Hacker News Reader

You haven’t actually criticized any particular point of this article only stated how obvious it is and how other stuff is more important. OK, it may be obvious to you but this might be quite enlightening to other people especially those who have been fed on the kind of self-help bullshit the author is debunking. A lot of people are into that, sadly, and not smart enough--or perhaps too desperate--to understand why it is bullshit. If it’s so beyond you then just move on. If you want to enlighten us do it without making slurs against other people less fortunate than yourself.

I didn't see any slurs in what he wrote. Try to be more constructive.

"dumbest blog ever" would be a pretty easy point to see. Seemed constructive to me...

How is that a slug? It sounds more like an opinion after all.

"[D]umbest blog post I've read in a while" isn't very constructive, but it's not an attack on the entire blog either, just on that particular post.

The first two sentences.

>You need to temper any goals you have with maturity and realism. I'm a terrible basketball player, but I'm sure if I spent 1hr/day every day playing pickup for 1 year, by the end of a year, I'll be better than at least half of the regulars. But if my expectations are that I'll be able to dunk and beat Michael Jordan, I'd be delusional.

I believe that's the point of the article. If you do your hardest, but still fail to beat Michael Jordan in a dunking contest, it's not because you were too lazy. It's not because you didn't try hard enough. It sure as hell isn't because you didn't bother trying.

It's just that you simply weren't lucky enough to possess some of the natural advantages Michael Jordan had. And it's important not to lose sight of that fact.

In winner-takes-all games, being even in the top 99th percentile is worse than useless.

To use your own example, true you might get better than half the regulars in basketball if you spent 1 hr a day at it, but you'd make exactly $0 being in the top 50th percentile of basketball players. You would be far better off if you had spent that 1 hr/day for a year on improving your coding skills further.

Can I ask you this: what purpose are you inferring the author had in writing this article?

That he's annoyed by a platitude from an athlete in a puff-piece interview.

First, I think the blog post is grasping at something important which is that we have this "just do it" mentality which has some obvious deficiencies. However I still agree with you. I think one has to start with reasonable limits and accept that no matter how good you are there will always at least sometimes be someone better than you. That's not a problem though. The difficulty is in forming a way of thinking about the world that allows us to become extraordinary.

One major deficiency in the blog post is that it emphasizes natural advantages too much. One major pitfall there is that emphasizing natural advantages over effort means that success becomes more like an innate trait rather than the product of a lot of effort at improvement. Natural advantages do exist, but improvement is the key still and this takes effort.

My view is very different, abstract, and metaphorical. I think that a person's attitude should be seen like an aviator's attitude (if you don't get the reference, see http://www.marvgolden.com/bad-attitude-t-shirt.html). It's not how you react. It's your direction and where you are headed. The "bad attitude" T-shirt is funny because the bad attitude is flying at a bad angle towards the ground.

Another way to look at it is to borrow the old person-as-chariot metaphor found both in Plato and the Mahabharata, and update it for the times: I am the charioteer. My body is the chariot. My emotions are the horses. My thoughts are the reins. But, I am the charioteer.

One can also borrow the person-as-tree metaphor found in Greek and Norse myth. Grow like a tree and be not afraid of shadows: become grounded in the darkness of the earth below and then reach up towards the light above.

The nice thing about these metaphors is that they can be repurposed as needed, but doing that right depends on "attitude."

I can't quite make out the picture in your link, but if it is the same shirt that I had years ago, the plane is upside-down, headed for the ground, and in a flat spin. As my uncle said, "it certainly is a bad attitude."

Excellent reply. Couldn't agree more.

Thank you. One the most inspirational comments on HN in a while.

"You can't win the lottery if you never buy a ticket." Doesn't mater how hard you work at predicting the winning numbers, if you didn't play those numbers, you don't win.

Couldn't have said it better myself!