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

Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 839 posts

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#501

Post by wpietri »

wayne_skylar wrote: post #498
endymi0n wrote: post #150

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…

I think the problem I have is that I don't understand how to get good at something that I have good taste in. Of everything that I've been able to learn I've always had some sort of pleasure in the doing. I enjoyed my C++ assignments in college. I've enjoyed learning the basics of woodworking. I love art and would love to learn to paint or draw but I can't figure out how to enjoy the small victories there. It's not a…

It's just like Glass says: you have to do a lot of work. Be comfortable that everything will suck for a while. Probably a long while. You may not notice day-to-day progress, but if you practice frequently, you'll eventually be able to look back and see that you're doing better.

For many, a good way to do that is just to take a class. You commit to showing up with other people and just working on the thing. A good friend joined an MFA program not because she really expected to learn much from the teachers, but because she benefits from the structure that forces her to write, write, write.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#502

Post by jiggunjer »

tchalla wrote: post #190

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Another part I like:

“'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least–at least I mean what I say'”

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#503

Post by sdegutis »

krapp wrote: post #114
kleer001 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a literal actor in time/space, for certain. That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-space.

>That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-space. I can agree with that. God as an idea is real in the abstract sense that all powerful ideas are real, and people believe in them, and treat them as real. But as someone who was raised in a (Christian, US Southern) religious background, I've come to believe…

Religion as a psychological tool is a very sad thing. But it's a very common thought, one I grew up with. In fact, I only started praying while still thinking it was all fake, but needing some kind of mental help past my problem in life at the time. So I understand that theory as well as anyone here.

But not all religions are created equal. The Protestant religions are emasculated to some degree. Since they're based around rejecting the truth, their foundation is all wrong, and they can never get back to reality. Unfortunately, they turn many people away from Christianity.

But that's not necessarily true. Those who keep looking for it will find it in Catholicism, just like John Henry Newman did. As he said, "to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." But more often, people don't really want to find out the truth. So they reject religion altogether. Except as a psychological tool.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#505

Post by jiggunjer »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #206

Antifragility Or more specifically, just getting the term for it. I spent years trying to articulate in my own mind many of the ideas in Taleb's book, and once I had a word for it I could see it everywhere and actually start to change my life to take advantage of the chaos in the world. Basically: you can't control what happens to you, but you can set your life up so that the natural variability of the world can be u…

Sounds like stoicism?

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#508

Post by mirimir »

devin wrote: post #182
teraflop wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." -- Jake the Dog

When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's stuck with me. Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.

I got basically the same advice from my adviser about collecting data for my thesis. "If too many experiments are failing," he said, "just do more of them, and faster."

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#509

Post by pjs_ »

Someone once told me that you can tell you are close to burnout when you think that everyone around you is an idiot. You must be burning out because it's not plausible that literally everyone you encounter is an idiot!

I like it because it is a logical construction that can be deployed even when your own perception is distorted by stress. It has definitely functioned as an effective safety alarm and I'm sure prevented some chaos more than once.

Post reply on HN