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

Reasons not to become famous

tim.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 428 posts

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#11

Post by ak39 »

What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone? What is this need for wanting others to know that you exist at all?

Jobs that demand "fame" of some sorts will always take an emotional toll on personalities that are never comfortable with fame, limelight and podiums.

I have been an introvert my whole life but only recently realised this about myself at the tender age of 40! It was a cold slap for me to accept it. I have always imagined myself gregarious and outgoing and friendly - wanting to speak to strangers, breaking silence in a lift - but these have never really sat comfortably with me afterwards. I'll be chewing and ruminating about the imagined mistimed comments or miscued lines for ages. I have bruised myself emotionally believing that I needed to be an extrovert to be successful when in fact I was only demanding too much of myself. Fame, and outrageous fame will likely kill me too.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#12

Post by Kiro »

molteanu wrote: post #4

I honestly thought this is bad writing. It jumps from one idea to the next without bringing any of them to the conclusion. One quote too many, maybe? And too many paragraphs that are meant to catch and arounse the reader's interest? I guess this is the style of writing needed to catch the attention of millions of followers. Am I mistaken? I've stopped reading this after 5 minutes. I've reallly tried, though. Edit: Do…

Regarding your edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

In other words, it's completely OK to downvote opinions. I think it's wrong but I don't make the rules here.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#13

Post by [deleted] »

speedgoose wrote: post #9
Expez wrote: post #6

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray: > I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of spee…

Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.

[deleted]

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#14

Post by sillysaurusx »

Hypothesis: On twitter, when your follower count exceeds the number you're following, you become a little nutty.

I've noticed this odd trend where if people gain a lot of twitter followers, then often their views become reinforced to the point that outsiders look at their tweets and wonder what happened to make them express such ideas.

But there's bias here: for tweets like these to be noticed, they need to be seen. Only those with followers are in that position. It makes sense that wacky tweets we notice tend to come from people with lots of followers. So I'm not sure if it's true, or if there are just a lot of odd people on twitter.

My own experiences indicate that the sweet spot is around 1k followers. More than that, you attract a lot of noise. Less than that, and it's hard to get noticed. But perhaps this is just personal taste.

The reason I mentioned this is that I'm in the fortunate position of having attracted a lot of followers recently (for whatever reason), but I'm concerned that things will turn sour. I like twitter right now. There are cool people on there, and I've met friends through the platform. But will it still feel like that at 5k followers? 10k? 50k? I feel like I should stop whatever is accelerating the follower count before it reaches an inflection point. So the article resonated with me.

If you're ever jealous of people with lots of followers (or fame in general, for that matter), just tune in to https://twitter.com/paulg and see the way people respond to pretty much anything he says. What's the point of being famous if you can't express an idea without being beset by thoughtless people?

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#17

Post by thaumasiotes »

ak39 wrote: post #11

What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone? What is this need for wanting others to know that you exist at all? Jobs that demand "fame" of some sorts will always take an emotional toll on personalities that are never comfortable with fame, limelight and podiums. I have been an introvert my whole life but only recently realised this about myself at the tender age of 40! It was a cold slap…

> What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone?

You can use fame to get money. If you're poor and famous, you can become rich off of your fame. But obviously, if you're poor and not rich, you can't become rich by using the money you don't have.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#18

Post by richthegeek »

speedgoose wrote: post #9
Expez wrote: post #6

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray: > I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of spee…

Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.

"have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress" is how many people define "rich".

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#19

Post by Jare »

speedgoose wrote: post #9
Expez wrote: post #6

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray: > I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of spee…

Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.

> Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress

Generally speaking, to me being rich (disclaimer: I'm not) means having that kind of money today and the confidence that, no matter what happens (barring large scale events like wars or asteroids) I will still have it for the rest of my life.

Post reply on HN