I had someone contact me after a few years had passed to give this type of feedback. It felt great. The world needs more weirdos.
Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
71–80 of 143 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#72> I kind of feel like a bit of a weirdo
It might be a bit weird indeed, but I'm sure none of the people at the receiving side find it weird.
When I get such emails, I feel good and think "what a nice person".
I'm sure "nice person" outweighs "weirdo" in this case.
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#73I wanted to thank my teacher who taught our little class Greek in Gymnasium high school, thank him for his stories about Plato, Euripides and Homer and Hector saying goodbye to his son before battle. Unfortunately I heard he died 10 years later. So many more people I lost contact with or had died. Gratitude!
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#74I feel funny doing it too, but I found it's better to get comfortable with who I am than to worry about it. I'm usually on the delivering end of reaching out to thank people from the past, but a few years ago one of my old managers reached out to me to thank me, and to buy me lunch, gratitude for something I'd shown him that had helped him. I felt like 10 million dollars.
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#75Haven't heard of this much - but what a great idea. There is no downside I can see and you could make someone really happy to hear from you!
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#76I have. There's a newspaper columnist in my home town who influenced me a lot as a writer. As a young person he showed me, by his column, that what's defined as "correct" is often less interesting than doing something unique for the sake of Making a Point. I wrote him to thank him and we had a nice conversation, and he encouraged me further to keep at my writing. I have, and I've since found my niche.
On the other hand, there was a manager I had at my first "big" job (that wasn't a small computer repair shop) who I butted heads with pretty badly, also as a young person. He ended up firing me, but not before teaching me tons and telling me things that stick with me til this day- things I now teach! Maybe I should. It's been over 20 years since he fired me, I think the statute of limitations has run out :p
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#77At least a few times, I've contacted someone from long ago just to thank them, and recently have been assembling a mental list of some more people. As soon as you start thinking about it, the list is so big that you'll never be able to contact all of them.
One of the first times, I decided timing matters. I had occasion to remember how much I admired a particular manager who'd helped my career a lot, and I emailed him just to say something like I realized and appreciated it, and that I try to emulate that. One of the things he said in his response was to offer connections for job-hunting. Fortunately, I wasn't looking at the time, and I realized that the message seems more genuine if there's no question of whether your motivation might be to network, rather than purely to thank the person.
One of the reasons I was thinking about this recently, is that I suspect I was helped out with something recently, by someone who knows me, but I don't know exactly who, and I pretty quickly came up with about a dozen likely candidates. A lot of the help that we get and give is done quietly, and often no one will know, but we can at least thank people for what we do know.
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#78Yes I do. I've made it a point to review periodically and to personally thank the people that have had a positive impact on my life rather than to wait until I'm at their funeral or I find out they've passed on. I've also credited them in some of my writings: https://jacquesmattheij.com/your-own-company-you-can-do-it/ Realizing that you need other people to get ahead and that some people will take a chance on you whe…
Mad HN nitpick:
> – dedicated to Piet Tacx, Fred Fluitsma and Eddy de Leeuw, thank you both very much for my early career and everything that followed from it.
it says "both" but you're thanking three people :-)
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#79When I started my first consulting agency it was primarily focused on helping game devs treat their projects like a real business, which I witnessed was a common point of failure for indie studios. I reached out to my old Preproduction in Game Development professor (Brian Sullivan of Age of Empires fame), who also had a lot of consulting experience, and thanked him for everything while asking for advice moving forward. He seemed genuinely appreciative of the message and gave me some great advice.
Re: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
#80Sometimes, but I keep that saying, "Never meet your heroes." in mind.
The trick is to choose sufficiently niche heros.
When I was young I was active in the demoscene but I knew few other demosceners in person. Needless to say, I looked up super much to many demomakers, genius programmers/artists who seemingly could create madly impressive works out of thin air. It was as if they could convert dreams into code, or something [0].
Then gradually, after visiting more demoparties, I got to know some of these gods, and without exception, they were super nice. I ended up collaborating (gasp) with some of them.
I'm convinced that if you're popular and you're overrun by fans every day, it gets tiresome. That's where that saying comes from. But I'm sure that your favourite knitting youtuber, or your physics teacher, or that amateur Ambient Techno Metal producer on soundcloud you're totally mad about, they really don't get fan mail often enough. Reach out.
[0] eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvPriI0sTwQ how??