Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?
It doesn't matter that you know what you have to do, eat well, do exercise, how to prioritize, what's good for you and what's not.
Unless you steer your emotions in the right direction, you won't be able to achieve anything, because resistance and stregth of will won't get you very far.
And changing your emotions is really hard, because they're mostly formed in your youth, and doing so need a systematic approach, consistency, and strengh of will... and that's precislesly what you lack; a vicious cycle.
Strong feelings are typically a sign of a strong desire or fear of something.
"Why does this bother me so much? It's not that big a deal. Oh, because I really want..."
Knowing what I really want makes it easier to take action to get it, especially when the feelings are getting in the way of the goal. (Bad feelings and the fear of bad feelings are often obstacles to making things better.)
This is a exaggeration of course, but I've been struck by just how many sticky problems have an emotional component.
I have a tendency to ignore emotions in favor of (what seems to me like) the main content, but I limit myself when I do this.
Enthusiasm, despair, excitement, fear - these are too powerful to ignore. But naming them and uncovering the deeper values they reveal helps me make better decisions.
For example, I value minimalism and getting rid of junk but routinely put off doing any decluttering.
I realized that what I call "decluttering" is really better termed "making difficult decisions about my identity."
To get rid of <hobby supplies> that I never use involves confronting the fact that I'm not a <hobby> person. It's painful to realize that I'm not who I wish I was.
Getting rid of something I spent a lot of money on reveals that I wasted the money. I'm not as wise and frugal as I wish I was.
I put off minimalism because I don't have to feel those bad feelings if I don't force myself to evaluate and make the decisions.
And this scenario plays out in a lot of different areas of my life.
I don't take action toward a goal because I don't want to get excited and then fail and have to face the disappointment. Easier to coast along content with the status quo.
My solution to these feelings is to remind myself that my hobbies don't define me, whether I do them a little or a lot. And it's OK to save some unused stuff until a season when I can use them. (Assuming that's not too far off.,)
But coming to terms with the fact that I don't have that kind of time in my life right now is hard, even though it's my own choice to prioritize other stuff. We're putting extra time into work right now with the goal of early retirement within the decade. This fact combined with the number of small children in the house means time-consuming hobbies with lots of small pieces are off the table for the next few years. I'm definitely looking forward to coming back to it in the future though!
I think the sacrifice is worth it but it's still a sacrifice. Usually I'm caught up in the busyness of life and don't think about it, but spending time on big-picture stuff like minimalism really brings the feelings to the surface. So no wonder I keep putting it off!
See George Lakoff’s work on cognition and decision making.
So rather than just facts, you have networks of facts and experiences that need to connect for things to make sense and you to truely know something.
Currently, it's rendered in gray font, and it has five answers.
I think it's the sort of question that's annoying to think about. It's not a complex technical question with a clearly defined answer you can look up on Wikipedia. It's not even obvious where you should start if you wanted to answer.
There is plenty of boring advice out there, but dispensing advice doesn't reliably help people. And yet, it feels like it should. Well-meaning people keep writing more of it.
Can we improve that?
How do you measure advice? Track compliance? Subjective ranking? Score outcomes?
I feel like there's plenty of science we're not doing, data we're not taking, that's applicable even to simple questions like "how do I make my advice more helpful", "what makes people not stick with it", "does following boring advice actually improve outcomes"
It's not particularly expensive to measure these problems. They could have a high impact, multiplied by a whole lot of people.
I'm not sure why the response today was to hide the question.
Sometimes it's obvious: they (or I) posted on the political/politicized intersections of a subject. Downvotes are likely a mix of people who are aggressively opposed to the apparent tilt of the comment and people who are ideologically opposed to anything they see as politics.
Most times, it's no different from any comment I've made that merely sat at 1.
I think there must have been an influx of people in the last half year or so who are more prone to downvote or flag something they disagree with or just don't like. Only someone with access to the vote database could run a more objective analysis, but my anecdotal impression is that HN is getting more downvotey.
A low stress, high joy life is preferable to these Really Famous Names we could drop.
Sure, they may go on rocket rides, but do they know any peace?
Maybe.
There is certainly a price to pay for greatness, and some are willing to give it a shot. It seems so condescending to look down on poor them, not knowing peace when perhaps that is not the thing they are searching for.
Possibly they do.
It's not known to me either way.
Clearly I'm skeptical of whether materialism can deliver peace, and clearly I'm saying peace is worthy of pursuit, but falling just short of judging others' level of peace achieved is prudent.
Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older.
Western traditions will eventually catch up.
"talk to your users" brings "you can't make the decisions" with it. Tech people love to talk about "lusers" and deride anyone who thinks differently as dumb sheep. If your users want the Office Ribbon and you hate it, are you going to build it? If your users hate the command line options are you going to change it or sneer at them to go back to babyworld and stop wasting your time?
"keep typing and don't die" means keep working when it gets hard, boring, goes wrong, feels unrewarding, competitors show up, people quit, your market dissipates, people are jeering at you and telling you it won't work, when your money is running low or your debtors are banging on the door, or you need to do a pile of admin paperwork, when you doubt yourself. "keep going" might be boring, that doesn't mean it's easy.
(cough) selection bias, lots of people want things for free, lots of people don't know what they want and just want a chat, lots of people grind for a long time and still get nowhere - consider how many other investors there have been over the past 70 years who tried as hard as Buffet and didn't become him because they didn't read the same things, come to the same conclusions, think the same way, have the same patience, or hit the same companies to invest in at good times, or were forced out for other reasons.
Regardless the definition of success, we tend to consider it as being in the top <50%. So even if everyone was more succesful (regardless the metric) in today's standard, only the best ones would be said "successful".
> everyone can follow boring advice
No, they can't. This article was written solely to show that fact, that most people actually _cannot_ follow boring advice; they often want the quick and easy way out. This leads to their downfall, or at least, lack of progress. As an inverse, if everyone could follow boring advice, this article would need not have been written at all.
It's just that successful doesn't always mean famous, and its not always glittery.
Most people getting rich are not start up founders. Or SV job hopping tourists. Most are people who work one job for long periods of times, max out on 401Ks, invest in IRA/RothIRA, index funds, real estate etc. They have stable families, and good health.
This kind of stuff doesn't get profiled on Techcrunch.
You can't defeat power law. It's something that happens everywhere.
Natural phenomenons, our universe, social interactions, romantic interactions, business etc.
Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in debt.
Also, CICO seems to be actually incorrect from what I read on it. Body's more like a thermostat than a steam engine and will work against you such as burning calories slower as you eat less.
If you really want to save money, then you need to think in terms of emotions and how to combat that rather than attempting to brute force it with willpower.
Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy of life for many people. Exercising means committing to spend time in an environment and doing an activity that many do not like at all——it thus means going against their desires for months, years etc.
And I am writing from the position of someone who is in shape, fit, does boring things that work, but had, like many, very limited success in persuading others to follow boring advice.
In business, finding work that you like.
In fitness, finding workouts that you enjoy.
In health, finding foods you like that are good for you.
Lastly, you can't make people want to change. You can only guide them once they show that they want to change. This is different from wanting a result. Someone who wants to be more successful is very different from someone who wants to learn how to work more effectively. Focus on process over end goal.
I love food. Wouldn't give it up for the world. I can also tolerate not eating anything for two days very well. It's not really going against my desire.
Ditto for exercise. The hard part is actually starting. Once you start, everything becomes easier.
These are those types of nuggets, and I say it as mellowly as I can, that sound good ("starting is most difficult part"), but have very little empirical, or even anecdotal, support.
Starting is on the other hand easier than sustaining calorie reduction or consistent exercise because enthusiasm makes the operations initially easier (see the subscription boom that gym every where have in September and January), but then when people start telling themselves that this was not as easy as they expected to be when unsupported by the initial enthusiasm, they quit.
the only study I can find that points to excercise lowering resting metabolic rate is one from 1989 that had nine subjects.
"Spend less money than you make" can translate sometimes into "don't search for medical advice that you need right now and fall for scammers that offer cheaper fake solutions"
I'm not saying that those were not good advice but, well, sometimes things get complicated.
Please try thinking of something original to do with GPT-3, and give proper credit to GPT-3 where it's due, instead of trying to claim what it spews out as your own thoughts.
Some constructive but boring free advice you should probably try to follow next time: If you don't want GPT-3 to write such driveling meaningless garbage out, you should try feeding it some more interesting meaningful garbage in, like so (both the input and more output examples are in the article):
GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine
https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...
I have so many inventions that I don’t have enough time to tell you about them all.
I’ll just mention a few of them.
I built a ten-million-mile-long Interdimensional Space Engine, powered by a Zipper Motor, which could travel at the speed of light, but I accidentally left it in reverse, and it has been going backward ever since, heading toward the Big Bang.
I invented the Infinitly-Tunable Infrasonic-To-Ultrasonic Reverberation Transmogrification Oscillation Oscillator, but I couldn’t get it to work properly.
I made the Jell-O-Matic Snackinator, but I couldn’t get it to work.
I invented the Roto-Rooter-Hog-Trough-Ammo-Dispenser, but it went bankrupt.
I invented the Poopy-Pam-Powder-Packet Pest Powder, but it didn’t work.
In a simulated test of the robot-run brothel, the robot-prostitutes had to satisfy the robot-customers without the help of the robot-pimps. It worked fantastically, and the results were published in the Journal of Robot Whores.
I built an Interplanetary Ice-Cream Maker that was so powerful it froze the sun, and the sun emitted an ice-cream cone that promptly landed in my mouth.
I constructed a city so large that it broke the Minsky Barrier, and had to be abandoned for the sake of the universe.
I had to be the one to create the SimCity religion, and the Sims still think of me as their god even though I do not control them.
Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!
NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality.
SOLARIS AND MR. BINNS: This is a two-part book and one unit of the work is composed of paragraphs which are so short that they disappear while you are reading them. The other part is some two hundred pages of giant print, which makes it appear that the author is quite dogmatic and trying to impress his (if you will excuse the expression) “larger than life” personality on the reader.