Comment by mduerksen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mduerksen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Your work-life is only one area where self-discipline comes into play. If you are content with just earning enough money for living, that's fine. I agree with you on that.

But a lack of self-discipline might hurt you in areas which are much more serious.

If you keep avoiding hard talks with your spouse, eventually you will have a problem.

If you do projects or activities with friends and always shy away from the unpleasant or dirty work, you're not being a friend they can trust to really go the extra mile with them. You will lose good friends over this. I personally have grieved a good friend over this.

If you never put any planning and execution effort into your family activities, there won't be any.

If you always keep away from doing mundane things like dentist visits, grocery shopping, regular house cleaning, your kids will suffer for your laziness.

And, maybe the worst: If your kids happen to not be overly gifted easy-achievers, and you do not teach your kids that most goods things have to worked hard for, then you have denied them a lesson their future life will depend on.

There is another thing to consider: if he's putting so little time at work actually doing work, odds are his employers will not be so keen on continuing to pay him that much money. "Just being who he is" is not an excuse they will accept, nor, really, should they.

That's the ruthlessly-pragmatic reason to not "accept this side of who he is": nobody else is going to, especially not the people who pay him.

It depends. A gifted and creative programmer may be able to accomplish in 3 hours what takes an average programmer 10, or by coming up with a creative approach to a problem, may be able to accomplish in 3 hours what an average programmer simply cannot do at all.

So while a manager may dislike that they perceive someone to be slacking off, it doesn't necessarily mean the person isn't providing a lot of value to the company. Value produced and hours worked are fairly loosely correlated for knowledge workers.

If you were running a startup, would you rather have 12 focused hours per day from a mediocre programmer or 2 from Linus Torvalds?

But at the same time, it seems unless there's a physiological difference in people like me, we should be able to condition ourselves into working more.

What I'm doing with my extra time is not productive by any measure and although it makes me really good at producing random facts at dinner parties....I can't see much else gained by the time I waste.

> unless there's a physiological difference in people like me

I think there is: different people have differently tuned reward-centres in the brain.

The book "the procrastination equation" by Piers Steel tries to capture those differences in equation form. Although it's probably faux-math, the key idea seems good to me: procrastinators are more sensitive to the time-until-reward dimension of a given rational choice.

And of course, being physiologically different is not an excuse to procrastinate away. Once we understand the nature of the beast, we can game our brain (as the book describes), and (I hope) we can then maybe benefit from brain plasticity to get better at this stuff over time.

>we should be able to condition ourselves into workin more.

Very disciplined people might be able to. You can't discipline yourself into being more disciplined. Accept that first.

Except that it is, in fact, possible to instill discipline in a person. Armies the world over do it by the hundreds.

I think for me I partly get a thrill and a dopamine reward out of not doing what I'm supposed to. For the same reason I used to spend hours a day in bed or online, failing college classes, but then quickly pounding out a few hours of good work for a lofty paycheck

I don't think the OP said his kids are starving, in fact he mentioned he's only 21 so most likely doesn't have any. I think you are jumping to too many conclusions here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com