Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

Your mentor might think you're boring, but what do your friends and family (and yourself) think? They're the ones that really matter.

Mentor are just that. It's your life, follow it the way you want, whichever way feels right, and don't submit to FOMO.

Every decade or so you'll notice you're changing, you're not the same person. It's okay, it's part of life. Getting children for example will deeply change your perspective in life on what is important and what is frivolous society dreams.

As you're moving into a position of more stability, you might be wondering if this is it. And that's a normal thing to think about. The sudden feeling that a block falls into place demands whether or not this is a good thing after all. Shift your focus towards other things that may spark your interest. Working fast and hard is only a facet of modern life.

Do whatever makes you happy, or head in that direction and don't sweat the details. If however you feel you're headed in the wrong direction, then don't be afraid of bold moves. That's what never settling means; I don't think it means keep chasing your tail like wild pup. If one good thing falls into place, it's an opportunity to shift focus onto something else and try to excel there too.

What an oddly judgmental piece of advice from a mentor. I'd take it with a pinch of salt and instead think in terms of problems instead of solutions e.g. what do you hope me to achieve by "not being boring"?

I'm in my late 30s and I find that energy ebbs and flows through life and career. Sometimes you are excited and energized and you can channel that for change. Other times you are down for whatever reason. Take care of your self, and learn how you do your best work.

I don't want to seem condescending, so I have to ask you to please bear with me: what led you to believe that those big ideas are achievable? Sheer youthful exuberance? The forgivable hubris of one who outshines most of their peers intellectually while still in a small-pond environment? Perhaps in our youths, we were not informed that world-changing ideas require not just the eurekan spark, nor the 99-percent perspiration of genius, and nothing so easily roadmapped as the once insightful, now trite 10,000 hours... but instead, the near-zealotry required to fight a sort of tide. It's the tide of a world which has naturally evolved against constantly reshaping itself in the image of each incoming wave of fresh youth with ideas that are reminiscent of "if I ran this place..." It's not entirely dissimilar from your body, which cannot tell a good mutation from bad, and so we're left with the onees who slip or muscle past our defenses, tiny fragment by fragment over eons.

You still believe, and have proof, that just about any one human can achieve incredible things. You know this because you have some hero who forewent significant parts of their lives in exchange for the mere lottery ticket of succeeding in the thing you admire them for. Many just like them failed at that same shot, and we are left without much reverence for the invisible graveyard of the almost-Jobs, almost-Gandhis, almost-Curies, et. al.

If the world was set up with immense reward in mind for those who change it for (let's not quibble on definitions, but:) the better, maybe human superstructures would have a lower baked-in resistance to change. Maybe. But the meager quantity of right-tail prizes available mean that most would hardly sacrifice a little comfort, let alone the sum totality of their possible lives they could live, for what? A lance lofted at a windmill.

If you wanted to give up everything and chase your big ideas, which at a young age, or even long from now, or tomorrow, you could. You could, seriously. And because you're on this forum you're probablistically understand risk scenarios enough to gauge the odds of success in exchange for your massive sacrifice.

I think about this all the time, too. Your average person will hardly give up the tiniest comfort, but how could we judge them or ourselves for it? It's not nature's fault nor ours that this same selfishness is how we killed to eat for all these millennia.

Anyone with too firm of an answer to this whole riddle fancies themselves a hegemon.

There was an age (about 25 or so) where this lesson beat me over the head until I finally accepted it. It was very freeing. Ironically, it lead to the most professional and artistic growth I had experienced as a result.

Turns out that focusing on what's right in front of you and ignoring "big ideas" (which are often more practical for aesthetics and performative identity over material reality) actually frees you to pursue what you really want. By trying to worry too much about "big ideas" I was actually being lazy/anxious about doing the actual work to figure out the "interesting ideas" that I actually wanted to pursue, "bigness" be damned.