Ask HN: What are your goals – what matters to you?

13 points by hoodoof ↗ HN
What is really important to you?

What are you aiming for?

What are your goals, short term through long term?

7 comments

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Set up a side business to blossom into paying 3* full time salary so I can be free of commuting, can live a high life and build assets at the same time. Doesn't involve coding as I've had it with coding and hate the complexity nowadays. I have nostalgia for the simplicity of bbcbasic magazine listings.

If I can achieve this in 5 years it would be ideal. First stage is in progress.

Something that I am planning to do. But it is incredibly difficult to manage with a full time job.
Yes I know, and I have a young family too.

So...

Solution for me is to reduce to 4 day week. Lucky I can do this.

And don't write a line of code. Leverage the umpteen cloud services.

I'd say it's incredibly difficult to manage even when giving it 100% of your time...
Only have one long-term goal: maximizing the happyness of my family. Biggest achievement would be not having to worry about finances and being able to work (a lot) less.

Pretty much every short-term goal ought to be a net plus on my longterm goal. Short-term goals: 1. Get our new SaaS business to 3K euro MRR So my wife can quit job and support the SaaS (It's targeting the niche she works in, once software is done she does over support / sales / marketing / networking etc.). This is #1 because her job is awfull and low-paying, so we need to fix that first. Just landed a great customer so fingers crossed...

2. Either get SaaS up to 8k euro MRR+ OR start another - So i can start working alongside her doing the same kind of work. Might even be able to hire someone so we can take some days off!

My job now is great. Pay is not great, but i can easily take days of if i want or work from home etc. No commute to speak of, so maximum time for other company stuff. If #1 or #2 is a bust, i'm pretty confident i will keep trying to get a SaaS off the ground. Either that or get another job half an hour away so i can retire a few years faster. Lets hope for the former.

Efficiency.

I want to make the universe more efficient. For me, this starts by making humans more efficient. My ideal would be the Borg.

I choose efficiency because it's inherently good. If you're more efficient, then you can reach other goals more efficiently, no matter what these goals are.

Concretely, I'm tackling the problem of inefficient communication and thinking. I believe that natural languages are one of humanity's main bottlenecks and must be replaced with something better by at least an order magnitude. A completely new and computer-aided communication paradigm.

I don't want anyone to ever have to communicate something that's already been communicated before. I don't want people to be able to express inconsistent ideas. I want to get rid of paradoxes and exceptions from language.

I also want to make the world completely transparent, make data free. This means getting rid of privacy, another one of humanity's main bottlenecks. Privacy is irrational and selfish.

My first step is to build a single application that aims to replace 80% of existing applications. To achieve this without bloat, a new interaction paradigm will need to be conceived. As I don't expect most adults to appreciate the value of the system (in my experience, they feel threatened) or have the ability to learn it, my targets are kids.

TL;DR: I'm building a next-generation communication app for kids.

Since the Universe is spiraling toward oblivion and expanding I think that you are well on your way. Humans are masters of paradox which is kind of like dark matter appearing and disappearing at the same time in two different places. We are software as a service.

The closest to a reasonable application is meditation where you sit down and do absolutely nothing as close as possible. Reasonably easy to acquire, meditation allows for communication to leap over bottlenecks in spite of language.

Upon reading this sit quietly with your spine straight for 5 minutes while focused on your breathing. This is the amount of time it takes to download the meditation app. Once you have this installed it is only a matter of sitting down again with your spine erect while paying attention to your breathing to utilize it. Any thoughts that come during this time should be recognized as thoughts and ignored. After 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes. Go back to doing whatever it was you were doing. Meditation can never be taken from you once it is installed.