Ask HN: What is the best advice you received in 2022?
I am a believer I can learn from anywhere and I thought I can ask HN folks to share what they learned or received advice that had profound impact. For me, be relentless in saying NO to things. It came from a trusted friend when I was complaining about overworked at my workplace.
149 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadOscar Wilde
It's old, but timeless, and I found it last month.
Naming these concepts has made them easier to identify and has put me back in the driver's seat
kinda like going down the rabbit-hole of building an automated solution to save 15 minutes of manual data entry
Advice at work by a manager. It makes discussions less confrontational, and I found that, regardless of whether it helps the discussion, it helps me keep a positive mood.
Context: After spending a few years in a well managed unicorn, I joined a small-ish startup that had managed to stay afloat with average engineers operating under constant pressure.
After getting decent funding, they decided to hire people to improve quality overall, and that’s when I came in, among others.
I have to admit it was hard for me to adapt from “I’m adding features to a well oiled machine” to “everything is full of rust and leaking and I’m supposed to build a product on top it”.
That’s why the change of mindset helped: switching the “this is shit” gut reaction into improvement plans helps you focus, prioritise, and avoid assigning blame. It also keeps the former wave of engineers from feeling attacked when they were involved in the original design and hear criticism.
Came from one of my employees.
Always struggled with being who I think the world will allow me to be as opposed to the person I am. I flip flop between those two states. That said, I think many of us do.
Not to be confused with allowing undesirable behaviors to run free, of course. I'm mindful of being the kind of person I want to be too.
Some things just feel easier when you're just being yourself and you choose not to give a shit what others think. It seems more attractive and confident.
It can feel scary because you somehow feel like you're putting your life situation or identity at risk. But I guess I've never been good at predicting the future anyway. Might as well be myself.
That would have me fired within 24 to 48 hours max. I'm a caustic potty-mouthed cynic outside of work, but have to basically hide a good portion of my authentic self in order to continue picking up a paycheck.
If the life advice is you should be your authentic self whenever its easy and there are no consequences. Well that's easy but kind of meaningless advice.
But nonetheless this is why be yourself, in the absolute, is bad advice. You always need a balance between individuality and conformance. Too much in either direction and you will have a bad time.
Basically, most of the things that are put in place have a reason behind it. You don't have to agree with the reason, but you must understand it before trying to solve a problem.
[1]: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
But here's my advice to you.
This is my command to you: love eachother.
I had a self realization and received the advice from myself during one of my "zen state pondering" that - being in the best shape of my health with improve EVERYTHING by 10x in my life.
A technologist for 24 years. Almost got my last product startup acquired in 2014 by a (back then) 500 million USD company. I have been obese for 15 years.
I have lost 30 pounds in last 4 months and now lifting and working out 4 days a week(I try 5 days). I look forward to working out now. I feel so much more energetic and elevated state of awareness. Everything is already so much better.
I’m a geneticist with a unique set of analytical skills that keeps me tied up in dozens of projects at a time, and my health is always the thing I let slide.
Whenever I finally decide to workout, I tell myself, “I’ll never let that much time go by between workouts again.” Then invariably, I don’t have time.
How did you overcome that?
This way you know you have to do it every day and it takes priority above everything else - if you don’t have health, how are you going to do other stuff you want to do?
Doing it first thing in the morning is a trick to simplify prioritization. Do not check your phone until you exercised. Obviously go to bed earlier to get better sleep.
After 3 months your body will adjust and you will carve workout and built a habit that is easier to follow.
Working out keeps me sharp at work which is cognitivly demanding and requires high levels of creativety and problem solving. From that angle, I take it seriously as core part of my day and my identity.
Overtime I started to enjoy doing hard thing in and of itself. Which is changing my life beyond what I could imagine.
Over last 15 years, I have tried to loose weight and sooner or later I ran into - "I dont have time" or "this customer proposal is more important" syndrome. Derailed my effort. Before I knew I was back to or worse than where I started.
I feel different this time. Its almost as important as eating everyday to stay alive. As important as having work to earn bread for family.
Being analytical, I have tried hard to find whats different this time. I dont think I have exact understanding but here are some factors that I came up during my pondering .
- Something just triggers this mindset where working out becomes a part of you. Almost a necessary activity like taking a bath. You can skip a day or two but it starts to smell and feel like you MUST do it.
- I feel the trigger has one or more the following components : 1) WHO - You do it for someone. It could be you yourself, family, kids, grandkids, girlfriend. 2) You have a strong realization that LIFE is finite & You want to have a better and longer life. 3) You are FED UP with something.
- Goal setting & how your mind processes goals - In past, my goals had a finish line. Like - "I want to loose weight" or "I want to run a half marathon". I was able to achieve those goals and almost soon after that my mind was like: "That's it man. We are done. Lets go back to default mode" (busy work, less active life style). This time my goal is - I WILL LIVE REST OF MY LIFE IN A HEALTHY MANNER. There is no end date or finish line. The results do not matter. I dont have goals to loose 2 pounds every week. I just do what I need to do to live healthy.
- There is also realization that EVERYONE must go through pain and pay with money and time, for your health. You do it in Gym or Doctor's office. You chose.
- Accountability was a big factor for me. In past, I would start but drop off at some point. This time I hired a gym-owner fitness trainer (awesome guy). My net investment is less than 3K a year. I go to him 2 days a week. Just that will easily help me live at least a year longer (keeping all other factors same). Whats the value of one year of time for me? Priceless. 3K is dirt cheap.
I can go on. I have been taking notes in a google doc with a hope to covert that into a eBook someday. I have thoughts from so many different perspectives, that I feel can help others too.
Other than that, I am trialing pen and paper for todos and exercise plans. I think this helps. Also see an exercise physiologist occasionally and that helps alot. A personal trainer you check in with every 4 weeks is similar.
Finally just see it as essential. You will die if you don’t do it kind of thing.
Corollary to this, remove friction for starting a workout. I.e. get equipment to your abode/office so you can start working out in 2 minutes.
And also: there are a lot of great work out sessions on YouTube. Dumbbells, yoga, stretching, etc.
And also also: if you don’t know where to start, just pay for personal trainer.
A few weeks back I tweaked my back just while laying down for some reason. Hurt like hell getting up. Next day, still painful, did some light squats. During the squats the pain didn't get any worse. So I added more weight. Less pain. More weight, less pain. Until I got to my working set for the day and nailed it. The back pain got better and it was all fine.
Now the lifting may not have had any effect on the pain. It could have just gone away on its own. I'll never know. But the point being that the pain didn't indicate a structural damage that was dangerous. Lifting probably also helped my mind make that distinction.
I've had many similar back pain experiences to yours. Bio-Psycho-Social model for the win
Thanks for sharing :-)
This doesn't even have to be a theory. Being top physical shape today is a minimum requirement for top notch intellectual performance.
Read:
https://www.espn.in/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaster...
They jog up and down the hills around the farmland,
At 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.
"Physical fitness and brain performance are tied together, and it shouldn't be a surprise that grandmasters are out there trying to look like soccer players," Ashley says.
Viswanathan Anand, does two hours of cardio each night to tire himself out so he doesn't dream about chess;
Chirila does at least an hour of cardio and an hour of weights to build muscle mass before tournaments.
The next generation of rich, successful, with super careers and affluence will be people with Christiano Ronaldo like physique.
As the father of a 20 month old, this year has been rough; she wants Mommy all the time and now that she's mobile there's not much I can do about it short of physically restraining her.
At the end of November she finally decided that I wasn't completely terrible; I went to Vegas for re:Invent and she was going from room to room looking for me. She still wants Mommy more, but Daddy has moved up a step from "unwanted intruder" to "somebody we take for granted but miss when he's gone".
Once you get to 2+ and language starts developing, your bond with the kid will skyrocket. Come up with good ideas for adventures with them and they’ll love you the way you’re hoping they will.
FWIW although this might be common, it's not always true.
My wife went back to work about four months after our eldest was born (her choice, no pressure from employer), I was working from home - and flexibly - and so I got a lot of quality time with him until he was 18 months and started at daycare. That including us attending the local "mother and baby" group (yes, it was called that) together.
After we had two further kids, both of which I also took to "mother and baby" group, they finally renamed the group ;)
I had the same "issue" with my son which is older. The issues went away after some time after we started to communicate (using words).
Kids are great.
I think the big change a few weeks ago was her finally understanding that Daddy is something other than "Mommy who doesn't have milk".
Anyway, thirty years later we’re good, and I would go to my dad way before my mom to talk about any sort of personal issue and such. Of course, every situation is different, hopefully it won’t take you nearly as long as it did for us.
I have found in my personal relationships in the past few years that the more I let go and stop trying to control things or take it personally when someone doesn’t act the way I’d like, the better it all goes. Of course, for some people that means the relationship drops off entirely, but for the more important ones they got a lot better.
By my PCP. Seriously, go get checked (and presumably treated) for Vit D/B12 deficiency, sleep issues, and inflammations and it might change your life.
This is especially true in adults relationships. If you don't put yourself out there and voluntarily assume the risk of going first, risking rejection, etc. then nothing is going to happen. Other people are not going to call you to hang out.
That commenter said it and I’m gonna say it too: I’ve been able to think much more deeply, thoroughly, and most importantly much further along than my old self before doing this (and even further than my coworkers in ways that has already paid off).
One day I really went off on it and wrote out my thoughts for 4 hours on some important technical ideas I’ve been ruminating on. Not in one big doc, either, but using Obsidian to connect my ideas to each other. I used those ideas to knock out a massive technical problem we were having at work with half a day’s effort. Found a quick win swimming around in my head.
It’s been a game changer.
Edit: I found the original comment!! Read it, there’s two other books there that have supercharged my life. Probably the most influential comment I’ve read on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594264
I was skeptical bc I’m huge on pen and paper, but one morning I just said screw it and put Obsidian on my phone. That alone unleashed a torrent of thought, I think always having something you can take notes on is the key. Paper isn’t always on you when an idea strikes. A phone typically is
They also publish mostly finished work (not necessarily perfect) semi frequently. These works could be blog posts, websites, YouTube videos, books, and a whole host of other things depending on what's being produced
how did you apply? or how does one take smart notes?
I tend to overthink a lot, to try and 'figure it out' or to 'make sense of it all', but really I just need to do the things that I already know need to be done, I always know things I need to do, I always have the next step, but because it doesn't quite feel enough or because it's not overly clear to me how the parts fit together or what will happen, I will go back into 'trying to figure it out mode'
It's depressing when I stop to think how little time I actually spend doing the things that will actually make the difference and move forward and how much my mind goes in circles trying to figure out how I need to change to make progress, but the truth likely is, I just need to do the thing, do more of it and do it faster, everything else becomes an excuse.
In some ways it's an insecurity, because you can't know the future ahead of time and you don't know how what you are doing now will fully link up to what you are hoping to achieve on a bigger scale, but you just have to take that leap.
I think this is super common amongst HN at least. I had to work on it too, but the mindset I fall back on now is that you can start doing it and figure it out along the way. Works for tons of things, from software, to plumbing. Worst case, we can come back later and clean up any mess we made along the way.
Best part is, every time you do something new, you get better and the next time is easier.
A pet peeve of mine is when people I know say things like "oh I don't know how to do my taxes". Just google it, there are so many great resources and you'll be done in 2 hours. (These are people with 1 state and 1 W-2, nothing complex).
"Then we had Dan Ingalls whose job was to be smarter than me and make it all really work,
and his favorite line was you just do it and it's done... and that's what he did and and so we had it almost right away"
("it" is an early Smalltalk interpreter).
Source:
https://youtu.be/Odmx-ScL-8o
(51m52s)
"Another thing you have to do, of course, is to have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it means: sit down on your ass until you do it."
I don't remember who I heard it from
I contrast that with how some people say "I'd like to learn X language" (like Japanese, or Italian, not like Rust) and they don't, some languages are difficult (German comes to mind), but ultimately, if you want to learn a language, you do it
"You gotta kill the person you were born to be to become the person you want to be."
There's a lot wrapped in it: discomfort, uneasiness, and determination. It's made impact from the day-to-day life level (trying new things I wouldn't have before) to the large life-scale (quitting my job to pursue my startup).
Ultimately, you just gotta go for it.
My experience with life has been different.
I took some elements from the person I was born to be. Only some elements of careful choice.
This made me a better person, a better human in the long run.
In the short term, it made me fit well, and also reduced unnecessary friction, which non-trivially helped in becoming the person I wanted to be.
Killing is kinda like burning bridges.
But sometimes whatever you are happens to be something like being overweight, or unmotivated etc. That's when 'being yourself' isn't very helpful.