61–70 of 289 posts
At least for me, recognizing that success is nice, but not getting too hung up on it (or expecting it) and to enjoy the labour itself (and find fulfillment in it) helps.
This is nothing more than a month old tweet from some random person with generic advice and zero empirical evidence to back it up. Why is this even on Hacker News?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this. Since any path to becoming high status attracts heavy gate keeping quickly (essentially clearing that path for people who have high status to begin with) it seems reasonable that people try to "hide" in low status niches where there are way fewer predators. I think success here is somewhat incidental. No doubt the vast majority of niche workers are pursuing non-viable careers, a minority can just a…
Tech is nice because it's tedious and can be difficult and for rich high status people, an easier quicker way to more guaranteed status is Medicine or Law. Your summary is both a good point and a little chilling. I've always wondered in Capitalism how this concept of a JOB for people to have a living wage is sustainable in modern times. Much less for people to innovate and thrive.
Many, many more people work at things other people think are silly and insignificant only to discover that thing is silly and insignificant and then they give up. Occasionally the opposite happens and the person succeeds. If you only look at the successes it probably looks like a willingness to be low-status is a marker for success, but it really isn't. It tells you nothing of the future outcome. The only thing it pr…
Also in the US I listen to Dave Ramsey callers, and there are lots of people whose car is worth more than their whole net worth, which is totally unjustifiable in my view.
The more-correct observation is that any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down. Most people are not high status, and want to be. It follows that the path has to be either risky, or difficult to comprehend. If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.
I disagree with this. Never underestimate how many people just don't show up or try at all.
Look at average screen time for Americans as a data point. It's a ridiculous 12 hours a day of media usage. Just think about that. People are basically staring at their phones/tvs for 12 out of the 16 waking hours.
As I get older I realize more often than not most successful people are not special, but simply were normally people that didn't screw up badly, showed up to work every day, and took better opportunities that were available. They graduated college with reasonable degrees, they didn't stay in bad jobs, or in dead-end cities. Eventually if you do that you will get a break, land at a successful company, get a big promotion, ect.
It's entirely possible to be low status and working on something incredibly important. E.g., driving a lorry to collect rubbish and recycling: nobody thinks of that as a high status job but imagine what happens if people stop doing it, and see if you can then still convince yourself that it's not an important job. It's also possible to do such a job for your entire working life and never taste "success". In fact, I would imagine that's possibly the default case. This in turn suggests that "low status" is an incredibly poor predictor of success.
Also, look at how rife poverty is across the globe. Poor people tend to be "low status", and many of them stay that way for their entire lives. Talking about their status as a "predictor of success" seems incredibly tone-deaf to me.
Overall this comment seems ridiculously ill thought out, to the point where I'm wondering how it's ended up here on the front page. To the person who wrote it: please, for your own benefit as much as anybody else's, step outside your bubble, because staying there is breaking your ability to think clearly.
This can be differently phrased as "privilege to be low-status". If you are an underrepresented minority and spend years working in a low-status position, the likelihood of a payoff for you is much lesser than it is for someone who typically doesn't experience discrimination based on their age, race, or gender. The downside for spending those years for some people is much higher than others. A social safety net can d…
I'm low-status. I work on stuff that may never payoff. I will never be successful, and that's ok. I was even told by a manager in my 1-on-1 that not everyone has the potential to be more than a midlevel dev. Also, this low-staus thing is not a great predictor. The hard work that is mentioned is prevalent in many of the studies looking at success. Of course this is part of a matrix of qualities.