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by digitalarborist
3599 days ago
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I know you wrote this with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I agree this list has nothing to do with the people involved. It seems possible that if pg wrote a piece on maximizing your odds of being a healthy adult both of those could be included, probably along with not doing a startup. Trouble is, like with all advice, your mileage may vary. Some people sacrifice themselves and the people around them completely for years in the hope of startup success and then bask in glory and wealth, others do the same thing and end up broken and alone at the end. Some people take the safe path, have loving friends and family and enough to live on, others take the safe path and end up unfulfilled, not producing a tremendous amount of value and next in line for layoffs. It's probably easier to make a list on what startups need than what people need at a fundamental level. |
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Being honest to yourself, admitting you are different, admitting you have desires noone else shares, accepting that people may look down on you when you pursue your dreams of happiness, is the hardest thing to do.
I don't talk about running away from anything, I talk about confronting everything that makes you who you are. Inspecting and taking apart everything you ever felt. Bringing it out into the open (not posting on Twitter but bringing it out in front of yourself) and accepting whatever it is that you are. And for that matter, accepting that other people might have it even harder than you and -- I don't get why you wouldn't -- being nice to strangers since their lives might have just fallen apart. The strongest indication that someone is an emotional teenager is when you see that they treat people, who they're not dependent on, badly.
I regularly see people who can't even see when they're figuratively slitting their own wrists. People who project their own unhappiness onto others. People who hurt others without a second thought, who are so incredibly selfish that they can't see that it's like a brick wall standing in between them and their own happiness.
Especially in the tech community and with scientists it is so common that they suppress their own emotions by rationalizing them away. So here's a list of one item that is probably true advice for happiness (except for psychopaths)
1. Make sure you feel and understand your own emotions. Rationality is not the opposite of emotionality (that would be irrationality). So use your emotions as a premise for your own existence and act rationally starting from that premise.