Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#21
The age of 25 is like that. "Most geniuses did their best work in their twenties"-pressure. "My God, 30 is just 5 years away"-pressure.

I suggest tackling this from a psychosomatic perspective. The body is an indirect but very powerful agent of change to the mind, Give yourself the permission to be calm and collected and deserve an average, wonderful, American middle-class day without guilt or anxiety. Enjoy that yummy sandwich and coffee and count your blessings. Avoid breathing like a bull in a fight. Avoid walking fast as if you're in a Jason Bourne movie. Avoid thinking rapidly, as if you're a hacker in a bad Hollywood movie. Real-life badasses are often deliberately slow. Real-life geniuses are very slow at the beginning when you ask them a puzzle. Secret : Expand the gap between perception and deliberate-thought as much as possible. That's where the magic happens.

Thus, using your body, allow your mind to reach a place of inner calm. Turns out that Clarity is the perfect path to doing anything good or great. Because it naturally leads to slow-thought, which leads to natural Know Thyself questions, which lead to self-confidence and a moment-by-moment ability to discriminate between what I want to do right now to be genuinely happy vs. what you should do right now as an employee, as a boyfriend, or other role-player (external conditioning). This leads to exercise, cutting down work hours to focus on a startup business plan, being a good serial killer, or whatever it is that you realize as part of the everyday slow Know Thyself process.

All the best! I'm sure you'll do quite well based on what you wrote!

tl;dr version : Deliberately Slow => Mental Clarity. Rest = automatic, by natural design.

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#23
I think that you want to accomplish something but have no idea what it is you want to accomplish.

You need to get obsessed with something. Don't kill it by being overly critical in advance -- e.g., it's too trivial, it's not going to sell, no one else will be interested, .... Those things don't matter. You have to find something that allows you to exercise your talents. You probably have something in the back of your mind already. Maybe some business idea. Start designing a website for it. Or maybe something in technology you want to learn -- a language, a framework, whatever. Find a trivial application to provide programming exercises that you can accomplish in that language.

I wanted to learn Python, read the book, couldn't get interested. Then I had an idea for a programming tool that I wanted for myself. I realized that Python was a really good language for it and became obsessed. Today, (5 years later), I have a really useful tool (still used pretty much just by me), and I've become very proficient in Python. My interests have moved on, but that was a good obsession for a couple of years.

Don't worry about not being productive. Back off and evenutally you'll get interested in something. Then you can be productive.

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#25
Getting enough sleep? Definitely worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8

Personally, I found that taking a full-time programming job destroyed my out-of-office motivation and productivity. It might be worth trying a job in a new industry for a while, or working out some sort of part-time agreement with your employer -- you might find your brain itching to code and produce something after work hours.

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#26
Do you have any friends?

Modern careers leave people estranged from their families and without any real friends. Although programmers like to believe their Asperger's syndrome or Randian individualism means they don't need a social or family life, humans are social animals. Not having anyone around who cares about you leaves people anxious and depressed. When you are anxious and depressed it leads to ADHD, hypochondria, and a sense of helplessness. The fact that you are asking this question anonymously on an internet forum leads me to believe your social life probably isn't as good as it could be.

In contrast, when people are surrounded by loved ones all the time generally they have little anxiety or depression even if they have serious physical health problems.

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#27
Seems like you haven't climbed the hierarchy of needs, which frankly, is the norm at your age (from my anecdotal experience). Your twenties are a struggle professionally to become good at what you do. My advice; stay focussed at becoming very good at what you do. Everything else falls from there.

Re: Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

#30
There are potentially millions of correct answers, but I'll chime in with one that wasn't brought up yet: hang out with the kind of people that match your goals.

For instance, find a startup entrepreneur and help him out. That will give you a crazy boost of energy and focus that you would never be able to create by yourself.

I think that's better than spending evenings rehashing bad stories with your shrink :-)

Post reply on HN