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Do whatever makes you happy is a lie

49 pointsby staltzover 11 years ago

24 comments

woodchuck64over 11 years ago
Arnold Schwarzeneggar said it pretty damn well on Reddit:<p>&quot;We can&#x27;t always do what we are passionate about, but everything we do can move us closer to our passion. I was never passionate about construction. But I laid bricks and worked so I could support my passion when I was starting out in bodybuilding.<p>The most important thing is, you need to find your passion. And once you do, put everything into it. Everything.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/19sjfo/this_inspired_me_and_i_bet_it_will_inspire_you/c8qzryg?context=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Fitness&#x2F;comments&#x2F;19sjfo&#x2F;this_inspire...</a>
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reustleover 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve been traveling around the world working 20-40 hours a week on my side projects (startups) for extremely little money. I actually haven&#x27;t spent a dime in the last 1.5 months.<p>How do I do it? I spend an additional 10-15 hours working wherever I&#x27;m living in exchange for a room and all of my food. It&#x27;s called WWOOFing, you&#x27;ve probably heard of it. The nice thing is, I get to focus on whatever it is I want without worrying about bills. Sure, it&#x27;s not for everyone, but I couldn&#x27;t be happier with how I get to spend my time.<p>I&#x27;m in the middle of brewing up a blog post about this, so feel free to get in touch if you&#x27;re interested in more about this.<p>PS: Here is where I currently am (Norway): <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/reustle/9465059825/lightbox/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;reustle&#x2F;9465059825&#x2F;lightbox&#x2F;</a>
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kylecover 11 years ago
<p><pre><code> Telling investors that the startup makes no revenue is a joke to them </code></pre> Maybe this is just poor word choice on the part of the author, but a startup with no revenue <i>is</i> a joke unless you haven&#x27;t launched yet. If you have, you still haven&#x27;t taken in any money, you might want to think about whether the product or service you&#x27;re offering is worth someone paying for.<p>On the other hand, if the author meant &quot;profit&quot; instead of &quot;revenue&quot;, then this sentence makes far more sense, there are plenty of promising startups and companies whose expenditures currently exceed their revenues, and shouldn&#x27;t be outright dismissed by potential investors.
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dragonwriterover 11 years ago
Author&#x27;s problem seems to be &quot;what I thought would make me happy doesn&#x27;t&quot;—so the issue isn&#x27;t that &quot;do whatever makes you happy&quot; is a lie, it&#x27;s that it&#x27;s a learning process, not something who h involves one choice and never thinking again.
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jasonkesterover 11 years ago
I think the advice is sound, but it&#x27;s phrased in a way that can be easily misinterpreted (as the author discovered). Better would be:<p>&quot;Arrange things so that you can do whatever makes you happy&quot;.<p>As an example, Rock Climbing, Surfing, and Travelling (to do those other things) make me happy. So I program computers.<p>Notice that Programming Computers doesn&#x27;t necessarily make me happy directly (though lucky for me I do find it plenty of fun). It does, however, allow one to quickly sock away a bunch of money by working a contract, and has lots of easy and socially acceptable ways to quit (contract ends&#x2F;startup burns a hole in the ground). The end result is that I get to spend a lot of time Travelling, Climbing, and Surfing.<p>Now, had I misinterpreted &quot;do whatever makes you happy&quot; as &quot;find a job doing whatever makes you happy&quot;, I&#x27;d be guiding people up easy routes and hosting children&#x27;s birthday parties at the crag for $60&#x2F;day. That would not, in actual fact, make me happy. Even though technically I&#x27;d be climbing rocks all day every day.<p>So yeah, turns out it is actually quite simple. Better still, by virtue of being here to read this story, most of us here are in a really good position to do exactly the same thing.
steven2012over 11 years ago
It sounds like the author has mistaken the original advice of &quot;Do what you love&quot; as &quot;Do what you think you love&quot;. How can this person know he &quot;loves&quot; being an entrepreneur when he never was one?<p>I guess he thought that being an entrepreneur meant more &quot;If you build it, they will come&quot;, which is wrong. The reality of it is that creating a startup takes a lot of different skill sets, including knowing how to build a business and managing cash flow, etc. And just because you love the idea of being something doesn&#x27;t mean you are actually good at doing it.
mathattackover 11 years ago
There&#x27;s a sad reality, which is most fun things don&#x27;t pay the bills for the median performer. Otherwise more people would be doing it, driving the wages down. The exceptional guitar player makes a killing doing what they love. Not the person at the 95th percentile, let alone the 50th.
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lnanek2over 11 years ago
&gt; Even if it would get investment, most investors would typically push me to make money as soon as possible.<p>Hell no they don&#x27;t. They push you to get users&#x2F;hyper growth. The whole point of investment is to let you grow faster than you can bootstrapping, which this article then goes on to say is the way to go with sustainability being paramount.<p>If you go for bootstrapping and sustainability and a competitor is being VC funded and burning down their runway of cash every year, they are going to blow you away in growth and your company will be irrelevant.
bclover 11 years ago
&quot;So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You&quot; does a good job of covering this - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You&#x2F;dp&#x2F;145550912...</a>
mcdougleover 11 years ago
Recently, I went on vacation to the beach with some friends, and before I left I snagged some books from my father&#x27;s bookshelf, one of which was &quot;Big Bucks&quot; by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. It&#x27;s short and simple and I was able to read it through quickly.<p>The message is pretty intuitive, and not especially innovative, but over the course of the book, the story lays out 3 rules of success:<p>1.) Do what makes you happy -- this way, &quot;work&quot; becomes &quot;play&quot; and you actually get excited enough to put the necessary hours and effort into it.<p>2.) Monetize what you&#x27;re doing -- prioritize money and success over &quot;play&quot; -- you can do what you love all day, but unless you actually make it bring in cash, it&#x27;s still just playing!<p>3.) Focus on increasing your income moreso than cutting costs -- not really relevant for this article, I guess.<p>I think what happened here was that the author didn&#x27;t make it to step 2. He was enjoying what he was doing, but he wasn&#x27;t striving to monetize it -- at least, not to the extent that turns it from a hobby into a successful means of income or cashflow.<p>(btw I recommend the book, even though it probably just tells more of the same stuff you read in many other success books)
niuzetaover 11 years ago
If <i>making money</i> is the goal and not the means, of course you&#x27;re going to stop liking it when the prospects stop looking good.
Yhippaover 11 years ago
Do the highest-paying job that you hate the least.
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wffurrover 11 years ago
It&#x27;s bizarre how much shelter, food, clothing, health care, internet access, etc. cost given how productive our economy is.<p>Guaranteed basic income + a modicum of required public service would allow people to literally do whatever makes them happy and drastically reduce suffering.
nickthemagicmanover 11 years ago
I agree with this 100%.<p>Happiness is an arbitrary condition based more on psychological factors than actual actions performed.<p>And as such should never be the full determining factor of your career.<p>For example, what makes you happy changes as you grow. Also, environmental conditions instill certain standards of happiness in people and as those conditions change so will a persons perception of what makes them happy.<p>Somtimes a simple change in your perception and internal state can do more for your happiness than changing some external materialistic aspect of you life like a new job or new car.<p>Existentialists would say: &quot;love what you do&quot;.
bitwizeover 11 years ago
A lot of people in the HN nouveau riche tend to forget: you can&#x27;t just skip to the self-actualization bit; there&#x27;s a whole hierarchy of needs you have to fill first. Starting with food on the table.
tomasienover 11 years ago
Outside of hubs, and even in hubs, it&#x27;s ridiculously hard to raise money for a startup that isn&#x27;t making money. I had so many conversations with investors for thecityswig.com who literally did not even want to have a conversation about user and customer traction if it didn&#x27;t involve them writing me a check or paying me for something - no matter HOW good the news was. Did not even want to hear it. And maybe that&#x27;s ok, maybe that&#x27;s even good, but it&#x27;s certainly true.
edsiper2over 11 years ago
Happiness is not an &quot;end&quot;, its about to enjoy everything you do.<p>If you enjoyed the process, does not matter if your startup failed or not, thats a total different thing.
doctorwhoover 11 years ago
Let me fix that title for you...<p>Do whatever makes you happy (without taking reality into account) is a lie (well, not a lie, just a wee bit stupid and naive).<p>Like people who go to university with NO IDEA what they want to do when they get out and then whine about not having a job and a huge student loan when they graduate.<p>Think. Decide. Do. And take responsibility instead of looking for someone to blame for why you are where you are in life.
RafiqMover 11 years ago
&quot;Do what you love&quot; comes with caveats BUT ... you didn&#x27;t do what you love.<p>You said what you love is building a product. However, what you chose to do is be an entrepreneur. These are different things.<p>You took on a combination of building a product and building a business.<p>If you had just built a product, without the necessity of having to make it a business, then I guess you would be much happier.
feintruledover 11 years ago
I agree with others that OP has likely just misidentified what it is makes him happy, but I don&#x27;t think that what it really was is necessarily money. Sounds like the author was actually most happy when he was designing his startup. So maybe he needs to focus more on the bit he actually likes - i.e. the creative process of designing web platforms. This may mean getting a salaried job with another company.
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speederover 11 years ago
Unfortunately, he is very much correct.<p>My associate, left finance to do something that he thought it was valuable to the world, that was make Android (because for iOS it was already a popular business, but Android noone was doing yet) games for children, with quality, and ethics, no ads, no in app purchase, no abusive tactics, no information tracking...<p>He came to me with that dream, and I jumped on it.<p>Now 1 year a a couple months forward, we have lots of free downloads, almost none paid downloads, also although other stores invited us, OEM contracts were offered to us, and whatnot, Apple and Google ignore us (I cannot decide what is worse, Apple, that we cannot find how to contact them at all, or Google, where a Developer Advocate review all our newly launched apps, and all of them so far he approved and sent to the editorial team, that... did nothing with them).<p>Then we look at our competitors, and what we see is: those having profits, are those that throw away ethics, like making games that allow kids to buy 1500 USD in smurfberries, or that not only put ads, but put them in a ambiguous manner so that kids activate them by accident. Those that follow the same path as us, are all extremely unprofitable, no matter the quality of their apps, the exception is those owned by huge conglomerates (ie: TocaBoca for example, owned by Bonnier) or those that profit from something else (for example making unprofitable kid games, and selling outsourcing services to other companies).<p>The reason we don&#x27;t jumped ship yet, is mostly because there IS some wildly profitable companies out there (as I said, for now mostly conglomerate-owned ones), and the market is still new and growing, and we are trying to be one of the early ones on it. But it is painfully obvious and tempting the power of unethical behaviour.
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alextingleover 11 years ago
&quot;Anecdote&quot; is not the singular form of &quot;data&quot;.<p>This guy has had one bad experience, and from it immediately derives a general rule that applies to everyone. How narcissistic!
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D9uover 11 years ago
Serial killers &quot;love&quot; killing...
6d0debc071over 11 years ago
Do whatever makes you happy is an ideal, and pragmatic in so far as you&#x27;ll have an advantage in that area as compared to someone who doesn&#x27;t have any passion for what they&#x27;re doing.<p>Of course someone with passion and some other edge like a superior education, or fewer ethics (in some areas,) or who just started earlier than you - is still going to beat you if you&#x27;re in a particularly competitive area.