So, the hardest thing for me would be to leave my job and focus all my time in starting my own business. Leave friends and family behind to put all my effort on it. Is it worth it? No.
Do the Hardest Thing
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Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#32This is dumb. Don't do hard things, do things which have a high ROI.
I could try to swim across the Pacific Ocean, walk across Siberia or consume a family size portion of McDonalds in a single sitting. All those things are hard. All those things have zero to negative ROI.
Doing hard things won't get you anywhere. Most hard things are useless. And a lot of the most valuable things are not hard at all.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#33I don't know if there's a way to say this without coming off as rude, but if the hardest thing you can come up with is podcast hosting, then maybe you didn't spend too much time thinking about hard things? If it works for you, great, you do you, but I don't think it lines up with the title nor the premise of the article even remotely.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#34In the current era of urge to make things faster/more, that article felt refreshing. Good things take effort and time to create, and it is not something bad, it's just the way the things become good.
(Author of the post here) I think the key point is that even bad businesses take time and effort to create! The distinction is between "low-hanging fruit" ideas ("Let's start a cafe!" "Let's start a WordPress theme business") and "high-value, high effort" ideas ("It's 2003. Let's build VoIP software.").
Where is Skype now? what good is creating something just to sell out and have it destroyed? High value? Skype's value right now is $0.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#35This correlates with tackling the monkey first:
https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d?...
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#36"brb gonna go broker world peace"
naw but this kind of mindset ended up burning me out at times; some of us clearly take general ideas like this in different ways than intended perhaps
but I think the actual "trick" here is about finding unfilled niches rather than necessarily doing "the hardest thing"
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#37In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do. I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the pro…
Seems like you tore through some outdated Jira tickets, which is cool, but what was the impact of your work?
Hard doesn't mean impactful. In fact that's one of the biggest mistakes I see junior engineers make! But glad you got that learning experience, as you become more senior you'll definitely develop a better understanding of what drives actual impact.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#38This correlates with tackling the monkey first: https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d?...
Agreed. I feel like Alphabet (who wrote this post) has kind of lost track of what they're espousing here.
Self driving cars were the "monkey" 10 years ago but now they are largely derisked. I'd like to see Alphabet working on the next generation of innovations. For me personally, I'd like to see them work on:
- Teleportation. - Talking animals. - A cure for death.
I'm not seeing them work on anything remotely as ambitious these days!
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#39I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it bein…
I think it's supposed to be interpreted as 'the hardest thing on your list of possible startup ideas', not 'the hardest possible thing in the universe'. I think it's also an alternative way of thinking about a moat.
I think author even mentions it on the side: the hardest thing thats also valuable
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#40In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do. I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the pro…
Seems like you tore through some outdated Jira tickets, which is cool, but what was the impact of your work? Hard doesn't mean impactful. In fact that's one of the biggest mistakes I see junior engineers make! But glad you got that learning experience, as you become more senior you'll definitely develop a better understanding of what drives actual impact.
Why are you being so condescending? A person wants to get into an open source project, so takes work he knows others won't finish before him, and you're talking to him like he's a noob (you have no clue how long ago this was). Hell, you don't even know if the tickets were outdated.