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By the way, the first trick was "The first step is to have an explicit belief in change."

You are afraid of looking bad: of creating things with computers that you'll then make public, with your name on them. Or that these computers, that you LOVE (your words), might turn out hard to program, with the looming prospect you then won't have what you love. If you weren't, you might have gotten a BA in computers first. After the expectation of getting a college degree went away, then you went and did what you actually liked.

And that's ok.

Because it's the things that frighten us the most that we tend to have to do next. You should be happy about this. There are people, lots of people if not the majority, who don't even attempt during a lifetime to do what they subconsciously want to and you managed to break through it.

The fear of creating never fully goes away.

Then suddenly, something happened and I lost interest.

Mmm... I'd love to go deeper into this "something that happened". But either way it's ok.

Now what to do about it. The typical things like finding supportive people, starting secret projects, or writing programs for yourself are unlikely to be enough. The bigger issue is you have to find a way to counteract resistance. You are sabotaging yourself. The bigger the prospect of humiliation, the bigger the resistance you'll put up.

That's why it's ok. Big creations are terrifying. You can't see them directly in the eye. You have to approach them indirectly. You have to practically trick yourself into working on big things, and computers are big things for you. You need to allow yourself to make mistakes [1]. To screw up (everybody does). To write programs that aren't great in the beginning (nobody's are). Aim small, have no expectations (push them away) and just play.

I'd love to be user #1 for something you build.

[1] trivia: research shows that when people feel free to make mistakes they end up making fewer mistakes.

If what you are working on originally looks understandable, you should be alarmed.

I wanted to get rid of data.

I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-09/antikythera-mech...

There's also a simulation (with videos) of the mechanism in Squeak EToys

http://spinellis.gr/sw/ameso/

1. Are you doing the encryption in a browser plugin?

2. How do you send the email without learning who the recipient is? Are you saving it on the server, thus not using SMTP, and then requiring both the sender and recipient to be users of Scryptmail?

It's incredibly hard to tell if something will work or not. So hard in fact, that you are better off assuming it won't. Because that removes the expectation it has to do well, which is what's really holding you back, not fear. You believe launching will be a success only if it yields a specific type of outcome.

If you call it an experiment, it will allow you to not take yourself seriously, or to turn the project into something else, and even to ditch it if you realize you find something else more interesting. Don't let premature commitment limit your options. Just play.

Brian Eno might have said it best:

  Artists who don't censor their own work: Picasso, Miles
  Davis, Prince. They're all people who just put it out,
  and have almost no critical self-censorship. They say,
  "Let the market decide; let the world decide." You might
  not be the best person to judge it.

  That's a kind of humility, actually: it's a mixture of
  arrogance, which says, "I know I'm fucking good." But a
  humility, which says, "I'm not the person to decide."

It's about centralization's bad effects. If there was a way for the bad affects to disappear, there wouldn't be a reason to rant. All things being equal, people prefer centralized utilities like electricity, water, and gas.

Just as it's possible to decentralize the Internet, I don't see why it's impossible to fight the bad effects of centralization. If you see insoluble problems, please feel free to list them here.

It'd be more accurate to say you don't want to give it up all the time. You don't want CAP; you want PACELC.

http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...

I learned an awful lot. Time for something new.

"Product distribution is more important than what the product is."

It's not enough to be contrarian. You should also be right.

"It's useful to be able to recognize whether you are on track or not. To have both that belief, but also paranoia, about am I tracking over my investment thesis."

You need to be able to articulate the vision well.

One of the founders needs to be able to build networks of people.

What is my distribution edge? What is the hack that I know that other people don't know?

Just as you spend 20+ hours with a possible CEO, go in depth in conversations with a potential co-founder to identify all the parameters and set expectations. Go over the parameters that might lead to a divorce.

Like (a) asking what problems the company has that need to be solved, (b) how much more productive than the average software engineer you are, and (c) that you are determined: that you'll solve any problem, learning what you need as you go.

When someone asks a silly question, like why Java 1.8 instead of 1.7, your attitude shouldn't be to defend yourself as having made an Oscar-winning choice. Your answer should be the most comical, borderline embarrassing answer, because it will fulfill the possibly momentary psychological desire of the interviewer to feel they are right. But it should also be an answer that indirectly embarrasses the interviewer too for having asked it. You could say Java 1.7 would have caused the least trouble, and then point out that e.g. if you missed next week's release the company would have lost it's number one customer and shut down.

Plus, if what the interviewer wants is to show off superiority, let them. If you do that, you get the job. The interviewer isn't necessarily a bad person, and they might realize how stupidly they acted and shapen up. (Of course don't work there if they don't.) The more general advice is don't oppose forces, for the same reason trees let themselves bend when it's windy.

If you are unsure or feel cornered over silly stuff, say "I'm not sure that's the biggest problem to solve, or the one that will generate the most value for the company." If you have ideas of what that is, then go on to describe them.

In short, push back.

But don't push back the way a suit pushes back with some general, phony sounding, evasive statement like "well, I don't know how that affects some of the stakeholders." Be specific.

(Don't think of pushing back as doing something bad. Think of it as being more open-minded than the other person. You are considering data they are neglecting. It's part of being a good designer. Corollary: make an effort to consider other people's ideas, else you'll be the one who is narrow-minded.)

If I had only one piece of advice it would be: focus on the root of the problem. Hint: more often than not it's not what it appears to be, but it's some other problem hidden five layers deep.

For example, if an aggressive interviewer says "Clearly you don't know how to code and are useless", then clearly the problem is the interviewer, and the way you can pass the interview is to tell the truth. That he is the problem. But -- to do it indirectly, with humor as a lubricant. Start from the very first word: "clearly". Don't give them an inch.

You say something along the lines of: "Well, it's dangerous to make absolute statements, you know, to say "clearly", or "always" or "never". Not just because there's always a chance one could be wrong, but mostly because I noticed with myself that when I do that it's often to counteract something I subconsciously know is true. Else I wouldn't be finding the need to try hard to qualify what I say. I'd just say it. And you know what, I regret it eventually. It's strange how the subconscious works. I keep being surprised at how things aren't always as they seem. But I'm willing to learn."

In this way you address the root of the problem: the interviewer is aggressive without even realizing it. You identify how one can tell they are acting in ways they haven't realized: by making absolute statements. You show humility: you explain this is something that happened to you before. You allow for the interviewer to feel superior: because you just explained a mistake you made. You didn't budge; you stopped the conversation right on the first incorrect word: "clearly". And indirectly you push back: by making the interviewer look like a fool (because everything you just said about yourself could also be said about the interviewer). The problem isn't the Java version. Don't talk at all about any tech there.

Be humble. Be empathetic with people's faults. But the way out is following the truth, even if that means that you made a mistake or you need to learn something new. ALWAYS look for the root of the problem. If it feels hard to do, that's precisely your cue that you should do it.

And if the interviewer or company still don't get the hint, then forget about them. They can't tell what's important.

The fix to privacy is more likely to originate from a project that gets users, like Dark Mail or Mailpile.

I originally suspected walking has more to do with psychology, specifically paradoxic intention, than it does with physiology. That being easily distracted allows your mind to drift, whereas aiming to solve a problem keeps your mind stuck in the same unfruitful paths of thought. It's great that there is some science behind it.

You don't have to ask people to supply a comment for every upvote. But you can ask them for downvotes. There are an order of magnitude less downvotes than upvotes.

idea: you can track an explanation why something was downvoted without showing it as a comment. It can be shown only if a user clicks on some type of "why this was downvoted" link.

This would not lower the signal/noise ratio on the main thread. People can continue having a discussion that degenerates to low signal/ratio about the downvoting into this other link. If anything positive comes out of it, and enough people upvote it out of the downvoted status, then you can start commenting on it again.

This would also be aligned with the policy of posting a comment when, and only when, you have something substantive to say.

Because unless the comment was restored back to a positive score, you wouldn't be able to post a comment on the main thread (as a reply to that comment; not the whole thread). The policy would be enforced, and you dang wouldn't have to be telling people to not comment about downvoting.

But I understand that what you are trying to say is you prefer to receive email for HN issues.

I would also like you to see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8176055

Expectation makes me clamp up and produce work that isn't as good/gutsy/valuable. Social pressure makes me spend years on things I didn't want to be doing.

Thanks.

(Edit: Great, more downvoting)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864809

Not getting anything done out of anxiety you should be getting something done is a real problem a lot of people have. I sure had it at times. I would be more sympathetic to the author and try to understand the problem better before calling her names.

You may want to revise that perspective. Besides constraints being key to creativity, they are also key to good design. Every design needs to limit options.

Additionally, it doesn't directly follow that society will have their decisions made by other people; and to the extent that it does, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Once again: fewer options -- constraints -- are key in creativity.

Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.

Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model, and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users, without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem, is about to change?

(1) You contradicted yourself. What multiple years long translates to as you increase the number of years is death. So it's not true that there is always an option to your goal. At some point you run out of time and it leaves you without options.

If you haven't found this so far in your experience you might find it in the future in your experience. The important thing isn't whether you found it so far or not. It's whether it's true.

If by getting back up you mean returning to the US and getting past visa issues to continue entrepreneurship there, then you said something that's not true: you can't say it won't be hard to get back up. You don't know how hard it will be.

It is true though that reward is proportionate to risk. I also agree with the more general advice: make an option work for you. As long as it's qualified with: be aware the option that will work for you will have limitations another option wouldn't. The closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets.

(2) When you find yourself justifying something with guilty words like "always" and "whole point" ("incredible" for the lawyer, "damn fine" for the university, "too damn good" for the opportunity) it's often to counteract something you subconsciously know is true. Else you wouldn't find the need to try hard to qualify the statement. You would just say the statement instead. You should be alarmed when you catch yourself do that.

After identifying the logical fallacy in (1), the second interpretation I had to reading your blog post was it was a cry for help from your subconscious. That it needed evidence it didn't have to convince your conscious part to reconsider the decision. I don't know if this is possible now that 5 months have passed.

It's also slightly suspicious you defended your blog post with risk. You might have subconsciously done it to camouflage the possibly bigger risk of deciding to stay in the US permanently if you are from India. You'd have to part from your family, possibly for a lifetime, and that can be a scarier thing than returning home. You'd also part with two co-founder friends and a startup idea. I can't know exactly what's going on in your case but if paying more attention to your subconscious helps your journey I'm glad this long response might have helped.

Tricky thing that subconscious:

  The vast majority of goals you are pursuing, every day
  of your life, operate entirely without your awareness.

  - Heidi Grant Halvorson

  Quietly determined people tend to win because the
  scenesters usually can't build anything.

  - Jessica Livingston