361–370 of 406 posts
You barely become a real adult at 30 (before you're just a "legal" adult) and there's a lot more experience needed to advise people about their lives.
Oh and fwiw, I'm 37 and still don't feel qualified to teach people about their lives.
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How do you measure that? My team just took tons of heat because there was a complex performance issue that needed our full attention. We clearly communicated that we would need a large chunk of time to solve it, and while we tried to stay responsive, a lot of stuff had to just get ignored for a while to be able to make any progress on it. We're finished now, and what we did will eventually save the client literally m…
One strategy is to consider establishing a success metric as the first step to every project. If you can't design a measurement for success/failure, maybe you shouldn't be doing that project.
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Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone. Really? I'm working in Mumbai right now (outsourcing has apparently gone dyslexic, as Russel Peters said). I'll be in rural Karnataka this week, and I'm pretty sure they'd disagree that learning the state of the art in any field is freely accessible to them. And there's 65 million people in that (relatively…
Thanks. Seeing my thought put into words by another person, some thousand miles away really is a gift. Our privileged perspectives so often cloud our ability to relate to people not that fortunate.
I disagree with the privilege narrative that's become dominant. It's completely zero-sum, when the history of privilege is one of it's extension to more groups and bigger portions of those groups.
In the future all humans will be as privileged as the humans of the west, and much more so. I'm concerned with how we can reach that place faster. Right now I think open source hardware on the reprap model is a fertile hunting ground for game changing solutions.
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> It is worth it, and anybody without kids who says otherwise knows not of which they speak. That's some gross generalization. Any childless bachelor could know what the "path" is like by staying over with a friend that has a child and helping out for some time. On the other hand, parents that walk the path and later find out they're not cut out for it, have to suffer quietly, and can't voice their true opinions, bec…
"That's some gross generalization. Any childless bachelor could know what the "path" is like by staying over with a friend that has a child and helping out for some time." Uh, no . Having children isn't like having a dog or being a part-time nanny or live-in tutor. It is a multi-decade commitment to raising another human being from infancy to adulthood with all of the frustrations and joys -- yes, joys -- that come a…
Also I didn't say (live-in tutor) == (being a parent). I said it's a way one can know what the path is like. Just like you can tell what the ocean is like by watching a movie of the ocean.
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I work at what the owners call a "15-year old startup" and they're very strict about being on time for the office hours. And the reasons you cite (in the shower, while commuting) are among the reasons they pay us salary. We're expected to work a small amount in the evenings and weekends as well as our 40 hours during the week. Our management uses the excuse "Well, it's the tech industry, we all work extra."
Wow that is somewhat surprising. I work at hedge fund, what one might consider a fairly stogy industry, and nobody cares when I come in to work, which is 9 or 10 usually.
I find this unremarkable. It's good advice for sure and most people would casually agree with it, but it's not consistent with what YC is doing nor preaching. That doesn't give the advice much weight in my opinion.
> On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about. And it’s hard to be totally happy/fulfilled in life if you don’t like what you do for your work I get that this is aimed at the startup crowd, but I've always felt that this sentiment is pretty privileged. We, the elite, get to cherry pick our work and do what we like. But I bet 9/10 people will never feel they have this luxury, and 8/10 will b…
A friend of mine once wrote something similar to your sentiments. May have been posted here in the past.
"I don’t like advice like “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Not because it isn’t true, but because it’s a monkey’s paw: it’s true under the right circumstances with the right people, and for everyone else, it’s just bad advice."
> Ask for what you want. That advice will land you in jail.
I guess you missed this.
It's funny how a 30 yo gives advices like he's an old (wise) man :-) You barely become a real adult at 30 (before you're just a "legal" adult) and there's a lot more experience needed to advise people about their lives. Oh and fwiw, I'm 37 and still don't feel qualified to teach people about their lives.
I'm 40+ and find his advice quite good and spot on. Reading and thinking on such matters, and hanging around with wise man (he surely does) will make you grow wiser faster. I don't think there's a speed limit on anything if we're talking about humans. There will always be high achievers like Sam, his career shows it. I learned not to ignore them regardless of age and feel good about it.