Very, very good reply, I'm glad I skipped past the unnecessary point-by-point at the beginning to get to the real meat of the reply.
There are a few weird and irrational biases I see going on amongst techies who frequent HN. I'll just talk about one of them because bias is a tough topic to talk rationally about.
The one I want to discuss that I see a lot of hackers doing is creating a need to do everything themselves. This leads directly to the delusion that side projects are things to take Really Seriously.
Sure, if I wanted to, I could chunk out all the work it takes to build a product, take it to the market, refine it, then finally build a company around it to take the load off.
But unless you're a real honest-to-god genius, then you're going to make mistakes, and those mistakes can add months, or even years to the time when you can Call It Done and go back to spending the time with your wife and kids.
If you're not absolutely strict about not letting it override your personal life, you will end up sacrificing your life to the jealous God of the Market.
You might try to respond by moving the goalposts, saying that the real goal here is learning, not achieving some kind of outcome. But do I really need to ship a product to learn?
There is a class of activity that is actively distrustful of the market, which insists that all learning comes from the creator's own mind. It's called art. If Picasso thought that the market was worth listening to, then we wouldn't know his name today. Artists by their nature listen to other artists, and not you. That's what makes it art.
Side projects should be considered to be more art than business. Art doesn't fuck with your personal life. Art informs your personal life. Whether you're creating it or enjoying it. If I'm sitting there hacking out a weird new concept for accessing databases and my wife comes into the room and wants to talk about our son's baseball game, I put down the text editor and listen to my wife. I do not tell her that I'm currently in flow right now and jeez could you really just come back later after I'm taking care of this Really Important Thing.
If you're bleeding your professional life so far into your personal life that you are even for a moment taking it more seriously than your wife and kids, you have fucked up your priorities. I would never ever ever even dream of doing this. Everything else is noise compared to my personal life.
"my wife comes into the room and wants to talk about our son's baseball game, I put down the text editor and listen to my wife. I do not tell her that I'm currently in flow right now"
But can you listen patiently, if you have been in a flow before?
I can't, even though I too often try to, to be polite, but I think I prefer being honest and stay in the flow, if I want to.
I can't. I've tried. I don't think it's necessarily messed up priorities. I think it's that some of us have obsessive compulsions to follow through on an idea or train of thought. I like to think I'm generally personable and hospitable, but I am a completely different person in the midst of a flow. I am abrupt and dismissive - not because I don't care, but because of an irrational urgency to put ink to paper. I often turn around, minutes (to even an hour) later, and dequeue every question or thing that was asked of me, one-by-one.
I feel like it's physically painful for me to not work in this way. I can not give undivided attention when there's something that needs to get out, and am certainly jealous of people who can context switch out of a flow like it's nothing.
I mean, I think it's similar to going to the gym: no matter how much I care about what you have to say, you're never going to get above 75% attention if you interrupt me mid-workout. The blood is pumping, Im hopped up on hormones, etc. It's not even that I don't want to focus, it's that my body is geared for something else and cant switch instantly.
Similarly, if I've been deeply focused, my brain has switched out normal, every day concerns for work material, my brain state is settled in to focus mode, etc. I spend hours a day (and have for years) teaching myself to focus on a large, abstract set of information in a particular state to attack problems. (It's actually a lot like visualization meditation -- to be able to hold a complex model of what you're working on in your head while you work.)
Im not able to instantly turn it off, it takes time to switch out of that mode of thinking and to bring back the "normal" information. It has nothing to do with priorities -- context switching, particularly a mode switch, takes time.
> dequeue every question or thing that was asked of me, one-by-one.
My ex used to hate that, she'd say "your not listening?" and I'd repeat verbatim everything she said and then she'd get annoyed because listening and listening are different things.
Current GF gets into a flow state herself so she is way more understanding :).
> she'd say "your not listening?" and I'd repeat verbatim everything she said and then she'd get annoyed because listening and listening are different things.
I'm the same way. My wife likes to say "you're not there". I haven't found a way for me to turn my mind off a problem quickly yet. One thing I do that may or may not help is if I see someone trying to tell me something that requires actual thought and feedback, and I'm not in the right mind set to provide them that, I'll let them know honestly in a diplomatic way.
When I'm working, I'm constantly aware of which stage of flow I'm in. I can work outside of flow, or inside of flow, the difference is how productive I am. I am only extremely rarely called on to produce massive volumes of code, I mostly do maintenance and feature development, not greenfielding.
So I've cobbled together a workflow that doesn't require massive blocks of uninterrupted time to drive results. It mostly revolves around the concepts of imperative, recognition, and refinement.
When I'm working, I'm either moving through an imperative, recognizing what the imperative is, or refining the system. Each of these steps has a well-defined mental workflow. I can put down the work at any time, then come pick it up later after the interruption is gone, quickly re-recognizing the imperative so I can start moving forward again.
Refinement is crucial to the system and allows for quicker recognition. For example, years of experience have taught me to always start with a clear workspace. If I can't recognize an imperative, then I start cleaning. Once everything's clean, I go look to repositories of the state of the project, such as the tracker, to get a high-level overview.
There I can see I already have a story open. By looking at the story, my familiarity and past refinements lead me to a structured way of developing the feature or fixing the bug. If I can't see a clear path forward, then I don't have an imperative and I need to design a new workflow. I used to try to put workflows down on paper, but these days I only do it for edge cases that I don't see very often, but are still really important. For example fixing mobile-only display bugs, my normal workflow of reproducing the issue from the test server locally doesn't work.
By enforcing a fairly rigid structure to my workflow and refining as needed, I can keep my mind free to wander while I'm working through imperatives. This means I can put the whole thing down, go play ping pong or grab lunch, and pick right back up where I left off when I get back. It's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be perfect.
Honestly, I can't make that switch too quickly if I'm just reading a book for very long. When I focus I go deep, and my emotions are sort of distant and my conscious "voice" is slowed down. I think I come off as very wooden in those times, and pretty much everyone I know who I care about, and cares about me gets and respect that.
Well said. However, some define "personal life" differently. Some meditate in caves. Some climb mountains, and maybe jump off them. Others like to hack on stuff. Or do art, which certainly can displace everything else. If you want a partner, you must find one who loves you for what you are, not what you might tolerate, with suitable tweaking.
The way I see it here is that your personal life revolves around two things, yourself and other people that you care about deeply. If you're single, this could mean your best friends.
Obviously you want a working marriage. But marriages, just like startups and side projects, take work. You need to hack on the marriage just like you might hack on the business. But you should never take the business more seriously than the marriage. The business exists to serve your needs, not the other way around.
How to hack your marriage is outside the scope of the discussion. But I believe they can be worked on so that they get better. Heck, I think a lot of the problems in marriages can be boiled down to the wife believing, with good reason, that the husband considers his job to be more important to him than she is. So this reprioritization alone can fix a lot of personal problems.
Definitely interested in learning about marriage hacks to implement if the right woman ever comes into my life. I'd like to master the yin yang of balancing flow versus scalable marriage.
Attracting a mate boils down to two things, building yourself up and putting yourself out there. Keeping them around boils down to being emotionally mature.
I usually follow my followers, that allows private messages, so you can message me there if you need help.
Sure, everyone's different. But find me a woman who would honestly be ok with playing second fiddle to your career, and I'll show you a woman who just doesn't value herself. Just because they'll accept it for the sake of the relationship doesn't mean they'll like it.
The relationship is going to suffer and you both are going to suffer for it. Just because you don't perceive yourself as suffering doesn't mean you're not. You just won't be aware of it. If it gets too bad, you'll wake up one day and find divorce papers on your kitchen table.
Think about what President Trump's marriage must be like in terms of priorities. Sure, people are different, marriages are different, but there's also an ideal to work towards. Marriage needs to fit the needs of both people, but it's not like people all have weird crazy different needs.
You're still missing my point. There are women who are honestly OK with "playing second fiddle" to their partners' careers. But they're also more committed to their own careers (or whatever) than to relationships.
Different people have different priorities, so there is no such thing as generalized "fucked up priorities" if you don't know the priorities of the person.
> If I'm sitting there hacking out a weird new concept for accessing databases and my wife comes into the room and wants to talk about our son's baseball game, I put down the text editor and listen to my wife
Sounds like you have a wife that doesn't respect your hacking time to me.
I wasn't saying that I do or that anyone ought to accept obesity as normal. However, in my country (I'm an American) it is prevalent. I'm overweight (though not obese) too. It's not that weird to view it as typical. The word "norm" can be construed in a lot of ways. In one sense it just means typical or average or median. In another sense it means normative or preferred. I think we know what sense of the word we're dealing with here though.
There are a few weird and irrational biases I see going on amongst techies who frequent HN. I'll just talk about one of them because bias is a tough topic to talk rationally about.
The one I want to discuss that I see a lot of hackers doing is creating a need to do everything themselves. This leads directly to the delusion that side projects are things to take Really Seriously.
Sure, if I wanted to, I could chunk out all the work it takes to build a product, take it to the market, refine it, then finally build a company around it to take the load off.
But unless you're a real honest-to-god genius, then you're going to make mistakes, and those mistakes can add months, or even years to the time when you can Call It Done and go back to spending the time with your wife and kids.
If you're not absolutely strict about not letting it override your personal life, you will end up sacrificing your life to the jealous God of the Market.
You might try to respond by moving the goalposts, saying that the real goal here is learning, not achieving some kind of outcome. But do I really need to ship a product to learn?
There is a class of activity that is actively distrustful of the market, which insists that all learning comes from the creator's own mind. It's called art. If Picasso thought that the market was worth listening to, then we wouldn't know his name today. Artists by their nature listen to other artists, and not you. That's what makes it art.
Side projects should be considered to be more art than business. Art doesn't fuck with your personal life. Art informs your personal life. Whether you're creating it or enjoying it. If I'm sitting there hacking out a weird new concept for accessing databases and my wife comes into the room and wants to talk about our son's baseball game, I put down the text editor and listen to my wife. I do not tell her that I'm currently in flow right now and jeez could you really just come back later after I'm taking care of this Really Important Thing.
If you're bleeding your professional life so far into your personal life that you are even for a moment taking it more seriously than your wife and kids, you have fucked up your priorities. I would never ever ever even dream of doing this. Everything else is noise compared to my personal life.