Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

Advice from others is mostly to serve them.

You've learned a bunch of things which feel very real to you. Makes sense to live in accordance with your hard earned lessons. (Which I think any reasonable person would assess and determine these are completely acceptable beliefs)

The same is true about your mentors and his beliefs. But he's him and you're you.

Personally: I'm an incredibly ambitious person but I've learned similar lessons as you and that ambitious energy has just found new paths to ground. Early 20s it was via work and social life (bars, parties etc), late 20s it was travel and hobbies, early 30s it's on psychological health and a partner to have kids with. I still work, but now only 6-8h/day. Then self care and dating.

There's two words that stick out for me here. "Boring" and "Entrepreneurial"

Reg. Boring: It's all going to come down to how YOU define it. Folks on HN (and life in general) is filled with people who can get fascinated and infinitely obsessed with things that most other people would find boring, and make a lot of money doing it.

I have my own small business, and am currently building a second. I'm thoroughly enjoying the technical, product and people challenges that come with it, even though the products themselves would likely make some people eyes glaze over. I don't have a sexy funded startup, I don't post walls of inspirational text on LinkedIn or go on Podcasts. No one really knows who I am. I'd say overall I'm pretty boring, and it's bloody great.

So perhaps the takeaway there is "Make sure you don't find yourself or what you do boring".

Reg. Entrepreneurial: This is the main issue I have with what he said tbh. What does that mean, especially these days? If it means going out on your own and starting you own business, I'd never disparage anyone from giving it a go, but it's definitely not the "smart" thing to do. Statistically you're going to be happier and wealthier by just having a well paid 9-5 job.

Either way, you've got plenty of time to figure out what it all means for you. Enjoy the journey :)

Life is like a river. You can build a boat out of driftwood, or just doggy-paddle around; fight the current or dive straight ahead. Ultimately you're going to end up where the river wants to take you, and there's no way to know where that is. The only thing you can control is what you do in the river, and whether you take the ride as a terrifying, inescapable path to the unknown, or a fun float on a sunny day. Your life is only the time spent in the river, so you don't have to worry about the destination. Everybody has their own way of passing the time. The only good advice I can give you, is to pass it in the way that you want to. Anything else is a waste of a good river.

....and if you can't figure out what to do in the river, that's fine too. Doesn't make a difference to the river!

If you have different goals competing for your limited time and energy (entrepreneurship, changing the world, building relationships, etc.) and you're not sure which to pursue, consider the values of self-actualization and personal agency and perhaps center yourself on them.

Self-actualization is tricky to define but it's basically the process of identifying whatever comes to you most naturally or has a tendency to emerge organically from your life experiences, and then pursuing it more fully.

The benefit of this approach is that whatever it is you end up doing, you tend to do it better, with more commitment, more creativity, and more satisfaction than if you had done something else.

It might change over time and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Other people may or may not like it. But in the end society's assessment of what you've done with your life is just noise compared to how you feel about it internally.

Listen to your thoughts... your unconscious, internal mental chatter. And if it's telling you to go a certain way, just do it, if it's the right call you'll probably end up doing something great, if it's the wrong one you will confirm that with experience and gain wisdom in the process.

I never said it was a negative thing. It's also not a negative thing to step back from that and add value to the world in other ways, maybe raising your kids, tending a garden, or stimulating the economy of some other places by traveling there.

For someone who's so happy and joyful about all the value you get to create, you sure are bitter that anyone else might not choose to do exactly what you're doing.

People who take time off to travel or otherwise enjoy their life don't do it based on the charity of working people as you seem to assume. They already worked, created value, saved some of that value, then spend their stored value as they please. Why does that make you so angry?