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Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

Necessary reading material: "Solitude and Leadership" [0], an address by William Deresiewicz to the United States Military Academy that discusses the importance of forming your own ideas through careful reflection. As important to the task of creating something of quality on a computer as to becoming an upstanding military officer.

[0] http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

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I'm speechless. Best essay I've read in a long time.

I'm posting this just to say thank you. I wouldn't have found this if not for your comment.

You're welcome! I'm glad whenever being broadly-read on the internet comes in handy, as it justifies the reading-broadly habit.

I'm trying to stop broad-reading so much, or at least do a less broad broad-reading. It's good to read other people aware of their broad-readness.

This is one of the reasons I love HN so much. Some people share really incredible things, which you wouldn't have found otherwise.

yes, simple things that are very important and related with our "normal life"

I'm just posting to say thank you (@hdivider) for expressing your opinion here - if not for your exuberant praise I think it unlikely I would have clicked this link in the middle of a comment thread.

I'm very glad that I found your praise and clicked the link. :)

Same here, thanks hdivider and asolove, that was a great read.

Wow! truly great to see so much love between HNers.

As a long time lurker (occasional commenter etc.) I immediately was reminded of this great essay as soon as I saw this current story.

Just in case you folks had not seen, the old discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110779

I really like the essay. However one thing to be noted, The author and even most of society expects you to achieve a higher goal, be successful. We raise kids to care about themselves, bless them to earn money and so on and that's fine.

But once they do become successful, we expect them to be a little giving, be less of a selfish person and help others. Unfortunately he/she was raised to be so self conceited, it would seem inane for them to be nice to others, stand up for others, and help them. Just dropping 2 cents from someone else that had a profound impact on me.

These two things don't seem to be that contradictory. You need to have some kind of success and resources to help more people in a meaningful way. It's not impossible for example the likes of Bill Gates etc who give away massive wealth towards causes they deem good.

No, I don't think the author does. About society I won't try to defend any opinion. The author would, I think, agree with me that the purpose of life is independent of "success" by any visible metric, and that a deep dedication to doing what is right comes in large part from not valuing success in and of itself. Better to be a lieutenant that does the right thing and reports war crimes violations than to keep silent and hope to be a General who can successfully change the system.

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