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Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

"I get that this is aimed at the startup crowd, but I've always felt that this sentiment is pretty privileged. We, the elite, get to cherry pick our work and do what we like. But I bet 9/10 people will never feel they have this luxury, and 8/10 will be right."

Privileged? Hardly. I worked a regular job for many years while spending years of my free time and weekends to create a business where I can now choose what I work on.

Most people aren't willing to sacrifice time now to enjoy comforts later. I don't consider it privilege that I did..and neither should the many people working on startups.

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>I worked a regular job for many years while spending years of my free time and weekends to create a business where I can now choose what I work on.

Then you did not have a regular job. You had a job that paid you enough to support yourself while retaining enough free time and mental energy to pursue your startup idea. For most people, this is not the case (esp. the mental energy bit).

I don't think that's a very fair statement. Some people are just "doers" and get off on working all the time. Some people also understand that you don't owe your life to your company (unless it is your own company) which means you make sure they don't take over every waking hour.

I guess maybe the issue is in the definition of what a "regular job" is... Over the past 15 years I've always worked at what I would call regular jobs, full-time jobs at large companies where people build careers. Many of these jobs included an on-call rotation. Until our first child came into the picture I was able to, and did, work on various other projects outside of work with the hopes of one of them making it big. None of them did but that work put me in a place where within the last couple of years I have been able to essentially pick my job and work at my desired pay. Now that our child is a bit older I've also gone back to working on smaller projects outside of my daily work schedule.

"Then you did not have a regular job. You had a job that paid you enough to support yourself while retaining enough free time and mental energy to pursue your startup idea. For most people, this is not the case (esp. the mental energy bit)."

I did have a 'regular job'. Most people party, hang out with their friends, and do plenty of other things in their free time. If you have the mental energy to do any of these things (or a hobby), you have the mental energy to start a company.

I worked 50 hours a week coding. Did I always have the mental energy? Of course not. But I had the discipline to continue on..even when I didn't 'feel' like it.

"For most people, this is not the case (esp. the mental energy bit)."

Most people don't want to sacrifice their fun time. I found this to be the case when I tried to find co-founders. All liked the idea of a startup, but none wanted to sacrifice their TV, friends, or bar time. It's one of the reasons why I have a successful company today..and most don't.

Well said.

Building a future generally costs us 10 to 20 percent of our "fun" time, or personal time.

Oh, I don't know about that.

Seriously. Mental energy is impacted by a lot of things. And I've had to come up the hard way, just due to my circumstances early on.

Doing this gets harder as we age. But under 30?

It's there for an awful lot of people who want it. There is one's own drive, and there are the kinds of friends one makes and how time is used.

For the longest time, I read one tech book a month. Just needed to gain perspective. I also turned the TV off.

The amount of time this frees up is AMAZING.

Networking pays too.

And for some people, that's starting a business. For others, it's self-employment / contract work. Still others, it's taking hobbies and spinning them into skills they love to exploit.

Lots of ways to get this done. And frankly, doing it consumes 10 to 20 percent of one's free time outside of a 40 - 50 hour work week.

That's not too much time. Just turning the TV off delivers that time for a very large number of people.

There is a clear cost for some jobs too. Where those work demands punch up above 50 hours, it really does start to get tough to do other things. Sadly, we've a lot of people stitching several basic jobs together and that eats a lot of their time.

But for many, who are just working full time, it's possible to make personal investments.

And what a lot of people don't get is the compounding that comes from doing that consistently.

One hour a day spent on this kind of thing compounds better than 5 hours on Saturday does. (though it's really nice to do both!)

Simple things, like just getting up early, make a big impact. Eating healthy, managing sleep to 6 hours instead of 8.5...

What is worth what?

Many people don't see a pay off they can visualize and believe they can actualize, so it's not worth it, and so they don't do it.

Setting aside difficult circumstances, it's often that simple.

I code on side projects, nights and weekends. I find that I can actually get more done on a long stretch on Saturday than little bits and bobs on weekdays. It takes a while to get into it and get momentum.

Me too. An hour sometimes won't cut it.

"Most people aren't willing to sacrifice time now to enjoy comforts later"

So what you're telling me is that most people can't just pursue their passion as their job but instead have to work a job they certainly do not enjoy in order to fund their real passion and hopefully make it into a career. That is, if they are lucky enough that their passion is actually a viable career option.

Sounds like you're agreeing with the person you're replying to, or am I misinterpreting what you said?

While you may not feel privileged because you had to make hard sacrifices, not everyone is in a position to make the sacrifices you made.

But even then, your anecdote only speaks for yourself. There are many people who are indeed privileged by exceptional class or talent and who don't even need to suffer through the sacrifices that you did. Doors have been swung open for them their whole live, while others (like yourself) have to open those same doors with a crowbar, and others still (like the OP's 8/10) will never even get to see the door.

There's a privilege here you are not seeing: ability. Just being capable of pursuing a startup puts you in an elite minority. Hard work and sacrifice are familiar to many people in the 8/10.

There's more to it than that: you probably had resources that afforded you that time, or support that valued and encouraged that kind of behavior. Maybe you had a good education or reliable parents. And you probably had fairly good health throughout all of that.

There are so many things that make your actions highly specific to your situation, and that's a privilege that you have.

If we're defining privilege that broadly, most people are privileged in some way... to the point where the word is basically meaningless.

Just because I've left some free variables in my description doesn't meant he concept I'm talking about is inherently vague. It means we need to put more work into pinning them down before one can make a proper analysis.

Don't expect perfection, because you won't get it.

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