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Stop Acting Like You're Famous

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Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#61

Post by loup-vaillant »

watwut wrote: post #58
asta123 wrote: post #47

My son put effort into dressing up for his Year 10 formal as that is what you do. But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others, and thought he should have spent a lot less effort into his outfit :)

> But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others Genuinely, that is good. People who care and judge how others look beyond normal social propriety tend to be pretty bad to be around.

Or that's bad, because all those kids who spent time looking good, didn't get as many compliments for their effort than they expected, or perhaps even deserved.

There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.

(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#62

Post by trueismywork »

Even Terence Tao advises mathematicians to develop their own personal style when writing mathematics. Your own personal style, based on your experiences, is what makes you unique and hence might make you famous.

You might not become famous by developing your own style but you'll definitely not be you if you don't.

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#65

Post by keiferski »

I haven’t studied the topic enough, but it would be very interesting to see when this dichotomy of money-making vs. self-interest really embedded itself into the act of creation. Somewhere during the Industrial Revolution, I suppose. But I also think the default mode of “art as self expression” plays a big part, and that’s more early-mid 20th century.

Because when you read about creators during say, the Renaissance, you don’t really have this much of a dichotomy. Da Vinci worked on a paid portrait project, and then did unpaid experiments on his own which ended up being useful for his paid projects. It was a very loop-like thing and I think he would find the explicit framing of “I’m doing this to make money” and “I’m doing this purely to create something I want to create” as alien. Ditto for most forms of art in most parts of the world, prior to the late 19th century.

The solution, I think, might be to focus primarily on the craft and not on the end product. You see this a lot with early 20th century fiction writers that moved in and out of journalism, with the idea that they were becoming better at the craft of writing, not at creating a final product or “being a good fiction writer.”

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#66

Post by prmoustache »

pat64 wrote: post #17

I’m going to hard disagree with this. A lot of the enjoyment I get from creation is the process of others enjoying what I’ve built. Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.

Apparently you skipped that one: "Advice for myself around leisure activities."

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#67

Post by prmoustache »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #7
peddling-brink wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I read “personal style” was, don’t make it your whole personality. And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism. For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.

But the second you want to make things for anyone else is when UI/UX matters. Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.

There are myriad of software that have been super popular despite having dodgy UI. But the whole point is not to care if your app is popular or not if the whole point is enjoying the process of building the app more than seeing it used by many.

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#68

Post by keiferski »

Hackbraten wrote: post #35
sph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defiantly do not want to see people's typos move the language forward, especially when it's native speakers always making the same silly mistakes, for some reason (could of, they're/their, your's, etc.). I do like non-native speakers translating and incorporating their local sayings into English prose.

If enough people are making the same mistake, won't it eventually stop being a mistake?

If everyone started putting ketchup into their coffee, would that make it a good thing?

Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#69

Post by prmoustache »

VelesDude wrote: post #11

For there to be famous people, there has to be non famous people. In the same way that up needs down, black needs white. A figure I saw once was based on "do they have a Wikipedia page" as counting as famous. And the ratio was something like 50,000:1 relative to the population. Would you bet your lives actions on a 50,000 to 1 chance? And even then do you think it would be possitive? Sometimes fame is the worst thing…

I would totally hate being famous.

Re: Stop Acting Like You're Famous

#70

Post by Aromasin »

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #31
Aromasin wrote: post #16

> The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work. I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. It implies several things that aren't true: * That a hobby done fo…

And after a while, your hobby if physical will take space for things that are done, and that you don't need anymore. So why not resell them and fund the next steps ?

You raise another good point; is all monetization of a hobby the same? No, of course not. It's such a blanket statement to say "Save the money-making schemes for work".

Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.

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