HN Explorer

Ask HN: Please think about changing your life

38 points by businessguy ↗ HN
This is throw-away account. I honestly wish luck to all HN community here. I am business man(i believe word 'entrepreneur' is over-rated) with several online and offline business. Doing quite ok.

I honestly wish luck to all HN community here, but after reading HN for sometime I can see that some of you guys are simply wasting your time here. In fact most of you are. This community pushes you toward starting your own online business, which is not for everyone(and not so glory). Pushing someone towards being a businessman is a terrible mistake, dont be influenced by that.

You can be very happy just being professional at what are you doing, having family, enjoying your hobbies, having vacations, free time etc. etc..

Seriously, think about life you are loosing every time you open another HN story and dont allow any community to dictate you what should you do. Fact that many really smart folks here waste time reading crappy advises on how to start business, grow it, etc just kills me. Its not better than buying "How to become a millionaire" crap books, seriously.

Sure some of you will succeed with their ideas, but most will just become depressed after realizing how they spend their LIFE.

Internet-businesses, entrepreneurs and hackers glory are overrated in this community. Try to take a break and re-think your life goals(and make sure you have some)

This post is irrelevant for some HNsers, but if it will make just one HN reader to re-think his life, wouldn't it be cool?

Thanks for reading this. Happy holidays!

10 comments

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sudont
While you have a point about work/life balance, this board is associated with Y Combinator...

I come here for technical discussion with interesting, informed perspectives of people who actualize technology often through a startup. If I wanted to chat about lifting, I'd head over to EXRX's forums, or just talk to my friends in the gym. I've got no real interest in forming a startup, and don't feel as if I'm a bad person for not wanting to when I visit.

chaosmachine
It might be hard to become a millionaire entrepreneur, but it's not hard to replace a day job with a few niche websites.

Frankly, I believe anyone wasting 8+ hours a day working to make someone else rich should think about changing their life.

It's hard to beat the feeling of looking in your inbox and seeing your daily income report exceeds what you would have made working all day at bigco... Especially when you just spent the whole day pursuing some random hobby, visiting friends and relatives, or maybe just reading a book.

YuriNiyazov
The only thing that needs to be changed is this post getting 33 upvotes. Flagged.
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vaksel
most people on this site are younger...when you are 22-25, you can afford to invest 2-3 years into chasing a dream.

Pretty much everyone does it, you have the people in the band waiting to get big, you have people with liberal arts majors trying to find a job in their field, you have people back packing through Europe...it's just the rebellious phase of trying to avoid being a cog in the machine.

Eventually(28-30) people either succeed or fail, and if they fail, they go get that life sucking corporate job and settle for a life of mediocrity.

I do find that HN tends to focus way too much on overnight success, most people jump from one idea to the next waiting for that instant homerun.

sysk
> Sure some of you will succeed with their ideas, but most will just become depressed after realizing how they spend their LIFE.

For many of us, the journey is at least as important as the destination. If you enjoy the journey it's not really depressing not to succeed.

yannickt
I am not an entrepreneur, I am a professional working for the man. I love HN because it is one of the smartest online communities I know of. I like learning from smart people.
dkarl
I think this is worth keeping in mind for perspective. Especially youngsters -- anyone under 25 -- should keep in mind that the lifestyle glorified here is just one option, and the obsession with it is entirely because of the dramatic success and riches that people have obtained through internet and other technical entrepreneurship in the last couple of decades. Rewind fifteen years, and people were not obsessed with this route. Fast-forward fifteen years and you will probably find the same thing. The fervor surrounding entrepreneurship is because some of the biggest movers and shakers in computing in the last twenty years, and certainly the ones who have been most rewarded with fame and riches, have been entrepreneurs.

Personally, as someone who grew up glorifying and obsessing about academia the same way people here focus on entrepreneurship, I have that perspective built-in. Or rather, HN itself provides the perspective by reminding me that different people get worked up over different things, and there's no single dream mandated for everybody. But even I'm vulnerable to "startup envy," despite never actually finding anything about it appealing except for the prospect of vast riches and everyone on HN thinking I'm really smart.

Also, I think the focus on entrepreneurship distorts discussion about topics that aren't directly related to entrepreneurship, but that's another story and not much of a complaint -- it's natural for discussion in any forum to be influenced by the primary focus of people who frequent it.

Groxx
I'd know almost nothing about software security if it weren't for this site. That's not a waste of time.

As to pushing people to become entrepreneurs: only extremely lightly, I think. Heck, I doubt if even 10% of the articles on here, much less the higher-ranked ones, have anything to do with entrepreneurship. There are a lot of people here with experience in it though, so of course discussions of such will be tainted with their knowledge. But that's what you get in a community.