Ask HN: What is the most important lesson you learned this year?

2) The following is copy-pasted from a previous comment of mine. It's a lesson I've not fully embraced until recently:

> "I guess the hardest thing is to fully trust yourself. Other people are just noise, as their opinions aren’t necessarily more backed up than yours. They often have a unconscious secret agenda that doesn’t fully take into account your well-being and the more someone is close to you, the more biased he/she is. “Don’t take risks”, “Don’t leave this place”, “Don’t leave me”."

Last but not least, get rid of toxic people. Get away from toxic environments. It takes time to heal from the negativity, the close-mindedness, the nihilism that rules upon so many lives and places.

Seriously, take care of your health and everything else will call into place. Trying to ignore something will only make it worse and not knowing whats causing the symptoms (or what caused an injury) will only make you worry more. Exercise (walking its actually really good exercise) and make it a weekly routine. You will be shocked how much of a difference it makes for your mode.

I also realised that I am a social person at heart. I just finished university and I miss all my good friends who all live in different parts of the country. Not just friends, but family. Its made me realise that keeping in touch is absolutely essential no matter what.

Lastly, don't be afraid.

This has been something that has been nagging me all my life. I really struggled with taking risks in my just-starting-career and social/personal life. Life is too short to think "Maybe I won't be..." "I don't think..." and so on. This is part of my incredibly short list of resolutions for next year and the rest of my life.

My immediate supv gave me an acceptable review and mentioned that I was underrated. I did my work, got it done, never moving any due dates, my focus was quality - no rework, etc. I ended up getting an engineering license, PE. They put me on a special project that only the best, most competent engineers get put on. But then they passed me over for a promotion. They promoted people with less experience, less qualifications than myself. Sure, they might have deserved it, most of us probably should have gotten more recognition than we did. But for them to pass me up and then turn around and say I was underrated, that's BS. So I took a new job, their actions, and inactions, were contrary to their words. So far the new job is much better, I get along with my immediate supv much better. The biggest thing I miss is all the cool people I met at my old job.

But this past year I started thinking of myself as an artist who happens to work in tech to pay the bills (I act semi-professionally and write for fun).

It's like something shifted inside and all of bits got into phase with each other. Remarkable, really.

Pick your co-founders by their honesty and humility. No matter what happens, you will build something together that you can all feel proud of.

Going through my fourth start-up now in 15 years. I feel so proud and grateful working with the people I do now. No fights, no stress, just good people who think logically and do their best to support each other.

Personal:

Starting a family is so much more fun than anything I've ever done. Jump into it and let it envelop your being.

Basically I learnt how much I need people in my life. I'm currently learning how to deal with their absence before I can move to a better place.

Don't spread yourself too thin. I'm young, still in graduate school and have plenty of good ideas I'd like to work on. This year I've learned to make choices about my lifestyle, projects, interests and to prioritize some. As a one-man team, to be successful you need to focus. Of course if I could delegate things would be different.[1]

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743203

Set your firmware to apply the back brakes first when suddenly encountering the unexpected.

My inner program had me subconsciously apply the front brakes first, so I flew over the handle bars and lost most of this year recovering from a serious bicycle accident.

Take care of yourself or not much else matters.

The most important lesson for me is realising the effectiveness of knowing yourself. Know your strengths, weaknesses, how to handle stress, how to handle conflict, know what you want, don't want, what you value, best environment for innovative thinking, etc.

Knowing yourself well helps you become more optimal in everything that you want to achieve.

2) I've understood that I absolutely know NOTHING.

... 20 age man.

If you're always returning to one approach, you're missing out.

Only agile, ever, means you're missing out on amazingly useful RAD practices. If you swear by refactoring, you may be doubling development time because thinking a design through before starting might've saved you learning it while typing code. If you only ever build native apps, you may not know when a web app is a better solution. Functional programming is cool, but OO is also cool.

2) People don't read. People don't read. People don't read. (Everyone: Customers, Co-workers, Business partners etc). So don't rely only on text based conversations.

I have learned the most from having my work critiqued by so many people - an initial editor, a technical editor, a copy editor, and a production editor. It's been humbling and enlightening every step of the way. I can't wait to get back to programming again, and apply what I've learned from writing at a professional level to building things with code. My technical work will be much stronger; writing a book has forced me to reexamine much of what I thought I knew about programming, in a really good way.

http://www.nostarch.com/pythoncrashcourse

2) It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what you're doing is 'harder' than what others are doing. Everything is hard if you're pushing your limits.

I still get annoyed when I feel a task is beneath me, but I've been trying hard to find something new to learn in it and to be mindful about how the task can be done well. Lately it's been dealing with lots of text files and classes that have tons of fields in them. No problem, just a chance to get to know the *nix tool chain and emacs just a bit better. I'm still not doing the best at this, but I've gotten better, and I've found that it's making me happier and making me a better Engineer in the more important tasks as well.

The importance of eating a healthy diet, working out more, reducing stress, etc., are a lot more vivid to me now.

On a related note however, perhaps ironically, is that I now feel a renewed sense of "There's only so much time left on the clock, so if I want to accomplish things, I have to sell out and go 101% to achieve then now". I'm still trying to figure out how to balance those notions.

I mean, let's say I could work less and live an extra 10 years. Let's say that's the difference between, I dunno, making it to 75 vs 85. The questions I ponder now is "how rewarding will the years between 75 and 85 be?" and "how much do I care about that?", etc. I know it sounds a bit morbid, but it's a real question. I've never been all that scared of dying, but I am very afraid of being old, frail, crippled, helpless, etc.

So there ya go... try to live like a rockstar now, flame out fast and die young, or go for the longest life you can live. How do you decide that? Fuck if I know... if I figure it out, I'll let you know.

And on an even less related note... well, at least vis-a-vis career / tech / etc... facing mortality did emphasize another thing to me. Since you don't know how much time you get, if there are things you really want to do, do all you can to do them as soon as you can. Sure, sometimes strategy dictates waiting, and sometimes procrastinating is just easy... but they say that people on their death-beds don't regret the things they did, but rather the things they didn't do. An example from my life: I've had a few tattoo ideas I've wanted to get done for years, but keep putting it off for no real reason. Now I don't know why I get waiting. And there are plenty of similar examples. So yeah, I'd say one important lesson is "do stuff now". :-)

2) ALWAYS, but ALWAYS use contracts, even when doing something together with your relatives, long-life friends and "that guy from university which was ever helpful".

3) Think you're worth more than you're getting? Ask away.

4) Learn to accept critique and not dismiss it. Accepting it and making efforts to improve on its basis is the way towards personal (and professional) growth.

5) Nobody is always right, learn how to gracefully lose a dispute.

6) Take time for yourself, don't rush head-first into any opportunity, don't accept every invitation, learn how to refuse. This will save you time, headaches and integrity.

Crazy obvious, I know! But it is a thing I learned this year.

2) Bullshit should be applied only carefully.