> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me.
Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.
Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.
And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.
What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.
Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
The older I get, the more I realize what matters to me as well. I worked a FAANG with a long commute. I then worked a job with a short drive (10m morning, 15m afternoon, both via Uber when it was cheap). I now have a 12m walk to and from. The last one is purely luck, as I didn't know it'd be so close when I applied. (None of this omits the importance of working with honest people who have shared values.)
I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:
> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.
It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.
You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.
I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.
Totally agree, I took a very well paying job with a company doing what I enjoy doing, but the attitude of the company was very much to extract as much money from the clients as possible. We had three hour monthly call where everyone would take turns to explain how they had upsold or otherwise made money for the company that month, someone from each call would get a token award for it.
I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.
A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.
The older I get, the more I feel it’s becoming in shorter supply. Even when I don’t like associating with those that seem to lack it, they seem to find me everywhere I go. This is professionally, as a consumer and even just socially. I’m probably just old and grumpy and this is a yearning for the good old days, but, when I look around it just seems to be getting out of control. For example, politics is huge indicator that exemplifies and reinforces the behaviors.
> we did bad things to people and made filthy money
I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior.
I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it.
It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start carelessly exploiting others for my own gain.
Integrity is important and missing. I think there's a contradiction in what you're writing though. Recognizing the importance of personal and social relationships is what's keeping the no integrity people around and/or getting them promoted. It's the networking for networking sake as well as the more mundane social lubricating they do in contradiction to integrity. It's disagreeing with discussions, projects, companies, leaders and going along with it and expressing agreement. It's smiling, being "enjoyable to be around", being naive or presenting as naive, and being easy to work with. And more specifically being easy for the many liars and sociopaths to work with. Caring for personal and social relationships is not inherently reinforcing of all that is good. I wouldn't know how to count, but I feel there's quite a bit of it reinforcing the bad.
The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it)
People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn.
You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.
It's nice if you find something you previously care about. But it can go the other way too-- you can care more about what you work on. You can focus on the reasons it is good, or efficient, or honest, or solves real problems, or whatever other metavalue motivates you to care more.
Same thing happened to me and I feel very blessed to get paid to do work that I would do for free as a hobby.
> People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well.
When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
It’s everywhere in tech. Ever since tech became known as the place to be for high paying jobs without requiring too much education or working hours, compared to traditional routes like doctor or lawyer.
The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
I started programming at 5, making it do what I wanted it to provided dopamine. I never found a sport I enjoyed. I do like painting though. I doubt very many people get into sanitation because they love making toilets clean, but even there I'm sure a few do. Before 2000 I think it was pretty normal for people to select software as a career without considering the compensation as a factor. It wasn't excessively better than other similar choices for one.
I think they enjoy the money and prestige; not the work, itself.
I get a real joy out of developing software. I have, for all my adult life. The fact that it paid well, was gravy.
I do feel that I was incredibly fortunate to have landed into a field that I already loved. I guess that my loving it, made me much better at it.
Of course, there were lots of "friction points," along the way. Working for myself, in retirement, has removed all of them. The one thing that I miss, is working in a team.
I don't think he meant that you should enjoy your vocation more than your vacation. But life is very different if you actually enjoy going to work each day, rather than dreading it.
I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity
I think this even affects people who do see their vocation in tech. The field has become so vast with many subfields that you can easily find yourself in a different subfield than the one you were originally interested in - probably even more so when everyone and everything is pulled towards AI.
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.
It’s interesting that recounting personal experience is considered “giving advice.”
BTW: I’m not retired by choice. I just found out -the hard way- that a significant portion of today’s tech workforce doesn’t want to work with people with gray hair. It’s a possibility that this could be a shared experience. We all get old, at some point.
I’m extremely grateful to advice I was given, decades ago, about the importance of saving and investing for retirement.
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things.
Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).
No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.
But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.
Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.
Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.
"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.
But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.
We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.
Sorry to sort of hijack your comment, but as I was reading it I was instantly reminded of a "blog post" that I have in my list of "blog posts for the blog I don't have, and which I will likely never actually share with the world", and thought "Why not share this one today?"
As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a sort of quality of "effortlessness". Though, now that I am re-reading the pseudo-blog-post (it's from more than a year ago), I am not convinced this is the best word, as it sort of...makes it seem like people didn't put in work!
Anyway, my opinion:
--
I recently caught myself thinking about how different people do and feel about certain kinds of work in different ways.
I think we often tend to think in two axes. We think about liking to do something and not liking — which is one axis (our enjoyment). And there’s also the axis of being bad or good at it, which is the axis of quality.
It seems to me that we think about work according to these two axes. However, I don't think this is the full picture. By which I mean that I think it's possible for you to like something, and for you to be able to be good at something (i.e. to produce good, even incredible quality work), while still having a third axis tied to this equation.
The Effort Axis.
The third axis, to me is, is the effort axis. We can be good at something and enjoy it, but it can still take us a lot of effort. People kind of think about passion, or being "born to do something" (some say it's a "calling"). I think that when you have a calling, you are deep into the third axis, and it is very likely you are also deep into the other axes.
The third axis essentially means that things should feel effortless.
You can be very good at something, but it can still take a while for you to produce good results. And especially if it doesn't feel effortless, it often means that you'll procrastinate more, and that you'll delay it. That it’ll weigh heavier on your mind. But if it feels effortless, you just want more and more and more of it.
This thought came to me when I thought about working on breaking down a project into user stories and, most of all, adding them and meticulously creating them in the appropriate task management software. This is something that I enjoy a lot. It's something that I actually believe I can produce quality results in. And if I really put my mind into it, I can actually do it fast.
But it doesn't feel effortless.
When I finalize it, I feel very drained. Again, I can feel that I've made good progress, that I've produced something very good, and I can genuinely think, "Yeah, I really liked doing this", but I feel very tired. Whereas I think I can code very effortlessly. I think I can effortlessly devise very complex solutions, or very simple solutions for complex problems. And I think it's clearly my "calling".
Today a colleague had the responsibility of handling this process of creating tasks and everything else. And I was marveled at how effortlessly he was doing it all. It's not that he has a lot of experience, or that his results were outrageously good (they were good, but not remarkable). It's just that it clearly felt effortless to him. And I thought: Now, this is something that we should focus this person on.
It's actually the first time they've done it. We gave him the challenge, like we have given other people, and it was amazing. It felt great to work with someone who was able to do things effortlessly.
People often say that you should surround yourself with the best quality workers, the ones who produce incredible results, the ones that have passion. Let's be clear: I have passion about working on those user stories, but it's not effortless.
So I think that you should actually surround yourself with people for whom the work feels effortless.
And at times, it may actually not be the best quality work, but it’ll drive them. They will have more energy. And you will marvel at the way in which it was not a problem for them. They looked at it, they started attacking the problem, and they imbued this wave of positivity — this unshakable belief that they were going to do it.
Even if the results weren't the best, you can feel that they will iterate over it, and they will do it quickly enough and with enough quality because it is effortless for them.
Do not underestimate the power of doing something effortlessly.
Hey this really resonates. I’ve been looking for a way to describe the observation that talent is multi-dimensional without using that word, or just saying something generic like “people are good at different things.”
> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
I've come to learn that "do only what only you can do" is not great advice at all. It's leagues better to be the 10,000th-best SWE at Meta than the world's best basketweaver. Often doing something super unique is an excuse for shying away from mainstream competition.
I once had a talk with one of (the?) world's best bonsai gardener in Edogawa, Tokyo. Trees cut by him are worth millions and he has pictures of himself with FANG leaders. This guy wakes up every morning at 5 and works until it's dark outside even though he clearly does not need to work for money, but because he loves it.
I think you underestimate just how competitive obscure fields and crafts can be. The world's second-best basketweaver is likely to be painfully aware of their superior rival, and push themselves hard to catch up and surpass them.
What you're really arguing is that SWEs are superior to basketweavers. But I wouldn't be so sure. That basket might well be around and admired long after the software's obsolete and gone.
What? I would much rather be the world's best basketweaver than the 10,000th best SWE at Meta. Are you sure you aren't projecting your biases on what you think is more fulfilling?
This is also the kind of advice that only sounds good on paper. In reality there is no clear marker of what you can and cannot do well unless you empirically experiment with everything which would take several lifetimes.
Modern gurus like Cal Newport advise the opposite, and for good reason.
Newport's book on this topic is terribly underwhelming, and I say that as someone who has really enjoyed his other books, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Most of the anecdotes he gives to support his "Career Capital over Passion" have an ambiguous directionality of the causal arrow. For example, the fact that the happiest admin assistants have been at the job the longest does not mean that getting good at being an AA makes you happy with the work. There is an equally plausible explanation that enjoying the work of an AA makes one likely to stay in the job longer. Most of his examples in the book are like this.
The place where I think Newport flounders in this area is that, in order to get "So Good They Can't Ignore You", you actually have to be able to put in the time and effort to get good. And the vast majority of people do not possess the self-control and willpower to force themselves to do something they dislike to the level that is necessary to achieve said mastery.
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance.
Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
>>
In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world.
<<
Good one! Im so glad I could built my current system with AI, because without it I wouldnt have started because of the amount of work.
I went into SWE because I liked programming at home with my school friends but I had no real understanding of the "commercial environment" I would end up - turning out: I'm quite a good developer, but I hate it completely under commercial constraints.
Instead, I switched to Product & Projectmanagement, where Im a AAA-employee with my tech-skills and where I can always stand out because I speak both languages and Im usually very well connected to the tech people (like short ways ie picking the phone and asking for a quick help/advice to get something faster done)
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
To be honest, I don't follow. The different stories strike me as telling different/contradicting lessons.
But taking just the first one, the Buffet one. I think maybe that's how we get willing people in the bad companies? Bad companies doesn't even have to mean evil and morally wrong, it can mean bad decision making and poorly run. Companies can still be plenty lucky though and that accounts for a lot. But if the people who hate morally bad jobs or irrational decision making leave and the ones who don't hate them stay that's going to lead somewhere.
Maybe individually a "good" person will be happier (and perhaps poorer, if you have the belief that lower morals is an advantage in business). As a society, you'd probably really like that naysayers remain at companies. As a company leader, I don't know which one you'd like. It depends on your goals I guess. Overall, it strikes me as not capturing enough. The "job you don't hate" is broad. If you have a belief in something that should exist in the world and that company has a way of producing it, it doesn't seem to be wrong to work there trying to make that happen even against a tide of coworkers you hate, existing products you hate, social implications you hate. It's a lot of stress and work though with a low success rate. That's enough for a lot of people to say no, but more curiously it's enough for a lot of people to just change what they hate.
Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"
Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like.
I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.
I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
That’s a healthy perspective. I’m someone fortunate to work a perfect job for me, and there have still been clients that almost burnt me out of it. It also can be painful to see work in your favorite field be misunderstood or misused.
Knew a guy who owned an I.T. consultancy who was fond of (privately) saying, "This job wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the customers and the employees!"
> List your debts. Create a concrete plan to eliminate them, starting with the smallest. Avoid taking on any new debt this month.
This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move will only beneficial after months). It's so much easier to take some debt, at least initially. The author doesn't give good advises for how to avoid getting into debt.
> Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo.
So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.
Buying a house was one of the best things I ever did. But it worked for me because houses are relatively cheap (compared to income) where I live compared to many other countries and I was well paid and frugal so I paid off the mortgage over less than fifteen years. My children don't have that luxury partly because house prices are higher but also because they were less ambitious and hence earn less.
So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.
Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal.
If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc.
Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that.
If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life.
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life. On the contrary, I feel gravitating toward social sciences, economy, culture, governance and stuff that is not very close to my professional/studies expertise.
Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes?
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
Due to personal and professional reasons I've spent too much time alone last years. I really noticed that I love being with people and that I cannot stand being all day in front of a computer by myself. I also read a lot about history, economy, culture and geography, but on the contrary my background is in Physics and I am finishing a PhD in NLP in which I don't feel very good.
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point.
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).
I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
And unless you're born rich, you start your life with debt: You need some form of retirement money for the last 20 something years you might not be able to work anymore.
If you buy assets on a loan/mortgage/etc, it's more like you're materializing this debt early.
Yes. I'm sure it would feel nice to pay off my apartment loan, but the interest rate on that is 2.75%, which is way lower than what I can (reasonably) expect to make on the stock market.
I think of debt-avoidance sort of like teetotaling: I understand where it comes from and empathize with it but I tend to agree with you that total/dogmatic avoidance feels unnecessary and maybe even deleterious in the limit.
Like alcohol or drugs, debt can easily be abused, and there is no shortage of people and corporations waiting to make a profit from selling you debt, alcohol and drugs in difficult or joyous circumstances.
Using debt as a tool requires a degree of "know thyself" wisdom and financial literacy that many people struggle to possess in their best times, let alone hold onto in their worst times. So the "overcorrecting" edicts ("avoid debt like the plague") probably do more harm than good, because most people don't care about the finer/nuanced details of these things and want simple rules to follow through good times and (especially) bad times.
The motivation behind the statement is all about avoiding ruin, not maximizing opportunities or even happiness. They're different goals but it's easy to confuse one for the other.
Yes. I wish my parents had been more nuanced in their advice about debt. Carrying a revolving balance is way different from borrowing to buy a home, for example.
I was proud to pay off my mortgage early, but missed out on nearly 20 years of tech-stock growth. That's a chasm rather than a nuance in retrospect, but there isn't a lot of nuance in aphorisms like "Avoid Debt Like the Plague."
Organize underground punk shows. Make a deal with bands to split the door in exchange for hustling a crowd. May require some fun conversations with the police later, but hey.
Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text
For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful.
Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.
It’s funny I read this book just this last Thu during my work break. Was it worth it? Not really given I already read most of the classics on personal finances and self-help.
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
> 1. Don’t Mistake Your Vocation
If one's knack/vocation just objectively doesn't pay a livable wage, what's the alternative?
2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague
In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in".
3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might
While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success.
4. Preserve Your Integrity
For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.
Adding an even older, non-Western data point to your Babylon example: a Kyoto shopkeeper, Ishida Baigan, was teaching nearly the same list in 1739 — honesty, diligence, frugality, plus "find your proper vocation" (shokubun), independently, with no contact with the Western tradition.
Two civilizations re-deriving the same short list from scratch is about the strongest version of your point — "outdated" just isn't the right axis for it.
This can't be stated often enough. Society, diet, education and technology changes, but we've biologically had the same makeup for thousands of, if not more, years.
Just because they're dead doesn't mean they were idiots. This is the young person's folly.
Then again, this attitude may be a substantial cause of what we define as progress. Gray areas are hard to figure out.
Many things in the world are radically different, and the economy especially is a different beast. The point about avoiding debt for example, is hardly relevant for businesses (even if it's generally good advice for personal debts.
The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me.
I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second.
Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.
I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less.
All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay.
It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out.
Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job.
All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.
I don't think the point was finding a job that isn't work. My job is definitely work; I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't getting paid. It's more about just being good at it.
There's definitely luck involved. I'm lucky to have found a thing with basically zero barriers to entry (computing). But maybe I'd be even better as a farmer or physician. We will never know.
It's good enough just to find something that you don't struggle in, though. Not swimming upstream, as the OP puts it.
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
As a counterpoint, there are plenty of people who are passionate about their hobbies and make no money on them at all. I have some doubts that there's a correlation between passion and money-making. Except, perhaps, that it helps to be passionate about money-making in order to be successful at it.
Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices.
The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
PP is outside the Americas. It could be more balanced outside this purgatory (linearly, bardo) we call HN
makes me wonder: is 'journey is the goal' just about as linear as 'means are the ends'? Then one can't get nonlinear interpolating between ("balancing") them
It's arguable that more than a handful of world-influencers are being their most improbable selves right this moment.. we could try and measure those degrees of nonlinearity
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
> and that's pretty important to me
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me.
Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.
Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.
And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.
What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.
Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
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The older I get, the more I realize what matters to me as well. I worked a FAANG with a long commute. I then worked a job with a short drive (10m morning, 15m afternoon, both via Uber when it was cheap). I now have a 12m walk to and from. The last one is purely luck, as I didn't know it'd be so close when I applied. (None of this omits the importance of working with honest people who have shared values.)
I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:
> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.
It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.
You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.
I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.
Totally agree, I took a very well paying job with a company doing what I enjoy doing, but the attitude of the company was very much to extract as much money from the clients as possible. We had three hour monthly call where everyone would take turns to explain how they had upsold or otherwise made money for the company that month, someone from each call would get a token award for it.
I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.
A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.
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I think that's why integrity matters so much: it removes a whole layer of moral bookkeeping from daily life
The older I get, the more I feel it’s becoming in shorter supply. Even when I don’t like associating with those that seem to lack it, they seem to find me everywhere I go. This is professionally, as a consumer and even just socially. I’m probably just old and grumpy and this is a yearning for the good old days, but, when I look around it just seems to be getting out of control. For example, politics is huge indicator that exemplifies and reinforces the behaviors.
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> we did bad things to people and made filthy money
I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior.
I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it.
It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start carelessly exploiting others for my own gain.
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Integrity is important and missing. I think there's a contradiction in what you're writing though. Recognizing the importance of personal and social relationships is what's keeping the no integrity people around and/or getting them promoted. It's the networking for networking sake as well as the more mundane social lubricating they do in contradiction to integrity. It's disagreeing with discussions, projects, companies, leaders and going along with it and expressing agreement. It's smiling, being "enjoyable to be around", being naive or presenting as naive, and being easy to work with. And more specifically being easy for the many liars and sociopaths to work with. Caring for personal and social relationships is not inherently reinforcing of all that is good. I wouldn't know how to count, but I feel there's quite a bit of it reinforcing the bad.
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The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it)
People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn.
You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.
It's nice if you find something you previously care about. But it can go the other way too-- you can care more about what you work on. You can focus on the reasons it is good, or efficient, or honest, or solves real problems, or whatever other metavalue motivates you to care more.
Same thing happened to me and I feel very blessed to get paid to do work that I would do for free as a hobby.
> People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well.
When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.
What blows my mind is how little people seem to care about integrity. For how little they are willing to throw it away.
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
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It’s everywhere in tech. Ever since tech became known as the place to be for high paying jobs without requiring too much education or working hours, compared to traditional routes like doctor or lawyer.
The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
I started programming at 5, making it do what I wanted it to provided dopamine. I never found a sport I enjoyed. I do like painting though. I doubt very many people get into sanitation because they love making toilets clean, but even there I'm sure a few do. Before 2000 I think it was pretty normal for people to select software as a career without considering the compensation as a factor. It wasn't excessively better than other similar choices for one.
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I think they enjoy the money and prestige; not the work, itself.
I get a real joy out of developing software. I have, for all my adult life. The fact that it paid well, was gravy.
I do feel that I was incredibly fortunate to have landed into a field that I already loved. I guess that my loving it, made me much better at it.
Of course, there were lots of "friction points," along the way. Working for myself, in retirement, has removed all of them. The one thing that I miss, is working in a team.
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I don't think he meant that you should enjoy your vocation more than your vacation. But life is very different if you actually enjoy going to work each day, rather than dreading it.
I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity
I think this even affects people who do see their vocation in tech. The field has become so vast with many subfields that you can easily find yourself in a different subfield than the one you were originally interested in - probably even more so when everyone and everything is pulled towards AI.
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
> I'm retired.
I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.
It’s interesting that recounting personal experience is considered “giving advice.”
BTW: I’m not retired by choice. I just found out -the hard way- that a significant portion of today’s tech workforce doesn’t want to work with people with gray hair. It’s a possibility that this could be a shared experience. We all get old, at some point.
I’m extremely grateful to advice I was given, decades ago, about the importance of saving and investing for retirement.
Given how much these jobs pay, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
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Huh this is literally about human integrity, not a dapp.
Why the need to insert this crypto spam ?
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One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things.
Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).
No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.
But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.
Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.
Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.
"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.
But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.
We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.
Sorry to sort of hijack your comment, but as I was reading it I was instantly reminded of a "blog post" that I have in my list of "blog posts for the blog I don't have, and which I will likely never actually share with the world", and thought "Why not share this one today?"
As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a sort of quality of "effortlessness". Though, now that I am re-reading the pseudo-blog-post (it's from more than a year ago), I am not convinced this is the best word, as it sort of...makes it seem like people didn't put in work!
Anyway, my opinion:
--
I recently caught myself thinking about how different people do and feel about certain kinds of work in different ways.
I think we often tend to think in two axes. We think about liking to do something and not liking — which is one axis (our enjoyment). And there’s also the axis of being bad or good at it, which is the axis of quality.
It seems to me that we think about work according to these two axes. However, I don't think this is the full picture. By which I mean that I think it's possible for you to like something, and for you to be able to be good at something (i.e. to produce good, even incredible quality work), while still having a third axis tied to this equation.
The Effort Axis.
The third axis, to me is, is the effort axis. We can be good at something and enjoy it, but it can still take us a lot of effort. People kind of think about passion, or being "born to do something" (some say it's a "calling"). I think that when you have a calling, you are deep into the third axis, and it is very likely you are also deep into the other axes.
The third axis essentially means that things should feel effortless.
You can be very good at something, but it can still take a while for you to produce good results. And especially if it doesn't feel effortless, it often means that you'll procrastinate more, and that you'll delay it. That it’ll weigh heavier on your mind. But if it feels effortless, you just want more and more and more of it.
This thought came to me when I thought about working on breaking down a project into user stories and, most of all, adding them and meticulously creating them in the appropriate task management software. This is something that I enjoy a lot. It's something that I actually believe I can produce quality results in. And if I really put my mind into it, I can actually do it fast.
But it doesn't feel effortless.
When I finalize it, I feel very drained. Again, I can feel that I've made good progress, that I've produced something very good, and I can genuinely think, "Yeah, I really liked doing this", but I feel very tired. Whereas I think I can code very effortlessly. I think I can effortlessly devise very complex solutions, or very simple solutions for complex problems. And I think it's clearly my "calling".
Today a colleague had the responsibility of handling this process of creating tasks and everything else. And I was marveled at how effortlessly he was doing it all. It's not that he has a lot of experience, or that his results were outrageously good (they were good, but not remarkable). It's just that it clearly felt effortless to him. And I thought: Now, this is something that we should focus this person on.
It's actually the first time they've done it. We gave him the challenge, like we have given other people, and it was amazing. It felt great to work with someone who was able to do things effortlessly.
People often say that you should surround yourself with the best quality workers, the ones who produce incredible results, the ones that have passion. Let's be clear: I have passion about working on those user stories, but it's not effortless.
So I think that you should actually surround yourself with people for whom the work feels effortless.
And at times, it may actually not be the best quality work, but it’ll drive them. They will have more energy. And you will marvel at the way in which it was not a problem for them. They looked at it, they started attacking the problem, and they imbued this wave of positivity — this unshakable belief that they were going to do it.
Even if the results weren't the best, you can feel that they will iterate over it, and they will do it quickly enough and with enough quality because it is effortless for them.
Do not underestimate the power of doing something effortlessly.
Hey this really resonates. I’ve been looking for a way to describe the observation that talent is multi-dimensional without using that word, or just saying something generic like “people are good at different things.”
Maybe you should write some blog posts after all.
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> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".
I've come to learn that "do only what only you can do" is not great advice at all. It's leagues better to be the 10,000th-best SWE at Meta than the world's best basketweaver. Often doing something super unique is an excuse for shying away from mainstream competition.
I couldn’t resist a quick Google search for this.
“Mary Jackson is a world-famous African-American sweetgrass basket weaver. In 2008, she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her basket weaving.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jackson_(artist)?wprov=sf...
I have to say, that sounds more fulfilling than anything I will ever do. People who become the best at anything are usually truly extraordinary.
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I don't know about basket weaving, but..
I once had a talk with one of (the?) world's best bonsai gardener in Edogawa, Tokyo. Trees cut by him are worth millions and he has pictures of himself with FANG leaders. This guy wakes up every morning at 5 and works until it's dark outside even though he clearly does not need to work for money, but because he loves it.
I think you underestimate just how competitive obscure fields and crafts can be. The world's second-best basketweaver is likely to be painfully aware of their superior rival, and push themselves hard to catch up and surpass them.
What you're really arguing is that SWEs are superior to basketweavers. But I wouldn't be so sure. That basket might well be around and admired long after the software's obsolete and gone.
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What? I would much rather be the world's best basketweaver than the 10,000th best SWE at Meta. Are you sure you aren't projecting your biases on what you think is more fulfilling?
These are also survivorship bias cases. The real decision depends on 4 factors of Ikigai.
This is also the kind of advice that only sounds good on paper. In reality there is no clear marker of what you can and cannot do well unless you empirically experiment with everything which would take several lifetimes.
Modern gurus like Cal Newport advise the opposite, and for good reason.
Newport's book on this topic is terribly underwhelming, and I say that as someone who has really enjoyed his other books, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Most of the anecdotes he gives to support his "Career Capital over Passion" have an ambiguous directionality of the causal arrow. For example, the fact that the happiest admin assistants have been at the job the longest does not mean that getting good at being an AA makes you happy with the work. There is an equally plausible explanation that enjoying the work of an AA makes one likely to stay in the job longer. Most of his examples in the book are like this.
The place where I think Newport flounders in this area is that, in order to get "So Good They Can't Ignore You", you actually have to be able to put in the time and effort to get good. And the vast majority of people do not possess the self-control and willpower to force themselves to do something they dislike to the level that is necessary to achieve said mastery.
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
Generalist jobs are all about that System 2 thinking. I never developed it, so my general power is limited.
I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said:
"Work at the job that you do not hate"
In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world.
I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too.
As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is how you become homeless"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s
At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance.
Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
>> In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. <<
Good one! Im so glad I could built my current system with AI, because without it I wouldnt have started because of the amount of work. I went into SWE because I liked programming at home with my school friends but I had no real understanding of the "commercial environment" I would end up - turning out: I'm quite a good developer, but I hate it completely under commercial constraints.
Instead, I switched to Product & Projectmanagement, where Im a AAA-employee with my tech-skills and where I can always stand out because I speak both languages and Im usually very well connected to the tech people (like short ways ie picking the phone and asking for a quick help/advice to get something faster done)
I think Kevin Kelly has taken the opposing side before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933)
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
> What are those artists successful at?
Making money in the profession that they enjoy, rather than having to take up one that they enjoy less.
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To be honest, I don't follow. The different stories strike me as telling different/contradicting lessons.
But taking just the first one, the Buffet one. I think maybe that's how we get willing people in the bad companies? Bad companies doesn't even have to mean evil and morally wrong, it can mean bad decision making and poorly run. Companies can still be plenty lucky though and that accounts for a lot. But if the people who hate morally bad jobs or irrational decision making leave and the ones who don't hate them stay that's going to lead somewhere.
Maybe individually a "good" person will be happier (and perhaps poorer, if you have the belief that lower morals is an advantage in business). As a society, you'd probably really like that naysayers remain at companies. As a company leader, I don't know which one you'd like. It depends on your goals I guess. Overall, it strikes me as not capturing enough. The "job you don't hate" is broad. If you have a belief in something that should exist in the world and that company has a way of producing it, it doesn't seem to be wrong to work there trying to make that happen even against a tide of coworkers you hate, existing products you hate, social implications you hate. It's a lot of stress and work though with a low success rate. That's enough for a lot of people to say no, but more curiously it's enough for a lot of people to just change what they hate.
HN front page : "Avoid debt like plague"
Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"
Corporate debt != personal debt.
Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like.
I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.
I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
That’s a healthy perspective. I’m someone fortunate to work a perfect job for me, and there have still been clients that almost burnt me out of it. It also can be painful to see work in your favorite field be misunderstood or misused.
> Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it.
Agreed.
But I think you would have been worse off had you chosen a career in something you did not like, be it law or finance or fitness training etc.
Knew a guy who owned an I.T. consultancy who was fond of (privately) saying, "This job wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the customers and the employees!"
This is a great little book that everyone should read. It's available for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
Also on Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
I was just coming to post this. That site is a treasure.
Book is available here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945
Standard Ebooks has it too: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
More formats here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
Some of it is very 19th-century and easy to over-romanticize, but "reputation is the asset" and "debt trades away freedom" have aged pretty well
> List your debts. Create a concrete plan to eliminate them, starting with the smallest. Avoid taking on any new debt this month.
This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move will only beneficial after months). It's so much easier to take some debt, at least initially. The author doesn't give good advises for how to avoid getting into debt.
This advice from P.T. Barnum is strikingly similar to Dave Ramsey's process of debt-elimination, or what he calls "The 7 Baby Steps".
https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps
> Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo.
So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.
Buying a house was one of the best things I ever did. But it worked for me because houses are relatively cheap (compared to income) where I live compared to many other countries and I was well paid and frugal so I paid off the mortgage over less than fifteen years. My children don't have that luxury partly because house prices are higher but also because they were less ambitious and hence earn less.
So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.
The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?
Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal.
If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc.
Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that.
If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life.
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life. On the contrary, I feel gravitating toward social sciences, economy, culture, governance and stuff that is not very close to my professional/studies expertise.
Turn procrastination into pragmatism.
Switch from service-to-self to service-to-others, or vice versa.
See your mind as shut gates that can be opened to something already perfect.
Make your sub-conscious super-conscious - any tips there?
I remember Prince (musician) said he would receive things from God and send them back to source.
Cut the strings that make you a puppet??
Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
Thanks! I will, definitely.
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes?
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
Due to personal and professional reasons I've spent too much time alone last years. I really noticed that I love being with people and that I cannot stand being all day in front of a computer by myself. I also read a lot about history, economy, culture and geography, but on the contrary my background is in Physics and I am finishing a PhD in NLP in which I don't feel very good.
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point.
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
Thanks! I'll give it a try.
> low in extraversion and agreeableness
I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
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> "Preserve Your Integrity"
"Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one's self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets." [0]
- Hávamál, written ~900-1000 CE
[0]: https://www.voluspa.org/havamal76-80.htm
> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague"
Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).
I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
Yes. That part should be taken with some caveats.
And unless you're born rich, you start your life with debt: You need some form of retirement money for the last 20 something years you might not be able to work anymore.
If you buy assets on a loan/mortgage/etc, it's more like you're materializing this debt early.
Wow, this is very insightful and I haven’t looked at saving for retirement as a type of debt before! Thanks for sharing!
Yes. I'm sure it would feel nice to pay off my apartment loan, but the interest rate on that is 2.75%, which is way lower than what I can (reasonably) expect to make on the stock market.
I think of debt-avoidance sort of like teetotaling: I understand where it comes from and empathize with it but I tend to agree with you that total/dogmatic avoidance feels unnecessary and maybe even deleterious in the limit.
Like alcohol or drugs, debt can easily be abused, and there is no shortage of people and corporations waiting to make a profit from selling you debt, alcohol and drugs in difficult or joyous circumstances.
Using debt as a tool requires a degree of "know thyself" wisdom and financial literacy that many people struggle to possess in their best times, let alone hold onto in their worst times. So the "overcorrecting" edicts ("avoid debt like the plague") probably do more harm than good, because most people don't care about the finer/nuanced details of these things and want simple rules to follow through good times and (especially) bad times.
The motivation behind the statement is all about avoiding ruin, not maximizing opportunities or even happiness. They're different goals but it's easy to confuse one for the other.
Yes. I wish my parents had been more nuanced in their advice about debt. Carrying a revolving balance is way different from borrowing to buy a home, for example.
I was proud to pay off my mortgage early, but missed out on nearly 20 years of tech-stock growth. That's a chasm rather than a nuance in retrospect, but there isn't a lot of nuance in aphorisms like "Avoid Debt Like the Plague."
Investing will make more money than a career. If it's really money you want, start a business or save capitol.
If you do it right this is true.
If by investing you mean gambling then it is by no means certain.
I've only ever been good at dancing to punk music, which has only cost me money so far.
Organize underground punk shows. Make a deal with bands to split the door in exchange for hustling a crowd. May require some fun conversations with the police later, but hey.
Me and my roommates living room in college [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF
youtube is calling
with an unexplained circus trick the article jumps from Barnum's 20 rules to "here are the four core principles" --- why these four?
I love project Gutenberg to provide the rest. it's a short pamphlet:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text
For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful.
Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.
It’s funny I read this book just this last Thu during my work break. Was it worth it? Not really given I already read most of the classics on personal finances and self-help.
For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
I appreciated Felix going over what he had to give up to get where he was. It let me be content with a bit less money and a bit more family.
I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...
How's that? I am not familiar.
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Let the peasants think they are poor because they are lazy and the aristocracy are rich because working their ass off. Yeah, right.
> 1. Don’t Mistake Your Vocation If one's knack/vocation just objectively doesn't pay a livable wage, what's the alternative?
2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in".
3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success.
4. Preserve Your Integrity For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.
Nobody is going to seriously discuss moneymaking tips from 1880, right? …right?
Is the advice from The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926, out of date?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon
Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.
Adding an even older, non-Western data point to your Babylon example: a Kyoto shopkeeper, Ishida Baigan, was teaching nearly the same list in 1739 — honesty, diligence, frugality, plus "find your proper vocation" (shokubun), independently, with no contact with the Western tradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishida_Baigan
Two civilizations re-deriving the same short list from scratch is about the strongest version of your point — "outdated" just isn't the right axis for it.
Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.
This can't be stated often enough. Society, diet, education and technology changes, but we've biologically had the same makeup for thousands of, if not more, years.
Just because they're dead doesn't mean they were idiots. This is the young person's folly.
Then again, this attitude may be a substantial cause of what we define as progress. Gray areas are hard to figure out.
I don’t know where to even begin, if you don’t see any difference between 1880 and 2026.
Many things in the world are radically different, and the economy especially is a different beast. The point about avoiding debt for example, is hardly relevant for businesses (even if it's generally good advice for personal debts.
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The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me.
I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second.
Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.
I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less.
All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay.
It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out.
Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job.
All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.
I don't think the point was finding a job that isn't work. My job is definitely work; I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't getting paid. It's more about just being good at it.
There's definitely luck involved. I'm lucky to have found a thing with basically zero barriers to entry (computing). But maybe I'd be even better as a farmer or physician. We will never know.
It's good enough just to find something that you don't struggle in, though. Not swimming upstream, as the OP puts it.
That guy looks nothing like Hugh Jackman
Only Hugh Jackman looks like Hugh Jackman.
This is inspiration and not advice for today's world.
Supplement and Complement the above with something like;
The Math of Money by J. Zachary Klingensmith - https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/
Understand compound interest.
That’s it - that’s the advice.
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
As a counterpoint, there are plenty of people who are passionate about their hobbies and make no money on them at all. I have some doubts that there's a correlation between passion and money-making. Except, perhaps, that it helps to be passionate about money-making in order to be successful at it.
Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices.
The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
Said another way: "Pride is for the poor."
>Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Imagine you are good at programming. Great, now get a programming career. Oops, it's the 19th century and computers aren't a thing. Tough luck.
Ada Lovelace?
I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
It's not like this outside North America. Life is much more balanced.
PP is outside the Americas. It could be more balanced outside this purgatory (linearly, bardo) we call HN
makes me wonder: is 'journey is the goal' just about as linear as 'means are the ends'? Then one can't get nonlinear interpolating between ("balancing") them
This, however
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183167
(Note, same author/brand)
It's arguable that more than a handful of world-influencers are being their most improbable selves right this moment.. we could try and measure those degrees of nonlinearity
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