Or, to put it a bit more optimistically - usable now is better than perfect later. I've found that, if I disappear behind a curtain and spend a long time trying to make something really well-polished and feature rich, that just gives the user a lot of time to build up their expectations, and also to get frustrated by the delay. By the time you ship, they'll be actively looking for ways to find fault. When I YAGNI my way into a 80% or 90% solution and turn it around quickly, though, more often than not, they'll initially just be impressed at how quickly I was able to help them. Requests for changes will come, but they're generally small, so it's usually relatively easy to turn those around quickly as well.

1. As a younger man I done a business deal on a handshake and then got ripped off after putting in a year of work - always get it in writing!

2. Companies are not loyal to people, people may be loyal to people, but never think an organisation will be

3. I ran up some debt as a student until I figured out personal finances, which boils down to; increase income, reduce expenditure, save and invest the rest, avoid liabilities as far as possible (e.g. do you really need a car on finance)

4. Avoid getting drunk! Get tipsy, not drunk

5. You'll always get over a breakup, no matter how difficult it seems at the time

6. Sometimes you have to leave a group of friends, a partner, or even family behind, to grow into who you want to be

7. Don't wait for other people to help you in your career or life, any help you get it a bonus and be grateful, but you're the captain of the ship - push yourself forward

8. Be yourself

9. You're better and more capable than you think

10. Tell those you care about you how you feel, you never know when you might lose that chance

We live and learn!

Anyway, I reached a point where my colocation fees were about 1.2k per month, I had been with my supplier from the very beginning, so from 1 server... At the peak I was grossing about 4-5k per month but generally monthly lows were about 2k, and everything had been organic, so I had no debts, and was just pumping everything back into the business. What happened was my provider offered to sell me his business for about 12k. You gotta keep in mind I was 18 at this time.

I took out a loan (my Dad was guarantor) and purchased his business. The aim was to, acquire his contracts for colocation with the datacenter and I was expecting to inherit an operating business which was turning in about 2-3k per month in normal "web hosting" businesses. All the sites were spread across about 30 servers, all of them really really old.

So, things went sour literally from day one. It turns out that he either fudged all of the sites on the billing software or they decided to just exodus on day one of me taking over. I ended up going from having healthy profit each month to operating at a deficit. Long story short it destroyed my business and nearly caused me to lose my degree at Uni from the stress of hacking away trying to save a failing business and continue with my degree.

Anyway, what did I learn?

Due diligence. Don't rush things. Don't trust people. You can really summarise this as a life lesson where I essentially ended up gifting someone 12k for "my patronage". It quickly became apparent I was his only customer and my success kept him just about ticking over, so I ended up "buying myself". I was pretty bitter about it for a long time, but I think I was just angry at myself for being so childishly naive to think someone I trusted wouldn't screw me over cause it suited him.

The surprise is not the fact that there is suffering around the world, but how we managed to achieve the level of prolonged peaceful co-existence that we have today.

We should act in such a way that suffering or chaos is reduced---however small such reduction may be.

Suppose you had a choice between watching T.V. and washing the dishes. Watching T.V. means, perhaps, that your spouse will need to do the dishes. You can reduce overall suffering by choosing to do the dishes instead of watching T.V.

Given that the default path of most processes is chaos, we should always act in a way that prevents this.

In the startup world, the default is to move as fast as you can, and it's often easy to mistake a maxim for product development as a maxim for life. The problem is that it's not good advice for many things in life. Examples:

1. Shopping. Especially big ticket items like cars and places to live. Urgency favors the seller because you don't do diligence well and you don't shop around for better deals when you're in a rush.

2. In a similar vein, negotiating. I got screwed on deals because I felt too much in a hurry to bring up issues I had. The important point here is that I could afford to wait, but I didn't want to, and that worked against me.

3. Job searching. Taking the time to line up offers will pay returns on your salary and happiness, even if in the moment you really just want the job search over with.

4. Managing people. I've had people who work for me ask "how am I doing", and in my urge to avoid the awkwardness of the conversation, I would answer some variation of "fine" even if in my mind I knew there were problems. The problem is that answers like those are very hard to take back once you give them (and especially hard to take back during performance reviews). So instead of trying to get rid of the problem fast, I eventually learned to step back and say "let me think about this, and let's talk about it tomorrow."

5. Relationships. If your goal is to find a life partner, you have a lot of diligence to do. Enjoy the honeymoon period, but don't mistake that for deeper compatibility. That comes from spending time together and requires getting through rough patches together as well.

6. Professional relationships too: on the one hand, you can't be passive in developing your professional relationships, but you can't rush them either. Respect is earned over time, so you have to play the long game.

When it comes to building products, then yeah, moving fast is an asset, but many things in life and career are marathons, not sprints, and you're just hurting your future self if you outrun your own pace.

1) People's words are like deep water. Pay careful attention to what people say--it's profoundly revealing (more than they realize). By listening, I've been able to identify people who intended to trouble me in some way. It's incredible, they just can't keep it inside even when pretending to be nice.

2) Actions speak louder than words (given #1, this is really saying something). Don't look for people to be who you want them to be; wait long enough for them to show themselves. And they will. ETA: You may occasionally encounter someone who is able to fool you for extended periods of time, like years. But even then they often leave useful clues as to their agenda.

3) If the product is free, the product is me!

I never took a budgeting class in high school and college, my parents lived paycheck to paycheck (still do), when I earned my first internship I was making over $1000 per pay period, that was a lot of money for someone who had only worked part time jobs for $10/hr before hand.

By the time I got my second internship I earned more than my mother, who was the breadwinner. Once I was converted to full time I had more money than I knew what to do with. It took a few months to stop making stupid purchases, learn how to budget, save, and invest. Painful lesson.

(Learned the hard way when I worked at a large bank.)

It's tempting to explain in minute detail something you are good at, but if you always tell people how to do their job, they will become dependent on you.

Let them figure it out on their own.

When there's a bug in their code, point it out, but don't tell them how to fix it.

If you alwaystell people how to do stuff, they will never learn to think for themselves.

If you can't honestly answer that with "yes" you are either accommodated, or running risks higher than you realize.

After I first started running and losing some weight, I became enthusiastic about it. Then with the notions of 'more is better' and 'no pain, no gain', I cranked up the mileage and pushed through the pain. But I learned a hard lesson when I tore a calf muscle.

Since then I've learned that form and technique, consistent and gradually harder practice, and getting expert help are necessary to really learn something. Ten years later, and over 18k miles logged, I can say I know how to run.

After 4 long, long years drifting around in my job, crumbled self-esteem, some mild-ish depression, I finally found another job and got out.

After a few months I realized that I was just 100% incompatible for the job I was in — not that I was unqualified or any of those other words that could also be true. I was simply incompatible.

I've learned to look at things a little better/clearer since then — evaluating things through the lens of my core values and how I feel rather than through the lens of imposter syndrome.

Maybe this is useful, maybe not :^)

I was working for a company that made lighting equipment for touring bands. One band had decided they wanted the biggest lighting desk in the world (this was in the early 80's). We cobbled together two of the company's latest digital desks as master-slave, and it nearly worked. Two problems remained as we got really close to the band's tour starting: a weird flickering in some of the indicator LEDs in the slave, and the output level (controlling the lights on stage) would sometimes wander around unpredictably.

We had a quick look and decided that the output level thing was a major issue which had to be dealt with first. The LED flickering problem was a) minor, and b) caused by a simple clocking problem which we could deal with later. We spent 48 hours or more with no sleep, trying to fix the output level thing. Got it just about useable, but not perfect.

The tour was due to start the next day so we decided to give up on the output level problem and fix the LED flickering, so that there was only one issue, albeit a bad one. Spent an hour fixing the clocking issue so that the LED's were OK, and lo, the output problem was sorted.

If only we'd dealt with the simple problem first, then we'd have managed to get some sleep!

And before you say that was a one off and bad luck or bad triaging or something, I've used the same heuristic more than once and it's always paid

I hosted the project on some PHP hosting who's owner was a guy I met while playing online games. I edited and worked on the game live through some editor that offered FTP connections.

Because I was 14 I didn't have a card and I had to go to the post office to make a payment I missed it once and the dude shut my site off immediately & deleted everything. No backups. Since I was editing remotely I didn't have recent backup I had some old copy of the codebase. I never manually backed up the database, I didn't even know what backup was probably... So a game died 2 months after it was launched :(

related memory: I didn't know how to configure a cron job so I asked the dude if he can host me 1 machine open Opera on some url, right click and set "Refresh every 60 seconds" (Versions before 12.00 had that)

Not really the hard way because DROP TABLE isn't instantaneous on big tables. So I managed to kill the query before the table was gone.

Always keep records of what you've said and agreed, people will have a different recollection of events down the line, and a written record is very handy at that point.

Things happen. They aren't who you think they are. Or maybe they suddenly decide they don't want to lift a finger, but they still get 1/2 the profits. And since it is a 50/50 partnership you can't even insist they let you buy them out.

Or maybe they are a great partner but they die in a car wreck and their spouse is a nightmare who just wants the business sold, now. Even if it wrecks your life. Be very wary of 50/50 partnerships without clear escape clauses.

The good thing is that once you get the grip of it you feel invincible. All the fear and the doubt you used to have while building a product disappear because now you know how to approach clients, and if you're smart enough you won't even start building a product without first having some feedback from potential clients.

I don't really understand the issue. Didn't you buy a bunch of prepaid servers and server administration software for just 12k?

Lesson: when in Rome, do like the Romans.

And P.S: no, you can't argue with the Romans and make 'em wash their dishes after eating.

One of the most interesting things to me in the past few years is that this core idea seems to exist in hundreds of different places and forms, and every culture and person has a slightly different set of abstractions for it. But there's an awesome universality to it.

A lot of times the people I know who live by the bible and the people I know who live by stoic principles are building roads to the same place, each thinking they're on a journey that only their path can provide.

I think a lot of people forget about the random act of kindness, and how it can go a long way towards making people much happier. It can be as simple as stopping to let someone cross the road, making your partner a sandwich, tidying the house, or even leaving a nice reply to a tweet.

1) Never assume people will respect the value of your time and the fruits of your labor. Some people in particular are looking for related arbitrage opportunities. It isn't even necessarily malevolent, it can be just a frequent human limitation in how value is perceived. Though sometimes it is predatory to the point of malevolence.

2) Assume any future promised reward is unlikely to materialize when making your decisions (if it is not specified via contract, assume it will outright not happen). If a given course doesn't make 90% sense if a possible upside doesn't happen, then it doesn't make sense.

When I see business people smile at each other and shaking hands, I cannot make sense of this in my mind. What's the point of smiling when both people couldn't care less if the other person dropped dead on the spot.

1. Do not trust “business” guys! 2. If they give you some “sweet” offer, look at the rule No.1

If you walk into any company where different departments get praise more then others it is a sign to walk out. You will always get treated like a second rate employee in those environments.

Don't join a team that's mediocre and/or where you're the only one with your skills. When it comes time to evaluate your performance or assess how long something should take, your manager and your team will be clueless. Useless people survive by playing politics. And when you quit they'll play games you can't win.