Take as much responsibility as you possibly can. Continually increase the amount of responsibility you take. - mediocre paraphrase of mine taken from Jordan B Peterson.
Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
331–340 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can break hearts”
Not to nitpick, but the words have no value. The value comes from what you or me assign to them. Certainly there are things in your past (or mine) that we heard and effectively ignored. But if heard again we'd laugh or cry. The point is, the meaning we attach to the words are literally in our heads. We determine the worlds they create. It's not the other way around.
Your comment is very vague. Words cause an involuntary reaction that cannot be turned off. You cannot stop understanding English at will. You cannot stop being hurt if you're rejected at will. In that sense the statement "words don't hurt" is simply false, and contradicts the direct lived experience of every human on earth (except those who train to not let words get to them, such as lawyers and politicians).
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a totally fair question, and I have to admit I did not - nuanced stories don’t fit in an online comment! The Great Recession hit and Obama’s climate push failed[0], so I went into healthcare (as another thing that needed fixing, and which there was political will to do something about). The lessons of all of those twists are more complex, but I still firmly believe that I got the right advice given what every…
This reminds me of a tale told by Lawrence Block: There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. "You lac…
Wow, profound and very true!
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#334Learning to say NO.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#335Two things that I’ve come to see as truths about the world are:
Most people are wrong about most things and most of their advice is awful.
Most people aren’t that great at their jobs. They’re doing enough to get by but not much more.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can break hearts”
Not to nitpick, but the words have no value. The value comes from what you or me assign to them. Certainly there are things in your past (or mine) that we heard and effectively ignored. But if heard again we'd laugh or cry. The point is, the meaning we attach to the words are literally in our heads. We determine the worlds they create. It's not the other way around.
> Not to nitpick, but the words have no value. The value comes from what you or me assign to them.
I don't think this holds, otherwise every libel suit would be thrown out of court on the basis of "that's what you think it means".
Not to mention that we have dictionaries that record the assigned meanings of words :-)
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#337As a male, sitting down to pee at home keeps the toilet and floor significantly cleaner. Even with perfect aim, you don’t see the micro droplets until they build up. Cuts cleaning time and frequency
Until you encounter a bowl that flows up when hit with a forward-facing stream instead of down. Too many times has this happened so pay attention.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#338If you work for nothing you'll always be busy.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#339If I can define advice as lessens that I've learned over time and would give others, it would be to always say hello or acknowledge an acquaintance's presence when you get the chance, even if you don't have the time or necessarily want to chat. You never know when they won't be there anymore.
Another one would be to try and measure your success at something if what you want is measurable improvement, but try not to measurably improve everything, because you become hollow. Don't let "passion" for something overcome the needs that should be met by it, whether it be a lover or a company.
Likewise, don't do for an employer (and maybe any other entity) what they wouldn't do for you, don't think of your employer as anything more than that, and don't make sacrifices for them if you have no clear pathway and control over how you can be rewarded for it. Promises are bullshit.
Also, one that might just be for me, but I would share with someone else if they were interested, is to not bother trying to learn something unless you can close the feedback loop of practicing it. That means being able to deliberately allocate ongoing time to it and treat it like a hobby rather than just reading or just listening. I used to think that I could just read article after article and technical book after technical book, or listening to podcasts during every piece of downtime, but it more or less ended up being worthless and now I think of it as basically stupid. There has to be an output to match the input, and for you to allocate the time to that, it probably needs to be sufficiently fun or rewarding rather than arbitrary.
Lastly, building on that previous one, taking vacations away from the computer and work. Take the downtime, otherwise you'll be forced to, and you might as well enjoy it before burning out.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to nitpick, but the words have no value. The value comes from what you or me assign to them. Certainly there are things in your past (or mine) that we heard and effectively ignored. But if heard again we'd laugh or cry. The point is, the meaning we attach to the words are literally in our heads. We determine the worlds they create. It's not the other way around.
Completely disagree. The "heaviness" of an insult is determined by various factors: how much you value the person holding that opinion, how much you want to be accepted, how many rejections you got through... We are not robots that can automatically choose to not care: in the past I was in the stoic camp, red Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and so on but now I recognize that that philosophy brought me lots of pain…
I'm no philosopher but my understanding is the stoics didn't simply choose not to care, they were selective about what they cared about.
When someone insults you are they responsible for how much you value their opinion? Are they responsible for how much you want to be accepted? Are they responsible for how many rejections you have had in the past?