Always think long term.
Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
31–40 of 81 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#32One of my old bosses told me, "remove the phrase 'it works for me' from your vocabulary. If it worked for _them_, they wouldn't be bringing their problem to you."
This made me realize that the phrase "it works for me" can be dismissive and condescending, and that I should spend at least a little bit of time under the assumption that I am the one that screwed up (personally, my team, or my company) until I can prove otherwise. Anecdotally, I'd say 90% of the time it is either a bug or poorly documented processes -- and those can be fixed! Only about 10% of the time is it truly users doing something stupid.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#33"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." It applies in business as well... (just not the killing part)
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#34I think a lot of stuff in this thread is general proverbs rather than actual advice received from another person.
This isn't advice that I've gotten either, but also just general wisdom: never give anyone advice about anything, unless they specifically ask for it. Web search for "unsolicited advice" finds a ton of info about why the practice is annoying. I take it to mean it is ok to try to lead by example instead, or say "for solving problem X, I usually try approach Y", but maybe that also edges too close to advice.
One specific piece of advice I got that I have found valuable is that to debug a misbehaving program, instead of trying to map the misbehaviour into a hypothesis of what is happening in the code, go immediately to running the code under a debugger and incrementally (e.g. single stepping etc.) run it until you see something go wrong, then backtrack and figure out how that wrong thing happened.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t wanna be harsh but sounds like a shallow line of thinking. Can you expand?
If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’ve likely surrounded yourself with people “worse” than you in some way. How can you grow in such an environment? You want to surround yourself with people smarter than you so that you can learn from them and grow. So if you’re the smartest person in the room, then you should go find a new room with smarter people. Unless you’re the smartest person on earth of course…
Do you spend all of your time in one room? Sorry, but I think you might be missing the spirit of the phrase above. Maybe one needs to have heard it "in context" the way I originally heard it to get the intended spirit of it? Dunno.
The idea isn't about surrounding yourself with people who are worse than you, just so you can say you are "the smartest person in the room". The idea is to focus on something and become so good at thing that you are -usually- the "smartest person in the room" on that particular topic. Which means this whole idea is only relevant to contexts that your thing is relevant. And to reiterate, this is more of an aspiration than something that's literally achievable. In reality, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, there will always be at least one person who knows more than you about thing. And that's OK. The point is about focus and the importance of putting in the work vis-a-vis your thing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#36“Be nice, you might encourage others and if not you can be rest assured that, at the very least, there is one less asshole in this world.”
While I admire the sentiment, jerks seem to do alright.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#37“Try to never be the person who cares the most” was an offhand remark my dad made to me when I was stressed over a group project in school. It helped me what in hindsight would’ve been very stressful situation many, many times.
I don’t understand what problem this solves
Ask a psych major.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#38"Always be the smartest (eg, 'most well informed' or 'best educated') person in the room - ON SOMETHING". Or to paraphrase slightly "Have a thing that is your speciality, to the point that you are almost always the most knowledgeable person in the room w/r/t that topic." I think this is a valuable idea to keep in mind, even if it remains forever an aspiration (which it probably will if interpreted in the strictest se…
That’s the opposite of advice I’d give to someone. If you’re the smartest in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.
This advice is about having one specific thing for which you can say you're "the smartest person in the room". It's not about being the "smartest person in the room" in any general sense. So imagine aspiring to have something about which you are better informed / knowledgeable, even if you're in the same room with Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Nikola Tesla, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, Yann LeCun, and Grigori Perelman. Are you likely to be smarter than all (or any) of those people in general? Maybe not. Is there some specific niche which is "your niche" where you are more informed than all of them? Very possibly so.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
#39"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." It applies in business as well... (just not the killing part)
James Mattis is a legend.