The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself

But always moving forward.

After thinking about it plenty, I think it boils down to this: some folks just weren't born with the fire. Often, this fire looks a lot like insanity.

Your a genius if you succeed, and an idiot if you don't.

I play with fire because it makes me feel good, plain and simple. I hack because I love it. I sell my own software because I love marketing, too.

And everyday, I'm confident that if I give folks enough value, in one way or another, they will give me enough money to eat. And my devious little plan hasn't failed me yet!

People can passionately follow art or music or movies and no one thinks them odd for not producing some of the same- that's how I feel about programming. I just like following it, especially the underlying philosophies. I'm an armchair hacker- oh, I've put a few things together in my day but they're the programming equivalent of Harry/Draco slash.

I guess this means Y Combinator's Hacker News has an official fangirl ;)

I consume large quantities of non-fiction, but would prefer to write fiction.

I'd rather create video games than play them.

I don't think consuming and creating are mutually exclusive.

There's also a difference between mindless consumption and focused consumption. People who produce a lot do the latter.

In my favor, my stick-it-in-your-ear conversation takes place tomorrow. It's on the docket and everything! :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164014

A lot of that is fluff, but the basic premise was that the Internet could probably be built more effectively with some sort of built-in gauge to determine the actuality of a person's "productivity" versus their "consumability."

IMHO the interesting part is even though both are highly related you need extra parts of the brain for the former. For example reading vs. writing. This pattern tends to repeat from reading about fMRI studies (completely reader there myself, not my science.)

I find [pure] takers to be incomplete and get close to be social parasites, even if harmless.

I think time has come for me to read less and do more.

Now I need to prove this to myself. By my recent activity, I am a great consumer and not much of a producer.

The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging people to consume.

Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context, is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85 percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.

My life is meaningless. I am weak.

...all you need is love?