Stop Acting Like You're Famous(ajkprojects.com) |
Stop Acting Like You're Famous(ajkprojects.com) |
But apart from finding a close community like this (who just happen to be online), I agree that engagement-driven or profit-driven creativity is generally an inspiration killer. It’s one of the main reasons why I chose to keep art as a hobby rather than a career. If I lost the passion for it, I wouldn’t know what to do with my life.
I suffered from this a lot because I love coding. There's a point when you may want to adjust your priorities. Beyond a certain point, it becomes defeatist to always do what you want.
I get though that the industry can feel like a giant psyop though so maybe it is better to be defeatist... Not sure.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. It implies several things that aren't true:
* That a hobby done for profit that can't also be done for fun.
* That a hobby for profit can't start as a profit-making venture, but turn into a passion.
* That work should be the only route to wealth.
* That optimizing for wealth can't go hand-in-hand with fun.
I despise the adage that a hobby is only a hobby if you aren't making money from it. I'm passionate about fantasy/sci-fi miniature building/painting, terrain modelling, and prop making. I love the expression of taking a universe that exists within the realms of novels and movies, and bringing it to the real world - to scale or in miniature. I design STLs/CAD models for 3D printing, scratch together terrain boards for people to play games on, paint miniatures any hour I get free, machine parts for various outfits and armaments, and spend hours fantasising about what universe I'm going to delve into next.
None of that would be possible if I didn't monetise the process. Most of what I build, I sell. If I didn't, I would neither be able to afford the hobby nor store the stuff I make. It would end up in a landfill. Parts of the hobby I took up explicitly because they demand higher prices when I sell it, but now they're some of the things I'm most passionate about.
Realistically, I'd love to do it as a full-time venture, but the semiconductor industry pays well and I'm not a famous maker so couldn't make it work - as the article states well enough. To suggest that hobbies can't both be fun and profitable though is a philosophy I think should be quashed.
Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.
I've learned a similar thing over my years, so I'll share:
The pressure to do something amazing or uniquely is very very real. This can lead you to avoiding a lot of hobbies (sports, crafts, etc.) that would nonetheless very very personally fulfilling.
Understand that having a beginner's mentality can be fun in many pursuits. (This is an idea from zen.) For a few things we have mastery, most things we will enjoy as beginners.
Additionally, if you cannot do something with the desired results, the key thing is to find a variation of the activity that you find satisfying. For example: 1) I think I'm bad at sports. Wait, actually, I just hate sports that don't completely immerse me. Hence, I figured out way late in life that I enjoy surfing and squash. 2) I want to take photographs. I hate my photographs. Wait, actually I hate digital photography. Analog point and shoot gives me satisfying results. (Or, using a 90s Nikon coolpix if you're gen z, apparently.)
So for the people who are like: "Yeah, but you can't SUCK at your activity", my response is: "Right, but you also shouldn't give up on the activity wholesale because you're not a natural prodigy, and there's probably a non-obvious variation where you don't feel like you suck as much, perhaps because the variation is harder to critique." in the real magic here.
And, again, there's something special about trying something new. The people that tend to plateau in a pursuit are the ones who start out "good" because they are addicted to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. Being bad with potential, those are the non-lucky people that end up mastering their field.
This is an important point. The quickest way to make something unfun, is to get paid for it! That's because the second you get paid for something is the second you start doing it for someone else, creating value for someone else. you get paid to create value for others, not yourself. Play is creating value for yourself, not others that's why you don't get paid to play.
For whatever reason I manage to re-sign in to LinkedIn or Twitter once in a while, and boy do I hate the tone of people who act like they're some sort of business guru. Beyond the point of the article, there's a pretentious tone that I think one should avoid.
But stuff like:
> Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t
I have to disagree with. I like the craft portion of any activity. It's the type 2 sort of fun, where it's not necessarily fun when you do it, but the result makes you proud and happy, so it's worth it.
I think a better advice might be to do things for yourself rather than trying to please others?
Similar to parent, I find tremendous value in making myself my target audience.
> Design is for an audience and you don’t have one.
It's wrong to generalize like this. Good design drives your work forward, and if you enjoy doing it, then by all means focus on that first.
Not appeasing an audience even when you have one is also a good idea. Art is an expression of the artist, and it dies once it starts being created for an audience.
> Advice for myself around leisure activities.
Which I think is worth restating here.
It’s one thing to, say, buy Azure AD Premium so you can obtain auth logs and put them someplace/analyze them for your startup. That’s just taking your work seriously.
But unless you’re learning or practicing, or perhaps building out demo or educational content, you might want to consider whether your personal AAD tenant needs that at home.
(I’m not staking a claim on that. Just an illustrative example.)
Of course, earning money from that never crossed my mind – in that respect, I fully agree.
Happy to know I will never be famous but through my writings I will outlive my short time on this earth.
People will even ask you about this.
Even if a small percentage of them, say 5%, decide to emulate the famous people they follow we will have too many people who believe they are important.
It's so weird some of the things people do.
Screw that. If someone wants a pristine phone they can buy a new one like I did. It's bonkers.
I do this but mostly from trauma of having to kill things due to hosting costs (happened before), as long as its cheap/self sufficient enough the fun part dominates.
It's a decent blog post but smells like rich person (compared to majority of the world) privilege. Always easier to talk from above.
And sure why not it was shared here. I’d rather listen to the people on the streets in Africa and how they see life and the future.
On the flip side if someone is merely after fame that is not such a bad thing by comparison. It is not like those that seek wealth and power, it is at least going a more ethereal and potentially much less destructive goal. Having lots of fame doesn't necessarily take from others.
The problem with a lot of fame is that the more of it you get, the more decided people will be. A good modern example would be Taylor Swift. Some people love her, many don't even notice but some call her Taydolf Swifler.
Turns out you cannot get just the good, you have to have the bad come with it as well. Unless you are Weird Al, everybody loves him!
It comes across as typical anti-individual ("anti-millennial") drivel by a person paralyzed by society out of fear, who now wants to share that paralysis with others.
This kind of paralysis (and writing style) comes from failure - either too much or not enough.
This author should have made a song, a documentary, an app, a painting, a company, documented making a dish from an ancient recipe, recorded themselves doing their first kickflip, made a pixel-art game engine in C, traveled to the Richat Structure to prove that it is/isn't Atlantis, etc. but instead of all that much cooler stuff that would further enlighten themselves and the world, they wrote this projection of insecurity.
"Don't try."
Nobody says this louder than people who either give up too easily or are afraid of challenges. Maybe they've never experienced the fruits of labor when it comes to a personal venture - economic or otherwise.
You really can sell software, get brand deals on a YouTube channel, get sponsored doing action sports, perform on stage in front of thousands, gain fans by living and documenting an incredible life on social media. It's not only possible, but it's a lot more fun than living as a copy/paste bubble jacket drone who has to go to work, who never does or says anything interesting.
The author's choice to not use CSS is not effortless minimalism by the way, it's the same thing as his moody black and white photo example - it's a conscious decision to appear a certain way to an audience.
This article is what a crab in a bucket looks like in the wild. The author is trying hard - they're just putting more effort in keeping contemporaries down than pulling themselves up. A sad state of our youth.
Let me counter this with an age old adage that is simply true: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
>Want to try a craft or artistic hobby? Focus on mastering the skill and enjoy the variety it can provide.
"Focus on mastering the skill" is directly the opposite of "actively suck at what you do and take no pride in your work".
>Let me counter this with an age old adage that is simply true
A thing that is repeated often enough isn't "simply true" just because it's repeated often enough. Perhaps consider the situational applicability and limited-exhaustiveness of pithy proverbs.
He said make your art for yourself, make it like it is a diary entry.
TFA (later): well, we made it to the front page of HN
I won’t change my ways as I have enough money, but I would be quite… not happy starting out in these times and having to pose and fake until I make etc.
It does not help someone create the greatest thing ever in silence when nobody will ever know about it.
Personally, I follow specific people who regularly submit interesting content, and pay less attention to the homepage.
It feels sort of related to the technique therapists seem to use; based on patient's rambling stories, they summarize how they feel in much more succinct way than they themselves would have been able to, which makes them feel like they are finally being understood, which often results in tears.
Here's a question for you. Why, if /newest is meeting your needs, did you feel the need to make this comment, hoping to adjust HN's sorting behavior for the front page?
You, and everyone who upvoted this to make this the top comment on this post, are making the exact same mistake pointed out by the linked article.
I personally enjoyed reading the sentiment of the article and don't mind it being on the frontpage. But I would never think of writing a comment complaining that the article wasn't on the frontpage.
Why should the frontpage content only make you happy? This made me happy, so I was glad it was on the frontpage.
I guess the comment could also be juxtaposition on the headline: stop acting like you're famous.
I know I'm a nobody but it's interesting to read comments some are better than the linked articles.
If you see good articles on /newest that are languishing, please upvote them!
...and if there's a really good one that hasn't had attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can consider putting it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Especially if it's not an article you have any personal connection to—we'll appreciate the nomination a lot more if it's motivated by curiosity rather than self-promotion.
Crypto is effectively dead, LLM’s ended up mostly hype with limited utility, so what’s there to talk about? Random interesting side projects, retro technology, random science stuff, a bit of news, etc and that’s what HN front page looks like.
In any case, though, I did read the article before commenting.
I disagree.
We can debate if comments are more informative than articles and sometimes they are. Many times they are not, especially if you happen to be a SME.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read reddit, the signal/noise raise is very low, but when you get that 1 informative or insightful comments out of a sea of garbage, it keeps you going for awhile.
Just look at how many comments around the site are personal anecdotes tangentially related to whatever the post is.
As a revealed preference, no, you don't. It's trivially easy to collapse a comment you genuinely don't like, which would mean you wouldn't be posting in its replies more than halfway down.
Interesting idea. I'll give it a shot.
Mine was just about 10K+ before the Pandemic. Then, I found the fun part, the rhythm, and then it has grown since then.
I just assumed it was on the higher end on this site (like top 10-15%), based on the several dozen other profiles I've looked at. Seems I might be further down than I assumed, is all.
Yes ;).
I have become somewhat… jaded, in my view of the current tech scene.
I’m sure that some of it is just sour grapes, on my part, but that doesn’t make the problem any less real.
I don’t really feel like going through my posting history, but there’s been a number of times that I’ve been “OK, Boomer”ed, here (I suspect that you’d need to turn on I See Dead Posts to catch most).
I’ve learned to accept the SillyCon Valley ageism, but it still pisses me off, to see the awful results of disastrous decisions made by folks without experience. Many of these jackpots were entirely predictable, to anyone with scars.
If it were just the Principals, getting hurt, I wouldn’t mind so much, but the blast radius tends to include a lot of collateral damage.
Was it because I mentioned a particular HN setting?
I would certainly appreciate knowing what I did to earn the Ire of The Gods.
I doubt it was mentioning ageism. We talk about that, all the time, and some folks get pretty insulting about it, without getting dinged.
These two verses come to my mind often and have formed the basis of how I approach nearly everything in life both work and hobby. I feel the pursuit of excellence is a thing both for work and life in general.
On the Internet, everything is my work. I do not have some benefactor job outside of what I do.
For my hobbies and sports, I approach everything with diligence and care.
I hope to raise my children to do likewise.
Yeah. I was reading GP's interesting thoughts and was thinking: "At least I already got the part about not working for human masters right"!
The only way you can do what the author suggests, to do it for yourself, is if you have all your needs met already. Otherwise, you'd feel that making art is a bit of a waste of time, or you'd rationalize it by making it about status somehow.
I don't understand the equivalence the author is ultimately making in suggesting that creating something with polish is expecting to make money (and fame) from it. Yet notice all the things in the blog post are creations that are exposed to the internet (photography blogging, releasing a program online, making a website), rather than private, non-published hobbies which literally have no audience.
Some prefer to make things polished/more complete as they want others to enjoy something more and polish makes it more accessible/usable/meaningful, or because it's a reflection on them (whether using an IRL identity or even a pseudonymous one) and part of their enjoyment of the process.
Since we all know the audience is whoever will come across it, once something is released in the wild. Might be an audience of one, or many. Which isn't to say people need to care about the output of hobby but I disagree that money/fame is the only motivation in improving something.
It would weigh on me from an empathetic standpoint to not improve upon them if being released to others, so they're not and that's fine. Much like an artist's practice sketches they're intended for one's own private goals only.
The article isn't really framed like that though and downplays the internet as an inherent audience. Improving something even for just a random other person to enjoy/find utility in isn't inherently attention or money chasing, it's just bridging a gap.
That being said, I agree with you. There's nothing wrong with making something pretty for oneself. Many men and women do this with haircuts, makeup, etc. I still get my hair cut even though I don't do video at work. Just because something is surface-level doesn't automatically make it superficial or vain, or done for profit, though there is certainly some overlap.
“Maybe I should start journaling” turns into “How can I be a thought leader on bleeping journaling?” And it ruins everything.
I’ve done this multiple times and regret it. I’ve only recently adopted the mindset that this author is attempting to convey, which is simple: identify what you enjoy and why, and just do it - don’t try to exploit it and monetize it (which the author has strangely conflated to “being famous” I think)
So I like the article. It’s a nice reminder. As to the other commenters railing against its “LinkedIn-ness” or it being a platitude, sure - but it’s upvoted and it is what it is now.
Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
Other takeaways that stuck with me were:
— Finding enjoyment in the process of learning and improving your own skills is crucial.
— Setting personal goals can help fuel growth.
— Sharing your work with others is a way to receive feedback and learn from other perspectives, but don't let pursuit, perfection or seeking monetisation overshadow the joy of the activity itself.
— Intrinsic rewards of your hobby or pursuit trump validation or financial gain.
In the end, you need to find something you enjoy doing, and do it because you ENJOY it.
Because when you read about creators during say, the Renaissance, you don’t really have this much of a dichotomy. Da Vinci worked on a paid portrait project, and then did unpaid experiments on his own which ended up being useful for his paid projects. It was a very loop-like thing and I think he would find the explicit framing of “I’m doing this to make money” and “I’m doing this purely to create something I want to create” as alien. Ditto for most forms of art in most parts of the world, prior to the late 19th century.
The solution, I think, might be to focus primarily on the craft and not on the end product. You see this a lot with early 20th century fiction writers that moved in and out of journalism, with the idea that they were becoming better at the craft of writing, not at creating a final product or “being a good fiction writer.”
“Advice for myself around leisure activities”
Personally I am no perfectionist at all, but I don’t see the fun in making stuff myself that I could otherwise buy. I took up sewing, not because I want to sew the perfect shirt, but because men’s fashion sucks. That said, I sew stuff I can wear. So it needs to look at least as good as what I could buy. I don’t think that it’s “acting like being famous”. Similarly, I am writing a screenplay, because I have a lot of experience reading bad screenplay that were actually made into movies, and I think I can write one that is at least as good as the worst ones I read. I don’t paint or take photographs because I know mine will look terrible.
Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
However, I disagree with the personal style part of things, or trying to make things look good. These things don't have to be about impressing an audience. It can be just as much about enjoying the process.
There are hobbies we do out of pure enjoyment. E.g. for me personally this is (choir-)singing. I know so many people who are better singers than I am (or ever will be) yet I couldn't care less. I am 100% happy with my skill level. If anyone else comes to the conclusion that somebody else is a better singer than I, they're probably right!
Then there are hobbies we do b/c we like the skill itself or b/c we want to have what comes with it. E.g. when I do a SW or HW side-project I really do want to create the best product (as niche-y as it might be) and yes, I do care a great deal about whether others like it or not. Put simply I want to be the best b/c I can be the best. I couldn't imagine doing this just for fun. TBH the whole idea of just-for-fun side projects sounds absurd to me.
By that time I stop enjoying doing whatever the thing is. Not fun anymore.
People will sincerely praise me and it will feel empty because I know there are millions of better painters, my laptimes are a full second off the ultimate pace, my guitar skills only good enough for playing alone in my office, my leisure programming projects all pointless and abandoned.
I envy two kinds of people: those that have found some thing they are very good at and keep enjoying it forever, but also those that can enjoy something for years even if they are realistically mediocre at it and never improve.
And the money making part is also true for me. I took up miniature painting and quite soon was at the level where people will pay you decent money to paint their miniatures for them. I started getting offers and accepted one, not for the money, probably just out of pride. It was complete hell, I hated the result and every minute I spent painting it. The client was happy, me, I guess I learned my lesson: never again.
1. Do the best you can.
2. Identify the weakest part of the artifact you just made.
3. Design an improvement to that part only.
4. GOTO 1.
When I take photographs of my friends, it is incredibly important to me that they be in focus, sharp, with a good depth of field bokeh that brings out their face and presents an attractive image. I take a huge amount of pride when a photo I shot ends up as a profile picture or widely shared. That's a large part of why I take them, to share with others.
Got my current job because of my public code and the quality of articles I have written on subjects relevant to the employer. When I interviewed they largely skipped the technical parts and focused on cultural fit and the kinds of projects I wanted to be involved with, because my publicly demonstrated track record left no question about the quality of my work.
It is fine to have some activities you enjoy without perfectionism, but there is a world of advantages that can come from a focus on quality.
The OP said, "In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your 'audience'"
Presenting to the audience is my goal. If you're telling jokes, your goal is to make your "audience" (friends/coworkers/family/etc) laugh. The only way you can get funnier is to try jokes out and see what gets a response, the measure of quality is external, not internal.
I don't tell jokes to myself in an empty room. I don't take photos just to look at them myself in Lightroom. I don't write open source code just to put it on a thumbdrive and throw it in the bin.
None of the activities I, personally, enjoy work without an audience. The audience is entirely the point. Without the audience I wouldn't enjoy them.
Saying "do things for yourself without an audience", period, without caveat, is wrong for tons of stuff.
Genuinely, that is good. People who care and judge how others look beyond normal social propriety tend to be pretty bad to be around.
There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.
(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)
A figure I saw once was based on "do they have a Wikipedia page" as counting as famous. And the ratio was something like 50,000:1 relative to the population.
Would you bet your lives actions on a 50,000 to 1 chance? And even then do you think it would be possitive? Sometimes fame is the worst thing that can happen to someone. Being anonymous can be a blessing in disguise.
Well... I do as the only user of what I create. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I also don't like clunky interfaces. So even though it isn't the process I enjoy doing most all the time I still put in the effort.
The possessive apostrophe originated as a mistake or idiosyncrasy, credited to one of two people in the early 1500s depending on who's making the assertion, that became widely adopted.
Possession should be, in static, unchanging, OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English, written "peoplees" (or something like that but you get the point).
Merely calling "'" an "apostrophe" was a mistake for over a century, as the word was a well-defined rhetorical term that was later adopted to describe the mark sometime during the mark's slow acceptance.
Grammarly makes people sound like soulless automatons who have been trained to write by similarly soulless and robotic corporate ad copy writers.
Sometimes it seems like half the English language is just Shakespeare or some other writer making up shit that sticks-- and that's awesome.
Other than that, in normal conversations, these mistakes are part of our personal identity if you ask me.
The artists and innovators I respect the most are people who have gone way out a limb to put effort into a expression or endeavor, knowing full well that it might not appeal to anyone else. It takes a lot of effort, self belief, and perseverance to do this, and there's no guarantee of success. In fact, success is unlikely.
But a world where everyone follows the author's advice feels mediocre to me.
A few years ago I had a need for an app which would allow an android tablet to play media when power was connected and pause when power was disconnected. Nothing like that existed (at least open source) at the time, so I dug up some ancient school project someone made for an android app back in 2010, updated it to allow media controls, and used it. I published it on fdroid, but I put zero effort into updating the already-then-outdated UI and never updated it again unless I had another need for it.
I wasn't getting paid for app development and design. I am not trying to get paid for app development and design. To the extent that having done this impacts my career, I think "bothered to create a custom android app for his personal project" says a lot more about me than "does not have a state of the art UI for his custom personal project app".
If people are turned off from that app by the outdated UI, I could not care less.
I applaud those that bad-mouth their previous employers because it makes my daily reading more interesting, but I can't in good conscience suggest that people should do it more.
Prior to ML, it was computationally unfeasible to develop speculative dossiers on the majority of populations.
Best not think too deeply on the matter... Have a wonderful day =)
0. Do less things
1. Do things at a natural pace
2. Obsess over quality
3. Don’t obsess over quality, eff the haters!
4. Do more things
;)
Yesterday they recommended that it was a glass of wine, and before that two glasses of red, then a bottle of white.
We kinda always knew it was wine, and like… stuff we can abstract away about blood pressure, moderation, hangovers, fond memories, and whatever, uncle Conrad.
No, we solve that particular thing like all things. But as a consumer, you’ve gotta average out the signal of strong claims.
“Eff it!” and “Obsess over it!”
are diametrically-opposed opinions about work, which I suspect many of us agree with both, a bit.
We try to explain it over and over again as each generation finds the same problems with new tools. Maybe it’s not that bad—but hey, at least my commentary was coherent enough to post ;p
You might not become famous by developing your own style but you'll definitely not be you if you don't.
What if I enjoy optimizing for a non-existent audience?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)
Postulating intellectual artifacts somehow bring contentment also can become unhealthy. As some folks spend their entire lives solving a civilizations perceived problems, and only later conclude most of the planet just isn't worth saving... if one becomes hapless as a consequence.
One may disagree, but that is an indulgence youthful idealism often prescribes. In conclusion, goldfish crackers are awesome... =3
Until the cheese mafia got to them. It's hard to get them without cheese now.
Problem is, if you haven't completely bought into the habit yet, and it feels uncomfortable relative to other options, I don't know that you can avoid asking yourself "why" you're doing the habit.
In your example, I guess you already find programming fascinating, but hadn't found the discipline to practice regularly. But I still don't know how many people wouldn't abandon developing the habit if they get stuck in the weeds.
Imagine learning the violin, because you've liked to listen to classical music. It takes a lot of faith when you're stuck hearing how bad you sound at the beginning, and how you have to duck nasty glances or comments from others in your household that have to endure your practicing. A secondary goal might be to be admitted to an orchestra and do concerts that your friends and family might attend. But that being "vanity" means that we should only focus on the primary goal of enjoying violin music. Again, I see many people getting lost in the weeds without secondary goals of some sort acting as a lodestar.
In that trying to force it is like Sisyphus. In giving up the battle, you are freed up to actually do it.
So your exaple is great, you had a good intention but once you gave up that structure then you actually got to the goal.
For photo example: If creating a style on Instagram for more presence and likes etc. does NOT negatively impact your photographic process and decisions, but solely build on top of the hobby that you already enjoy without social media, then go ahead.
Also a recent random view on this: https://nickang.substack.com/p/my-problem
Just make sure you enjoy the process.
As a gamedev my brain is continually broken trying to make games in my own time because I'm so used to treating games as a product. There's a wide gulf between doing that as a hobby and doing it as a job. Particularly in motivation around the end result.
For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
If others like it, that's great. If it doesn't get any attention, then it's OK, because I wrote that tool to fill my needs first.
>A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.
I also get a big kick out of sharing my work with the world. But I think it's quite easy to lose yourself in it. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you start optimizing for what you think the audience wants, and not what you want (which is what the article is getting at I suppose).
So, I make a conscious effort to work on projects that are "just for me" from time to time, and I try to make that decision up-front.
I think I get the most out of my "for the world" projects overall - it's where I really push myself, like you describe - even though they're "leisure activities". But I still need the just-for-me projects to stay sane.
Yet people somehow find my work and tell me what they think of it. One day I came to HN and saw my project on the front page. At first I thought someone else had had the same idea as me. Then I started getting emails about it, about my website. Every time it happens it's incredibly motivating. It feels like I finally reached out to someone.
Making things just for yourself and your own enjoyment can be a very lonely activity and you might find yourself with some kind of audience anyway even without trying. That experience can change everything.
there's the things I do for me, because i would like for them to exist and have fun making it. But for anything that's not exactly that, having someone else care is extremely motivating
I do enjoy writing and editing.
Art is there to create experiences for people. If somebody writes a novel in the woods, but nobody is there to read it, does it really make sound?
Before him, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted” and the patron would also decide how much to pay the artist (generally they’d be paltry sums). With Michelangelo, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted,” and Michelangelo would go “sure, that’d be 400 golden florins, take it or leave it.” There are stories of him not delivering his work when the patron decided to change the price after the fact.
On the topic, I think that if the “money-making” bit is defined broadly enough, then it merges very well with self-interest. Like if someone asked me to make a remix of a song, but then how I’d do that is left completely up to me, it’s a broad enough task as to feel like I’m in control. At that point, there’s very little of the feeling of “I’m doing this for money.”
Well, that and his tendency to murder folks, of course. But that part's less relevant to the "how old is art-for-money-vs-art-for-art" discussion.
For one the much more important metric is whether you enjoy doing it, because ultimately you are doing it for yourself. Secondly, as an educator I have to say that many people absolutely suck at predicting their own inability to learn a thing.
There are many people who say they will be bad at $X and because of that prediction they avoid doing $X, which in turn is the reason they can never become good at $X.
It is much better to just take the gift that Punk culture has given us and focus on finding A) joy in doing things even if you are not good at them and B) finding your own way of doing them, because for many hobbies there just isn't one objectively good way of doing them.
Then I hope you don't count sports as hobbies because being better than the worst people who do it for fun is a stretch goal if it's me doing any competitive sport.
I guess this is my gripe with advice in general: Why should anyone else make that their aim? It’s great that it works for you, but I don’t think that’s applicable to me :)
I applaud taking up this skill, but there absolute is stellar men's fashion out there, it's just not outwardly public AFA retailers and brands. I was a member of https://www.styleforum.net for many years and highly recommend it.
And you can get MTM custom clothing on the relative cheap. I've used https://www.divij.com/ in the past, a small family run business where they book appointments in major cities to do measurements and provide sample books so you can inspect the fabrics in person, then order online any shirts and suiting.
That's ok, but then there are things that are not available to buy. I want a 500-850 degrees C 3D printing hotend, which can only be built of ceramics. I'm a hacker. Gotta make it.
https://voxleone.com/2024/03/05/3d-printing-im-making-a-500c...
And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism.
For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.
Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.
One of those is performative and creates pressure and expectation, often at the expense of personal enjoyment and rest. The other is just finding the bit that's interesting to you.
I’m sure the author is doing some sort of simplification of things. A lot of learning processes aren’t necessarily enjoyable and almost none are enjoyable all the time. I spend years learning how to airbrush while absolutely hating the process because I wanted to be able to do certain things. Now that I can actually make the stuff I envision I enjoy the process, but sucking at the beginning? Yeah that sucked. Hell, even if your end goal, is, outside validation… go for it!
But I do agree with the whole “life is short, so what you love” sentiment. It’s just that you could put it so much better and less condescending than the author does here.
If my advice is to myself, I don’t see how it is condescending. It seems by definition that it can’t be. I cannot pretend to be above me.
My summary of the sentiment would be “don’t allow the weight of imagined judgmental eyeballs to steal your joy in trying or pursuing your personal creative endeavour”
There is an irony in the blog now being seen at HN scale and judged.
I don't get the urge many English speakers have to justify any deviation (i.e. any typo) as valid and indisputable. There's grammar nazis, but there's also illiterate people :)
Your point is well taken, but this attitude toward the orthography and grammar of English emerged several centuries after the 1500s. There was nothing resembling an accepted orthography when the personal apostrophe emerged. Everyone was winging it.
Prescriptive grammar peaked in the mid to late 1900s or thereabouts. Linguists are more relaxed about their approach to language these days. Most publications have a style guide, but if you don't have an editor, there's no reason to cargo-cult it.
Comedy is good with an audience, and not so much without, so it's a great example.
If you're doing comedy as a hobby, even though comedy is done for an audience, then you can feel free to take time away (or stop entirely) when it's no longer interesting to you. If you're doing it "for the audience" in the sense that the OP is talking about (where the audience is the only point, rather than just being a part of the experience of your enjoyment of doing comedy), then no, the show must go on and you must sacrifice your own interests for the audience's sake.
It's sorta like the difference between the low-key hobbyist mindset of selling something at the local farmer's market vs the high-pressure "obligation to the shareholders" mindset of corporations.
Or to go back to the article title's advice to "stop acting like you're famous": a member of a local improv troupe might doesn't have to spend much of their life worrying about what the paparazzi will say or how the critics or box-office numbers will judge their improv (even though the improv is very directly a performance for an audience), but an A-list celebrity actor does have to keep that awareness in mind at nearly all times, and it often makes their life miserable.
(I originally corrected the use of "it's")
Egotistical is the wrong word perhaps, but it's an absolutely degenerate trap to accept, and a path to personal destruction if continually embraced. You'll have little to no authentic substance as a human if everything you do is predicated on how you'll make money from it, but only in situations where realistically it's a choice. People who get into this trap end up as amorphous blobs or empty husks. People need things in their life that they do for the sake of it first, with money coming as an ancillary benefit if at all.
I've only spent money in the last year (no earned income), laid off a year ago, and I'm grateful to have saved enough to last some of the drought of work. I have to be careful to modulate how much I'm spending, but if I didn't, I'd be wildly worse off now that had I not at all. Spend as frugally as necessary, but have some hobbies or passtimes that you do just for you, selling the result if you like, but don't predicate your participation upon whether it's valuable to anyone else.
In the US, or many other developing countries (i.e., those without a robust social security mechanism), the only way most of us can afford to pursue our passions to a high degree of performance is through cross-subsidization with a "real job".
The benefits that passion provide to a rounded life, better mental health, sense of perspective and so on are far worth the price paid, assuming your day job can finance it appropriately.
It's either that or poverty, which works OK for some until they have or want a family, get sick, have to take care of their parents or worse.
Monetizing passion is a shitty Faustian Bargain imposed upon us by the time and place we live in, unfortunately.
What you may be getting at is that somebody who is being creative as a job should be fairly paid for their work. Which I totally agree with, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about.
I disagree. Quoting the blog post itself:
so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
> Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good.
Absolutely no. I was always interested in visual design and set out to replicate what I saw and liked. I don't cater to anyone. My blog posts, coding style, and other things got negative comments, and I took note of them and thought about them, but I didn't agree with all of them, either. I only compete with myself and sharpen my axen the way I like. I'm chopping my own wood, so I don't need to optimize anything for others' wood.
In other areas of life, I have always chosen what to do, listen, watch and like. I don't yearn to fit in. In fact, I spent at least half of my life in a pretty opposite state.
There are sartorial competitions they chronicle where it would be impossible to get any more colorful.
It gives you suggestions, and marks your errors. It's up to you to decide which ones to add, which ones to ignore.
I generally use its punctual help, and want to see its suggestions about my sentence structure and flow, since English is not my native language.
Also, I use its advice on different levels depending on the recipient of the text I'm writing, plus the length of the text itself.
For many, money is their master. Or prestige is their master. Or self image is their master. Or personal desires are their master. Since this thread quoted bible, I will point out Jesus said (it is rendered in red letters) that "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money" (Matthew 6:24).
Anyway, I am not trying to hijack this thread and sermonize or anything. Just tying up a loose end that forms a important basis for how I personally have grown to understand the world.
I really wish I understood the original language for this because both sides of this or sound essentially synonymous to me, so I don't really get the "either" part of it.
No one can have ↑↑. Either ↓↑ or ↑↓.
In these texts, the words used are:
• μισήσει (misei): will hate
• ἀγαπήσει (agapēsei): will love
• ἀνθέξεται (anthexetai): will be devoted to, hold to, or cling to
• καταφρονήσει (kataphronēsei): will despise or look down upon
These Greek terms reflect a range of emotions and attachments similar to their English counterparts. The term ἀνθέξεται implies a sense of holding on or support, perhaps with a sense of duty or obligation, while καταφρονήσει suggests a more intellectual or volitional form of disdain or disregard, compared to the direct and potent emotional charge of μισήσει (hate) and ἀγαπήσει (love).
I didn’t say people today aren’t creating the best possible work, I said this focus on the juxtaposition between the market and the self seems like a recent thing to me.
One example is the Windsor guildhall [1], where the architect was forced to add extra columns "for safety reasons" even though he knew they were unnecessary and even though they conflicted with his artistic vision. He was clearly unhappy with this and made them all an inch short of the ceiling as a demonstration to later generations, even though it was impossible to see this from ground level so he still got paid.
Michelangelo would also appease his patron (gonfaliere Soderini) while he was present, famously by faking the altering of the nose of his statue of David. Then some years later while Soderini had fled to Rome for unrelated reasons, Michelangelo publicly made fun of Soderini and mentioned that he only worked for him because he paid so well [2].
These are just some examples that readily came to mind, I'm sure there are many many more. The concept of patronage has existed at least since Roman times, and very much implied that the artists involved would spend their time glorifying their patron instead of just doing "what they want".
[1] https://inel.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sir-christopher-wrens-...
[2] https://100swallows.com/2007/09/22/michelangelo-as-a-backbit...
The 1980's so the deregulation and the invention of financial products that changed wealth exponentially.
If you're saying design doesn't matter at all then changing the look of Hacker News to be like Reddit should have no effect on user satisfaction, signups, or usage.
I sense a bias toward minimalism (that I share) but that's still intentional design.
Half the social media apps are the same thing: Feed, like, block people, follow, post (with image/video, etc.), hash tags, etc. but the slightest difference in design and branding sets forth a different content platform.
UI/UX isn't just aesthetics, it's utility and a huge part of what the thing is.
with that said, I agree with your overall point, if you're determined to make something popular you shouldnt skimp on design
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
(My pet peeve is native speakers unable to pronounce "aesthetics" correctly. Drives me nuts. )
This is why the English of Shakespeare doesn't hold up today because we are constantly adding and changing these things in a wonderfully organic fashion. It just makes it difficult to define.
The question is should we define it or is it like catching the wind with a net?
Another example is the word Monetize. It used to mean to turn a item into a form of money like currency. Almost nobody uses it like this nowadays. Decimate is another one.
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?
For example, I know Italian and French, yet I cannot think of any weird misspelling only native Italian or French speakers do. I always wondered if it's because of education or how grammar is taught in Anglosaxon countries that is ultimately the root cause of these errors. It is a peculiar phenomenon.
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Agree with that one though :)
Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
Is quality of language and taste opinion or fact? I could see the debate being vigorous on that one.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
Unsurprisingly signs of language qualities have a tendency to reinforce the language spoken by people in power.
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.