Ask HN: When did you take greater control over your life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When did you take greater control over your life?

Share your story about the time you took greater control over your life.

One of my own 'AHA' moments was when I discovered that you can't. Yes you can never take control over your life. You need to relax and go with the flow. We all think that we are controlling our lives, but consider this, suppose time is a river and your life can be represented by you sitting on a small boat. You can puddle a bit and control a little bit of where you are (akin for example to choosing a career or job).

However, the flow of the river determines the overall direction! Now, for the interesting part. Now and then other people get on your boat. A girlfriend, a child a wife! As you go along the river, people come and go.

Another interesting part is what I call 'crossroads', they also appear almost randomly. Situations where a 'do this' or 'do that' can influence the journey. You will probably get about four in life. Most of the times when this happens you will not know is happening. For example you went on holiday to Costa Rica and ended up meeting a girl in the Airplane, should you eventually marry this girl it can influence the rest of your life.

Money and success can give you a temporary dejavu of control. You can have a great business, you control your time, your health is tops and out of nowhere your boat hits a rock, or somebody came in the boat and drilled a hole.

This is advice from a 'baby boom hacker' they exist on HN too! :). Married same day as Charles and Diana! So far the score is on my side! Had a lot of bumpy rides, married three times, 5 kids, a number of businesses, went bust twice, lived through two wars (Cyprus and Gulf), lived through the bad years in South Africa, worked in five countries.

Control? We can't even determine the outcome of a program with certainty!

Thanks for the feedback. I understand where you're coming from.

If I could simplify your view: Stuff happens, deal with it. I don't mean to ignore the nuance. But to generalize it further: the universe is stuff happening that you can't control. You can think you're controlling it but you aren't.

That's a metaphysical view I can't rule out. But I was thinking about control in the sense that, I have more control over a car once a learned stick shift. Or humans have greater control of over the Earth resources than since our hunter-gatherers days; we know how take sand to silicon.

But I never meant to suggest (with the original car metaphor either) that I'm completely in control of life. I did mean, and I do think, that I can get greater control over life. In the same way I can chop down I tree and turn it into a table. I just need the skill. Though, it's hard to learn.

Yes it is a bit of a metaphysical view and by no means I am advocating a fatalistic view, where one should just sit and wait for things to happen. You can 'control' your immediate environment to an extend but not much more. To 'control your life' in the real sense it is impossible. Life is mostly a 'random walk' a bit like the stock market going in a certain direction but to find sense out of the noise is very hard. Are you here to-day on HN because your DNA makes you? Are you interested in CS because you had a teacher (parent etc) that influenced you (even subtly) at school? What would have happened if he was not there? So what is my suggestion? Just drive your boat, enjoy the trip and don't let it rust in port!

'Or humans have greater control of over the Earth resources than since our hunter-gatherers days; we know how to take sand to silicon'... this is for another post :), just watch the videos on the Taiwan typhoons! We can only control a very tiny part of that fractal, but maybe you right as people we may be able to give it a bit of colour! Just in case you wondering I call myself an Agnostic Atheist Christian Buddhist!

Five years ago. Incidentally, almost exactly five years before "Ask HN random crap" started getting old.

Incidentally HN is less than 3 years old, meaning that it was never not old :-P.

uh, no.

Ask HN: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? ;-)

FWIW, I do drive a stick shift, and I've always driven a stick shift (so, close to 10 years now...) I learned to drive on one. I think my stall-count was 5 on the first day and 37 on the second day, and I only got the car moving about twice on the second day...

EDIT: The original thread title was: When did you switch to stick shift?

The title was metaphorical. I meant to get people to share their coming of age stories; when they decided to take more control over their life: switch from automatic to stick shift, so to speak.

Well, when did you?

Even metaphorically, I'm not sure the question makes a whole lot of sense. My whole life has been a series of progressively more independent and progressively more important choices. I chose to go to a charter school instead of my public high school when I was 14. I chose not to go to college when I got out at 19, instead working at a tech startup. A year later, I reversed my choice. I chose to study abroad for a semester in New Zealand my junior year. I chose to switch my major from physics to CS in my last semester. I chose not to immediately get a job upon graduation, instead finishing up a volunteer project I'd been working on all through college. I chose to work in a financial software startup for a couple years, and then chose to quit and found my own company when the opportunity came up with a friend. I chose to abandon it when it became apparent we weren't going to succeed, and get a job at a big company.

There's no single point where I "switched on" and said "Okay, now I'm going to take charge of my life." That's the stuff of movies - most of the time when people try it in real life, they go right back to the routines they had before.

Thanks for the feedback. I should've been more specific. But I felt asking a specific question while easier to understand, excludes people by definition. Like if I asked, why did you decided to startup? That excludes employees. So I asked "take greater control". But I never said "get complete control".

I meant share a story about a time when you were prompted to become more independent; like why you became an entrepreneur, consultant or employee for instance. Or if you left home, why? What happened? Why the choice of more independence? Frustration? Drive to do good? Forced by circumstances?

Maybe I'll ask again but differently next time. I didn't think asking for the full story was trivial.

When my kid was born. That was a pretty good wake up call. I was 28 at the time and up to that point just taking whatever gig that I could get. Lots of money one part of the year, dirt poor another, it didn't really matter.

The extra responsibility helped me to focus quite nicely.

I'm alive twenty five but I've still got no control.

I painted myself into a black hole of frustration. The situation was bound to fall apart, and it did about a year ago. Unfortunately, not at my initiative.

I am hoping that this is the time when I take control. Better late than never.

(In some ways, I've always taken control. In never being satisfied with the -- usually inefficient and boring and mistake-laden -- status quo. However, trying to introduce changes from the bottom up, or even just follow your own road, has limited effectiveness in some organizations.

That's just the way they are. You could say it was my fault for not getting out sooner, but then I was dealing with a lot of stuff on multiple fronts.)

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