs
by serf 9d ago
>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust.
following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
- hmokiguess 9d agoSome people aren't very self aware of their own bubble and how luck plays a role in their life.
- bluGill 9d agoPeople who say that tend to make their own bad luck and not get nearly as far in life. Not that luck doesn't have a role, but everybody gets it.
- bcrosby95 9d agoPointing to luck renders all advice meaningless.
- esseph 9d agoLuck can mean opportunity, but doesn't reflect on capability, availability,or outcome.
- jdiff 9d agoMuch advice is meaningless, baseless post-mortem correlations from people trying to justify their own success.
- rexpop 9d ago"Buy more lottery tickets!"
- teravor 9d agono, it's "buy lottery tickets to exclusive lotteries". the ability to enter such lotteries is where success lies. either through connections or ability.
- harimau777 9d agoIf you need connections and ability then you are back to luck.
- smcg 9d agothose can be cultivated.
- harimau777 9d agoTo a degree maybe but the degree differs dramatically for different people. To give an extreme, someone with a significant disability growing up in an impoverished family in the middle of nowhere is generally going to have very little opportunity to cultivate connections and ability.
- rexpop 8d agoIn my metaphor, "lottery winners" is already representing exclusivity.
- deleted 9d ago[deleted]
- heavensteeth 9d agowho's to say OP hasn't suffered or otherwise disadvantaged himself in upholding that moral?
- sodapopcan 9d agoExactly. Plus, many people don't seem to understand the word "avoid" (it's come up in my own bubble recently). It doesn't mean "never." For example, a vegan would not say "I avoid eating meat." Furthermore, because someone successfully avoids now doesn't mean they went through a period of being unable to in order to earn the privilege to do so regularly.
- aziaziazi 9d agoYour exemple says much more: a short definition of veganism may use "never" and not "avoid", but a more complete, thoughtful definition encompass catches it: > [...] which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable [...] https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
- simoncion 9d agoYou appear to be confusing "avoid" with "never interact with". If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.
- sodapopcan 9d agoOops, just wrote something similar before seeing this. It came up recently in another community where it seems some people take the word "avoid" to mean "never" and in this case: "never not even in the past."
- Chance-Device 9d agoThat is what avoid means. Avoiding something means staying away from it to the best of your ability. You may well be constrained by circumstances such that you sometimes have no choice, but the intention of avoiding something is to come into contact with it never.
- simoncion 8d ago> Avoiding something means staying away from it to the best of your ability Yes, that's what I said. "To the best of your ability." often means "You have to occasionally spend small amounts of time working with really shitty people.". OP said: following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible... Unless OP's professional life made them a ton of money, either they had a uniquely terrible professional life, or what you and I understand "avoid" to mean is not at all what OP thinks the word means.
- swatcoder 9d agoFor reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority. A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway. Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
- benashford 9d agoIn theory, yes. In practice, it only takes one or two bad hires and those trustworthy environments go bad surprisingly quickly.
- saulpw 9d agoI've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.
- DanielHB 8d agoI am seriously considering going into more lead/management role because of this, it is so demoralizing to feel I am doing work in a way I don't agree with. Never thought I would say the day, when I joined this career all I wanted was to work on interesting problems and not work more than 40 hours per week. These days the interesting problems are always solved in the worse ways possible and I am often swamped with work that I don't even have the time to do any improvements out of my personally-assigned backlog.
- DanielHB 9d agoI have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join. If I am almost certain to at least have a mild dislike for the work I might as well go for the place that pays better. Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.
- rexpop 9d agoWhat makes this a luxury? I've met many people in my life, and this gives me the opportunity to pick-and-choose with whom I do business. It's a matter of degree. Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
- underdeserver 9d agoSomewhere there's a Charlie Munger quote about how that's the best thing about being rich - you don't have to spend time with people you don't like.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- bmitc 8d agoIt's unfortunate for the non-rich though, because we have to have our lives affected by those who are rich but don't want to spend time with us. Munger's "architecture" is a good example of that.
- cyanydeez 9d agothis is one of those slippery slopes to the 'king has no clothes' parables. Or adapted for modern life in America: 'the king shits in their diaper'