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.
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?
Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
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.
Also, it's just two sides of a point of view to see something like "upselling" as pressuring clients into buying things they don't need, or making them aware of things they didn't know you could provide.
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.
Teaching of right and wrong in school has fallen off. Anything touching on traditional morals risks being conflated with religion, which is kryptonite in the public schools. So now it's much more about how you feel, and excusing bad behavior because of hurt feelings, "disrespect," or some culturally or socially disadvantaged group you might claim to belong to. The soft bigotry of low expectations. We've stopped demanding that people follow the rules. If a kid got in trouble in school, he could probably expect to be in trouble at home too. Now, it's more likely that the parents will call the school and complain.
I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.
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.
It have a sense of relief that I’m content with so much less. Yesterday I made some sourdough bread and it was so gratifying. They cost around 70 cents CAD when you break down the costs for flour, salt, and energy to cook them. When you pull them out of the oven they do this incredible thing where they crackle and pop as they cool, and the rock-hard crust gradually softens. The smell is incredible. The first slices are always this impossible combination of crispy, glass-like crusts with a chewy, pillowy, delicious interior. It’s so good.
I’m in the worst financial condition I’ve been in my life. I earn less than half as much as I used to. Yet I enjoy things like this, I love my job, I can afford to take care of my family, there are countless things I want to do that I can still afford to do. Explore the outdoors, swim, dive, read, fish, spend time with friends.
That stuff is making it. I don’t need to exploit anyone to enjoy those things. In fact, I can make people’s lives better! I can give my neighbours nice bread. I can share fish I catch. I can take someone to an amazing spot I found.
The world doesn’t ask anything of us beyond that. It’s a choice to pursue more, and it’s a choice to pursue more at the expense of others. I really believe that choice comes with a consequence, too. My impression is that people who choose poorly tend to live hollow and discontented lives. I don’t think there are many exceptions, and when there are, these people tend to share a lot of traits with psychopaths. I don’t envy them either.
I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.
Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.
I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.
Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.
Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.
But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.
I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships.
They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and supported each other.
Personal Integrity isn't something that can be faked. If you are in the kind of relationship I just described, fake integrity will be exposed fairly soon.
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.
> 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.
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.
I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface.
I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee."
I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets.
It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work.
I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.
All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
I asked for examples of how the algorithm worked. I asked for examples of how to call the code. I asked for a happy-path unit test and a simple error-handling unit test. I asked it to rewrite something as a pure function. I pointed out an obvious race condition and told it to guard against that issue. I asked it to rewrite a function in the style of this other function. I told it to separate one function into two separate functions that handle the first step and the second step separately.
Etc etc.
If you don't understand it, ask for more or better comments, or better variable names, or cut down the scope into a smaller section, or more examples.
Edit: also I almost entirely leave the LLM in read only mode... I tell it to make the smallest change possible, and tell it I will only copy paste it in its proposed change when I understand the change and where it needs to be made. That way it's my hands on the keyboard, interacting with the code by making recommended changes... 80% of the code is touched by me (via copy-paste) most-of-the-way before I will 'git commit'.
Sure, there was one recursive folder descent function that found the most recent file modification time that I didn't fully understand, but it's self-contained in a function, I don't care to learn every corner of file modification times, and it appears to work, so I left it as is for my static site generator.
The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high".
Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.
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.
Or as the sibling comment said, do you enjoy the vocation or the vacation more?
(Everything in moderation of course: Even the most interesting and meaningful project will turn into drudgery to some degree, simply due to the amounts of time involved. Also we're in the attention economy, so there are lots of things specifically designed to feel more rewarding in the short term than to work on a long-term project. Maybe the difference is how much meaning and reward there still stays besides the day-to-day drudgery)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you should write some blog posts after all.
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.
“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.
The deep end of anything almost always has some positives attached to it. The best basketball players make a ton of money. That doesn’t make it a good career option.
For more obscure activities it takes an unreal amount of effort and sacrifice to get near the deep end of the pool. I grew up knowing a lot of people who were the best of the best at their sports and poured their life into it, but none of them ended up making it professionally or getting into the Olympics despite a lot of trying.
For a hobby or sport it’s more enjoyable if you’re not trying to turn it into something more. Leave it as a relaxing thing you do on the side.
2. The MacArthur Grant, while obviously greatly commendable as an achievement, is monetarily worth less than what the 10,000th Meta engineer makes in one or two years.
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.
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.
Modern gurus like Cal Newport advise the opposite, and for good reason.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. It just doesn’t make sense.
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.
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.
That's a formidable combination.
> 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 ...
You probably think that because talking fancy and bullshitting come naturally to you.
"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.
Making money in the profession that they enjoy, rather than having to take up one that they enjoy less.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments):
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.
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??
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.
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.
I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
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.
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.
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.
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."
I love project Gutenberg to provide the rest. it's a short pamphlet:
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.
So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.
So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.
Absolutely don't buy a house. I'm very happy I looked at that decision critically when the first opportunity arose and conventional advice encouraged it. I'd never have left my hometown, and my whole life henceforth would have been in service of debt. Pass. Much happier renting forever with every aspect of life being better.
Now I look at prices in places I live and think "Why in the hell would I commit this much money to a tiny shitty condo, people are delusional", but might consider it these days if the price to own vs rent comes into better balance now that I've established a new overall home.
Me and my roommates living room in college [1].
"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
If by investing you mean gambling then it is by no means certain.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon
Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Supplement and Complement the above with something like;
The Math of Money by J. Zachary Klingensmith - https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/
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.
That’s it - that’s the advice.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
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.
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.
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
