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Comment by ptn | Hacker News Reader

That one was pretty drastic, but very true. Thanks for the advice.

Sounds like you just need to man up and grow a pair. Honestly. If you think what he said was "harsh", then you're in for an interesting world. At some point in my life... I think it was the start of my senior high school year, I just became comfortable and cool with myself. I started not caring about what others thought, and just did what made me happy. I made new friends, ditched old ones, and started my career. Confidence in yourself is the best thing you can have. As soon as I graduated high school I moved to Hawaii to work for a new startup, and haven't looked back. Live life from the perspective of "will I regret not doing this?" rather than "will I regret doing this?".

Also, at the chance of coming off as cheesy... think about the legacy that you want to leave for yourself. What are people going to say at your funeral? What will your tombstone read? What can you surround yourself with so that every day that you wake up in the morning, you're excited to get at it and live it? I think that's where true happiness comes from, and that's what truly matters in life :) </end-hallmark-card>

I didn't think it was harsh, but "A: I'm shy. B: You are gonna die! Don't be." really caught me off guard.

I can totally see your point and agree completely. My legacy is something I think about constantly.

When I die, I want to say "FUCK YEAH! Let's do that again!", not "Yeah I felt safe".

Put yourself in embarrassing situations. Go to a karoake night and "sing" spoken word style, hopefully off key, the great part is this isn't hard for most people. Take the guitar to some kind of open mic night and absolutely bomb, make sure it's tuned wrong before even going on stage.

Go with the intention of being bad.

After that you'll get over it.

Or woman up and not grow a pair. It isn't really harsh or not harsh. There are merely realities of being human. (It may, however, require a drastic change in perspective).

In reality, your circumstances and actions are immaterial to your mental state. (I think this is obvious from the number of depressed people in the USA).

I think instead of asking 'what can I do to be happy', you really have to tell yourself 'I am going to be happy', and then go out and do things.

If you do it the first way, you spend your life coming up with millions of unsuccessful 'get happy quick' schemes, that never quite pan out.

If you do it the latter way, you start out happy, so you don't really need to do anything. But you do do things, because people who are happy go out and get stuff done.

I struggle with this problem too, so your predicament touches on something with me.

It is drastic because in this situation, you have to be drastic. Shyness a is kind of hesitation. You are about to do something, but you catch yourself and say 'well what if'. Then you backslide from your motivated position to 'maybe i shouldn't', and so, with one hesitation, you've gone from 'doer' to 'didnter'.

So you just have to smother that initial hesitating voice and think drastically about things. If I don't do this, it is one more wasted opportunity in my ever-shortening life.

Every time I've taken a risk where i smothered the initial hesitation it has paid big dividends (not in money).

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