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Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

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Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#251

Post by cmos »

In my startup we had a customer who said they weren't going to pay us. I was upset and pissed as I had given them another chance after a previous payment issue to help them out of their hole. It felt personal.

My lead salesperson asked "do you know what a sunk cost is?" "no" "it's an accounting term for money that can not be retrieved, and going after it will probably only cost you more money, so you just have to write it off" "your being upset is compounding the loss. Let's spend that time and energy creating new sales instead of being sad about old ones. You need to write this off"

Felt 10x better, we then brainstormed and invented.

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#252

Post by setgree »

Context: I was leaving a startup (so as to avoid getting asked to leave), and I had a final lunch with a member of the C-suite. He had not exactly been my friend at work but at that point we were in the same boat. I expressed concern about how the whole thing was going to look to future employers, and he said:

“This is tech. Nobody cares how many times you’ve been fired.”

He was dead right. Nobody even really asks. I just say we had a good run and then the company changed significantly after a difficult funding round and afterwards I wasn’t as good a fit.

I should let him know that his remark was prophetic.

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#253

Post by [deleted] »

candiddevmike wrote: post #151
satysin wrote: post #52

Eat less and restrict when you eat. As a teenager and twenty-something I just ate everything, all the time, and often far too much. I was thin so there was no issue. But one day I started to put the weight on, not much but it was there. Then I need some medication for something unrelated and the weight really went on . Changing my eating habits was hard . I was so used to eating all the time that not eating for just…

Sounds like bullshit, to be honest.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#254

Post by jazzyk »

wodenokoto wrote: post #133
javajosh wrote: post #124

My mother told me to not care what other people thought. She also told me that words can't really hurt people ("sticks and stones..."). She also believed its "mean" to have any preference about people, calling it a version of "keeping score". In fact, "keeping score" was one of the worst things you could be accused of in my household. Her advice fails to accept the reality of social and emotional needs. It also fails…

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can break hearts”

Words can break hearts when they come from a loved one, or someone you look up to.

Why would what some random person says break your heart?

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#255

Post by lalopalota »

barrenko wrote: post #201
tsol wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best piece of advice I received was 'slow and steady wins the race'. It's something I heard a 1000 times before and 1000 times after, and it never meant that much to me. When I heard it, though, at just the right time and it made just the right amount of sense that it totally changed my perspective on everything radically since then. It's totally changed the way I operate and the way I look at things. But I can't…

When the master is ready the student appears, works as well.

Isn't it the other way around? "When the student is ready, the master will appear."

https://kagi.com/search?q=when+the+master+is+ready+the+stude...

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#257

Post by naasking »

IgorPartola wrote: post #166

Always take sides. By not taking a side you are automatically wrong. This doesn’t mean you should engage in identity politics, etc. but when faced with a choice take the time to make an informed decision. If you say something “should be a thing” you are automatically now in charge of creating it or convincing someone to create it. Do not tell people who are working on things that they should realize your idea if you…

> Always take sides. By not taking a side you are automatically wrong.

Hard disagree. Sometimes "I don't know, we should research that more" is the best response. Maybe even often rather than sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#258

Post by annyeonghada »

vasco wrote: post #211
barrenko wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a similar epiphany. Worked really hard on it and while it kinda changed my life, I eventually realized I'm simply not a builder type person.

What other types are there? Genuine question.

Talking about me: I'm very much abstract and academic and do not really care about practical applications. I went into Physics and realized how much I hated the lab and the more experimental oriented subjects: I love the Math sequences, love Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics, loved Special and General Relativity but hated Laser and Optics, hated Electrical Circuits, hated Nuclear Physics (prof was an experimentalist who talked endlessly about detectors).[1]

Nowadays the tendency remains: I love study Philosophy, Theology (even if I'm not religious), History, Math, Theoretical Physics and I love speculative or fantastical literature like Sci-fi, Fantasy, Occult, Conspiracy Theories... not because I believe them but because let me explore my own thinking.

Sometimes I wish I were more building oriented: it would help me in the working world. Projects, results, metrics, outcomes are all so tiresome.

[1]Thinking about it I should have done Math instead of Physics.

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#259

Post by Bakary »

ysavir wrote: post #240
Bakary wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

I think that's a very narrow interpretation of what a search engine does. Or a narrow interpretation of what the GP was doing. Probably both. You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've lea…

Essentially I see two competing processes here.

Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.

The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.

Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

#260

Post by gbro3n »

edw519 wrote: post #248

Mentor advice: 1. An estimate is better than a guess. An measurement is better than an estimate. 2. It's never the money. (They will always say it is, but it's not.) 3. Never let anyone eat your lunch. 4. The best time to turn it on is before it's ready. You'll get plenty of data to finish it faster. 5. The only good Powerpoint slide is evergreen. If it's not, it's already obsolete. 6. Your positive mental attitude m…

Would be great to get some context / examples around some of these
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