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Comment by aashaykumar92 | Hacker News Reader

"And what is the distant horizon he's working toward? From the 42 Floors home page, it's 'The best place to find office space.' That's the impossible he's making possible? That's why he's working 100% of the time? What a joke."

I respect all your prior annoyances, and don't care to comment on them, but this one pissed me off. 42Floors seems to be doing a fucking awesome job in helping startups, even well established companies, find office space. Pissing on their efforts by making some snide remark ('what a joke') is completely uncalled for. Finding office space IS a huge problem for companies, especially startups who don't have much money but still need some space...42Floors is making that process (which I'm sure can sometimes be seemingly impossible) far simpler by providing the service that they are.

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Yeah, it's a great service they're offering, and I didn't mean to imply it's not.

But the author seems to be putting it right up there with fighting for civil rights or vaccinating children or helping the poor. And that's taking it too far.

It's good to be motivated and passionate about work, but it's also good to have perspective.

I don't think passion is limited to fighting for civil rights.

But you're right in that I do talk about startups as a mission. And that's because a startup's default result is failing. It takes extraordinary efforts to avoid that default result and very, very few ever make it.

For what it's worth, I worked for 5 years running a non-profit as well. Loved that job too. I don't find passionate work to be limited to either startups or non-profits.

This made me think of Bret Victor's talk Inventing on Principle where he encourages the audience to basically do what you're criticizing - sort of developing an activist mentality for the problem you're trying to solve, even if it may seem trivial to some.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

> it's also good to have perspective

I would argue the opposite: if everyone took a global perspective on everything, nobody would ever do anything except work to extend the human lifespan. For humanity to be worth anything, it needs to strive for "useless" goals--art, humor, making money, etc. And to be motivated to strive for these goals, you need to think what you're doing is the most important thing you could be doing--even if, in a global sense, it's not.

Is it enough of a problem to burn the rest of your life on a pyre in service of that goal?

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