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Follow boring advice

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207 pointspoushkar97 comments

I've seen PG [1] say/write versions of this: "The Y Combinator founders who followed our advice succeeded. The ones who didn't, didn't."

The advice is so simple, it's hard for a lot of outsiders to believe it's worth anything. "Make something people want." "Talk to your users." "Do things that don't scale." "Keep typing and avoid dying." People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that.

My company got into the Winter 2009 batch of YC, the same batch as Airbnb. They weren't around for many of the dinners; they spent a lot of their time away from the Bay Area doing exactly those things that PG advised, mostly in NYC, where many of their most active users were. They just did that stuff, over and over, for several years. Now they have one of the most successful companies out of Silicon Valley in the last 15 years. (I saw PG tweet a couple of years ago that he'd recently dinner with them, and Brian would still write down PG's suggestions in a notebook.)

During that batch, I was flailing about trying to find some magical trick to make our company work. I remember one office-hours session with PG, excitedly telling him some buzzword-filled story I'd dreamed up about how our company could be a brilliant success. "Just make a good website" he replied.

It took me a while to work out how the Airbnb guys were able to follow the advice so effectively whilst we and so many others got stuck in the weeds, but looking back now it's pretty obvious. They were just very comfortable in their own skin. They didn't have ego issues around needing to seem like geniuses, needing validation all the time, fearing rejection or embarrassment. "Talk to your users" was easy, as they were sociable, likeable people who put on cool parties and who were naturally able to make everyone in their company feel welcome and valued, and everything else emerged out of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?

Paul Graham, the creator of this website.

Paul Graham, the cofounder of YC, whose website you are on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

He is one of the founders of Y Combinator and the founder of Hacker News. pg was the moderator here for a long time.

For example: "Challenge HN: build pg-bot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 (148 points | May 30, 2011 | 39 comments)

I never meet him, but apparently he repeat this kind of advice a lot, and someone of the first batches of YC made an image of a fake action figure of pg that repeats the advice when you press a button. I can't find the link :( .

> Am I supposed to know who PG is?

Yes, you are, if you're using the site he created (not to fault you for not knowing but often many HNers will reference Paul Graham by his initials so it's useful to know).

AirBnb provides a platform for people to break laws and covenants in their community. Maybe they got lucky that they were not shut down before they got big enough to fight back?

This is mostly tangential to my point, but for what it’s worth, they’ve been engaging with local governments from very early on in their history, and they got to the position of being able to work with governments by starting out focusing on building something people wanted and talking to their users.

I don’t dispute that there are negative externalities to what they do and that their existence and growth are not without controversy, but my comment has nothing to do with that controversy, it’s about the useful advice in building a financially successful company.

Thanks for being so upfront and transparent. Very inspiring comment.

Reads like standard survivor bias

Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :)

Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company?

That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.

> far less successful than Airbnb

Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups:

1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.).

2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bottom line:

> Net income -$4.584 billion (2020)

Which, yeah, is during the pandemic, but they've never been profitable.

Though I guess these days success is measured by how much money you can get from investors, than building an actually profitable business.

You're the second person in the thread who has sought to diminish the point by tangentially invoking the controversial aspects of what they do. It's a non-sequitur. I'm not engaging with that part further, as I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675

As for financial losses, yes of course the pandemic year was hard, but it's completely false to say that Airbnb has never been profitable or that it is not a financially strong company. Indeed they have financial strength built into the foundations of the company; they were revenue-focused and profitable in their first few months, and the very thing that made them attractive to investors was that their unit economics (dollar margin per transaction) was so strong. And they have had several profitable periods in the years leading up to their IPO. Yes they may have ended up posting losses, because they've spent heavily on marketing/growth and expansion into new product categories, but that doesn't make them a weak company, quite the opposite. If you're trying to equate them to money-sinks like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, etc, you're mistaken; they are the very antithesis of those kinds of companies.

Could someone expand on "Do things that don't scale." - that seems somewhat counterintuitive.

It means doing things that you can do when you have 0 to a few users but that would not work beyond that. For example, Doordash validated their idea with posters and manually taking orders and delivering them themselves, no app, no drivers.

It is counterintuitive at first but when you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. When you're getting started you should focus on doing things to get started. Worry about scaling when you're scaling.

When you only have 10 users, the easiest ways to please all your users is to do things by hand that make the experience of those users excellent, rather than worrying about creating systems that will only pay off when you have 100,000 users.

When reddit started out and had almost no user base, they had employees each impersonate a handful of different users to give the site a sense of a pre-existing community. When Dwarf Fortress was starting out, their sole developer would create custom ASCII-art scenes to send to every supporter above a certain dollar threshold.

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Sending out invoices for example.

You can work on automating it and hooking various payment providers.

Integration with payment providers is a lot of hassle and engineering work. So when you have 5-10 customers it does not make sense to automate that.

Sending invoices manually does not scale of course - but that advice is given in specific context of company. Where you should focus on working on your product and not on automating invoices "because somewhere in the future it will be needed."

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that.

I thought you gave away 7% of your company for the big pile of VC money that YC hooks you up with, so you have a few years of runway to find an intersection between "an idea you had" and "an idea people are willing to collectively spend a lot of money on".

That outcome was not likely for anyone other than the top 2-3 companies per batch pre about 2011, and in 2009, due to the financial crisis, we were basically told “you probably won’t raise money at all”.

We went to YC because it seemed like the best place to learn how to build successful companies and to be around others doing it.

My favorite example of this is how to get stronger and healthier. There's no secret, and you actually don't have to do anything too extreme.

Exercise regularly, drink water, don't eat too much, mostly plants, get lots of asleep, avoid drugs and alcohol.

Now that I do so well with all that advice, I can't quite remember why that all sounded so hard or "boring" before.

1. Because you actually need protein to gain muscle mass, so there goes your "mostly plants" without a caveat about "vegetarian protein", which has its own set of problems.

2. Exercise regularly - what is regularly? What kind of exercise? You never had over-work injuries? Injuries from muscle / postural imbalances? Etc.

I concede that most of this advice is available for free, but unless you have a GOOD coach, you will get injured before you get results. Then there is plain doing too much.

Again, you can come back with "Well, I am just talking about not being obese" - in that case, yea, it's much simpler since you don't have to worry about getting enough protein and balancing that against becoming over-weight.

There's a universe between being obese and being even an impressive weightlifter.

If I can play with my kids (as in, actually run around on the playground), play sports at a casually competitive level, hike for several hours, and help my friends move heavy furniture, that enables a pretty full life. I don't think you'd disagree it's pretty simple to get there.

Besides, you can probably still gain a ton of functional strength while on a plant based diet anyway.

I do agree.

Vegan proteins are not absorbed as good as egg / whey but it's possible to structure a vegan diet to gain strength (eg. vegan protein shakes). Personally, I tried briefly and gave up.

There are impressive vegan athletes even if it's hard to say whether they built more or their muscle on a vegan diet or not.

That said, I agree with your message, getting stronger is not always easy.

None of these are terminal criticisms, and in fact can be rectified with just a bit more information or expert advisement.

You might argue that it means the advice isn't simple. I would counter that in the average case, it's simple enough. We are surrounded with material, examples and non-examples of the advice being followed to the point of it being tiresome.

For cases like injury and plant protein sources the information and talent is so readily available for someone of sufficient means to take action with, that the "complexity" won't matter after six months.

I am personally unable to program my diet / workouts to effective result, even with significant effort and over a decade of experience.

I gained 25kg on a vegan diet through a span of 5 years. You just have to eat a bit more than comfortable but protein digestibility is a non-issue. Stuff that I ate - tofu, seitan, tempeh are very low processed soy/wheat products and can very quickly give you more than 200g of protein a day.

For me, the biggest problem was meeting caloric needs. It's very hard to get to 3000kcal+ eating non-processed plants.

PDCAAS, DIAAS or similar "bioavailability" measurements are standardized on pigs bowels and are targeted towards malnutritioned individuals that border on starvation or suffer from kwashiorkor.

As for weightlifting, you can do rounded back (inefficient form) deadlifts smartly (not overdoing the load) and get strong enough.

Don't things like rice and potatoes give you a quick path to high calories?

I find vegan protein powders to taste better than whey which is kind of gross to me. (I’m not a vegan). They usually have a blend of 5 or so protein sources to balance out the amino acids.

If you need more calories then fat is by far the easiest.

> bioavailability

Are there estimates available that you find more compelling? I’ve been using PDCAAS as my metric since its the standard for daily value on nutrition labels.

Context: vegan for ~6 years, barbell strength training for a couple months now, and trying to eat to support muscle growth.

Vegan protein was good enough for a world record setting strength athlete [0][1]. This documentary [2], produced by James Cameron, made me <edit>go vegan, sometimes i eat animal protein but rarely, aware that my inflammation values will rise by 70% doing it</edit>. The oldest olympian on the pedestal for the US was 39,5 years old at the time and vegan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian [1] https://medium.com/four-pursuits-ventures/worlds-strongest-m...

[2] https://gamechangersmovie.com/

As with many things the hard part isn't understanding how they work - most people, deep down, already know what actually works. It's hard because it requires working against the part of your brain that wants to conserve energy, eat energy-dense foods, and surf the web late at night. Everybody who hasn't already built good habits wants there to be an easy, secret way to get the results without the effort (and it is effort. Once you've been doing it for a while it's very easy. But I remember how hard it was to build up to that point).

The same applies for finances, dating/socialization, and business. Everybody knows to save/invest money (maybe not exactly how to invest), to not be afraid of failure, to ask questions and take initiative, to talk to users and make customers happy. Our simple animalistic brains don't like to do those things if we don't have to. It's uncomfortable for many people.

Nope ... there are a ton of 30-somethings writing "easy" advice like this and bemoaning the ignorance of their twenties. I'm a few decades older yet and can tell you that I'm still learning and integrating new ideas into my framework of how business (and the world in general) work. Creating a simple idea is easy but think about how many counter-examples there are to just this one rule (and you can find 100k more simple rules that together have complex interactions).

My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive.

> My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive

I love my life by this and it has already paid off with dividends.

The crabs in a bucket formula points out an important fallacy. Even incredibly generous help in every send line a zero sum hand can end up being bringing huge ventures to both parties.

It's one of the main lessons that people from high scarcity societies need to internalize when moving to a post scarcity society.

My problem I run into with these sorts of things, and to some extent normative ethics, is that they frequently contradict one another in reality. So you might be in a situation, and one piece of the advice would suggest one course of action, and another would suggest the opposite, and there wasn't any way to reconcile them.

I think they're well intended and can be useful to think about but beyond something like "these are useful things to be aware of or to keep in mind" it's hard to apply things in life.

Perhaps it's reading too much into what's intended by the authors of these sorts of pieces, and maybe they're just trying to communicate some help, but this particular piece is "advice about advice" so in that regard I think these issues are relevant.

Applying other people's rules (advice) to situations tends not to work out well. Using other people's advice to create your own framework and using that to live seems to work better.

> My simple rule ... it never hurts you to help another human. Sometimes it also benefits you but at a minimum your reputation in your sphere of influence is positive.

This is definitely not true, whether the general form you led with, or in the specific minimum you mention.

Contradictions to this rule are so widespread that we have an aphorism for it. ("No good deed goes unpunished.")

I have one really boring bit of advice (on public speaking) that many people refuse to believe is worth anything. Similar to what OP says, they imagine there's some deep secret, like "power poses" and body language, or eye contact.

It's this: know your subject inside and out, plus the answers to all the questions you're likely to get. When you're speaking, remember: you know the stuff, they don't, you want to communicate it. That's it.

You'll forget everything else with all that adrenaline roaring in your ears, anyway.

Reminds me of all the trick advice on how to do well on the SATs. My advice is simple:

1. take all the math classes your school offers

2. read lots of sci fi books

That's what I did, and I got the SAT results I needed.

The other day I picked up a book on building vocabulary for the SAT. Flipping through it, I knew essentially all the words. I've never studied vocabulary in my life. I just read a lot.

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Because it's hard to follow any advice, let alone boring ones. I'd probably say it's hard to do many things.

The advice for dieting is also boring (exercise more, eat less and more healthy foods), but there are still many overweight people. The answer is straightforward: it is actually pretty difficult to follow boring advice.

I agree. Boring advice are usually pretty simple. But simple does not mean it's easy.

Because emotions rules.

It doesn't matter that you know what you have to do, eat well, do exercise, how to prioritize, what's good for you and what's not.

Unless you steer your emotions in the right direction, you won't be able to achieve anything, because resistance and stregth of will won't get you very far.

And changing your emotions is really hard, because they're mostly formed in your youth, and doing so need a systematic approach, consistency, and strengh of will... and that's precislesly what you lack; a vicious cycle.

You can consider emotions as a compass. I have found it useful to listen to them, to figure out their cause. We will carry emotions our whole lives, ‘changing’ them doesn’t bring about the insight to actually deal with them. I recommend looking to resources like ‘It’s Not Always Depression’ by Hilary Jacobs Hendel

I started paying more attention to emotions when I realized that they show me the truth about what I value.

Strong feelings are typically a sign of a strong desire or fear of something.

"Why does this bother me so much? It's not that big a deal. Oh, because I really want..."

Knowing what I really want makes it easier to take action to get it, especially when the feelings are getting in the way of the goal. (Bad feelings and the fear of bad feelings are often obstacles to making things better.)

Everything is a feelings problem.

This is a exaggeration of course, but I've been struck by just how many sticky problems have an emotional component.

I have a tendency to ignore emotions in favor of (what seems to me like) the main content, but I limit myself when I do this.

Enthusiasm, despair, excitement, fear - these are too powerful to ignore. But naming them and uncovering the deeper values they reveal helps me make better decisions.

For example, I value minimalism and getting rid of junk but routinely put off doing any decluttering.

I realized that what I call "decluttering" is really better termed "making difficult decisions about my identity."

To get rid of <hobby supplies> that I never use involves confronting the fact that I'm not a <hobby> person. It's painful to realize that I'm not who I wish I was.

Getting rid of something I spent a lot of money on reveals that I wasted the money. I'm not as wise and frugal as I wish I was.

I put off minimalism because I don't have to feel those bad feelings if I don't force myself to evaluate and make the decisions.

And this scenario plays out in a lot of different areas of my life.

I don't take action toward a goal because I don't want to get excited and then fail and have to face the disappointment. Easier to coast along content with the status quo.

> To get rid of <hobby supplies> that I never use involves confronting the fact that I'm not a <hobby> person. It's painful to realize that I'm not who I wish I was.

My solution to these feelings is to remind myself that my hobbies don't define me, whether I do them a little or a lot. And it's OK to save some unused stuff until a season when I can use them. (Assuming that's not too far off.,)

I have another technique for this. I like to paint, and I'm ok, generally what I paint now is recognizable. But I've given myself a really long time line on getting good. Like 25 more years of practice. If you have a desire for a hobby there's no reason you can't think of it like golfing in retirement, or something similar. I'm ramping up to doing it more over a really long time.

In my case I kept the core supplies but got rid of a big stash of stuff that I was keeping in order to be able to "go make something on a whim" after realizing that right now it's the lack of time more than the lack of supplies that has been keeping me from creating. If it's going to happen, it will have to be a deliberate effort for a particular project and in that case I can also make the effort to go out and buy what I need.

But coming to terms with the fact that I don't have that kind of time in my life right now is hard, even though it's my own choice to prioritize other stuff. We're putting extra time into work right now with the goal of early retirement within the decade. This fact combined with the number of small children in the house means time-consuming hobbies with lots of small pieces are off the table for the next few years. I'm definitely looking forward to coming back to it in the future though!

I think the sacrifice is worth it but it's still a sacrifice. Usually I'm caught up in the busyness of life and don't think about it, but spending time on big-picture stuff like minimalism really brings the feelings to the surface. So no wonder I keep putting it off!

Very true. And as I reflect on why I used the identity language, I'm realizing that expressing my irrational feelings in an exaggerated form also helps to reduce the impact they have. By announcing dramatically to my husband, "I'm not a sewing person anymore!" I'm able to see just how silly it is to have that thought as a subconscious burden holding me back.

I recently dusted off an ambitious hobby project I shelved years ago and "finished" it. In the three years that the project sat, my relevant skill set and the available open source software improved to the point that the project took days rather than months, and ended up better than I originally expected. It was very satisfying to pick up again.

We think we make our choices rationally but in fact we don’t - they’re based on emotion and are mostly unconscious.

See George Lakoff’s work on cognition and decision making.

I think there is also a difference between knowing and _knowing_ - as in internalizing the information and relieing on it. There are many things that have been taught in school, for example, but made little sense untill I got the tools to truely understand them and be able to play with them.

So rather than just facts, you have networks of facts and experiences that need to connect for things to make sense and you to truely know something.

Most people lack the 'hustle' needed to action any advice let alone boring advice.

Are you asking this question yourself or are you suggesting that the author should have added this to the article?

I like this question.

Currently, it's rendered in gray font, and it has five answers.

I think it's the sort of question that's annoying to think about. It's not a complex technical question with a clearly defined answer you can look up on Wikipedia. It's not even obvious where you should start if you wanted to answer.

There is plenty of boring advice out there, but dispensing advice doesn't reliably help people. And yet, it feels like it should. Well-meaning people keep writing more of it.

Can we improve that?

How do you measure advice? Track compliance? Subjective ranking? Score outcomes?

I feel like there's plenty of science we're not doing, data we're not taking, that's applicable even to simple questions like "how do I make my advice more helpful", "what makes people not stick with it", "does following boring advice actually improve outcomes"

It's not particularly expensive to measure these problems. They could have a high impact, multiplied by a whole lot of people.

I'm not sure why the response today was to hide the question.

I've noticed a lot more grayed out comments in general, including my own.

Sometimes it's obvious: they (or I) posted on the political/politicized intersections of a subject. Downvotes are likely a mix of people who are aggressively opposed to the apparent tilt of the comment and people who are ideologically opposed to anything they see as politics.

Most times, it's no different from any comment I've made that merely sat at 1.

I think there must have been an influx of people in the last half year or so who are more prone to downvote or flag something they disagree with or just don't like. Only someone with access to the vote database could run a more objective analysis, but my anecdotal impression is that HN is getting more downvotey.

It might not be the sort of thing amenable to measurement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

> so why aren't far more people successful?

You can't defeat power law. It's something that happens everywhere.

Natural phenomenons, our universe, social interactions, romantic interactions, business etc.

Who owns the definition of 'successful'?

A low stress, high joy life is preferable to these Really Famous Names we could drop.

Sure, they may go on rocket rides, but do they know any peace?

Maybe.

Maybe peace is overrated?

There is certainly a price to pay for greatness, and some are willing to give it a shot. It seems so condescending to look down on poor them, not knowing peace when perhaps that is not the thing they are searching for.

My question was "Do they know any peace?"

Possibly they do.

It's not known to me either way.

Clearly I'm skeptical of whether materialism can deliver peace, and clearly I'm saying peace is worthy of pursuit, but falling just short of judging others' level of peace achieved is prudent.

Agreed. This purely materialistic definition of success is a very western concept.

Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older.

Western traditions will eventually catch up.

Eat less calories than you burn. Spend less money than you make.

Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in debt.

They're not really advice, so much as goals?

Also, CICO seems to be actually incorrect from what I read on it. Body's more like a thermostat than a steam engine and will work against you such as burning calories slower as you eat less.

If you really want to save money, then you need to think in terms of emotions and how to combat that rather than attempting to brute force it with willpower.

In fact one of the very common risks is to mix up goals and boring advice. Say, you wanna score in a soccer match: just receive the ball, get rid of defenders in case, and kick the ball in the net——which is both true and useless.

Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy of life for many people. Exercising means committing to spend time in an environment and doing an activity that many do not like at all——it thus means going against their desires for months, years etc.

And I am writing from the position of someone who is in shape, fit, does boring things that work, but had, like many, very limited success in persuading others to follow boring advice.

There's the white knuckle approach to life. Grinding through the pain. Alternatively, you can search for things you actually like.

In business, finding work that you like.

In fitness, finding workouts that you enjoy.

In health, finding foods you like that are good for you.

Lastly, you can't make people want to change. You can only guide them once they show that they want to change. This is different from wanting a result. Someone who wants to be more successful is very different from someone who wants to learn how to work more effectively. Focus on process over end goal.

I love food. Wouldn't give it up for the world. I can also tolerate not eating anything for two days very well. It's not really going against my desire.

Ditto for exercise. The hard part is actually starting. Once you start, everything becomes easier.

"The hard part is actually starting. Once you start, everything becomes easier." - For whom?

These are those types of nuggets, and I say it as mellowly as I can, that sound good ("starting is most difficult part"), but have very little empirical, or even anecdotal, support.

Starting is on the other hand easier than sustaining calorie reduction or consistent exercise because enthusiasm makes the operations initially easier (see the subscription boom that gym every where have in September and January), but then when people start telling themselves that this was not as easy as they expected to be when unsupported by the initial enthusiasm, they quit.

CICO is just physics; but you need to work BOTH sides of that equation. If you ONLY try to shift the balance to deficit by limiting intake, of COURSE your body is going to react to the new starvation environment. That's why you should moderately reduce intake while ALSO moderately increasing output (i.e. do physical activity)

Exercise also causes your basal metabolism to lower.

I don't know that to be true. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14692598/

the only study I can find that points to excercise lowering resting metabolic rate is one from 1989 that had nine subjects.

People don't live in a vacuum. The first advice is simple but in the real life easily will spiral into "fight all the time against the partner that insists into overfeeding you" or "move to a less contaminated area free of substances mimicking hormones" or "drive more time to reach a better restaurant near the workplace and now you have five minutes left to eat".

"Spend less money than you make" can translate sometimes into "don't search for medical advice that you need right now and fall for scammers that offer cheaper fake solutions"

I'm not saying that those were not good advice but, well, sometimes things get complicated.

Are you yet another GTP-3 bot? Because that's incoherent, irrelevant, uninteresting, and totally misses the point. It's pretty obvious on its face, it's been done many times before, and it's quite easy to spot, because the weird grammar and punctuation and logical inconsistency of your posts give it away.

Please try thinking of something original to do with GPT-3, and give proper credit to GPT-3 where it's due, instead of trying to claim what it spews out as your own thoughts.

Some constructive but boring free advice you should probably try to follow next time: If you don't want GPT-3 to write such driveling meaningless garbage out, you should try feeding it some more interesting meaningful garbage in, like so (both the input and more output examples are in the article):

GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

I have so many inventions that I don’t have enough time to tell you about them all.

I’ll just mention a few of them.

I built a ten-million-mile-long Interdimensional Space Engine, powered by a Zipper Motor, which could travel at the speed of light, but I accidentally left it in reverse, and it has been going backward ever since, heading toward the Big Bang.

I invented the Infinitly-Tunable Infrasonic-To-Ultrasonic Reverberation Transmogrification Oscillation Oscillator, but I couldn’t get it to work properly.

I made the Jell-O-Matic Snackinator, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I invented the Roto-Rooter-Hog-Trough-Ammo-Dispenser, but it went bankrupt.

I invented the Poopy-Pam-Powder-Packet Pest Powder, but it didn’t work.

In a simulated test of the robot-run brothel, the robot-prostitutes had to satisfy the robot-customers without the help of the robot-pimps. It worked fantastically, and the results were published in the Journal of Robot Whores.

I built an Interplanetary Ice-Cream Maker that was so powerful it froze the sun, and the sun emitted an ice-cream cone that promptly landed in my mouth.

I constructed a city so large that it broke the Minsky Barrier, and had to be abandoned for the sake of the universe.

I had to be the one to create the SimCity religion, and the Sims still think of me as their god even though I do not control them.

Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!

NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality.

SOLARIS AND MR. BINNS: This is a two-part book and one unit of the work is composed of paragraphs which are so short that they disappear while you are reading them. The other part is some two hundred pages of giant print, which makes it appear that the author is quite dogmatic and trying to impress his (if you will excuse the expression) “larger than life” personality on the reader.

Humans are hard wired to look for quick fixes and shortcuts. That's why instead of eating less calories they jump on some new revolutionary diet or put their money into meme stock instead of just playing the index. Every one wants to be smarter then the average Joe.

Just because it is simple doesn't mean it is easy ;)

Sounds like there is a business opportunity there.

This, I suppose, is implicit in the word "boring". I think the premise is: People could follow boring advice to become successful but they don't, precisely because it's boring.

Regardless the definition of success, we tend to consider it as being in the top <50%. So even if everyone was more succesful (regardless the metric) in today's standard, only the best ones would be said "successful".

Perhaps because boring things, and often even simple things, can still be extremely difficult. They can be exhausting. It's very tempting to believe that more exciting and/or complicated approaches, will be easier.

Those things have other sides to them; "make something people want" means that you probably can't make the thing you want. If you want to make a text editor and people don't want that, you can either please yourself (fun) or do something you don't really want to do (useful to others). It's much rarer that the two things overlap, but I guess more powerful when they do.

"talk to your users" brings "you can't make the decisions" with it. Tech people love to talk about "lusers" and deride anyone who thinks differently as dumb sheep. If your users want the Office Ribbon and you hate it, are you going to build it? If your users hate the command line options are you going to change it or sneer at them to go back to babyworld and stop wasting your time?

"keep typing and don't die" means keep working when it gets hard, boring, goes wrong, feels unrewarding, competitors show up, people quit, your market dissipates, people are jeering at you and telling you it won't work, when your money is running low or your debtors are banging on the door, or you need to do a pile of admin paperwork, when you doubt yourself. "keep going" might be boring, that doesn't mean it's easy.

(cough) selection bias, lots of people want things for free, lots of people don't know what they want and just want a chat, lots of people grind for a long time and still get nowhere - consider how many other investors there have been over the past 70 years who tried as hard as Buffet and didn't become him because they didn't read the same things, come to the same conclusions, think the same way, have the same patience, or hit the same companies to invest in at good times, or were forced out for other reasons.

Your premise is incorrect, therefore your question answers itself.

> everyone can follow boring advice

No, they can't. This article was written solely to show that fact, that most people actually _cannot_ follow boring advice; they often want the quick and easy way out. This leads to their downfall, or at least, lack of progress. As an inverse, if everyone could follow boring advice, this article would need not have been written at all.

Because the hard part isn't knowing what to do (the advice), it's actually following it day in, day out.

They are.

It's just that successful doesn't always mean famous, and its not always glittery.

Most people getting rich are not start up founders. Or SV job hopping tourists. Most are people who work one job for long periods of times, max out on 401Ks, invest in IRA/RothIRA, index funds, real estate etc. They have stable families, and good health.

This kind of stuff doesn't get profiled on Techcrunch.

I'll add another one that I repeat often on HN but is profoundly unpopular:

Take responsibility for your situation in life. Stop blaming bad luck, other people, fate, your parents, etc.

The advantage stems from if your situation is your responsibility, that means you can better your situation. A common thread I've found with happy and successful people I've encountered is that all of them have this attitude.

So, can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life?

If not, then it proves you have not even control over your own mind.

"Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences—solely. He originates nothing, not even a thought."

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm

> can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life?

Yes and yes.

But there are consequences to the opinion you choose. If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure.

> "Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences—solely. He originates nothing, not even a thought."

Not buying that.

>Not buying that.

So, you are not changing your opinion. But you could if you wanted to.

You could change your mind about something that you believe to be false, without any outside influence, through pure will.

>If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure.

The link is to a well known essay by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, mediocrity and failure. It goes into the consequences of such beliefs at great length.

So Clemens freely chose to write that, and you freely chose to quote it. How droll.

Do you in general believe things of your own will for utilitarian reasons?

It makes me think of "The Secret" / Law of Attraction, or similar cults, though I have not actually been a target of proselytizing for those. More people than I'd realized are into it.

Speaking of ancient advice, I found this recently.

"13The lazy person [who is self-indulgent and relies on lame excuses] says, “There is a lion in the road!

A lion is in the open square [and if I go outside to work I will be killed]!”

14As the door turns on its hinges,

So does the lazy person on his bed [never getting out of it].

15The lazy person buries his hand in the dish [losing opportunity after opportunity];

It wearies him to bring it back to his mouth."

The link between fear and laziness is something I'd not realized until I read this. I thought my low tolerance for risk was wisdom but it was simply fear that lead to laziness. It seems that humans had similar struggles thousands of years ago.

one thing that my last decade taught me (with examples from .. trading) related to his mention of acting and compounding, with a bit of dusty spiritualishness

if you find yourself in total chaos, try many small things, and don't bother with negatives and failures, just take what's nice, drop what's bad, repeat. it requires a very strange mindset.. feels almost like religious faith, but fear and self imposed negativity can be such killers .. being a tiny bit blind and hopeful is often great (hence the small things, don't hope to become usain bolt tomorrow and smile while waiting).

Maybe luck also had something to do with success?

I wonder these days if it was good idea to let everyone "write" on internet. Blogging seems like a plague these days... Look at me I am tech guru

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