surprisingly not listed: writing blog posts
Vanity activities
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Vanity activities
#12I enjoyed the article. Many comments here on HN seem to be missing the point.
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.
Re: Vanity activities
#13Are we really shaming having hobbies now?
No, the author actually says: Acknowledge that they are hobbies.
Re: Vanity activities
#14I enjoyed the article. Many comments here on HN seem to be missing the point. The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself. If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves.…
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Re: Vanity activities
#15I have this debate with people about news and podcasts sometimes (news was one of the examples in TFA). People say they are doing it to remain informed, and it’s a high-value activity, but I argue it’s mostly entertainment since it rarely affects any decision-making. This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment. (To be clear…
I agree, but also the context matters. Reading news about sports is basically always entertainment, with an exception of maybe betting, to make better bets. Reading news about housing market can get me in a better position to buy my next home for cheaper, or strenghten my negotiation position.
Re: Vanity activities
#16Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees. Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet. What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?). From there, it follows that…
"Networking", in the abstract, can be good for finding a job. As they say, it's who you know not what you know.
That being said, industry networking events, like conferences and such, are almost not at all useful for that purpose. In my experience they're mostly used for B2B sales (which is a kind of networking, I guess).
Re: Vanity activities
#17Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees. Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet. What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?). From there, it follows that…
I feel like networking at events is valuable, but networking events are less so with some exceptions. You ideally want to bump into someone with a high value network, but most of the people going to networking events are going to the events because they don't have a high value network.
An exception would be mixers for interns and juniors; few people have a developed network at that point, so even those with a couple good contacts are interested in expanding, and there's a lot of potential.
Re: Vanity activities
#18Interesting thought. However, the author starts with “In business…”, then immediately goes on to shoehorn the idea to people. The logic tracks if your underlying assumption is that the core purpose of a human life is to “be productive” (sic generate profit).
Re: Vanity activities
#19To call reading the news “vanity” exposes the true vanity of this kind of post. What is the logic of assigning the word “vanity” to my interest to know what’s going on in the world? It’s vanity because I have no important decisions to make about the war in Ukraine, or the perfidy of my government? It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it. What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own…
The given definition of vain is "if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit)". I don't directly profit from reading the news, it's true. I'd have to make quite hand-wavy arguments about why it's beneficial. We can also list activities such as friendship, dreams, appreciating beauty, and feeling excited as non-profitable. Then there's having aspirations: what do we gain from that? Without goals, we could save a great deal of time and effort. Striving for profit, then, is a vain and non-profitable activity because of the unnecessariness of everything.
Re: Vanity activities
#20On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities". If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
I have a friend who calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that other people keep up to date".
There is some value in posting on LinkedIn, but the real value is that you can go back and find people who are weak connections when you are looking to hire, purchase services, or ask favors.
I think everyone should join LinkedIn and connect to every one of their colleagues that they would work with again. Then, once in a while, keep that connection alive by sending a message or commenting on a post.
It's a long game, but will pay dividends should you ever need to chat with them.