Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?
Encouraging me to keep asking "why does work the way it does" was a big one for me.
Also how did it impact what you have done?
I heard this in a TED talk years ago[0].
Telling people what you plan to do can evoke the same emotions as actually doing that thing, lowering the drive to do the work to accomplish the goal because you got your emotional reward already.
Being a serial starter, I retroactively noticed this pattern in myself when I heard this. Now, when I want to do something new, I shut up about it until I either complete it or have enough momentum in the project to have reached critical mass.
That's the key! It's about validating the goal by yourself first. Having support from people is amazing.
Small scale example: If I tell my partner that I plan on going to the gym this weekend, I'm less likely to go when the time actually comes. If I make a plan to go to the gym but don't tell anyone, I'll probably do it.
Larger scale example: When I decided to try selling my fiction writing, I purposefully told no one for about two or three months, until I made some sales. Then, when I felt I had enough momentum and something to show for my plans, I told my partner what I've been doing. He was very very supportive. But then I fell into a habit of telling him _too much_ about my writing journey and plans, thinking it's safe now. It wasn't. The more I talked about it, the less I actually did it. It got to the point where I had to go into lockdown mode of not talking about it at all (and asking him not to ask). Now, I am careful to only talk to him about aspects of writing I've already finished. I can talk about how I've released a book, or what challenges I had in the last release. But I can't talk to him about what I'm writing this weekend, or what my plans are for my writing, or when I hope to have my next release.
I think I can apply it to both my work life, thinking about times where I overworked myself at a company where nobody else cared enough, and to my personal life, thinking about times where I invested myself fully into relationships where it wasn't certain to be requited.
WSJ Oct 2021, "Burned Out? Maybe You Should Care Less About Your Job", https://archive.md/2fsRi
It feels stressful and lonely because you feel like you have to hold all the strings together and if you fail, the whole project will fail.
This made me realize that the phrase "it works for me" can be dismissive and condescending, and that I should spend at least a little bit of time under the assumption that I am the one that screwed up (personally, my team, or my company) until I can prove otherwise. Anecdotally, I'd say 90% of the time it is either a bug or poorly documented processes -- and those can be fixed! Only about 10% of the time is it truly users doing something stupid.
This isn't advice that I've gotten either, but also just general wisdom: never give anyone advice about anything, unless they specifically ask for it. Web search for "unsolicited advice" finds a ton of info about why the practice is annoying. I take it to mean it is ok to try to lead by example instead, or say "for solving problem X, I usually try approach Y", but maybe that also edges too close to advice.
One specific piece of advice I got that I have found valuable is that to debug a misbehaving program, instead of trying to map the misbehaviour into a hypothesis of what is happening in the code, go immediately to running the code under a debugger and incrementally (e.g. single stepping etc.) run it until you see something go wrong, then backtrack and figure out how that wrong thing happened.
Don't believe for one moment that 5 hours on Product Hunt or anywhere else for that matter represents a serious marketing effort.
If you want to run a business rather just create stuff, your work has only just begun. In the light of Facebook and other social media revelations, the idea of a truly disposable email address which means your entire life is not analysed and spammed to death has to be worth something.
You haven't told anyone about it though. And I mean you shout from the rooftops every day and everywhere you can think of. You market. People are not going to come looking for you. You have to start approaching influencers, be seen and be heard everywhere you think your potential users might lurk.
And, by the way, everyone sees a million new ideas a day so you have to be consistent, appear to be permanent and appear to be solid. No-one is going to entrust communications with you if they think you are a small, one-man band with an idea and little else.
Time to start reading marketing articles and strategies and applying them.
And expect it to take time.
Added bit : I've just watched your video. No, I won't be using your service and nor will anyone else. I have no idea how good it is and I am not going to find out. And nor is anyone else.
Why not? Because you uploaded a silent, technical video. You have made the classic mistake of trying to show me how something works before I even know if I care. This is a technical video, not a selling one.
You need a voice.
You need to tell me what my problem is and make it resonate with me.
You need to tell me how to solve it.
You need to tell me it is simple.
You need to tell me what it costs.
You need to tell me to link right now to the place I can sign up.
You might need some other things but these are the basics.
You need to sell your idea to me, not explain how the software works. I do not give a damn about the bloody software until I give a damn about the bloody problem!
Tell me where I'm hurting, sympathise and then magic-kiss it better. You know - just like Mummy did when I was small!
Or to paraphrase slightly "Have a thing that is your speciality, to the point that you are almost always the most knowledgeable person in the room w/r/t that topic."
I think this is a valuable idea to keep in mind, even if it remains forever an aspiration (which it probably will if interpreted in the strictest sense).
It's not as black/white as you're making it out to be. Reality is far more nuanced.
The idea isn't about surrounding yourself with people who are worse than you, just so you can say you are "the smartest person in the room". The idea is to focus on something and become so good at thing that you are -usually- the "smartest person in the room" on that particular topic. Which means this whole idea is only relevant to contexts that your thing is relevant. And to reiterate, this is more of an aspiration than something that's literally achievable. In reality, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, there will always be at least one person who knows more than you about thing. And that's OK. The point is about focus and the importance of putting in the work vis-a-vis your thing.
What happens with classroom professors or surgeons in surgery rooms? Should they leave the room as well?
If you're starting with a new career, learning on the job, it's not good if you're the smartest in the room. Then you need to find a place where other people can teach you.
It can also be read as a ego-booster. If you know the most of all people about basketball at a birthday party, it's a cool thing to talk about.
If you read closely, the two statements doesn't even contradict. S(he) said that it's good that you are the best AT SOMETHING. You said, it's not good to be THE BEST.
Because they have more work than they can handle and want you to fill in their shoes at some point in time. That is the basis of hiring junior developers.
In term of personal finances: Save early and save often. Compound interest is your retirement friend.
I don't need to work until I'm completely exhausted, it's okay to stop with some fuel left in the tank...and resume some other time.
If your making a tough decision, you have already determined that both options are equally attractive and equally good decisions. If this wasn't the case, it would be an easy choice. So if you are choosing between two seemingly equally good decisions, your choice doesn't matter. They are both equally good options, and so are the same level of risk in having a bad outcome.
“Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up”.
Probably not a popular tip for many on HN who enjoy tinkering, but its truth has served me well in my entrepreneurial endeavors, where as my nerdiness less so.
One cannot know everything and we all are bound by finite time, but if you learn the skills and build the network to bring many talents together, you can accomplish greater things than doing it all on your own.
Similarly: "No man is an island"
- Denzel Washington in Training Day
If you have knowledge/skills but no connections, you've still got no game.
I think you need some of both to really get anywhere.
So this kind of ends up being good advice for people who err in a particular direction and could stand to beef up the part they are missing.
Related: if you can't find anyone to fund you to work on what you think are the most important projects, just take the work that people will pay you to do but that allows you enough free time to work on the stuff you think is the most important.
Being straightforward with feedback is most often helpful to both parties than beating around the bush to make the person feel okay.
When I started my masters program I was trying to find interesting research projects to work on to eventually write my thesis about. My advisor is a pleasure to work with because he listens and tells me what I _need_ to hear to my face. He once said “You’ve spent too much time on this and the results show they are close to useless or if no value towards your goal. I think you should stop spending your time on this and look at X instead.”. I felt sad and disappointed for two hot minutes, but then I clearly moved on to what eventually became my masters thesis.
Halfway into the program, my advisor quit and I took up another advisor, and he was the opposite wherein I always get soft feedback and spend weeks more effort only to realise that he meant to say it was not worth it.
I took that as a lesson to always be straight with my feedback for people I work with.
We all tend to worry too much. I used to make plans to fix the future. Something which we can not fix. I have learned to make plans with broader strokes. I have been fortunate in my working life to pursue my love of technology. I am very grateful for where I have landed. Not where I had planned to land but possibly where my heart wanted me to be. That may sound corny. Let me phrase it as my work is now doing what I once mused upon rather than the business I thought I would be running. As someone else put it, plans are useless but planning is invaluable.
Usually the advice is to floss everyday to get rid of carbohydrates in your interdental space which can be a breeding ground for bacteria which will eventuall chip away your tooth enamel leading to eventual tooth decay (if I recite correctly).
Also less mouth odor.
Never had an issue with mouth odor.
I imagine most people don't floss every day.