Craftsmanship – The Alternative to the Four Hour Work Week Mindset (2018)

- the “grow huge or go home” startup is one path, but not the only path. Looking around your own city will make it obvious that smaller profitable businesses that provide goods or services do exist in this world and are a perfectly reasonable way to make money. I, personally, am perfectly happy to be involved in a business that makes a consistent healthy profit, rather than being perpetually in the red, chasing hockey stick growth.

- putting time/money into things that will pay consistent dividends is huge leverage. In your case, you put time into your product upfront and are now reaping those dividends. You don’t say explicitly whether you built it yourself or hired someone to do it, but either way... over a decade, you either invested time or money into it to turn it into a dividend-generating machine

- in a lot of ways, the ultimate goal for a business is to turn into something that can continue to run without the owner/founder’s involvement at all. It may not get 100% there while the owner is still around, but if the business isn’t something that can eventually be sold and managed by someone else, it’s more a job than a business, and when the owner retires, the business disappears too.

For me, your model of a lifestyle business is beautiful, but it’s significantly different than the 4 Hour Work Week model of a lifestyle business. Those two end up getting lumped together and depending on which model people are thinking about when they read “lifestyle business”, they have significantly different reactions. My own reactions:

- “I spent 10 years building a SaaS product that makes me enough money to go rock climbing all the time”: AWESOME! Nicely done! That is fantastic!

- “I spent a few months tracking down suppliers on AliExpress that can dropship cheap sunglasses. This makes enough money to go rock climbing all the time”: Urgh... well... hopefully that works out well for you long term I guess.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Submissions and comments play different roles. Submissions provide topics for conversation. Once enough time has gone by—on HN, about a year—the cache is considered clear and the floor is open for a fresh conversation on that topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Please don't teach people how to self-censor.

You could say that about any rule that asks users to do one thing rather than another. I think most people here would support "please don't copy/paste into the threads" as serving the overall quality of the forum rather than seeing it as a censorship issue. This is the sort of case where it's probably good to have a rule, since the thing we want to avoid is having copy/pasting become common.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

On top of that, I wonder at which point does planned obsolescence and lack of quality becomes the broken window fallacy? What's a difference between a glazier's son running around and breaking windows, and the glazier installing a delayed-action chemical that cracks windows months after installation? What's the difference between either of that and designing products to fall apart sooner and sooner?

> Outside of a few cases you can still buy the watch that will last 60 years or the amp that will last 20.

Perhaps from artisans. I don't trust you can buy such things at any premium brands. There is every incentive to cheat, charge premium prices while still cutting corners on quality, and pocketing the difference. People eventually wise up to that, but that takes a lot of time, so it's reliable only with niche products.

And I totally see a scenario where copy paste makes sense. Maybe the person wanted to have a discussion about their idea and there wasn't enough engagement (for whatever reason) previously. Repeating (and copy-pasting) the same idea with the hope that this time it gets discussion and cleared up seems totally fine.

Even in real life people do totally repeat themselves.

Anyhoo, you seem to be some sort of admin, so I guess this is important for you folks.

My 2c.

Having cheap (and therefore widely available) products that are hard to repair and may have short lifespans is generally desirable in my opinion, even though there are some ecological and worker rights issues.

We should be wary when we discuss what a premium brand is. Artificial brand tiers have led us to treat many mass market craptastic companies as "premium" despite them not knowing quality if it smacked them. Bose is an example of this - mass availability at a markup under the guise of a premium brand. But very few audio productions would depend on Bose products because they barely last in any kind of harsh environment.