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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

There are two ways of living: fear-based, and love-based.

People who live fear-based avoid things. They avoid things that might cause heartache, pain, difficulty, etc. but all of the most interesting pursuits in life have the potential to cause these things sometimes.

People who live love-based move towards things that bring happiness and satisfaction in the long term. They work hard and play hard, and when they hurt they know that things may get better.

I heard this several years ago now, and I see one of these approaches in most people around me.

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To make this more relevant to entrepreneurship and startups...

It is possible to get a pretty good idea of how someone will behave under times of stress by just talking to them for a few minutes. Then gauging if most of their worldview is driven by-

- Shame / Guilt / Apathy

- Fear / Anxiety

- Anger / Hate

- Pride

- Courage

- Joy

- Compassion

Now we are often taught to 'be compassionate' or the 'enjoy life', but there is a difference between actually feeling that way and trying to convince people, including yourself, that you feel this way (which would be fear driven).

This is a bit difficult to explain, especially given my limited writing skills, but pretty easy to pick up in the subtext of conversations. For instance in the way that people phrase certain things, or tone with which they talk about certain issues.

There is probably some correlation between this sort of emotional development and conventional success. But I think this sort of development is probably more important to the subjective experience of life as a human.

Very interesting.

What's the difference like?

I mean, what kind of responses do you see from people whose world view is driven by pride/courage/joy/compassion ?

I think this can also defined in the level of risk one's willing to accept. Fear-based is having a low risk tolerance. It's so easy to choose the safe route; steady corporate job, work your way up the ladder, etc. It's predefined and historically tested. But I fail to see a lot of happy people at the end of this line.

Making big life changes is hard, and a risk. The more I talk to people about this topic, though, the more I can see in their eyes that they wish they had taken bigger risks in their youth.

You have described a much more "realistic" model for this - it's a spectrum of risk-aversion, not a binary attribute.

A complementary attribute is the level of "abundance mentality" present in the person.

The difficult thing, though, which is what everyone glosses over, is that it is difficult to achieve abundance mentality. It's a good metric to look at, but there is much, much more work necessary to improve it.

And that work is actually not at all trivial, unfortunately, and hard to pick up on the Internet, as it is highly personalized.

Abundance mentality is an excellent term, I'll happily rip it and use it from now on.

Indeed, the "safe" route could be called survivor mentality; to maximize the chances of not dying without offspring. What about a world where you are not really in danger? When you already have food, clothing and a house, and no one is preventing you from procreating at will?

Those who in that position still want a bigger house, more food, a yacht, expensive sports car and a harem; they're still in survival mode _after already having survived_ past any meaningful definition of survival.

They're over-survivers; and indeed, it's not a binary thing but a spectrum.

Hence, try to enjoy the abundance, and let others enjoy it; develop your attitude towards abundance mentality. We all have already survived.

I don't know that I agree with you at all on this.

I don't think a healthy person ("abundance mentality") can ever have too much of whatever it is they value. That's not to say that you're not happy with what you have or always unsatisfied. Only that you're always seeking to expand your "life," whatever that means to you. To make your life abundant. For many healthy people, that might include yachts, cars, more travel, more pursuit of hobbies, growing their business, improving their love life (for this, having a harem is probably not a great strategy), improving the world's political situation, expanding knowledge, etc.

I think the viewpoint you're advocating really just reduces to giving up on values, i.e., asceticism.

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