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Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

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201–210 of 348 posts

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#201
Luck plays such a major role in life that:

1) You're better off looking at things probabilistically.

2) You should seek ways to put the odds in your favor whenever you go up to bat and forget about the outcome.

3) When things are going your way, don't get arrogant. And when things aren't, don't get despondent.

4) You should keep going up to bat and let the law of averages work things out in your favor.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#207
For me I have learned that there comes a point when you need to work differently in order to protect your health and family well being. Big salaries are great, but when the price for that is massive amounts of overtime that takes you away from your family it just isn't worth it. Now I work for myself and I love it.

Hobbies are vitally important to keeping you happy and healthy, don't neglect them.

When you get a speeding ticket and the GPS co-ordinates in the photo imply the camera van was miles away, the court won't care.

My son was diagnosed with ADHD. A relief to know what it was, but also a burden in terms of managing it.

Falling down the stairs after slipping on a Nerf gun hurts. It really, really hurts.

Family comes first, always.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#208

Stay with a single programming language, a single framework, a single library, a single tech stack, a single version control system until you extract the last drop out of it. Also, I am done with T.V & Social Media. World Cup 2018 is going on ATM, we have Cricket World Cup next, then we have another Sports Tournament, and another, and another one... The entire entertainment industry is one infinite `loop` of baloney…

You don't find value in enjoying a 90 minute game with friends? I'm all for limiting TV but World Cup 2018 is not really an endless cycle, they only do it once every 4 years and it's far less content than the Olympics.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#209
post #156

* Five co-founders are too many. * If you are working on someone else's crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea. * Call people you might need later when you don't need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them. * Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You'll make money, lose money, then understand money. * Build as many projects as time allows. It's nice to have the option to…

> Don't ask people what they think about your idea. They'll either be supportive or mean to you. None of these are about your idea. While I agree that some people will be blindly supportive or mean (or will lie as another comment pointed out), it sounds to me that you might be asking the wrong people or you might be allowing ego to taint your perception of their responses. In my experience, there are plenty of though…

On the topic of asking people about your idea, I was once having a bit of a problem with this topic. Everyone seemed to "love" what we were busy with, and they'd throw in some suggestions on what else we could do to make our product more suited to their needs. I thought this was great; we're on to something, right?

A little bit later, I relayed these situations to someone who was giving advice on where to take the product / business, and he pointed out that these low-effort supportive comments and "please add feature X" suggestions are ways in which people brush you off in a non-confrontational way. He pointed me to a pretty good book called The Mom Test, which goes through the reasons why this is the case, and also how and what type of questions you should ask. Highly recommended reading, it was eye-opening for me.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#210

For me I have learned that there comes a point when you need to work differently in order to protect your health and family well being. Big salaries are great, but when the price for that is massive amounts of overtime that takes you away from your family it just isn't worth it. Now I work for myself and I love it. Hobbies are vitally important to keeping you happy and healthy, don't neglect them. When you get a spee…

Thanks for writing that.

Why does distance from car to camera van matter though? I'm very curious!

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