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Comment by ks | Hacker News Reader

> "I think your assertion that "you can't have it all" is telling. We are raised in the US being told that we can indeed have it all, if we work hard enough."

But unfortunatly, not everyone can have it all. That attitude may lead to more risk taking, but it will also be a constant source of unhappiness.

60 minutes had a story about Denmark, which is the happiest country in the world. Their secret is to try to get it all, but also know that you might have to settle for less.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/60minutes/main3833...

Video is here: http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/140/happiness

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>That attitude may lead to more risk taking, but it will also be a constant source of unhappiness.

Not necessarily. It may be a source of unhappiness, but it may just be a calibration effect. Consider the question, "on a scale of 1-10, how happy are you?" I know 1 == sad (not me) and I know 10=="a marijuana forest full of strippers?!?". But what does 5 or 8 mean?

Say I'm the sort of person who might rate myself a 9. But If there is a person, real or hypothetical, who is "happier" than me (1), but not quite a 10. So that leads me to conclude HE must be 9 and I must be 8. But I'm not less happy, I just don't know how to answer a "how happy are you" question.

Similarly, I might want to rate myself a 5, but then I think about how I wasn't eaten by velociraptors, and jack myself up to 7 (my understanding is that something of this nature occurs in Denmark).

(1) His beer comes from further away than my beer and his wife's ass is higher up than my wife's ass.

The best advice I'd have to anyone wanting to begin a start-up here is that the RISK always has to be GREATER than the REWARD for there to be a PROFIT. RISK > REWARD = PROFIT. It's that simple.

I find the saying "you can have it all" to be idealistic bullshit that dooms an economy and its people to failure and exploitation. It merely justifies the reason not to have a welfare system because it is your own damn fault if you take a leap against common sense that is never able to pay off.

Example: 50 years ago AT&T invented the picturephone AKA video phones. The reason it took almost 40 years for it to even become marketable was because it wasn't worth the risk for people. There wasn't enough reward to justify the risk of changing, so no one did.

Simply put it gave 10 frames per second of picture, gave no benefit over voice and cost a fortune. $20 vs $1200 for a handset, it was a retarded product and took 50 years to even get uptake and by that time it was on broadband phones and the housephone market is already beat by VoIP and Webcams.

Would a start-up have survived 50 years with no selling product?

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