Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 248 posts

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#151

Post by ericb »

jeangenie wrote: post #119
ericb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise the fact that you're not being yourself will overshadow whatever it is you're trying to achieve. I view my "self" as fluid, and whatever I want me to be.

You bifurcate "I" and "me" implying the former can reliably create such a state in the latter; if this is the case, then what's actually at work in forming your "me"?

I used two different terms to aid the reader, but I and me are just pointers to self and like a ruby class running metaprogramming on self, one can rewrite oneself. The new code still comes from the self, though.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#152

Post by Tycho »

larrywright wrote: post #140
Tycho wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Automatically loving thy neighbour (ie. everyone) is a ridiculous notion. You love the people that are most important to you, that deserve your utmost respect and kindness, so of course this will mean you love a select few. Furthermore, trying to think up reasons why you should love any random neighbour would be an exhausting exercise in self-deception. Plus if you don't love people for their qualities, but instea…

I think you're putting an unnecessarily negative spin on these things, and perhaps taking them more literally than they're intended. Here's my take: 1. "love thy neighbor" - Don't waste time hating people. Forgive and forget. 2. "don't be selfish" - Put others before yourself. Anyone who has been in a relationship will tell you this is a good idea, but it applies elsewhere as well. If you manage people at your job, p…

I don't think I'm taking things too literally, although obviously I'm focusing on the negative impact, as per the original question.

1. Sorry, but the verse isn't 'try to get along with thy neighbour' or 'tolerate thy neighbour' it's love thy neighbour. I'm all for amicable and polite relations with people/strangers, but as far as i can tell the teaching really aspires to a sort of 'what would Jesus do?' level of care towards people wherever you find them.

2. I don't think putting others before yourself is a good idea, except in the case of close family or partners. Have faith in yourself, take opportunities where you find them, better yourself, don't feel bad about it - if you put others first you can't necessarily do those things, and whats more the others wont necessarily appreciate your action and/or see that it wasn't done in vain. Of course, you should still be honourable towards others.

3. Interior dialogue goes something like this - 'Well, what career should I choose? Medicine perhaps? Well, that makes lots of money, but I don't feel a natural calling for it. And since money isn't important, I ought to choose something else. I'll study English literature, which wont land me a high-paying job, but that's not what I care about.' Ten years later: 'Well writing isn't going to get me a job at all, so I'm not much different from an unskilled/uneducated member of the workforce. I feel I could achieve a lot and offer a lot to society, but now I'll just take a low paying office job. If I was a doctor, I could be having kids right now, buying a house, saving for their education, have long-term financial security and the ability to help other family members, going around the world on holiday having enriching experiences. Oh well.' Money gives you security and freedom, the idea of settling for the basic necessities is very dangerous IMO and not likely to lead to happiness.

4. Christianity at its core is about forgiveness, and in the end it leads to sacrificing justice for mercy, which leads to dysfunctional relationships or communities. Yeah 'nobody's perfect' is a good lesson but these teachings go further than that

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#153

Post by Mongoose »

Jach wrote: post #59

I'm not exactly sure how to word it, and I'm not aware of a single source who advised me on it, but it seems like there's a pervasive feeling in society that "If I want to learn something, I need a teacher." I outgrew this mental model around 14, and now in college I feel so much further ahead of many of my peers who are lucky to have taken a HS programming course once before choosing a programming degree. I wish I h…

I can definitely echo your feeling of lost potential in my earlier years. I too am a current college student and wish I could go tell my 15-year-old self to learn Python instead of spending most of my free time playing Counter-Strike.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#154

Post by wallflower »

il wrote: post #87
silvestrov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds more like you're a shy extrovert rather than an introvert.

As I've heard it defined, extroverts gain energy from social interactions, introverts are fatigued by them. If, like me, after a few hours of small talk you feel exhausted and want to sit in front of a screen alone, you're probably an introvert. I have some extroverted friends who will not go to the grocery store unless someone goes with them to keep them company. I prefer taking walks alone, and so on.

> I have some extroverted friends who will not go to the grocery store unless someone goes with them

We did a teamwork exercise where they split the E's and I's. To both groups, they said that you have the next day off - tell us what you're going to do. The E's were going nuts with chartering a plane to Vegas, big party while all of the I's were going to do something alone, maybe even just catch up on laundry. The difference was shocking.

In another exercise, they had an E monitor a team of us I's on a logic puzzle. As the E later described, he was just basically watching us I's sit there and not say anything and then a few minutes later - we started talking. We won but the non-talking communication really weirded him out.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#155

Post by Mongoose »

Wilduck wrote: post #10

"You're smart." It took me five years of coasting on that presumption before I realized that being "smart" isn't nearly enough. I'm still working (after a few more years) to develop the habits that would have come from hearing "you're a hard worker."

I always cringe a bit when I come home for the holidays and get praise from family on my purported intelligence and achievements. I feel as though this mentality kept me intellectually fat and happy for most of my teenage years, inhibiting the drive to constantly grow that I've fostered since entering college.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#156

Post by wallflower »

il wrote: post #30
hasenj wrote: post #11

Not from any specific person, but the idea that you have to step outside your comfort zone and do X and Y even though it doesn't come naturally to you. Every time I did that things got messed up and I ended up worse than I was before. If you're outside your comfort zone, you will act in non-authentic ways, and when you're not being authentic, you can't be the best possible you. Examples of stepping outside comfort zo…

If you're trolling this post with spectacularly bad advice about bad advice, well done. If you truly believe that, you have a very cynical worldview. I am quite introverted but whenever I force myself to go to a social event where I don't know anyone and make friends, I always have a great time and meet awesome people, and it invariably goes better than I thought it would. If you just assume the people there WANT to…

> If you just assume the people there WANT to be your friend, you don't look needy and your extroverted side comes out, and you can still be yourself.

Sadly, I believe most introverts are pretty selfish - worrying what other people think of them when, in reality, most everyone is not thinking of them - and may not even notice them.

Another thing about Introverts - with most extroverts, it is fairly easy to figure out who a person is or at least who they primarily represent themselves as. With an introvert, a stranger is going to have to invest a lot more in getting to know who an introvert is - that's exhausting to some people - why expend energy figuring out the quiet ones when you can have fun talking to the loud ones.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#157

Post by jdietrich »

Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life. They have absolutely nothing to teach you. This is strong stuff, granted, but I think it is tremendously important.

Every single piece of bad advice I have ever received was from someone who didn't like their life. If you're unhappy, you have two basic options. You can do something to make yourself happier, or you can rationalise a reason why happiness isn't possible. The former is generally a steady upward slog. The latter is like quicksand - the longer you're there, the more solidly you become stuck.

All the bad career advice I got was from people who didn't like their job. Some believed that jobs were just inherently unpleasant, so you might as well go for the unpleasantness that pays the most and gives the best pension. Some believed that good jobs were just inaccessible for 'the likes of us', so there's no point getting you hopes up. Some were so uncertain of their employability that they took the first job offered to them and never dared do anything to jeopardise it. I heard rationalisations dressed up as philosophy, as ethics, as macroeconomics, but they were rationalisations all the same.

Learning from the mistakes of others is useful and productive, but an unhappy person can never provide any insight into how to be happy. Either they don't know what would make them happy, or worse, they do know but won't do it. Never underestimate how hard someone will work to rationalise why they just can't go back to college or start their own business or visit Europe or leave their awful wife.

When seeking advice, ignore status, intelligence and experience. Seek out the happy people, they're the only people who can help you.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#158

Post by shadowfox »

rfrey wrote: post #99
j_baker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back up a minute... "Introverts are perfectly capable of overcoming their personality tendencies." The first thing you're assuming is that introverts either want or need to overcome their introversion. There isn't anything wrong with being an introvert. There is something wrong with being an extreme introvert.

The first thing you're assuming is that introverts either want or need to overcome their introversion I certainly did not mean to say that. I don't believe it. What I said was that introverts are capable of overcoming their tendencies. They're tendencies, not fate. The commenter a few levels above said they had a great time at parties; the comment I responded to said that sounded like a shy extrovert. Not so, say I:…

> What I said was that introverts are capable of overcoming their tendencies

I think the person above was pointing out that by saying that introverts need to "overcome" their tendencies, you are effectively saying that introverts have an issue that needs to be overcome.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#159

Post by nradov »

lisper wrote: post #109

"Honesty is the best policy." This is quite possibly the single biggest lie we tell our kids. There are times when dissembling or even outright lying is the right thing to do. It's important to learn to recognize when telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not the right thing to do. It's not easy.

It's still good advice for young children since they lack the judgment to know when a lie is appropriate. Gaining that judgment and learning when and how to lie is a natural part of growing up.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#160

Post by nradov »

mduvall wrote: post #2

Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit, thus the advice that comes from colleagues along the lines of "don't do the homework, it's really a waste of time" when everybody is actually doing it, could screw you over. It didn't mess up my life per se, but definitely had an impact on my grades when I was a naive freshman.

You should treat college homework and studying as a constrained optimization problem. Decide up front how many hours you're going to put in per weak and then figure out how to maximize your GPA within that limit. In the remaining time you can do whatever you want.
Post reply on HN