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Comment by nnoitra | Hacker News Reader

No substance. Just like any other blog that teaches you how to make incredible things happen, offering way too general advice. Just because you can start a blog and write doesn't mean you should.

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The idea that, at this point in every single reader's life they need "substance" along with ideas, is just a bit much. You, at this point in your life, would want/need more substance but you are just one person. There is a lot of value for other people in reading bullet point lists of these types of things. For example, if these are all things I've known and learned in my 42 years on the earth, a bullet point list serves as a nice, general reminder on a lot of levels. The "I've forgotten more about productivity hacking than most 20 year olds have learned" adage is true here for 40yos. Maybe you are at the point where some of these are recent topics for you - things you've recently learned in much longer format. So you reject it as "Everyone knows this - silly".

We all have biases - we just have to view things from others' perspectives sometimes to avoid those biases coloring our outlook.

I disagree. I see a number of hard-won lessons here.

I just spent the weekend volunteering as a mentor for an entrepreneurship event, and first-time entrepreneurs really need a lot of education in basics. I can see this being useful as a checklist of common anti-patterns. In particular, I've recently seen people getting 6, 9, 10, 11, and 13 wrong.

I do strongly dislike the title of the blog, and the hype-filled headlines make me twitch. It has so much marketing and glibness to it that yes, it's the kind of thing that makes programmers insane.

But I think it's worth listening respectfully to people who have accomplished things, even if they're very different than you. Take what you find useful, and leave the rest.

The making things happen attitude is very unsubstantial. If it was substantial, then everybody could apply it the same way and the world would be an easy place.

I find way more difficult to hack attitude than to hack code.

OP here. Thanks for reading my post and providing feedback.

This post wasn't meant to be a deep dive but more a list of activities ("ship before you feel totally done") and ways of thinking ("the best ideas are usually not universally embraced") that have served me. I have other posts that get very specific - like this one about making email introductions - http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/the-anatomy-of-a-great-email-i...

You are entitled to your opinion about the value of my blog but as I mention in BP #5, people struggle to put themselves in the minds of others. Your logic appears to be "I don't find this valuable, therefore this person and everyone like him should not blog." Based on the number of tweets, upvotes, and personal messages I've received about this post, it has provided tremendous value to lots of people who happen to be different from you.

I think the main issue with your post is offering the perspective from an employee/freelancer viewpoint only. If you are the owner of your own company the issues with making things happen are totally different.

Though I agree with 'no substance' part of your comment here, I strongly disagree with the rest of it.

Internet has at last provided a platform where literally anyone can get up to writing and publishing and that only provides it its awesomeness.

Yup; the ROI on blogging is higher for bloggers than a lot of leisure activities, and the net returns for regular users/consumers is high, too.

If I could, I'd make everybody blog, every day. (Unless they have better things to do.)

That's your opinion. I took away at least one solid tip and that more than justifies reading it.

bah humbug

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