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Life is now. If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to liv

by yason 12y ago

Life is now. If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled. If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place? Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things. If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree. For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus. Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion. I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.

prof_hobart 12y ago
For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come. I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong. But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come. "Now" is a "rolling window". Lost 'nows" also agrregate.
  - prof_hobart 12y ago
    It is, but acting as if the current "now" is the only thing that matters leads to very short term thinking, which often ends up with bad long term consequences.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Yeah, but the post is addressed to people having the exact inverse problem.
- calinet6 12y ago
  There is a balance to everything. Sometimes the balance is in the opposite direction from your assumptions. If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done. They have my focus for most of every day, and I care deeply about them. I don't let them hit the floor. The things that are missed are the ones I put out of mind to do that; that are broader than my current focus, more long-term, and especially, the things that are more human and soft. The long-range planning, the investment in systems to make my work more effective and less of a hamster-wheel, and the investment of time in life itself and the things that make me feel like myself, and make me truly inspired and motivated to to better work with the time I have. It is these things that I forget as I'm trying to work harder and "do the right thing" for my future and my company's future. Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough. That's why keeping this balance is so incredibly difficult, and incredibly important. Your company needs a human, not a machine. It needs someone who is sane and effective every day, consistently, without fail. And if you're leading a group, multiply that importance by the number of people in it, because they will all be affected by your imbalance more than you will. This is one of the kernels of Zen, by the way. The harder you try to hit the target, the further away your arrow lands. Success is not all about pure effort. My hypothesis about your anecdotal examples is that they were probably missing something else. There are so many things. Or, their lack of investment in their company was not, in fact, balance, but simply lack of care or attention. They are not the same.
tedks 12y ago
This is the sort of sentimentality that has no place in modern capitalism. Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track. If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard. In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself. Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard. Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
- knd775 12y ago
  Huh. Interesting mindset. I truly hope that you don't have massive regrets later on in your life.
- mooreds 12y ago
  Hey, I applaud you for your mindset for its purity and clarity. I think it's a bit shortsighted myself, but I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s), and I think it's important to realize that everyone has different priorities. I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life. I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ams6110 12y ago
Startups thinking they are "going to make peoples lives better" or "make the world a better place"... no you're really not. At least not very much. The vast vast majority of people in the world will never ever know about you. It's even quite easy to make the argument that services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that people have heard of have create at least as many if not more problems than they've solved. Don't get too conceited.
cagl 12y ago
I like this perspective. Thanks for sharing

by yason 12y ago

prof_hobart 12y ago

For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come. I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong. But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.

coldtea 12y ago
>For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come. "Now" is a "rolling window". Lost 'nows" also agrregate.
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  It is, but acting as if the current "now" is the only thing that matters leads to very short term thinking, which often ends up with bad long term consequences.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Yeah, but the post is addressed to people having the exact inverse problem.
calinet6 12y ago
There is a balance to everything. Sometimes the balance is in the opposite direction from your assumptions. If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done. They have my focus for most of every day, and I care deeply about them. I don't let them hit the floor. The things that are missed are the ones I put out of mind to do that; that are broader than my current focus, more long-term, and especially, the things that are more human and soft. The long-range planning, the investment in systems to make my work more effective and less of a hamster-wheel, and the investment of time in life itself and the things that make me feel like myself, and make me truly inspired and motivated to to better work with the time I have. It is these things that I forget as I'm trying to work harder and "do the right thing" for my future and my company's future. Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough. That's why keeping this balance is so incredibly difficult, and incredibly important. Your company needs a human, not a machine. It needs someone who is sane and effective every day, consistently, without fail. And if you're leading a group, multiply that importance by the number of people in it, because they will all be affected by your imbalance more than you will. This is one of the kernels of Zen, by the way. The harder you try to hit the target, the further away your arrow lands. Success is not all about pure effort. My hypothesis about your anecdotal examples is that they were probably missing something else. There are so many things. Or, their lack of investment in their company was not, in fact, balance, but simply lack of care or attention. They are not the same.

tedks 12y ago

This is the sort of sentimentality that has no place in modern capitalism. Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track. If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard. In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself. Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard. Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.

knd775 12y ago
Huh. Interesting mindset. I truly hope that you don't have massive regrets later on in your life.
mooreds 12y ago
Hey, I applaud you for your mindset for its purity and clarity. I think it's a bit shortsighted myself, but I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s), and I think it's important to realize that everyone has different priorities. I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life. I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ams6110 12y ago

Startups thinking they are "going to make peoples lives better" or "make the world a better place"... no you're really not. At least not very much. The vast vast majority of people in the world will never ever know about you. It's even quite easy to make the argument that services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that people have heard of have create at least as many if not more problems than they've solved. Don't get too conceited.

cagl 12y ago

I like this perspective. Thanks for sharing