The Anatomy of Determination | Hacker News Reader

The Anatomy of Determination

5 pointsCaiGengYang4 comments

So I am reading Paul Graham's essay "The Anatomy of Determination" ---http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html and wanted to discuss it here.

I consider myself a fairly intelligent person but seriously lacking in determination, causing me to drop out of college 3 times in USA and getting my visa denied the last time I reapplied back about 3 years ago.

Is there any way to slowly become more determined ?

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"Know thyself" is the advice that I've followed. When you're younger you tend to have identities and opinions that are like what you were indoctrinated into, and those things are not necessarily you. And so most people are - to some degree - acting out a role, rather than being it, and that saps away ability to pursue anything genuinely. But so long as you still believe the things that aren't you, you aren't questioning that - you wonder instead "why everything sucks," you have trouble taking things seriously, you wonder how other people seem to get on so much better, and so on. It is a discomfort that is near the higher stages of Maslow's hierarchy, because it requires careful examination of your personality and limitations.

But if you go back and question all of your choices, everything you think you are, then you may make a lot of progress very quickly. That may lead you far away from the goals and identities you have now, or it may give you a slight course correction.

Edit: And high intelligence is in some ways a hindrance to this exploration because it improves your abilities at self-deceit.

Exactly, high intelligence isn't neccessarily a crucial ingredient in starting a successful startup. As Paul Graham mentioned : "There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing."

He also mentioned that : "Indeed, if you want to create the most wealth, the way to do it is to focus more on their needs than your interests, and make up the difference with determination."

After reading this particular paragraph, I scratched my head to think of something I could build that users would love and came upon this idea : I realised that alot of people like to share pictures,videos and images with their friends and family.

Thus I want to create a well-designed image/video/picture sharing app that users would love. How do you suggest I go about doing this and what technologies would be best to create such a site ?

Thanks alot !

GengYang

I would not suggest you do that. There are a plethora of services that you've described. What will differentiate yours?

I got this idea from the YCombinator RFS list :

http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

There's also a new updated list : http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

I am just fishing for ideas and suggestions because I want to get to work on one of these ideas by building a prototype and getting users to test it.

Just wanted to post these ideas here to get some feedback and discussion so I can settle down on 1 idea to work on ...

I suffer from chronic indecisiveness and find it hard to decide alone, so I am posting these ideas here to get some feedback and discussion on what might be the best one to work on that can potentially get many users to love it ...

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