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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Lots of selective memory and faulty reasoning here. Take his first example: "Took art classes in high school instead of working out with the football team. I design for a living now." It's easy to retroactively give a positive interpretation to any life choice you might make, but consider the alternative. Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever.

Similarly, the folks who took risks, ignored the common wisdom, and failed miserably may not be writing blog posts extolling risk taking and ignoring the common wisdom. IMHO there's no sound generalization to make about risk. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, and plenty depends on our attitude towards it.

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"It's easy to retroactively give a positive interpretation to any life choice"

It's not only easy, the brain is probably very eager to do this all the time, so that we'll feel the last 5,10,20,50 years of our life wasn't a complete waste of time

Yes. The book Stumbling on Happiness discusses this a lot, and I highly recommend it.

I posit that people who can't convince themselves that most of their life decisions, no matter how arbitrary, turned out good in the end are depressed.

Scott that's an really interesting perspective.

Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever.

The likelihood of football leading directly to a career path (rather than through connections obtained while playing) is far lower than the similar probability for art, though - there are hundreds of thousands of jobs that directly use art skills, whereas the number of football jobs is far lower (even if we include high school coaching in the equation).

In that sense, doing art is really the "safe" option, at least compared to playing football. It only feels less safe because in high school playing football is a lot more respected than doing art.

One reason that hindsight makes us feel good about our past decisions is that we change the rules of the game when we look back.

Sure, the likelihood of football leading directly to a career path is far lower than art, but if the football choice was made, he may look back and say, "I'm so glad I chose not to get into the career rat race and follow my football dreams instead..."

If he had played football in high school he could have met a life long friend. Or gotten a free ride to an OK collage. Or simply had a lot of fun at the time. Looking only at the positive outcomes it's easy to look back on arbitrary choices and think you made the correct one because there are many outcomes that could be considered positive.

Heck he could have become injured and still think it was a good choice, because he learned he was not invincible at a young age and focused on living a healthy life.

I chose to work out and play h.s. football. I'm a developer at Intel, so maybe I learned a lot of discipline playing football? Or maybe I'm more inclined to do corporate work...

"It's easy to retroactively give a positive interpretation to any life choice"

Johnny I'd say you followed the head sheep. Now you're in a cubical wearing khaki pants to work spending your day on ycombinator news, dreaming about what could have been.

Maybe, if I stop learning and creating new things. And I wear jeans and flip flops.

There's also something about the type of risk taken here. Taking art over football isn't exactly a major risk. It's a choice, and perhaps one that went against the prevailing wind, but it seems to me more like this guy is advocating 'do what you want'/'follow your gut instinct no matter what people say', rather than 'take risks' per se.

I'm totally all for doing what feels right, but you gotta admit, sometimes people are looking at you funny because the decision you're making is a bad one.

"IMHO there's no sound generalization to make about risk."

Sure there is: if you never take them, you'll be mediocre. Conversely, you can't be good without taking risks. Of course, it's stupid to claim that you should always take risks. For instance, I feel that playing Russian Roulette won't make you great. In fact, I'd say it's downright stupid.

Are there good resources for tales of failure?

It's easy to find books and articles on people who made it, but not so for the losers.

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