Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

jeremyeder.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 154 posts

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#91

Post by cortesoft »

frogpelt wrote: post #83
cortesoft wrote: post #26

Oh man this is such a perfect example of productivity porn. Every action you take isn’t a vote for the type of person you wish to become, it is a vote taken by the person you are. I hate this mindset of “I am constantly working towards becoming someone else”. When do we spend time as the person we are? When do we enjoy the fruits of our labor? I feel like some people who take this mindset see their lives as being two…

Your reaction is a somewhat natural push back against the prevalent idea of selling people on things they don't yet have. But you probably need to temper your reaction. Surely you would expect someone to work on improving themselves. That's what education is. That's how people develop skills. James Clear in Atomic Habits is definitely not just talking about productivity. He's talking about your health and fitness and…

Yes, I agree with this. I think a good life is finding that balance; how much of yourself goes into production, how much into consumption. How much do your push yourself to be better, and how much do you accept and live with your flaws? How much do you invest for the future verse consume in the present? Too much either direction will lead to a bad life.

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#92

Post by Jaygles »

mcguire wrote: post #44

Ok, so let's see here. 1. Got a meaningless certificate. Also expanded his "wildly successful business leaders" network. 2. Added people to a project in order to get it completed faster. (The ghost of Fred Brooks is making it hard to type here now.) 3. Proposed re-orging Red Hat engineering. 4. Had a meeting. 5. Wrote strategy doccies. 6. Mentoring. (1 out of 7 isn't bad.) 7. Had a meeting about advertising copy. I'm…

Fred Brooks is still around I believe

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#93

Post by p_j_w »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #28
nicbou wrote: post #15

This kind of content is better suited for LinkedIn. I'm not a machine. I need rest and recreation to function properly. I sometimes get sick or sleep poorly. I sometimes get bursts of inspiration. There's no telling what condition I'll be working with on a given day. But perhaps you're right. Perhaps I'm casting my vote against being some sigma grindset, 4 AM cold showers, audiobooks at 3X speed kind of guy. The othe…

Why would this perspective not be compatible with rest and relaxation?

Did you see the list of what the guy did? At no point did he include rest and relaxation. He's clearly fetishizing productivity.

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#94

Post by s1artibartfast »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #47
cortesoft wrote: post #26

Oh man this is such a perfect example of productivity porn. Every action you take isn’t a vote for the type of person you wish to become, it is a vote taken by the person you are. I hate this mindset of “I am constantly working towards becoming someone else”. When do we spend time as the person we are? When do we enjoy the fruits of our labor? I feel like some people who take this mindset see their lives as being two…

> Every action you take isn’t a vote for the type of person you wish to become, it is a vote taken by the person you are. This is patently false. If you start smoking cigarettes occasionally and start doing it more, you are becoming more of a smoker. The actions you take or don't take are the clearest input to the person you become. It's true that this is also the person you are, but that distinction seems meaningles…

>It's true that this is also the person you are, but that distinction seems meaningless if you're trying to become someone better (whatever better means to you)

Do, or do not. There is no try.

This is a meaningful distinction, even if it is a nuanced one. There's a profound difference between focusing on who you want to be tomorrow versus who you want to be today.

One mindset takes you out of the present and is an act of self denial. The other embraces the present and affirms positive self identity.

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#95

Post by upupandup »

aeternum wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #26

Oh man this is such a perfect example of productivity porn. Every action you take isn’t a vote for the type of person you wish to become, it is a vote taken by the person you are. I hate this mindset of “I am constantly working towards becoming someone else”. When do we spend time as the person we are? When do we enjoy the fruits of our labor? I feel like some people who take this mindset see their lives as being two…

By posting this, you are becoming a person that enjoys life and is unlikely to get burnt out.

by posting on HN, you are becoming a person that spends time posting on HN

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#96

Post by karaterobot »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #89
karaterobot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is patently false. If you start smoking cigarettes occasionally and start doing it more, you are becoming more of a smoker. The actions you take or don't take are the clearest input to the person you become. It's true that this is also the person you are, but that distinction seems meaningless if you're trying to become someone better (whatever better means to you). I don't know about 'patently false': it's li…

It is a false dichotomy. Every action you take today is a vote by the you who exists right now. Every action you take today does build the history of the person you are tomorrow. It is not one or the other, but both.

Describing any action as a vote about your future identity is a way of thinking about the world. It makes sense within the particular framework this article is presenting, but it is not a universally held belief, and it's not self-evidently true. It's a metaphor.

Here's an example: if you choose not a rob a bank 10,000 times, that's 10,000 votes for not being a bank robber. Then if you choose to rob a bank just one time, you're suddenly a bank robber. 10,000 to 1, the number of votes doesn't actually matter.

That's a silly example, but what it means is that your identity isn't always the result of a bunch of small decisions. Often there's just one "vote", and that is the decision you make, the action you take.

One objection to this may be "but being a bank robber isn't who you are, it's just something you did." If so, I wonder how to square that with the example of becoming more of a smoker by smoking more cigarettes? Can I vote not to be a smoker, even if I smoke a lot of cigarettes? Or to be less of a smoker by smoking more cigarettes? That doesn't make sense to me.

Anyway, hope this clarifies my objection: "actions are votes about who you will become" is a metaphorical explanation, not a literal one, so that comment way upthread is not patently false in my opinion, even if it's arguable.

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#97

Post by mattgreenrocks »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #58

I don’t have a comment on the article. But if I was the author, it would be pretty rough reading the comments here. I guess it’s worth remembering that for every blog post out there that perhaps we don’t like, there are a million that are never written in the first place for fear of being exposed to criticism. So maybe there is virtue in just having the courage to put yourself out there and invite the world to cast t…

I don’t disagree with some of the comments here, but they fall into the “doesn’t need to be said” bucket for me.

Yeah, I can’t say I’ve done as much as this guy, but the quote is helpful in framing small actions when building toward habits.

Re: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become

#99

Post by mattgreenrocks »

kodah wrote: post #24

I feel like the author is moralizing something in order to make it more gratifying . > firm believer that structure dictates behavior So every action you take is a vote and structure dictates your behavior. This sounds oddly familiar.

This is insightful.

Would the author do these things absent the post-hoc moralizing?

Maybe we are seeing what it looks like when we concoct narratives to order our life, and it hits a bit too close to home. After all, how coincidental is it that the thing that brings ultimate fulfillment (career) is also the thing that we’ve been told all our life to put so much into.

Post reply on HN