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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

He's right. But muscles can also break from overuse. Just be careful, ya'll.

I want to highlight your comment. I don't necessarily think there is a ton wrong with this blog post, and major kudos to the author for his success. I would just like to point out that trying to transfer these techniques into 90+% of the rest of the population would probably not result in their success.

I'll use myself as an example. I've heard the bromides of "Get out of your comfort zone" and "push through", yada yada, many times. And I indeed have gotten out of my comfort zone many times. But I've found that often times I have extreme stress reactions, sometimes bordering on panic, when I get too outside my comfort zone. I find this especially the case where I take too much on at once - I have a poor ability to prioritize and just "let things go" that aren't important. I wish this weren't the case, but after many cases of trial and error I've found this is how I am. It's not that I'm not capable of growth and change, but I'm quite positive what has worked for this guy will most definitely not work for me.

In general, be very careful of following any successful person's advice on how they became successful. There were a whole lot of other circumstances, innate gifts, and a lot of luck for any specific person that won't transfer broadly.

This is why most people cannot become a Navy Seal. At some point you hit physical and mental ceilings and your body has to stop.

Do you think you perhaps pushed too far too fast, and that a slower pace might work better? Or that the circumstances were not well suited to support "pushing through" at that time?

I'm genuinely curious here. I also empathize with the struggle you have experienced. Sometimes I'm not sure how hard I should push myself, or when I need to first repair or strengthen my foundations.

For me, it's not necessarily just that I pushed too far too fast. It's that I realized that if I do push far, that I need a good amount of recovery time to deal with it. That is, I'm OK with dealing with one big stressful event, but it's the "death by a thousand cuts" that I just can't handle, cases where I have lots of little stressors or interruptions.

And that's OK. There are plenty of ways I can be happy by not putting myself in situations where I need to deal with tons of these little stressors. Just probably took me longer than it should have to know what I'm good at, and how I like to be challenged.

Thanks for sharing. That's awesome that you gained a better awareness of what works for you. Cheers to that.

Or, in other words - you need to learn how to pace your stresses and over time you’ll couch yourself to a person who’s capable of handling stress better.

I am a very sensitive person, nevertheless it took me years to learn how to do big leaps; and while at first I believed the only way forward for me were those “revolutionary, yet incredibly painful steps”, I had then reached an age when I could no longer progress in larger, rarer chunks.

So I learnt that I need to pace my pushes. It still is a cut each time, but I had to know how big that cut can be so that it would not be an irrecoverable wound.

Remember, none of those people jumped off a cliff to stop fearing heights. Neither have they worked out in a situation with a vitamin deficiency. It’s all healthy and psychological.

Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.

Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.

Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.

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