Advice

Observing my family, I have realized how much exercise impacts your quality of life as you age. I've seen family blame "just getting old" for many symptoms of poor health choices, such as problems walking up stairs or type II diabetes. If they focused on health, they might be able to improve their quality of life significantly!

As a specific example - various studies have correlated the ability to stand up (or, doing a squat) not only with how long your life is - but also how long you will live independently. Extrapolating this - not only does exercise have the potential to extend your life, but it also extends how long you can continue to do what you want in life - such as traveling, walking, living alone, etc. Being specific - I know one 60-year-old who ran a half marathon last year, and another who can barely walk up the stairs to his bedroom.

I wish I had learned better health and exercise routines as a teenager!

I would say that I regret not doing these things earlier, but a large part of the issue is that it's somewhat expensive (both in terms of time and $$) to exercise and eat well, so it would have been hard for me to afford living like this (both in terms of time and money) when I was younger.

(Yes, you can eat well and exercise well without much money, but it's super challenging if you can't afford quality prepared foods and a decent gym membership: I don't see many 24 year olds that have a full time job, are in top physical health, but also still have time available for other interests...)

As the Bob Dylan song goes, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

It seems like a strange decision take take a month off after founding your startup to build a side project in Japan.

I think Hunter S. Thompson's advice for young people is much better, because in it he makes the point that anyone seeking to give you advice can't possibly know enough about your situation to give good advice.

https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/

If who you are is pedestrian, don't hesitate to be the most pedestrian you can be.

Typo - "Shot" should be "short"

Although I have to admit, that word might fit in some cases...

Definitely a 20-30 thing, never even crossed my mind before I was 25.

Study abroad was my favorite part of college. Spending just a few weeks each in Taiwan and Costa Rica was pretty enlightening.

We're politically liberal (sometimes to a fault), not any more optimistic than average (and quite possibly less), and definitely not what I'd call "energetic". It'd be more accurate to say the PNW has positioned itself as the laid-back alternative to SF. I've known a couple companies who have left the area because they couldn't find enough people here in their particular field who wanted to really work hard.

On these particular axes (which may or may not be important to you), Seattle/Portland simply aren't in the same league as San Francisco or New York City. People in those cities are mercilessly open, optimistic, and energetic.

My advice for any young person is to learn to think for themselves and figure out things for themselves. There is no magical advice out there that will work for everyone. The same thing that will transform someone's life in an amazing way will ruin someone else life.

Most of my interests formed, solidified and shaped me in this range. 20-30 is more so improving aptitude. I am not saying people do not find new lifelong interests past this range.

in general i like that he scoped his advice to his own years though. very humble thing to do despite having done more than most of us will in our lifetimes.

It's never ever too late to do anything, the important thing is whether someone's willing to admit they didn't know as much as they thought.

A good tan! Get some sun, bro!

Someone 20-30 disagreeing with the previous generation is much more likely to be right imo.

Do you or is this just some lefty privileged angst?

You'll end up more closely identifying with first gen immigrants which puts you in a pretty good place out in SF.

You'll get used a lot in your 20s, people will make a major buck off your skillsets, but if you keep growing them you'll skyrocket a few years after most everyone else plateaus, the joy of working and fear of poverty never leave, but they are rocket fuel later.

You get used to deprivation, develop a non-fragile sense of self, and learn to let most things go too, you'll get used to sweating in secret and it'll give you a great pokerface, it's great training for doing the hard things once life gets easier financially in your 30s and temptation to coast lays most other people low.

This. I was often surprised to find out that a famous person whom I admire is actually a very nice person, replies to my e-mails, and sometimes even agrees to meet and talk in person. Sometimes you may even be able to help them with something, and that feels really awesome.

> you should listen carefully to/date people studying arts, literature, social studies, education, politics...

But you should always listen to more than one person in each category, and compare what they said.

That being said, I can see how -if you identify as a non-conformist in some way or the other- it makes sense to move to a place with a higher-than-normal ratio of other non-confirmists.

After all, even if they are not of the same bent as you, at least they are familiar with the feeling of not fitting in and, hopefully, as a result are more tolerant of other people who deviate from the norm - whatever that norm may be.

I might replace that advice with "be in the city", where "the city" is anywhere that isn't suburbs/rural.

It's actually hard to be fully aware of the high levels of conformity one finds elsewhere until you have spent 6+ months in SF.

That's not to say that there aren't widespread prejudices held in SF.. the biggest one I have encountered is the belief that people living in "flyover" states are idiots and are less enlightened than those living in SF.

Saying SF is open to nonconformity is not another way of saying SF is "enlightened". It's just an aspect of enlightenment that SF culture does particularly well compared to other parts of the world.

This isn't even necessarily all kinds of nonconformity... it's just some that are rare elsewhere.

If you pick a person at random from anywhere in the US you'll find roughly equivalent levels of enlightenment and judgmental views. What's unique about SF is that being different is way more acceptable than it is elsewhere.

When you live in SF for a while and then go to other major cities and see how people dress it looks like they are all wearing a conformist costume, trying to look acceptable. But acceptable to whom? It's this instinct toward conformity that is so repellent about many areas of the country. The example I used about fashion is just an example, the same exists when it comes to life choices, values, etc.

For maximum flexibility, aim to be a jack of all trades, and learn to fluently translate between tech-speak and business-speak.

Also, doing it this way, it was an easy ritual -> brush teeth, shower, lie in bed and read, feel tired and can't focus anymore, set book aside, turn off bedside lamp and close your eyes and fall asleep quickly. This adds up to a lot of reading over the months and years.

I'll read waiting in line. During unproductive meetings. Riding in any sort of public transport/lyft/etc. In airports. On the toilet.

One of the things I like about getting old is I can let go of all those things I should be doing, in my case writing but in your case perhaps that's reading.

It's scale that seems to kill education, in fact I sometimes wonder if there might just be too much of it.

You can create complex things while young, but also you can pick up skateboarding at 40.

My assumption that it's rarer for those who are older is probably due to the fact that they have to worry about making a living and there aren't as many resources where you can engage with your peers outside of university, and also the fact that as a kid, making mistakes is not frowned upon but merely a process of discovery, whereas when you're older there is a lot of negative emotions associated with failure.

I can assure you that having good social skills is absolutely nothing like being a smoker in the 1960s. And, there is no absolute relationship between having good social skills and getting talked into believing crazy ideas.

I have absolutely no idea where you get those ideas, but they are completely and demonstrably wrong.

Related to this is the talk the founder of Asana gave at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. If you can make the people that are on the front lines of doing good a bit more efficient then you are doing good yourself.

Having worked at a YC-backed alternative to payday lender (https://www.//lendup.com) and having spent a lot of the time in the call center listening to our customers, I'd suggest that a lender to folks without access to credit can have much more impact than you could possibly imagine. Being able to instantly inject $500 into the bank account of someone that needed it for a car repair or they'd lose their job when they couldn't get it elsewhere was only one of the many, many examples. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of customers, and the impact is not trivial by any measure.

Taking something that is incredibly painful and making it a delight at scale is a beautiful thing, almost no matter how trivial that thing is. I'm reminded of when Steve Jobs forced the Apple team to shave 30 seconds off of the startup time, because multiplied by the number of people who use Apple devices it's the equivalent of years in aggregate.

I love that there are thousands of companies trying to change the world by making the one thing they work on absolutely perfect. It's a great thing.

I have a serious medical condition. I was sexually abused as a child. I spent nearly 6 years homeless.

The last thing I want is someone trying to "rescue" me. I've spent enormous amounts of time trying to figure out how to solve some really hard problems without approaching it as charity and rescuing other people.

For example, I am trying to start a program to help homeless people and others with barriers to regular employment start making money online, even if it is only in dribs and drabs. I do what I can to advocate for more development of market-rate, inexpensive housing rather than "homeless programs" per se. I want to see the fabric of society change such that we have less homelessness. I absolutely don't want to see more Big Feels (TM) efforts to Help The Homeless because that almost always means giving them temporary relief that often actively helps keep them stuck and then expecting them to grovel in gratitude.

Having thought about this a whole, whole lot, I think good business models are the single best way to make the kind of civilizing impact I desire to see.

We need more Ghandis, who taught India financial self sufficiency as the antidote to being Britain's bitch, not more Jesus Christ Superstars, who at this point is a meme of "the only good man is a dead man who died a martyr." I assume that was what the world needed 2000 years ago. But I would like to see less charity and more healthy fabric of society that makes the lives of ordinary people work better without them having to prove they have some problem that merits positive intervention of some sort.

I"m fine if people feeling like their vision will "change the world" is the motivation they need to put themselves through the hell that starting a company can be. I'm extra fine if that framing has them thinking in terms of "How does this genuinely improve the lives of people and not just milk them for money to line our pockets?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html