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Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

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Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#131

Post by burntoutfire »

dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #93
imgabe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had a job that paid well enough for you to take off and travel and enjoy your life, then you just opened up one more well paying job for someone else (who might be stepping up from one of those shit jobs). The greedier thing would be to stay on and suck up more and more resources that you don't need and don't even make you happy.

> you just opened up one more well paying job > stay on and suck up more and more resources As opposed to creating more value and enabling the company to hire 5-7 more team members? Maybe you view yourself as a zero-sum resource-suck, but I typically multiply what my company does through new ideas and creative pursuits.

Why assume that the replacement wouldn't also be such a multiplier? Maybe it really doesn't matter who does the job (the OP or the replacement)?

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#132

Post by burntoutfire »

yowlingcat wrote: post #73
xeromal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to look at it statistically though. Many more have failed than succeeded and while not exactly the same, your argument could be used for someone wanting to be a FIFA or NFL athlete. Sure, some succeed, but many don't. Same with the million-dollar business idea.

There's a lot more room for multi-million (maybe even billion) dollar businesses than there is room for professional footballers. They aren't even in the same, err, football field.

I'm not really sure it's true for the billion businesses. How many billion+ businesses were cretated in the past 100 years? Maybe 10,000? And how many people played in the NFL during last 100 years? The Internet says it 23,204. And that's just football, if you compare across all high paying pro sports, then number must be in hundreds of thousands.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#133

Post by burntoutfire »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #45

Are you me? I'm 28, and genuinely feel angry about the anti-corporate "the system is for losers, follow your passion" shit that was shoved down our throat as teenagers and young adults. It's not a recipe for anything except burnout and depression. Staking your ego on being the "guy who knows a lot about technology/concept x" is even worse. Stick with your job, and make sure to keep time for your wife (or husband) and…

That's an interesting take. You're probably right, if we make majority of people feel "beneath" the median path in life, most of them are bound to become depressed. Hardly anyone can be that special snowflake and create a successful startup, video game etc. And yet modern American culture is saying that you should go out and try doing it anyway. Guess what happens if you do...

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#134

Post by bckr »

annyeonghada wrote: post #126
oxff wrote: post #94

> The body requires a lot of maintenance and has limited energy Weight training 3x week takes around 270 minutes. Add rowing / swimming 2-3 week for some 30 to 60 minutes. That's ~330 minutes a week, nothing.

Then you start adding commute and preparation and it's never 1-1.5 hours, it's 2-2.5. Then you start taking into account that you hate physical exercise (I've tried group sport, gym, running, swimming, walking etc...) and you start treating it like a job and instead of being relaxing is another chore. So not only I'm doing something just for maintenance, but it feels like work (in my case, it is work) and while I'm s…

This also doesn't count time spent thinking about / gathering / preparing / cleaning up w.r.t. food, hygiene, etc. GP is just another dismissive comment.

Exercise is also a job to me.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#136

Post by atoav »

Become boring... to whom? Seriously. Becoming boring to others or the world is not a thing to worry about. Becoming boring to yourself is a different thing.

Just do what you enjoy doing, what makes you curious, gives you energy, drives you forward. Sometimes this will be a project of passion, sometimes this will just laid back daily routine.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#138

Post by rramadass »

A lot of the "Entrepreneurial rah-rah, YOLO etc." are complete BS. Only a very very lucky few make it; the vast majority fail and suffer for the rest of their lives. I personally know of a couple of people whose entire lives (and their families) have been ruined because they kept trying to be "Entrepreneurial" and failing repeatedly instead of maintaining a steady job, saving money and taking care of their family. For the vast majority of us folks who do not have a financial safety net, a nice, steady, income-generating job is the safest bet. So keep your "boring" job, do your "entrepreneurial" activities on the side and if it takes off, then think about quitting your "boring" job but with a full knowledge of all the risks involved.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#139

Post by cheradenine_uk »

imgabe wrote: post #109
dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporate profits are not necessarily the same thing as value. Showing ads 0.1% more effectively... Of course not, but when a project idea I architect & develop results in a bunch of new team member hires that 1) I get to train and mentor and 2) are all putting food on the fucking dinner table for their families and getting to enjoy their lives through productive labor and 3) make the lives of our customers a littl…

I never said it was a negative thing. It's also not a negative thing to step back from that and add value to the world in other ways, maybe raising your kids, tending a garden, or stimulating the economy of some other places by traveling there. For someone who's so happy and joyful about all the value you get to create, you sure are bitter that anyone else might not choose to do exactly what you're doing. People who…

I see this a lot, and I'm put in mind of the Dawkins quote (to paraphrase)

"Nobody preaches about the sun coming up tomorrow. Nobody preaches about certainties. Believers preach about their world view not because they are certain, but because they are UNcertain"

I.E: What people like this are trying to do isn't convince you - it's to convince themselves.

If you choose another path, be it in work, decision to start or not start a family, from the mainstream you get pushback in many forms, because it's very hard for people to not want the choices that they make to be the _correct_ choices, and that must mean the _correct_ choices apply to everyone, right? We can all get trapped on the hedonic treadmill together!

There's a bit of this in the WFH/Office debate, too.

Best advice I ever got: If you want to be happier, get poorer friends.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on being “boring”

#140

Post by teekert »

getoj wrote: post #25

From Bill Watterson's commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. I was lucky to read this when I was graduating and it changed my whole career path. I am now very happy and very boring: "Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an ecce…

Absolutely agree with this, but particularly that last sentence. I'm now 40 and I have the feeling that just this last year I'm sort of starting to understand what work really makes me happy and I'm also finally in the position that I feel like I'm valuable enough to just say no to boring work I consider not worth my effort. I can finally focus (mostly) on work that I really like, and it even looks like people around me appreciate this. Also, importantly, this type of work exists at my current employer.

It took a long time, and I went through years of staying with the same job, having highs and lows and thinking and reflecting, with a coach sometimes (I was lucky that one of the jobs had a coach for every employee) on work and the way it makes me feel, what I'm good at, and how that may be because of how I was raised, or the role I had to take or took in my family.

You are good at some things because you did them a lot. Sometimes those things match with what makes you feel good, sometimes they are that nagging thing you couldn't name but carried with you your whole life. I.e. I'm considered social, social glue, someone who gets a group to get along. But it costs me an inordinate amount of energy and I just now am learning the benefits of respectfully guarding your own interests, I feel just like the writer of this assay: [0]. Still growing up at 40.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906621

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