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Life is Short

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life is Short

#11

Post by mildbow »

anunumoose wrote: post #3

Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement. It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else…

Lots of people will pick fights with people who have an audience (like pg) just so they can borrow that audience for a short while.

I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?

In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.

If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.

Is that "bubbling"?

Re: Life is Short

#12

Post by RKoutnik »

It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail.

On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence:

> I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"

This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.

Re: Life is Short

#13

Post by jsprogrammer »

the_watcher wrote: post #2

This is probably my favorite thing pg has ever written. He's right in so many ways, but my favorite is just his reminder of "don't wait."

He's also wrong in ways. Bullshit may not 'trick' you, but you may 'buy in to it' and that possibility is not considered in this writing by pg, where he believes that bullshit is either forced on him, or that 'it' somehow tricked him into believing it while not considering that he may be leaving a trail of his own bullshit right behind his self.

Re: Life is Short

#14

Post by oskarth »

RKoutnik wrote: post #12

It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail. On the other hand, there's s…

> While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for it.

This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.

Re: Life is Short

#15

Post by RKoutnik »

oskarth wrote: post #14
RKoutnik wrote: post #12

It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail. On the other hand, there's s…

> While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for it. This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.

Oh, I fell for those sour grapes hard (and might I say, you're absolutely right). It's trivially easy to find "think"pieces supporting any opinion under the sun, making my insistence on declaring grapes sour even easier.

It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...

Re: Life is Short

#16

Post by evgg »

xenadu02 wrote: post #6

I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you…

What is your reasoning behind labeling building one's own PCs as bullshit, as opposed to buying Macs?

Re: Life is Short

#17

Post by jacobolus »

oskrim wrote: post #10
anunumoose wrote: post #3

Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement. It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else…

I'm sure he's well aware of the critizism. I think this is mostly about the random hate one gets for doing original thought.

Graham’s essay that got dumped on was hardly an “original thought”. The whole “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” schtick is as old as civilization, and Graham’s version was a particularly lazy and poorly argued one.

Re: Life is Short

#18

Post by unclebucknasty »

RKoutnik wrote: post #12

It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail. On the other hand, there's s…

Hear, hear and well said. That inevitable backlash is there indeed and can stymie you out of the gate. The thing is, those who have bold ideas and/or stand for something tend to also be more sensitive to this negativity. I suppose we know that, at the end of the day, our ideas are nothing in a vacuum. As much as we'd like to blaze the trail, we need people to follow or join, not attack and tear down.

Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all.

This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.

Re: Life is Short

#19

Post by reasonattlm »

Life is short. So why not do something about that? Are we not meant to be the very essence of creation? Is this not an age of revolutionary progress in biotechnology?

Just this past week I helped out a young company whose founders are working toward clinical translation of a method of clearance of senescent cells, one of the very first actual honest-to-goodness narrow focus rejuvenation therapies to emerge from the labs. This is something that works to repair and reverse a form of tissue damage that contributes to near all age-related disease.

This is far from the only approach to human rejuvenation presently under development.

But, you know, life is short, so pay attention or not, up to you.

Re: Life is Short

#20

Post by babuskov »

xenadu02 wrote: post #6

I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you…

Matches my experience. I switched from Linux to Mac after 7 years of knowing exactly which patch to apply to what piece of system (either kernel or various libs and apps) to make it work properly.

And I think twice before starting new projects. Although, I still sometimes feel like twice is not enough.

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