You're just in the process of coming to terms with change. The only advice I can give you about that is this: Recognize that change is not something to be afraid of. It takes courage and certainty to choose because no one can make a choice for you. You will be accountable for the path you take. The choice is yours. Like you said, indecisiveness leaves you getting nothing done because you know that you have to make a choice. I believe the silver lining you're talking about is the decision you're most eager to make. Think about it as long as you have to but the worst thing you can do is to not do anything :)
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
191–200 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#192There is nothing stopping you from doing all 3 independently or combined. Give your 110% if you decide to pick one to do currently, and maybe in a few years or a couple decades, transition to another one.
I found that when I stuck trying to decide what to do, I ended up not doing anything at all. I figured, if I just pick one, that is a start. There is nothing stopping me from leaving that industry/field and going into a different one, except myself. To solve problems requires action, go do something and then you'll figure out that that was not the solution.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#193It is great that you are thinking of this and from my experience, it will continue to come up even after you have solved this one and you become more of an expert in the path you have chosen. Something to help with the paralysis is to note that you are in a very privileged position. Majority of the world is not plagued by this issue because the problem they have to solve is how to survive. So, in other words, there i…
HN guideline says it's okay to comment just to say "Thanks". So, Thanks for your comment :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
Which tools do you use to organize the digital artifacts you create? And how do you organize them?
Archive.org! I upload everything. I organize best I can within my own disks/google drive (and sometimes public S3 buckets), but that stuff is too likely to go away within my lifetime to even begin to make a difference long term.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#195Have kids. Your main problem then is to feed them, keep them clothed, keep them relatively happy, and educate them (all surprisingly non-trivial problems with lots of learning along the way, especially the last two). Pursue career goals as much as possible, but conditional on having acceptable solutions to kid problems mentioned. Simplifies things, and provides a good option in case of failure on work problems (“Work today sucked, but at least I’ve got these great kids!”). Constraints can be good!
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#196I think you should work on what you want to (day to day) with an eye towards solving bigger problems that you believe should be worked on.
So if I believed that healthcare needed to be worked on but that energy and AI were what I was interested in doing day to day, I'd look at applying AI to healthcare and who is doing that and I'd look at how energy impacts healthcare. Maybe there's a NIH group studying power grid reliability or something.
And then I'd try to find a way to work with many teams to provide that side-expertise in AI or energy if I was already an expert with those, or I'd try to find a full time job working on it.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#197>it's a short life, so I want be careful to avoid future regrets.
Seems like you mostly regret your life being short.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
> Why do you do it To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software. > what tools do you use? I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write…
On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak.
Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption.
[1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#199I usually toss the ideas around in my head for a little while and then I will write it up and keep it in Google Drive. It may be a page or a few pages, or a half a page. I create a folder for the idea and then put the document inside that.
What I do not typically do is go over my old ideas, which might be a good idea. But I think the act of writing the idea down goes a long way towards crytallizing it in my memory, for is I ever want to revist it. (Back in college, I would take notes in class, but never review them.)
Most of the ideas get touched only the one time. Some I come back to and expand on. And some actually become projects (which is what I call the root folder where I keep all these, "projects").
If the idea does become a bigger project, I will often have many more ideas and they will get written up in the same folder.
EDIT - oops, this comment is in the wrong post! This was supposed to go under the :How do you take notes" post.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#200I got some good advice about a decade ago, which I've used for guidance and, on reflection, has served me well. You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside. Until you have this clarity, do what you can to become part of the core community driving the thinking in your field of choice. There's a strong case for the social importance of many proble…
> You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside Great point. What startups that are trying to infiltrate "old/traditional" industries like hospitals or healthcare are realizing. Need to shadow doctors to see their workflow, not just propose a solution based on your observation or reading articles about hospital shortcomings.
You mean... make software for the people who use it, not the people who make it?