[deleted]
Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
551–560 of 839 posts
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#552Recursion
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#553This might be super basic, but... assume positive intent. Your parent is not your enemy. Your teacher is not your enemy. Your boss is not your enemy. The other team at work is not your enemy. The corporation is not your enemy. The other political party is not your enemy. Or, more accurately, YOU are not THEIR enemy. At best, you're an NPC in their game. Many of them probably even want to help you, because you are ano…
I like what you said. One thing I'd add is: if you're not assuming positive intent, at least assume ignorance. Classic Hanlon's razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#554Nobody 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…
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”
― Chuck Jones
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erik Hagerman is on a four year news blackout: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-to...
Article date: March 10, 2018 He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. ... Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. Life finds a way I guess.
can't ya just make a triple-shot latte at home
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#556Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions. A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them. An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why. Imagine the responses to these two questions: - "Did you like the movie?" (Leading) - "What did you think about the movie?" (Interrogative-led) How do each of these questio…
Eh. I don’t know if I’d frame it the same way?
When I think about this, the only time I’m getting single word responses is when someone wants to kill a conversation. If you’re finding this happening a lot because you /only/ ask yes/no questions and/or people don’t feel free/comfortable/interested to tell you more past that then that’s the issue. You can try to ask more open ended questions rather than thinking of it as leading vs non leading. (You’re almost always asking leading questions in real life. Context is abundant) Ones with more potential ways of answering can be good for those who are not as conversational/literal. But be prepared for the conversation killer of, “I didn’t like it.” It will happen...
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#557One thing that’s been super meaningful for me is the notion that if you don’t put something into words, either in speech or in your head or on paper, you don’t know anything about it, even if it’s a feeling or a belief or an intuition deep within you that you’ve held for as long as you can remember. The act of simply putting a thought into words makes it immediately obvious to you if you really understand it or not,…
I once heard something along the lines of "to learn to express yourself properly is to learn to think". Sometimes our understanding of something is a muddle of unstructured thoughts and hunches. To express yourself properly you need to organize these. After you did that, things are often much clearer.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#558Nobody 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…
This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin. Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a dec…
I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you.
I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#559Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's almost all small stuff. If you're finding yourself stressed out about something, ask yourself...will it have a significant impact on your life within the next month? Will you even remember it in a year? If you can truly adopt this mentality, it cures road rage. Okay, so some asshole cut you off in traffic. Why lose your mind over it? It won't even have an impact on your day, let…
I have adopted this way of thinking many years ago.
Now the only thing that creeps up during the day is the occasional feeling of existential dread, of losing my senses to age and illness until the universe finally suffocates me and casts me into the eternal void.
Honestly, I think I'd rather get upset about that asshole in traffic.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#560That our responses and our negative relational feelings are based on out own choice - Nobody makes me feel angry, victimized, as a failure - it is always my choice to feel those feelings.
It is not always i am able to choose not to feel it, but i always know i am feeling it because of my own choosing.