Ask HN: What have been your best decisions in life?

62 points by arikr ↗ HN
What have been the best life [and career] decisions that you've made?

76 comments

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Being ruthless about removing people from my life who are bringing me down, or who have a view of me that may be accurate, but is pessimistic.
One of mine was not worrying about what other people thought of me.
“You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
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Like most decisions that turned out to be good financially, it was purely by luck.

* Buying real estate... a lot of it

* Staying out of the stock market until after 2009... then leveraging and buying a lot of stocks

* Playing inverse volatility until 2017... missed out on the VIX termination event in Feb 2018

Some things that didn’t turn out well:

* Crappy career. Had to quit after many years of training to get there due to external pressures. Fortunately the above compensated many times over.

Life isn’t perfect, but I’m lucky to be relatively healthy and living in a safe part of the world.

Can you elaborate on the career?
It wasn’t tech related. Highly regulated and unfortunately quite unnecessarily politicized.
Deciding as a 13yo that I would be a games developer.
Ditching my smartphone.
Do you use any phone?
I've got an LG B470 flip phone. It's really quite a piece of crap but it does the minimum. I've got a family and a side business, so it's not really practical to go without (despite the temptation.)

My fondest hope is that enough people will step back from smartphones to create a market for slightly-more-capable flip phones. At a minimum, having a decent camera would be nice.

1. Working out regularly (3 times a week lifting weights), eating healthy, and playing team sports (co-ed soccer and volleyball). In my 30s, and still in the best shape I have ever been.

There was a time when I didn't work out regularly, and I have to say that a 'weak' body affects you in many way down the road. Trying to 'save time' by skipping working out, or not doing physical activities is counter productive. Similar to skipping sleep because you don't have time. It destroys your health in many ways.

2. Moving to the US as an exchange student (in high school), and living for a year with an american family that I had never met before.

3. Studying Computer Science

I agree with number one. There aren’t many decisions anyone can make which are %100 guaranteed to improve your life. That is one of them.
Moving to a different country
Picking the right spouse.

Edit: Picking the wrong partner can be catastrophic financially and emotionally. Pick someone you can trust, rely on, and who compliments your strengths and weaknesses. Be prepared to go to great lengths for them when necessary.

Same here, and I would add, picking the right kids. ;-)
I don't think you 'pick' your kids, unless you foster first... but you can raise them right, and that makes all the difference.
What, they didn’t send you The Catalog? We usually get ours partway through the second trimester.
We're not that far from that thing being a reality.
Yes, yes, and yes. I never heard this until way after I picked the wrong partner.
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Sticking with a project in college out of interest, despite pressures from family and friends to ditch it or not work as much on it.
It's difficult to answer because we don't know what we the roads not taken would have been.

For me, the best decision was to move to a foreign country. My life has been much more exciting in so many ways. One of my regrets is that I could have done it sooner.

1. Marrying my wife.

2. Not leaving her when things got hard.

3. Having children.

4. Learning how to program.

Traveling slowly for almost two years. I tried staying at least a week in each place and at least a month in each country. Stayed in some places like Peru for longer (9 months total).
Life - Dropping out of a for-profit college and moving from Atlanta, GA to San Diego, CA

- Focus on my own goals

Career - Javascript! Javascript! Javascript! - Starting my own company

Quitting tuba.
sounds like there could be an interesting story behind it
1. Moving out of Russia (to Canada)

2. Picking up jogging - really helped me to fight anxiety and started thinking straight

Traveling all over the world... while young.
Learning to program.

Lifting, learning to count calories, healthy habits in general.

Staying out of the sun.

Moving out of the rust belt.

In preparation for moving, moving back in with my parents and getting close with them after a period of about a half decade of taking my family for granted.

> Staying out of the sun

Can you elaborate? I am doing the opposite, because I am almost all the time in the office or gym. I force myself to get as much sun as possible for the Vitamin D and articles associated with it here on Hacker News[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556732

It ages your skin. Take a vitamin D pill instead.

You can go outside without being in direct sunlight.

* My parents leaving Romania for the US (on the Greencard lottery) when I was 10. * Leaving a large company to work on a product I believed in (Airbnb 2012). * Not paying too much attention to my peers and doing what felt right: not getting a service job as a teenager and freelance coding(even when my effective hourly rate ended up being lower than working at Subway), becoming a farmhand after working as an engineer; taking a job at an art hedge fund in NYC while living in rural Washington. * Viewing money as a side product rather than a goal.
That’s a really interesting history. I took a very traditional route. How did you end up positioning yourself for jobs like the art hedge fund? In my experience that would have required some amount of real life social connections or hustling. Just curious... for my kid’s sake.
(in no order and i might have left out some)

1. Traveling and living overseas for over half of my twenties. Gave me a world and multi-cultural perspective.

2. Getting emotional healing from an abusive childhood. Gave me confidence to pursue life from a place of healing and peace.

3. Getting married to my wife who I share everything with, including being work partners.

4. Having children which has opened up a whole new aspect of wonder, curiosity and adventure.

How did you get to travel and live overseas in your twenties?
Quitting alcohol. Going vegan. Learning a trade (programming).
If the question about business life, leaving an SV-based company. Otherwise, marrying and having children.
Living below my means, both when I was "poor" and now that I have more money.
1). Marrying my wife

2). Sticking it out in CS undergrad when I was having a hard time with the material instead of dropping out

3). Leaving shitty jobs(though I could've left sooner at each instance) for greener pastures

4). Instead of resorting to drugs or alcohol to deal with bad times and loneliness in my life, turning to running instead and running the Marathon des Sables(and unrelatedly but subsequently finishing my pilot's license) which made me believe in myself