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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Drink, smoke, gamble, eat oysters, dress well, have sex, use your credit card.

I am so glad you posted this!

I already enjoy 3 of these (drink, sex, credit card) and I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work. Starting immediately I'm adding the other 4 and I'm not going to feel guilty about any of them.

A friend of mine offered me a real Cuban cigar yesterday and I politely refused. I'm calling him back tonight. I'm also going to the mall and buying something I never would have worn before. Then I'm hitting the casino and I don't care if I win or lose. I'll skip the oysters, but Saturday night, I'm picking the most decadent thing on the menu. And yes, there will be beer (maybe even spirits) and sex.

If Hemingway, Einstein, Churchill, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde indulged to feed their creativity, then maybe I should do it more often, too. I'll let you all know how it goes. A couple of days later.

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Wow, this feels so surreal -- I thought the article was satirical at first, and now here it's changing people's lives.

Anyway, I'll keep this short:

1) It's your life.

2) Taking risks is wonderful. So is breaking rules, particularly the invisible ones, like social norms.

3) Nevertheless, taking up smoking because you read a bad article about the habits of highly creative people written by somebody who clearly isn't highly creative is fucking retarded.

I believe you failed to sense the sarcasm in that post. Get real.

Why did you have to write "Get real"? That's just mean.

Damn! I knew I should've trusted my surreality radar.

In my defense, posts like the parent's -- except earnest -- aren't uncommon on HN.

I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work.

This is the difference between people who are creative for a living and people who merely wish to be creative while earning a living. For 95% of programming work, if you're reasonably bright and experienced, getting it done boils down to the very difficult and subtle art of not being bored to the point of depression. Creativity requires the opposite art: being easily bored, tormented by the familiar. That would make any programmer miserable and unproductive.

I disagree. I see part of my job (software developer) as creative writing because I get to manipulate abstractions and generate something tangible. I feel the iterative process of making something from a blank editor screen is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job. Yes, there is frustration and sometimes I lose myself in focus and become irritable (to interrupting coworkers) but when it flows, it flows like running the rack in pool.

I wonder if you consider yourself “creative for a living” because I am, and your generalization does not ring any bells for me.

Creative people are often motivated by a task, filling in holes in the patterns they see (and finding these patterns), not by boredom.

I don’t smoke or gamble and have no interest in picking it up. Drinking is limited to “on special occasions” (and that is how I like it). I do however like to travel, and that is my guilty pleasure.

I can feel guilty about this (hence guilty pleasure), so I travel less than what I want to, exactly because it affects “work”, like the grand parent talks about. But that feeling helps me be creative for a living, because I finish the things I start rather than go awol, smoking, drinking, or traveling the world.

Agree with you. But, I believe creative people get bored easily except when they are not creating something and so they would get bored of too much gambling, drinking, dressing up, spending money, finding/buying sex. All these vices are mostly ways of removing brain clog (engaging the brain in trivial activities so that the creative part can sleep and start afresh). But there are better ways of doing this.

I also disagree. Creativity requires that someone see rules as suggestions, and then go beyond them to ultimately accomplish what the rules were trying to take you to in the first place. In my experience, programming takes a lot of creativity to make a more efficient process... creativity is like seeing the world as a puzzle when everyone else is spacing out.

vice correlation != creativity causation ;)

I was betting myself that someone would respond like this. See, I'm ahead already.

phew. I wasn't sure if you were being ironic or not.

Excellent! You must celebrate with a glass of Champagne. Something classy, like those rappers drink - you can put it on your card.

Have a "fuckin Cristal. Everything else is piss."

I can't believe Franklin was tossed into the wardrobe section and mis-quoted, funny, it's almost as if it was done on purpose.

Although I do see the point, I wouldn't advocate strict adherence to the author's propositions. I think the following has been said on HN before, but it bears repeating: balance is key.

Please, let us know how it goes with the intensified debauchery. Maybe I'll change my ways if your experiment's results prove to be enlightening. =)

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