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Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
581–590 of 839 posts
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#582A famous golfer once scored a hole-in-one after not playing tournaments for some time, only focusing on training.
A reported asked "Surely that was luck? You cannot train for a hole-in-one reliably."
To which the golfer answered: "Yes. But the more I train, the luckier I get."
That has stayed with me. Whenever I complained about bad luck (at least in my internal monologue), I started wondering what would have happened if I had trained more, be better prepared etc. Really helped me to shift a bit towards growth mindset.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#583From my father: No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid. He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself but stil…
Nick Carraway, is that you?
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#5841. That getting good at something can sometimes be quick; if you have the right background. But when it's not quick - that doesn't mean you can't get good. It simply means it's a process. Experiencing the part where I'm bad at something as simply the "beginning of a progress bar" and knowing it's going somewhere, and that practice is necessary allows me to persevere and not experience frustration or a feeling of inadequacy.
I would tell this (along with a real life story to match about myself) to my employees whenever they got discouraged. As a team lead, I would often do the same work they did, so they compared themselves to me, thinking something should be easy for them just because it's easy for me at this point in time. I would tell them it's not a fair comparison to make - I have several years of additional experience doing this compared to you, and I've done this a thousand times, while they're doing this the first time. Of course it appears easier to me - I've had practice, and that's all the difference between them and me, not intelligence or some other trait they have no direct effect on.
2. Evaluating my own and others' ideas through a set of explicit criteria (asking yourself "what does the solution to this problem need to solve in order to be considered adequate?") keeps me from falling in love with my ideas or solutions to problems. For example, my specific implementation for some software might look good to me. If someone else shows up with a different solution (e.g. during code review), then those criteria are the questions I need to ask them to verify that it is indeed a better solution, and that it doesn't overshoot what's needed. If it is better by those criteria, then there's no reason not to toss my idea aside and use theirs.
Of course, this concept also applies to the criteria themselves - someone else might convince me that my criteria are wrong, by noting that some of them are not explained by a greater goal (such as the larger task at hand -- the company's mission, turning a profit, etc.), and so on.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#585As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea, someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it, etc.
As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing) You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the optimal way for anything: dating, starting companies, creating products, learning something new, investing, ... .
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#586A decade of success against steep odds later, I ran into the high school teacher who I idolized and who helped me actually achieve something. Most teachers tolerated me or insulated the rest of the classroom from me. But he put in the effort to get me engaged with something that got me to sit down and try. I was excited to show him what his work had helped me accomplish. He had two things to share with me: 1. He does…
I've had a similar experience with a professor. We used to chat about more advanced topics after class and he seemed really happy that I took an interest in his subject.
Some years ago I was giving a recruitment talk at the university and I bumped into that teacher. I greeted him like an old friend. He said "Oh, you were in my class?" as he hurried off. It hurt and I felt so silly for it.
On the other hand, I've had elementary school teachers approach me with a smile while I was in my late twenties.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#587My opinions are not mine and they are holding me back. Give multiple and opposing views equal respect and disdain at the same time. Treating a thought as your own, as an opinion "you hold" greatly holds you back from a great deal of valuable perspective. Of course you surely hold some world-view and gauge things from that position but try to cultivate more of these positions as if you were someone else. Don't get you…
I like the related Marc Andreesen model, have strong opinions, weakly held. To get anywhere new requires some degree of (probably misplaced) confidence in what you're doing. The key is balancing that with the ability to apply new information to your model, possibly even doing a 180 on what you believed was true.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however that is defined). It is not fluent. Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so. However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist Swe…
One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people who are well fed and privileged and so forth. Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your…
When I say IQ I mean the number gotten to through something like WAIS or WISC (which start becoming unreliable above 130. It is almost as if it is hard to standardise a test for the 99.3rd percentile... :) ) Not the crap used most places. The only environment I know WISC from is cognitive disabilities testing in school, where it is used for two things: check whether someone has legal right to extra support and as a tool to understand what kind of extra help a student needs even if there is no legal requirement for extra support.
I find the whole selection through IQ that you describe dubious at best, and I seriously doubt the usefulness of it. It is a good predictor, but not that good.
However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20 years before that.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#589All culture is a lie which only persists through re-telling.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#590Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…
I didn't see anyone posting this, which is in my opinion the best essay on PG's site: