Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 243 posts

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#41
Guys, nobody in this thread has given the advice to give up! If you were a scientist who travelled back in time in an accident from 2117 when humanity created a black hole, and you have a solid physics degree and don't really have anything to do except 1) become rich and influential and 2), make sure that a certain very specific experiment isn't repeated, or, for example, personally finance that it first be tried on Alpha Centauri (4 light years away), so everyone can see that Alpha Centauri disappears in a black hole (about which your probe sends back data), so they won't try it on Earth, then you will be in the following position: You will know about lots of inventions from the next one hundred years. You don't really have anything to do, you don't care about preserving any timeline or anything like that.

Obviously you're not exactly an engineer, so you can't make any inventions from the next hundred years in your garage - you just know generally how they work.

A sane course of action under these constraints would be to get identity papers somehow (after all, you're stateless), get a patent on a future invention that you understand well-enough to describe clearly, then get financing for it and build it.

You're an educated and very high-IQ person with degrees, so after minor set-backs around getting jobs and papers, you get set up, very clearly and eloquently describe your invention (in a patent filing), wait for it to be granted, and now you are free to get money from anyone. You send the patent papers to 150 vc's without a response, which you consider odd. You send them to a further 500 people in a position to help but still get no response.

You go to your alma mater, of course you don't recognize any faculty, it's from before your time, and they ask you if you have a prototype - you say no, you're not an engineer. They ask you how you know it would work. You hem and haw and say,it's all written down very clearly. They suggest you build a prototype. This is actually beyond your skills - you're a theoretical physicist not an engineer.

This is very frustrating for you.

This is when you post "what inspires you to persevere through adversity."

But the answer is that you should realize that the 2017 idea-stage funding climate is not sufficient to fund you. It doesn't matter if your idea patent can be the basis for a $20 billion company, which is enough to finance your Alpha Centauri demonstration.

You're stuck. You know very well what will happen if you don't intervene (though actually, you're not certain - the physics here isn't clear, whether the same timeline is likely to repeat.)

At any rate you GIVE UP trying to fund your patent. Instead you decide that you will finance it yourself by doing something completely different. You do remember that around 2025 or 2026 there is a huge bubble followed by an unfathomable crash, and you had actually just read - before your travel - the biography of a founder in that era who quickly built dynastic wealth. Since you are very smart and just need funding for your prototype, and anyway you have sixty years to get rich, there's no hurry, you decide to find him and be one of the first ten founders. You tell him some simple inventions from the future in just a few words, and to your great surprise he is completely on board and instantly agrees that they are all viable, he straight-up gives you 50% equity in his company, you start pulling 120 hour weeks and seven and a half years later you have exited with $20 billion and start doing your space stuff. (You muse that this was all thanks to working on whatever HE wanted, even though it had nothing to do with anything you knew about - you started with ZERO knowledge of 2017 web tech. All that knowledge of one hundred years of technical development paled in comparison to a name you recalled offhand - thereby proving the old adage, it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know.)

Anyway, a few years later your space research shocks the world - oh, also you read something about telomeres - you can't BELIEVE you forgot about that, you've always hated and hardly paid any attention to biology but you remembered you actually know enough to slow aging by 90% especially in the skin, and back in your time all babies were given telomere extension shots, which has been going on since shortly before your birth in 2090. Since you're a billionaire with a lot of time on your hands you read up on it, order a small animal and then human experiment, and long story short you give about 8 billion people longer, happier lives by inventing something in 2030 that was slated for 2085, even though you didn't even care.

Oh, and as for your original first patented invention, on a lark you wonder if anyone would finance it now that you have $20 billion, you have the spiffy prototype built, hold a big VC meeting on a private island where anyone who's anyone shows up with three partners - and still nobody has any interest whatsoever. As great at it is, whatever it is, it turns out it's not fundable. The world's just not ready for it.

Moral of the story: sometimes you should just give up, and the sooner you give up, the sooner you can start making some kind of progress.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#42

Personally I look towards people I admire; especially times they screwed up. For example, right now Donald Trump is somebody that's very inspiring to me, because I consider him a great and admirable man, who has also made many mistakes over time. I admire his ability to pick himself back up and keep going. You will probably have other people you admire; look for times they made mistakes. What's important is realizing…

Admiring Donald Trump, that's depressing.

No, pushing public opinion against better knowing, that's depressing.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#44
A depurated sense of will sprung from a cultivated naivette and protected capcity of awe, but having learnt to want only reachable things drawing aside mere hypotetical desires. That and living as a permanent act of choice, replete of responsibility, a song of my share of freedom, no matter the dire options.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#45
If you're on a "failing trajectory" but there's work in front of you, block out everything except for the work. If you can't handle that, then take a break and then get back at it. If it's something you really don't want to fail at, then there's probably something about it that you really love. Try to discover that again, without worrying about the untold future. If you focus in every moment, then you WILL make progress -- if only bit by bit.

Don't compare yourself to other people, but recognize that you're probably incredibly lucky to have any opportunity to fail at in the first place. Think about your accomplishments and setbacks as a set of experiences that will only ever help you in the future -- not as liabilities on paper.

Finally, don't complain. It's difficult at first, but it'll help keep you away from self-pity.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#46
I have a few North Stars that keep me going:

* "Be a light" I can bring joy to other people in the world, and that there is still so much more to do.

* "Bask in the light of loved ones" The love of friends and family, even when I feel like I've let them down.

* "Don't be so hard on yourself" A self-love that allows me to forgive myself for my many fuck-ups. Not always without regret and never without reflection and learning, but eventually I do get there.

* "Don't stop dreaming" A deep-seated desire to help all fellow humans reach their fullest potential; to express themselves with their fullest freedom. This one is the most abstract, the "farthest" of my North Stars; it's so faint I'm sometimes not sure it actually exist. Perhaps this is the closest I come to that thing called "faith".

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#47
post #33

I'm not sure that failure is the word you want - I would call them setbacks. Failure suggests finality, it is the point where you are out of options and have to change goals. Overcoming failure means how to restart on a new goal after giving up on the last one. Overcoming setbacks means how to stay focused on a goal despite interference and things not happening as you hope. My simplest answer is to pick the right goa…

you need to like the life you'll live to get there. most olympians like training above all else, just like great entreprenours like working above all else.

I would say that there has to be some type of incremental reward but expecting to like life all the time is not the right mental place to be in. IMHO it is a huge cause of failure because it makes you so fragile to setbacks. It filters out far too many important journeys that will include brutally tough times. Such journeys can only be "liked" in the rear-view mirror when it includes the contrast with the good-times and relief/pride of overcoming the bad. If you do not expect to enjoy the journey but still commit to the destination, you have a better mindset to get there.

Pro-athletes are probably a bad example for anything other than being pro-athletes. I have got the impression from some of the interviews with swimmers and tennis players that they utterly loathe training with a passion especially when their way of life is was designed for them by their parents before they ever had any self-direction.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#48
I realized a while ago that inspiration isn't very helpful for getting you through adversity. Inspiration gets you going, but grit and discipline ultimately help you push through.

I'm going to go against the grain of most of what's being said in this thread and say that the best way to get through adversity is to discard a goal-based mentality entirely, in favor of a system-based mentality. Figure out the stuff you have to do every day. Get disciplined about doing that stuff. The 'small wins' you get from just executing the loop over and over again build up a lot of momentum over time.

I started with making my bed as soon as I got up every day, and just built on that. When there's something new I want to do, I set up a system for it. When the system isn't working, I change the system. Rather than deciding whether I wanted to do something or not before doing it, I'd just do it, then reflect afterward if that made things better or worse.

This approach got me through some really really bad times, helped me get fit, got me through tough, stressful workloads, calmed me down in times of chaos and helped me make the right long-term choices. I'm overall happier.

Here's some resources:

- http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers... - https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...

edit: oh and one other thing I got out of this approach. People absolutely can change, it just takes a lot longer than people usually put on. I'm a different person from who I was ~4 years ago, mostly in a positive way.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#49
2 things

1) Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHWUCX6osgM

2) Reminding myself of my blessings in life. Most of us have many things to be thankful for, even in our worst moments

Whatever you do, do not seek sympathy from others. It can be very comforting to vent your frustration to people and get their sympathy, but it does absolutely nothing for situation and only enforces your despair.

Re: Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

#50
post #48

I realized a while ago that inspiration isn't very helpful for getting you through adversity. Inspiration gets you going, but grit and discipline ultimately help you push through. I'm going to go against the grain of most of what's being said in this thread and say that the best way to get through adversity is to discard a goal-based mentality entirely, in favor of a system-based mentality. Figure out the stuff you h…

Solid advice! Would you mind sharing some of the systems you've implemented?
Post reply on HN