Live data from Hacker News

Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

experimentalhistory.substack.com

11–20 of 361 posts

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#11
post #4

As a Frenchman, it took me a while to realize it was supposed to mean "a painful thing to do"

Yeah me too! My first thought was, but frogs are... delicious? What is he even talking about?

That said, I was very surprised by the quality of the article, and the writing. I was expecting yet another bucket of self-help motivating bullshit and it's the opposite of that! And also quite funny.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#15

Well, I think people have big aspirations, and these typically are achievable with lots of money, and people think you have to 'eat frogs' to make that money.

That’s of course totally culture-specific, and the entire point of the article is that people should be thinking more about whether their aspirations are in fact their own or are they just having goals they think they’re supposed to have, and wondering why they feel sort of empty inside.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#17

Who cares about all this? The work or not work is not an end. It's a means to an objective. I want to move the world closer to what I want it to be. I have a theory for what I need to do for that and it's going to take work. Out there I'm sure is my antipode, someone who is taking a different path to the same objective. I'll let them do that way and I'll do this way and let whatever works work. But for me it's hard w…

Good for you. But you’re definitely generalizing from a single datapoint if you think people in general have very well-defined long-term goals beyond "what my society tells me I’m supposed to be doing". Why work towards goals that aren’t worth the pain of getting there?

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#19
Kind of makes you think what's more important: the ability to do things you want to do, or the ability to not do the things you don't want to do... people do seem to give up on the latter one quite a lot in order to get the first one and then realize the trade-off they've made may have been somewhat non-optimal way too late to be able change it.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#20
That's one of the best things that HN has ever sent me. I especially liked this penultimate paragraph:

"I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."

I love the last bit: "..so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."

Post reply on HN