Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
The danger of overly ambitious goals is their brittleness, and when they break, they break all the way. Much like &quot;the best camera is the one you have&quot;, the best diet is the one you keep, and the best course is the one you&#x27;ll attend. It&#x27;s better to set yourself up for modest success than spectacular failure.<p>-------<p>Community matters. Relationships with other people matter. When I  thought strong work would scratch my every itch, it&#x27;s because I&#x27;d yet to discover the contours of other ways of life one might have. I was fine being an antisocial workaholic at 20. As I approached 30, my face went white as some unspoken emotional thing in me began to realize what I&#x27;d missed. But you can come back from that, and it&#x27;s very worth it. If you&#x27;re willing to suss out the rules of engagement and play it straight, the world is happy to have you.<p>-------<p>Western religion and American conservatism (archetypically, not the current implementations) have interesting and important insights about society and conduct, and they&#x27;re things that off-the-shelf liberal culture suppresses or misunderstands, not from raw malice, but from calcified disinterest.<p>Revisiting the bible and last-generation conservative ideology with the idea that it might be an imperfect set of abstractions with something to teach rather than a guidebook for cruelty to be read literally led to a lot of personal growth, since the stories are archetypes about different types of conduct and their potential consequences. These stories aren&#x27;t always right, and aren&#x27;t always useful, but they were a second voice that, living in a coastal&#x2F;liberal&#x2F;progressive filter bubble, I had never heard. Seeing and understanding the &quot;best&quot; of what the right thinks, instead of the most &quot;otherizing&quot;, led me to a worldview that feels more balanced, more centrist, and less polarized. It makes me assume positive intent in more people, and pick sides and fight less often.<p>I credit Jordan Peterson&#x27;s lecture courses for packing these in a way that my progressive athiest self didn&#x27;t immediately reject.<p>-------<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;salary-negotiation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;salary-negotiation&#x2F;</a><p>Everything @Patio11 says about salary is true. I missed out on gigantic sums of money, but later got them back on the table. The mental models in the article have, on a 5 year timeline, resulted in serious earning growth with absolutely no negative consequences.