Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

"Ask yourself at the darkest hour of the night: must I write? If your answer is yes, then you should redesign your life to align with this necessity."

This is really great practical advice. Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.

"You’re looking outside of yourself for the answers, and that’s the last place you’ll find them. The only way for you to move forward is to move inward."

If I can only find answers internally, then why the hell would I listen to you now? What if my internal voice tells me the only answers come from outside?

"Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future."

So, "Wherever you go, there you are".

> Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.

The problem is that humans don’t work like that. We aren’t the passionate bunch the author think we are.

People work for money and status , we are extremely result oriented not passion oriented.

Even on here people enjoy technology , hacking etc. But if you gave us absolute certainty of economic and social success via some other drastically different path (e.g. a reality show such as Jersey Shore) , we would not hesitate one second and wear our tightest tank top and trunks , get tanned and play the part.

I say “us” because I include myself in this scenario too, and I despise reality shows but you cant argue with millions of dollars and millions of followers.

They are respectively the currency of financial and social success.

it’s far better to be a millionaire reality star whose claim to fame is clubbing and partying on camera than a professor with an IQ of 185 whose fusion startup went under

speak for yourself, mate

I'm not so sure about it. Maybe I'd do the Jersey Shore thing, but if someone offered me enterprise sales job at twice what I make as a coder, I wouldn't take it. It is just so much at odds with my personality, that the money would absolutely be not worth it. (If it was $1m per year, and my middling performance would be acceptable, I'd probably take it though).

> we would not hesitate one second and wear our tightest tank top and trunks , get tanned and play the part.

speak for yourself bro. i'm not it.

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