5 ms·

I honestly thought this was terrible advice. The problem this kid has is everyone has praised him seemingly since birth and so he thinks everything is simple.

• unalone 17y ago
  Why not do what's easy? It's a lot more fun, and as you do it you learn. Never assume that just because you're drifting through life you're not growing as a person. I find that I learn and progress just as much in my idle states in life as I do at those critical moments that throw everything in relief. I also think it's very, very bad advice to tell somebody to follow a dream that they don't entirely understand. I've had both: Dreams where I only vaguely felt I wanted something, and dreams I couldn't help but pursue because I understood them so completely. The latter dream is valuable and absolutely worth pursuing. The former dream isn't really a dream at all, and pushing too hard at it will only make you feel that maybe dreams aren't worth following after all. Following the wrong kind of dream will burn you out in the worst way.
  • scott_s 17y ago
    The good stuff - the learning that, I think, matters and helps you actually grow - happens when you get past the easy beginnings and push into the hard stuff.
    • unalone 17y ago
      I disagree. While sometimes you might not be willing to get into the good stuff, other times you're absolutely in that mood and get into it without breaking a sweat. I see nothing wrong in going with the flow most of the time. For the last while, I've been going at things at my own pace. I try, hard as possible, not to let myself get into anything I don't want to do. The result, I find, is that while I'm not as überproductive as I was last year, when I was in a bad place and trying hard to get out, I still generate a lot of work without seeming to have to make an effort. What's more, I'm growing in a lot of ways at once because I don't have the slight resentment against the work I used to force myself to do. I find as I look at great works of art, regardless of the genre, that with the greatest masterpieces there comes a sense of relaxation. The people who made them weren't obsessing over them any more than they wanted to. They'd just taken themselves down a path in which what they were making was exactly what they wanted to make, and they made it. I find the same thing about Internet startups, actually: My favorite start-ups tend to defy a lot of the conventional rules, work at a relaxed pace, and then explode and grow huge.
      • scott_s 17y ago
        We've had a similar conversation before, but I think you confuse "hard work" with "uncomfortable, obsessive, frantic work."
        • unalone 17y ago
          Have we? My bad. I guess I only start to think of work as work once I don't want to do it. Right now I'm messing with theme design, for instance, and if I'm lucky what I'm building will be used by hundreds if not thousands of people, but I'm doing it for fun so I'm not counting it as work. On the other hand, spending ten minutes to write a paper is excruciating labor.
• akl 17y ago
  I disagree that there's a specific reason for his feeling lost; this is probably due to still feeling some of that myself (I'm nearly 25), though. That said, I joined a startup as his age. Younger, actually - I was 18. It was a good experience in that I learned a great deal of technical knowledge very quickly and it laid the path for the career that I've formed since then, but it's not a remedy for a spiritual problem. I'll qualify my experience to say that the first startup I worked at was not a good company; our president was arguably a snake-oil salesman in a lot of ways, and myself/the other engineers often worked 'deathmarches' leading to a moment where I was literally told during a doctor's appointment that I would have a heart attack before I could legally drink if I didn't find a new job. I don't regret the job, overall; I learned a lot professionally and personally, and the next startup was far more successful. I do regret not wandering a little more, though, and he should take this opportunity.
• morphir 17y ago
  I praise you for these insightful words of wisdom. Thank you.
• nostrademons 17y ago
  The majority of startups also don't stick with anything beyond the initial thrill. That's something you have to learn for yourself: no external organization is going to hand it to you. When I started actually completing projects (and I was older than this guy is), it was largely because I'd tried a bunch of things in superficial depth and found that they weren't all that satisfying. I bounced from a physics major to philosophy to sociology back to physics and finally ended up with a CS degree. I tried out orchestra and guitar and bass and taiko and sailing and fanfiction and sci-fi/fantasy and programming as hobbies. I "learned" dozens of programming languages by website & academic paper before actually settling down to write some code. I needed that experience to figure out for myself what I really considered important and was willing to put the time into learning well.
  • Shana 17y ago
    Thank you for this- you make my life sound so much more normal.
  • dubcomesaveme 17y ago
    ha, myself a physics to economics to cognitive science major early in college, now settling in on Computer Science to sit down, gear down, and actually MAKE some stuff. In the short term, it's a financial drain to spend extra time during your college years to try everything that interests you. But in the long run... WHO CARES. Better to spend a couple years finding yourself in your early 20s than having a mid-life crisis when you're 40.
    • caffeine 17y ago
      I hate to tell you this but ... most people do both :) Don't think of them as crises, though, because they're not - they're just what it feels like to outgrow your life. The more often it happens, the more you're growing, so take heart in that.
• caffeine 17y ago
  Seriously? This kid unloads his complete existential disillusion, and your advice is "join a startup"? HN is starting to smell like Kool-Aid..