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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Sort of. I find reading other people's stories gives me "permission" to do and try things.

I'm naturally quite a retiring person, but getting candid explanation of people's techniques and approaches has given me the "if they can do that, I can try it too" attitude numerous times (as has HN and numerous blog posts, to be fair - I can pinpoint certain things I've done to being inspired by specific pieces of content).

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Could you give examples of things you've done and the HN posts that triggered them, please?

I'm familiar with the feeling you describe (They can? Then I can too!) so I'm just curious to see what is in those posts that can inspire someone (content, semantics, anything).

I can't remember where I first read this, but one basic piece of advice I've carried in my head for at least three decades is "if you want to be good at something, find a person who is good at that thing, and then do what they do"

This helped me a lot in my first few jobs, i.e. identify a person who is successful and well respected, get to know them and try to do things the way they do.

Works in school too -- if you want to do well, do what the successful students are doing. Usually boils down to pretty simple stuff, e.g. studying a lot more.

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/commentary/email-newsletters-busin... was on HN 6+ years ago and inspired me to get into email newsletters, which I was very skeptical about. Now we're a company of 9 doing it :-) It's not a very self help style post, but just seeing examples of something was enough to inspire.

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