Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?

Producing a happiness revolution would be the most productive thing I can imagine and being happy is a good first step.

Is that tendency toward idleness punctuated with productive spurts actually a weakness? I would hold that it is actually the appropriate situation in many respects, and that our society simply hasn't adapted to account for it yet. One of the only physical characteristics that humans have going for them compared to other animals is their physical endurance. We're built for long stretches of physical work. We are not, however, built for long stretches of intellectual work. Economically speaking it also makes sense. While a worker performing physical tasks establishes a level of productivity and remains mostly constant, an intellectual worker multiplies the productivity of others tremendously. They change the nature of the work being done. Economically, at least in a capitalist system, this is supposed to result in those intellectual workers seeing their compensation rise tremendously as well - providing them with the resources to take long breaks allowing them time for contemplation, improvement of their skills, etc. Were it not for the illegal actions of major tech companies early in the growth of the software field, we might see compensation related to the value intellectual workers produce. As it is, they set the standards for what such workers should be paid and divorced it completely from the value of the work being performed.

This has happened before, back during the Industrial Revolution. Factories and mechanical automation enabled workers to leap in productivity over their craftsmen predecessors, and factory owners divorced their compensation from the value of the work. Eventually, whole families had to work extremely long hours 6 or 7 days a week just to be able to afford to eat. Society let this happen because they saw the workers as not deserving of a share of the value they were creating because 'a machine was really doing the work and the owner paid for the machine'. Things eventually reached a breaking point and society forced factory owners to pay a single person enough to raise an entire family on for 40 hours of work in a week. This was a monumental change. Whereas previously about 3 incomes with each working 60+ hours a week was necessary to raise a family, 1 income from 40 hours reaching the same amount was not a minor adjustment.

Social change takes time. Mental workers being a large group is really quite new, and society hasn't yet figured out how to handle them best. They're trying to just treat them the same as physical workers, which will inevitably fail simply because the human brain is not built for decades of constant mental work.

It's not about comparing yourself to others. He's not saying "My kids are the best thing anybody has ever done." It's kind of like training for a marathon, in a way that they aren't quite the same, but let's go with it. You train hard and often, you spend hours and hours on just preparing for it, and when the race comes you suffer, push yourself, sweat and bleed, and finish. 1000th place! But you still feel great, you still feel accomplishment, it's a heady feeling.

You can say "So what, all you did was run 26 miles, lots of people do that, some even run hundreds, or walk cross country, what you did isn't that special."

Well, yeah, it's not, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel good to look at your accomplishments and feel awe that you completed it.

It's like that with kids. You pass off the whole raising them with "feed, burp, clothe, ship 'em off to be educated by someone else" which is just sad and insulting. You gloss over the sleep deprivation, the worry that wake you up in the middle of the night, the laughter and tears of the kids, and parents teach kids more than you give them credit for.

It sounds like the problem you have is with your ego. You're portraying yourself as someone you aren't, or someone you haven't become yet.

Your ego is handicapping you from doing anything. Throw it away. Stop comparing yourself to others. And just work and be the best you can be.

"But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen."

Unfortunately that's not true. People will the lottery every week. In business that happens too. Look at all the well funded startups which never amount to anything, and factor in the prestige, earnings and opportunity those companies afford their participants. Plenty of people are early employees of hot startups simply via friendships and connections. Many of them leave or are fired. Many of those people become vastly wealthy.

Moreover look at all the one-hit wonders and luck is an even greater factor. If people who are smart, talented and able can reproduce their success why are they so rare? When someone never manages to get close to their initial success lack is often in play. It's not that they weren't clever, or didn't work hard, but it can be that luck picked them from a field of very similar people.

That shouldn't of course change your behavior. Luck is beyond our locus of control and planning for it, or around it, is like planning around a potential meteorite strike, or rain.

Anything you can force via effort isn't luck which is why people get confused. You can achieve against the odds via hard work alone which is why working hard is worthwhile.

You can also scale your success. The difference between making a living, making a million and being Mark Zuckerberg can all be attracted to work and wit without the need to factor luck into the equation at all.

Finally we're all focused on good-luck. Bad luck is the real enemy. To be diagnosed with a serious illness, or to be unable to take an opportunity due to factors you cannot effect will cut the legs out from underneath you however hard you work. Sometimes your good luck is invisible unless you're aware of the bad luck of those who'd otherwise take your place.