Comment by pjlegato
11 years ago
This "that's just like, your opinion, man" attitude may be fine if you have no worldly goal affinity and are planning on spending the rest of your days in a remote mountain monastery. If you don't care about achieving any particular goal, then yes, all possible attitudes are equivalent. But that sort of handwavey quietism is not actually relevant to almost all people's situations.
If you do have specific short term goals -- such as, say, "building a profitable software product before we run out of money" -- then all methods of approaching the task are demonstrably not equal. Some will work much better than others in terms of achieving that goal.
We can study the empirical results of the numerous attempts already made by other people and thus avoid repeating their mistakes.
This makes sense. But I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I think goal-motivation is different from goal-attachment. Being attached to "I will do my best to make x happen" rather than x itself focuses on actions and growth (within realm of control) than consequences (often outside of realm of control). Like a product failing because people are just not into it.
I think we can avoid those mistakes but what I see here is people telling other people what to do in a way that sounds unconditional: "x is better regardless of your situation." Some techs are better for x, other for y. Merging someone else's experience tree into your own is good, but it must be contextualized by their perspective--they're working on mobile embedded soft vs. you are on web, maybe, for instance. Or games vs. databasey things. Or their job is a performance engr but you are UI...