Not really putting 80 hours in to something because you “love” it is also a fallacy and is just a stupid and you will burn out just as fast….

no it doesn’t reread the post.

Then the bubble burst. While the company I had started with some friends is still around, I not only lost all my money (banks went wild in the aftermath of 9/11, and not even so-called “secure investments” were worth the ink written on the contract), but attracted all sorts of frauds, con men, and greedy “business partners”. Due to my lack of experience in dealing with those, they not only managed to cheat me out of whatever money I still had on the bank, but they piled up huge debts in my name, then swiftly went underground and suddenly there was just me to bear the burden of dealing with all the mess. Five years after coming into possession of all that wealth, I was living in a hot 2×2 m room in the middle of nowhere with little else but the clothes on my body and a battered old laptop which was my gateway to the world — definitely way worse off before the dot-com bubble started — and still debts to pay for the remaining of my natural life.

That certainly gave me a perspective on what really matters in this life. Money, glory, fame come and go at just a moment’s notice; if you’re unable to deal with that, you can only get depressed or insane. It’s not that all those are “bad” in itself; I did enjoy being rich for a while, it was actually quite fun. But to make it as the only goal in life will just lead to disappointment. Of course some people are more lucky than others. But then I open the pages of a tabloid magazine and just see what the lives of the rich, powerful, and famous are: divorces, stress, frustrations, depression, disease, and all their lives fully opened to public scrutiny, to the most intimate details. Is that the kind of thing that truly brings ever-lasting happiness?

There surely has to be more than that. But the alternative wasn’t fun, either: being poor, destitute, and living under dire conditions definitely didn’t make me happy, either, and I would be hard pressed to believe otherwise :)

So there has to be a “middle way”. And the trick seems to be actually very simple from the intellectual point of view: we just need to focus our work and activity to make others happy. If that means going through volunteer work, helping a charity to set up their website, or simply to create something which is fun and draws people to it to have fun together, then that’s all that’s needed to make a “dent in the Universe”. Practically everywhere around us we see people who just want to make life for others more difficult by cheating them, expecting that this will lead them to a degree of happiness — there is this momentary thrill when you feel you’re superior to others you’ve cheated, but this quickly subsides, and you have to do it over and over again. At the end of the day, those people never seem satisfied. Still, all our society is built around this principle: learn how to be competitive, learn how to outsmart others, if you’re not able to cheat to struggle for your career you’re a weakling and worth of contempt. What happens? Sooner or later, all these people get frustrated (even if they don’t actually admit it) or even depressed (even if it remains undiagnosed) and turn to all sorts of stimulants (even if it’s over-the-counter “happy pills” prescribed by doctors and not necessarily alcohol or other entertainment drugs) to “forget” about the horrible lives they lead. We have millions of examples like that. Is it worth following them?

I think not. Instead, simple deeds that make others happy — specially if you’re definitely not looking for anything in return — is enough to bring satisfaction. Incidentally, they might bring much more; so long as you’re not expecting nothing, anything that comes from that act is a bonus: usually it might just be a smile, a thank you, and some minor recognition of your work. But don’t even count on that: be content in helping others and see them happy. And there are so many little things we can do for that. Sometimes it’s just sending a nice email or a comment on a blog :)

Working for startups isn’t for everyone and that wasn’t Mike’s message…his message was if you wanted to follow that route, you had better be prepared to put in that time and work.

I mourn the loss of the old job, but if I hadn;t let it go, I would likely end up hating it. You are correct, I didn’t know how to work any other way at that place, and it was slowly killing the joy.

You are correct. There are plenty of over-worked, under-funded non-profits out there where the “IT depatment” consists of the guy who knows how to use the query designer in MS Access and can create large, flat tables many columns wide, and which strongly resemble spreadsheets. If you want to make your mark, so to speak, find one of these places.

Thanks for the straight talk. Great post.

Thank you.

(:

On 4/11/2001 I wrote about this very topic and said in my article: “Think of all the dot.coms that are now gone. Vanished. How many beautifully
crafted, but now useless applications sit in storage boxes at U-Store-Its around
the country? Are you working on one of those projects right now? Is that OK with
you? ” as a piece for AngryCoder. So, it’s nice to see you younger guys are still working this out.

http://jonkruger.com/blog/2011/12/02/making-a-dent-in-the-universe/