Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?

In the startup world, the default is to move as fast as you can, and it's often easy to mistake a maxim for product development as a maxim for life. The problem is that it's not good advice for many things in life. Examples:

1. Shopping. Especially big ticket items like cars and places to live. Urgency favors the seller because you don't do diligence well and you don't shop around for better deals when you're in a rush.

2. In a similar vein, negotiating. I got screwed on deals because I felt too much in a hurry to bring up issues I had. The important point here is that I could afford to wait, but I didn't want to, and that worked against me.

3. Job searching. Taking the time to line up offers will pay returns on your salary and happiness, even if in the moment you really just want the job search over with.

4. Managing people. I've had people who work for me ask "how am I doing", and in my urge to avoid the awkwardness of the conversation, I would answer some variation of "fine" even if in my mind I knew there were problems. The problem is that answers like those are very hard to take back once you give them (and especially hard to take back during performance reviews). So instead of trying to get rid of the problem fast, I eventually learned to step back and say "let me think about this, and let's talk about it tomorrow."

5. Relationships. If your goal is to find a life partner, you have a lot of diligence to do. Enjoy the honeymoon period, but don't mistake that for deeper compatibility. That comes from spending time together and requires getting through rough patches together as well.

6. Professional relationships too: on the one hand, you can't be passive in developing your professional relationships, but you can't rush them either. Respect is earned over time, so you have to play the long game.

When it comes to building products, then yeah, moving fast is an asset, but many things in life and career are marathons, not sprints, and you're just hurting your future self if you outrun your own pace.

However, I think by far the most of "people understanding" happens in the not consciously accessible parts. So I think that the best way simply is... experience and time. What really helps is if you actually want to understand other people, if you are curious. If it's like "work", like studying for an exam, something you were told is necessary but deep inside you'd rather do something else, your (unconscious) brain won't cooperate.

There's a lot of circuitry taking input from the visual and also from the auditory areas of the brain that do a lot of subconscious processing, and they "train themselves". Book knowledge is of little help, it can aid indirectly at most. The good news is, pretty much every one of us already has quite high abilities in this area, the main problem may actually be that you suppress what your deeper brain is trying to tell you. You probably already have those magical people-understanding abilities in a pretty advanced form!

Deep inside I knew perfectly well I was being screwed over during my first trip to the US in one of those New York electronics stores - but I suppressed it and spent a huge amount (for a poor Ex-East German student) on electronics I didn't need and that were 500% overpriced :) Just make sure that your losses are small, like mine (I think I gained a lot more during that simple encounter than I lost), don't try to avoid it or fret over it when you make such kinds of mistakes due to not understanding other people (or suppressing it without realizing it). Imagine that you just paid tuition for the best university there is to understand other humans.

Another issue related to and responsible for suppressing those instincts is that actually acting on them often is more work (at the immediate point in time) than just going with the flow (and suffering later). Example in your case, but same with any relationship: You actually know it's over, and much later, in retrospect, you will know that you already knew, but actually taking the step and ending it right now is really hard. But here again no external advice to your conscious self can be of much help. Especially since only you have all the information about the specific information, so asking others who don't have all that context for advise seems to me to be a form of procrastination - you did something (ask others) so that feels good, but it should be you yourself who makes that decision since only you know what's going on and the people involved.