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The days are long but the decades are short

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#271

Post by peteretep »

jader201 wrote: post #19

"1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list." I would have worded this as: "Always put your family, friends, and significant other at the top on your priority list." Or, at the very least, "above work".

    > "Always put your family, friends, and significant other
    > at the top on your priority list." Or, at the very
    > least, "above work".
This is a sure-fire way to get stuck in a little town with a dead-end job and the same kids you went to high-school with.

Some people are important people to prioritize in your life, but just because they happen to be a friend, related, or you're dating them is not a reason to put them above your other priorities.

Answering "Where am I going?" and "Who am I going there with?" in the wrong order is a mistake.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#272

Post by peteretep »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #39
mikeg8 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an amazing father and grandfathers, all of whom I am close with. I've dreamed of being a father for many years (26M) and think I'll make a great one someday based on the examples I was fortunate enough to have. But I don't like the thought that as soon as you have a child, you instantly have to be defined by that. Is reproduction really the meaning to life? (Biologists say absolutely). And saying you don't hav…

Not reproduction: parenthood. Never mind how the kid got there; they are soon more important than everything you naïvely thought mattered. Not so much defined by that. Instead, motivated by entirely new impulses. Its not that you change your mind about success. Your mind changes, and that isn't a bad thing.

    > Your mind changes
Definitely!

    > and that isn't a bad thing
Not yet entirely convinced on that front.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#273

Post by malnourish »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #261
malnourish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner and I (heterosexual relationship) have both independently decided to not have children. Personally, I was raised at first with an abysmal parent, and then by a slightly-better-but-still-not-good parent. Never had money, homeless, abusive, etc. I don't want to have kids not because they left a bad taste in my mouth (I still love them: they were young, made a mistake, but still tried), but because I never go…

Children are actually a great way to experience what you missed in childhood.

Perhaps you are right, but I also want to experience what my parents never did.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#275

Post by dabernathy89 »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #170

A lot of the points can be boiled down to "work very hard". But what if you simply are the type of person who doesn't like working? Another point is do what makes you happy. For some lucky folks, work makes them happy, but there's a lot of us who don't like it. And no, it's not just a specific job. A lot of us are just kinda lazy to be perfectly honest. The things I enjoy most are running, eating fine meals, quality…

> A lot of us are just kinda lazy to be perfectly honest.

I'm glad i'm not the only one who feels this way sometimes.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#276

Post by bandrami »

willholloway wrote: post #202
astrocat wrote: post #68

> 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…

> 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 be right. We (humanity) are fixing this. Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone. The tools to create a new world have never been this cheap, and ther…

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 small) Indian state.

there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge.

I definitely agree with that, which is why it's hard for people who used to make a living transmitting knowledge. Oh, and a lot of the knowledge being given away so readily includes "how to violently undermine the global capital system that made this information dissemination possible".

There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly.

Were you working in 1998? I remember those days...

There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable.

I'm very lucky in that I get to use my talents for low-level programming to work on water purification systems. Mumbai has 10,000 deaths per annum (yes, 10,000) from waterborne illnesses, and it's probably the most developed city in India. But this isn't a problem that needs cleverness; it just needs a whole lot of people to do a very lot of hard, low-paid work. Water in particular gets loaded into the "entrepreneur" model all the time, but it doesn't really fit. You need a lot of people to build a lot of public pipes and faucets, and you need a social contract.

Gates has been asked why he doesn't work on the global digital divide and usually just says "Maslow", and I think he's got a point.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#277

Post by Thiz »

> ... but the decades are short

And there are only ten of them. Don't waste them.

If I could pick where to live my decades again this is what I'd do:

1st decade in South America. Learn to play and love your family.

2nd decade in Europe. Learn to study and admire art.

3rd decade in USA. Learn to make money.

4th decade in Australia. Learn to raise a family.

5th decade in Africa. Learn to love nature.

6th decade in Germany. Learn to philosophize.

7th decade in India. Learn to pray.

8th decade in the caribbean. Learn to enjoy life.

9th decade in an asylum. Learn to make friends for the last trip.

You won't make it to the tenth decade. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#279

Post by gregpilling »

jacquesm wrote: post #213
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not reproduction: parenthood. Never mind how the kid got there; they are soon more important than everything you naïvely thought mattered. Not so much defined by that. Instead, motivated by entirely new impulses. Its not that you change your mind about success. Your mind changes, and that isn't a bad thing.

If there is one thing that rammed that home it was sitting next to an incubator watching O2 levels and heartbeat of an early born infant. Re-alignment of priorities would be a very mild way to describe the feeling.

I agree. My son spent his first week in NICU, and 6 years later had a brain aneurism, and another brain surgery at 11 years. He is fine now. Work problems are pretty insignificant in comparison.

Re: The days are long but the decades are short

#280

Post by peteretep »

kamaal wrote: post #222
samsolomon wrote: post #3

Those of you on HN that are past the 30+ mark. What would you add to this list?

Start saving and investing as early as you can. If you haven't, do it on a war footing. Get rid of debt. The more you invest, the more you are likely to benefit over time. In fact you may be surprised more than anything else out there. In many cases, even more than careers, job, raises and promotions- investments play a very critical role in how well you are going to do financially.

    > Start saving and investing as early as you can. If you
    > haven't, do it on a war footing. Get rid of debt.
Yeah, maybe. My net positive worth went red about age 18, and stayed that way (sometimes drastically) until I was about 30, when I finally clawed my way back out of the debt hole.

The decisions I made, the things I learned, the rash choices I made, decisions to quit jobs and do something exciting when I couldn't afford it, randomly moving to another country without any kind of security net, dumb startups that I didn't have the savings to bootstrap properly, holidays I took that I couldn't afford, needing to execute on things because without it I wouldn't eat, starting (and then finishing) an expensive degree I couldn't afford, the partying I did...

I wouldn't change it for a thing. If I die tomorrow, I will have lived.

Those experiences are what have put me in the very solid earning position I'm in now. I save nearly 70% of what I earn, I've been out of debt and had solid savings for a while, and I have a great standard of living.

Leaving it all to Lady Luck and hoping that it works out OK in the end is obviously a risky strategy, but the idea that your 20s should be about scrimping and saving rather than getting out there and screwing stuff up is equally risky.

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