You can't avoid future regrets. Focus on the domains that you care about.
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
311–320 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#312Do something that uniquely pulls our species forward by decades, if you can.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#313The answer I think is in the question. "Lifetime" If whatever you do gets you a longer health span, then you can do lots of other things too.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#314I'm all for egalitarianism in the public sphere, but in private I still believe that there's such a thing as natural born talent. Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel dispropor…
> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in. > Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't wor…
I don't think it's about money. One example I immediately think of is the various free software projects that are short on people who care and have time to work on it. Often I find something that seems interesting to me but hasn't been worked on in months. I can't yet program, but I always think "if I had the skills, I could just work on this myself right now". It's not that I'm special in this, except that I care and not everyone does.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#315The road not taken.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#316I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…
Thank you so much for that quote from Kierkegaard. I've been trying to put it into words and haven't been able to. It's nice to read it as such.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#317Why do you feel the need to work on a "Big Problem"? Do you feel the need to leave a legacy, or do you really want to make things better by working on paridgm changing enabling technology? I think there is a problem with trying to target your attention on world changing technology, in that it is very rare for the world to be changed in a big way by direct effort towards change. I think this is related to both the dif…
> History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way. Very interesting. Can you give a few specific examples of this for me to look into? How have you come to the conclusion that this is a trend?
There’s a good book called Mastery (Robert Greene) on this topic
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#318"We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#319I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…
This is also (arguably) the point of "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#320I always went after the hardest unsolved problem I could find. This has often ended in pain and heartache but that taught me about some things to look for in a problem. Some key bits of advice: 1) Prepare like your life depends on it. It does. Your time may not come for 40 years, but if you're not prepared, you'll never know. So study hard. This is where Paul Graham's "swim upstream as long as possible" comes in. 2)…
> Most successes come around age 50
What do you mean by this? Don't most of those who make it big do so while young?