Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Similar to the coffeeshop fallacy is something I described to a friend over dinner the other night as the "ambulance fallacy" ...

He was telling me about his startup ambitions and about one particular business that he said sounded like a ton of fun (it was an alcoholic beverage business) - he loved the lifestyle potential of being "that guy".

I told him a story about how I wanted to be an EMS worker when I was 12 years old. Why? For a single, simple reason -- I thought it was _extremely_ cool to be able to drive around with lights and sirens blaring, blasting through traffic. That was it.

Then a family friend who actually was an EMS worker told me one day what the job was actually like - sure, for about 10 minutes you were driving like a madman through traffic, but the rest of the time you had to, you know, actually BE an EMS worker :)

And the same goes for startup life -- you have to actually BE a startup founder for 99% of the time. Don't get caught up by the lights and sirens.

This is similar to how I talked my brother out of his brief thoughts of becoming a professional pilot. It sounds wonderful, but in reality the pay is poor (unless you're one of the lucky few able to work their way up to a good long-haul route), a lot of it is boring, a single relatively harmless medical problem can end your career, etc. etc.

You have to look at the bad parts of any job when considering a career or starting a business, and it seems to be something that people are bad at doing.

Very few jobs, I imagine, are anything like they seem from the outside. Every glamorous-looking job has many hours of painstaking drudgery involved.

On the other hand, dull-looking jobs probably have great parts that outsiders never know about.

When I was a child I could not understand why every adult did not become a Good Humor man- my absolute dream job at the time.

"Don't get caught up by the lights and sirens." - this is great.

That being said, if you know about the lights and sirens and still choose that path, maybe that's the path for you after all. i.e. - you can't build a business without doing the boring stuff as well as the fun stuff.

Firemen have a similar lot. Sure, you think you get to drive a firetruck, and pull women and children out of burning buildings. But most of your calls will be extracting mangled teenagers from mangled cars.

And even if you get to go to a house fire, there's only a tiny window when you can enter the building, because modern homes are filled with plastic, which burns very quickly. And if you do enter a burning building, you'll smell like burnt plastic for the rest of the day (despite all your protective gear).

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