Ask HN: How to not base self worth on your own work?

I had the benefit of working with Geoff Ralston. He likes to tell founders this: "Startups don't fail because they run out of money, startups fail because their founders give up." It sounds trite, but the insight is generally applicable. You do not fail when a project or string of projects is bad, you fail when you stop trying to succeed at the next one.

A few thoughts:

1) There is a dangerous trap for people who are pegged as "smart". The logic is this: You are smart, therefore you do well at things. If you are told this enough, you start to reverse it in your head: "You do well at things, therefore you are smart." If you take that as true, what happens when you do poorly at something? Does that mean you're not actually smart?

The key thing to remember is that everyone starts off bad at everything. Everyone. Everything. You get better by trying and learning. At this point in your life you should optimize for speed of learning. Know that you will have projects that are objectively bad and failed to meet their stated goals. Also know that if you never fail an attempt, you are not working at the edge of your ability, and you are not learning as fast as you could be.

2) Humans are social animals. You are stuck with this, so I encourage you to learn to live with it. You can think rationally about it all day long, but the chimp platform you're built on is always going to measure your self-worth by the strength of your social network and your place in its hierarchy. Go join a groups of people with like-interests. It will be very hard, and you will probably feel constantly nervous and awkward. You will be bad at socializing. But each time you try, you will get a little better. And you won't fail unless you give up.

This is so important to understand. You are in complete control of how satisfied you are with yourself.

My strategy is to pay attention to the present, for example if I had a 'bad' day at work and feel stress at home, I might think about how nice the pjs feel on my skin, or "Trees, wtf those are awesome!"

You are free to exist outside of societal and moral constructs that you perceive (in this case excelling at work). Once you know the source of your dissatisfaction, simply stop feeding it.

Try doing the same with dreams. I find it is slightly disturbing if not downright scary how I can so easily forget such detailed accounts of my oniric life.

It makes me feel like a complete stranger too.

> This is mostly because the consumer culture emphasizes people's imperfections in order to sell them products and services. You walk down the magazine isle of a bookstore and are bombarded with messages: you're out of shape, you need to be better at sex, you need to learn how to talk to people better, you totally need to check out the latest and hottest JavaScript framework bro!

I would file this under the 'extreme consumerism' department that America is quite famous for though.

As others here have said, look for meaning in your life in other places, both in the way you do the work (process-orientation) and in your relationships.

But there is an important lesson you'll have to learn to make any of that work, which is nicely summed up in the considerably under-rated "Julian Comstock" by Robert Charles Wilson: "Just because nothing lasts doesn't mean that nothing matters."

Everything you do, everything you are, is transient. The work you are doing to day will be bitrotted away to nohthing in five or ten years. The relationships you have will grow and change, and just as surely they will die, or the people you have them with wil die, or you will die.

The appeal of religion is that it's a trick that allows people to live with this reality, but the cost is extremely high. The challenge for those of us unwilling to accept the epistemic and moral compromises religion entails is to find ways for our lives to be meaningful that don't require quite such massive self-deception or accepting even a tiny bit of moral authority based on things that "just made sense" to pre-modern high-status men who knew less about the world than the average intelligent high-school student today.

Looking inward--meditating and whatnot--doesn't help much on the transience issue, because everythat that you are will also pass away. It can help on some practical things, though, including developing an awareness of all the good things we have simply by being clever enough to be born in the right time and place.

Looking outward, to help others, to contribute to the world, to develop a braoder network of social connections that are not purely self-indulgence (although a life without self-indulgence is a life not worth living) can help, although it comes with all the frustrations of dealing with human beings. No good deed goes unpunished.

I'm not a natural helper or teacher of others, but I've found the greatest satisfactions in my life have come from mentoring and managing in ways that make people's lives a bit better. One of the things that makes that work is an awareness that if I help someone learn something, the good I've done will last. The potential positive effect of mentoring goes on pretty much indefinitely, long after I've been laid-off from my job or my project has been shelved or my girlfriend has dumped me or my marriage has ended or my friends have died or all the other things that really do happen to people in the course of a long, full and successful life.