121–130 of 226 posts
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> You can direct all your efforts to bending cutlery, but you're not going to make a good living out of it. You're just not. It's like you're specifically trying to undermine yourself. You never heard of Uri Geller?
Yes, and not because he directed all his efforts to bending cutlery. His efforts were directed at creating the illusion of bending cutlery and marketing himself (and mostly the latter). Quite a difference.
Phrases like, "The myth of burn out" and "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early" give me great pause. Burn out is real . It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster. Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]: "So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and c…
I agree it's real, but I also agree people use it as a cop-out. I definitely don't see it happening over a short timeframe at a normal job. Only time I got any real burnout, was for my capstone at Uni. I had been working around the clock (up to 80hr weeks) for three months solid. Sidenote, It was actually kind of a cool experiment. I knew I would burn out; I also knew it was worth it (being my capstone). So I got the…
Basically, if you are passionate about something you can set goals based on that, and the hard and boring work that is part of getting to the goal is overcome by the passion of getting to the goal. As an interesting example, look at people who play storyline video games to the end, versus ones that stop before finishing. People who are invested (a form of passion) in how the game ends, slog through the boring parts to get there. People who aren't invested get turned off by the boring part and stop. The same thing is true with movies and books. If you care about how they are going to turn out, you sit through the 'slow' parts, if you don't care, you don't.
I found the call to action at the end "Sign up for info on my super secret project that will turn you from Lazy Bum to Execution Machine!" really jarring as well. If you conflate passion and lazyness and rationalization then how can you make something effective?
When people tell me they can't stick to a project they just wander off into other things. I try to figure out if there are things where that doesn't occur. You know, the kind of person who says "I've got ADHD that is why I just played this video game for 4 hours straight." And you ask the obvious question, "Were you giving it your full attention?"
I don't doubt for a moment that folks will rationalize their drop in productivity as burn out sometimes, but it is dangerous to go from there to saying something like "burn out is a myth." One does not imply the other.
I discoverd that i prefer to work a little less hard doing things at my own speed, even if i don't develop my "full potential".
This is such crap when the real estate market was good I made more money per year watching my apartment appreciate than by working my ass off. Perhaps in some existential sense of 'worth' this is true, but in terms of making piles of cash, definitely not.
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> This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work. Several years ago, I almost did the same thing with my infant daughter. Put her car seat in the back seat. Got in. Started driving. On auto-pilot started heading towards the office. It was only when she happened to make a sound (she o…
Seems like an opportunity for an app (disclaimer: obviously did not do my due diligence and google if there was one first. T minus X seconds in counting until the first 'there already is one' post).
I feel sorry for the author of this post - he actually believes hard, boring work is the only way to accomplish anything. I've done both hard, boring work, and easy, efficient and enjoyable work. The easy work was both more enjoyable, more profitable and far better for my life as a whole. Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for acco…
Seriously. This article is just useless flamebait, unworthy even of the slightest praise. It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes…
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> If you think you can improve your life, work better, with more fun, with more meaning, with better challenges, then by all means go for it. Sure, but what if that is to the expense of others? The widening wealth gap seems to suggest so.
Taking advantage of an opportunity while somewhere someone doesn't have as many opportunities as yesterday does not necessarily translate to "you took their opportunity". In what sense is getting yours "at the expense of others" unless you have achieved it by deceit, fraud, or force? If you're referring to general technologically driven unemployment, then yes in a very broad sense programmers do profit at the expense…
I agree with what the author is saying, however, I think that the overall message of sticking with something, and not leaving when you encounter the first sign of monotony is applicable to software engineering more specifically than the author describes. I will provide an anecdote from my career to illustrate what I mean. I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked o…
This post assumes that there is a single criterion for success that is universal to all people, and that those who move "haphazardly" between pursuits will fail to meet this criterion.
The truth is that some people are maximizers who define success through things like financial achievement, and some people are satisficers for whom success is truly getting to work on things you love every day.
I do agree that this generation (myself included?) is much too willing to give up on something that is getting boring / tiresome in favor of something new, when continuing on the original path would have in fact made them successful shortly. The only project I've stuck with for > 4 years in my entire life is paying off, largely because of my team's dogged pursuit of the same goal, even when things got tiresome.