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Comment by unclesaamm | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and his advice to his kids (paraphrased): I don't care what you do, as long as you do it every day for the rest of your life.

I think one of the main thing this advice misses is that if you're doing a "lean startup" then you could very well end up doing something different than what you started. It's hard to know what exactly the continuation will be in what you do.

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An equally 'deep' advice could be: I don't care what you do, as long as you don't do it for the rest of your life.

Yeah, there are two ways to find value in your life's work. One is to continually perfect your craft (Jiro), which means dedicating yourself to primarily one skill/career/industry. The other is to continually diversify your skill set by trying new things and experiencing the breadth of activities life has to offer. I don't think you can say one is more meaningful than the other, but it does seem that they are mutually exclusive.

One could argue that some paths are impossible to reach without diversification of skills.

Lean Startup is also based on consistency, except that what you do is not defining the kind of task as such. What you do is to keep learning, listen to your users and push the company into directions according to those insights. That's your One Task, even if it might encompass a lot of different subtasks.

It's unlikely that this interpretation corresponds to what Jiro meant, since it essentially tells you to practice being an opportunist every day, rather than to practice a more narrowly defined occupation in greater depth. But it's one way to accept both pieces of advice without disagreeing with either :P

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