First off: don't feel too bad. The behaviour you describe is super-common and I think probably the norm, rather than the exception. Most people don't have to battle with it though, because they have regular jobs with commitment-reinforcing routines and regulations.
What you need is to somehow get that same level of external "force" on you in this new running-your-own-business environment, where otherwise it is so easy just to slack off.
Let's try a framing technique.
When you think about stopping work to play a game, I want you to very clearly visualise coming to your client empty handed and them firing you. I want you to visualise having no money and not being able to afford all those things you like spending it on. I want you to visualise - again, super clearly - losing the respect of your peers, your family, even strangers you have met on the internet, all because you couldn't just get on with it and do the work and make your business succeed. And why couldn't you? Because you couldn't resist playing a stupid game designed to make someone else money at the expense of your productivity.
Got that horrible and depressing scenario clearly, vividly, and richly painted in your mind?
Now, just as vividly, picture yourself sitting up straight with amazing posture, coding like a damn JEDI, master of your domain, submitter of outstanding work, ahead of deadlines, everyone loves you, this is what you're good at and by god you're owning at it. You're virtuous and awesome, an actual fucking adult, a creator, producer, and earner of real stuff with real value.
You get the idea. Your imagination is a powerful tool which can do a complete hatchet job on the person you deep down don't want to be but seems appealing in the short term, and it can be PR god to the version you aspire to be but somehow don't have the bravery and force of will to become. When you do that, and get these images in your head with enough detail that they seem real, it bleeds into reality and pushes you to becoming one over the other.
Be warned though, this kind of intense visualization of bad consequences (or positive rewards) can also back-fire: if you start associating thoughts about your work with potential negative consequences it could drive you to shut down / try to distract yourself harder, and if you start daydreaming about positive consequences it could satisfy your reward circuitry and reduce your motivation.
In other words, you have to know yourself and your own triggers and defense mechanisms: what works for one person might be the worst possible thing for another.
Yep.. I find that an addiction analogy is useful. If you told a heroin addict to visualize how crappy their future will be if they keep using, how effective do you think that would be? It's not a rational process. Reminding one of how awful a person they are might simply trigger a stronger urge to fix.
Being mindful of future happiness definitely keeps me on track. But I think the core problem is that one's "body" has learned strategies for temporarily ameliorating stresses that are nearly impossible to talk down. One must simply deny the body the fix in the hopes it will reduce its chemical urge.
> This minimalist site was bought, written, and launched in under an hour!
That simple sentence accomplishes so much.
1. It acknowledges the basic look of the site and that he is totally aware of this. i.e. If he does work for you it will not automatically just look like this basic site. Of course! (But good to clarify)
2. Despite being super-basic, it's still a legitimate design choice ("minimalist") and he is also aware of this. i.e. He understands style, at the very least to the extent of a popular archetype.
3. He bought the site, wrote it, and launched it. i.e. Although he is offering PSD to HTML, he may well be able to help and advise on other aspects of getting a website online so potentially could be the only guy you need to use.
4. It all took less than an hour. i.e. Everything involved in setting up that site would have been within his $65/hour, so it gives something to work from in estimating how much hiring him [for a more complicated job] might be.
I don't think I'm reading too much into it, that one sentence seems deliberately written to imply all those things. Which, means:
5. He can write skilfully. i.e. Communication with this guy will be pretty clear.
Having seen several of Adam Curtis' documentaries, it was impossible not to read this whole piece in his voice, which I found had a tremendous influence on the reading tempo.
Nowadays I am used to skimming and speed reading and jump reading and chunk reading and generally doing anything other than actually properly word by word reading a piece as an intact ordered playback...but here, for once, I could and did.
It took me a little while to even get what this is. I understand the public votes on "the biggest problem" and then whoever "solves it" (or, I assume, makes significant progress on it) receives £1 million.
The best case is a carefully constructed short list for voting and the whole thing being essentially an orchestrated PR stunt with a winner (probably a known strong candidate even at this announcement stage). The worst case is this quietly fading out until no-one remembers it and there aren't even many real records of it ever having been a thing.
Or perhaps I've got "best" and "worst" the wrong way around there.
I somewhat disagree. It will disrupt a single complex that's been perpetuated, and yes, it will create and allow for a lot of innovation - however producing product and developing resources into buildings, and other systems, cause tons of pollution and non-renewable destruction of our lands. It will actually be bad IMHO in certain circumstances if non-polluting energy comes too soon to us.
If I follow correctly, you believe that non-polluting energy would loosen constraints on production and the acceleration of growth this would cause would have a net negative environmental effect because the increase in non-energy-creation-related pollution would more than counter balance the savings from non-polluting energy. Is that an accurate summary?
Assuming rules / laws / regulations weren't put in place to counter this, yes. We all know how fast government is to act ... which is why there should be concern.
Bollocks to that. You would prefer we remain hamstrung with expensive finite dire polluting energy sources so we can keep the vast majority of humanity stuck in poverty? A pox on your thought processes.
The biggest problem is people, not technical. Too many of them, and they are too irrational, or uneducated or held captive economically by the current events. Unfortunate this problem is unsolvable in conventional moral and ethical terms, but a working solution would be worth trillions to the remaining rent collecting population.
I was amazed to see this on the front page, assuming it was a link to today's comic, which would possibly have been the first time I witnessed a non-xkcd submitted to HN. That would've been cool, it's a good one.
The fact that this is actually a link to the accompanying article from Tycho is great as his pieces are usually quite interesting but I miss out because they don't come up on the Penny Arcade website until a good few hours after the comic. It's infuriating actually, as the comic frequently makes me want to read what Tycho has to say but it's not there yet. I don't understand why they do that. Anyone?
The writing on Penny Arcade has always been insightful and funny. I think being great writers is what makes them great comic artists.
If you're interested in games news, I've found the Penny Arcade Report to be fantastic. It hasn't been around long, but I several articles from it have already hit the front page of HN. http://penny-arcade.com/report/
Gabe's writing has gotten much, much better of the years, though Tycho's has always been good.
But seriously, I remember early Gabe newsposts and they were just full of typos and spelling errors and I honestly lost a little respect for him. Then again, I was an arrogant little shite ten years ago, so don't read much into that.
Totally agree — Penny Arcade Report is super impressive. They cover such a wide variety of stuff and have an incredibly broad range from Kickstarted board games to AAA console franchises.
The Tycho essay is on the main URL and (almost?) always contains a link to the day's comic. So the essay can't come out ahead of time.
I speculate that their "use model" is that you click refresh on the main site on MWF until the new essay comes up, then click through to the comic. Of course if you use an RSS feed or click refresh on the comic page, it makes less sense.
What I would like to see is coordination between the two by delaying the release of the comic and/or Tycho submitting his piece sooner so they're released in unison.
This is going to sound extremely unreasonable but whenever I read the comic and click to the article only to see what Tycho wrote about the comic of two days ago, I find myself thinking "Gabe's done his part! This art didn't draw itself! Where's the accompanying essay then?!".
JD(GM) out.
♬ Like an angry English teacher getting in a strop at a student for not bringing his coursework to class on the day I made them all write in their planners weeks ago.
"tsaou...tour pants...???... tsao u to ur pants??? ... ts a out our pan ts... TSA out our pants! Got it!"
PS. In submitting this - your Web page (!!) - I was hoping to get some feedback from wise old HNers as to whether it was legit or not. Though the page out of context seems faintly scam-like ("We will mail your request for FREE!" "We've got a lot of printing and mailing to do, and can only do it with your support!"), it seemed to check out with the other pages on the site and all the information about you so I figured it was fine, but still was interested in what other folks made of it. I wasn't expecting the author himself to be the first to assure people with his previous HN credentials! Great stuff, and keep up the awesome work.
Thanks for sharing it! If you have any ideas for how to make it seem less sketchy while still conveying that we're going to send a free request for you, let me know!
Needless to say, it's a little unfair of me to so casually and easily remark "the page out of context seems faintly scam-like" without pinpointing exactly why, and offering "ideas for how to make it seem less sketchy". This kind of thing is also very subjective, anyway! However, in my opinion, it might be an improvement to drop the caps on "FREE" and perhaps the exclamation marks on the two quoted sentences too. The comment around here by "stfu" about the buttons is also interesting, and hadn't even occurred to me, but seems like a good observation.
Well, the big question for me was, “Why would anyone expect either of these options ever actually work?” and your site does not seem to address this fundamental question.
There are a few little things, too, like the ASCII arrow "bullets" and cheap-feeling graphics, that just make it seem less trustworthy. Contact me if you’d like me to donate a wee bit of time to upgrade your look & feel.
"...the agency can charge for the time it takes to search for records and for duplication of those records"
In the spirit of absurdist satirical works such as Brazil locally relevant in light of recent events, here's an immediate lunatic conspiracy theory:
This whole Snowden leak business is an elaborate and wholly orchestrated "make work" scheme to boost the economy by flooding "the agency" with requests for records. In three months four out of every five Americans will be hired in this line of work. Brilliant, government economists, simply brilliant!
Considering that everything alleged has been announced, confirmed, discussed, and documented for years past (Patriot Act, ECHLON, hoovering all international communications, etc.) I'm wondering why all this, now, is garnering such outrage. The idea's time, I suppose...
There's been outrage in the past, but it's generally been limited to the tech community and didn't last long because it dropped out of the news quickly. This time the government openly acknowledged the mass collection of everyone's phone records without probable cause, and continued media coverage has allowed it to build momentum. I think many people have been very upset about it for a long time, but everyone else seemed to show apathy so they did too, because if no one else seems upset, it's hard to feel like anything can ever get done about it. When everyone is angry, there's more chance of getting something done.
However, I stress seeing medium.com links. I really like how HN puts the domain after a link, and having so many and so varied articles listed under the "medium.com" umbrella is irritating when the quality is, to put it mildly, rather mixed.
There are a few writers on there I wish would choose to publish on their own space, rather than in this - ahem - "medium".
When the 'Hong Kong Baffled by Snowden's Hideout' WSJ article was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853397), one paragraph that leaped out at me and also got some attention in the comments was the following:
"Hong Kong is the worst place in the world for any person to avoid extradition, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom," said one lawyer who’s worked on a dozen extradition cases both in the U.K. and Hong Kong"
I don't know what to make of that or how to put it together with this Home Office alert, but it is all rather interesting.
What you need is to somehow get that same level of external "force" on you in this new running-your-own-business environment, where otherwise it is so easy just to slack off.
Let's try a framing technique.
When you think about stopping work to play a game, I want you to very clearly visualise coming to your client empty handed and them firing you. I want you to visualise having no money and not being able to afford all those things you like spending it on. I want you to visualise - again, super clearly - losing the respect of your peers, your family, even strangers you have met on the internet, all because you couldn't just get on with it and do the work and make your business succeed. And why couldn't you? Because you couldn't resist playing a stupid game designed to make someone else money at the expense of your productivity.
Got that horrible and depressing scenario clearly, vividly, and richly painted in your mind?
Now, just as vividly, picture yourself sitting up straight with amazing posture, coding like a damn JEDI, master of your domain, submitter of outstanding work, ahead of deadlines, everyone loves you, this is what you're good at and by god you're owning at it. You're virtuous and awesome, an actual fucking adult, a creator, producer, and earner of real stuff with real value.
You get the idea. Your imagination is a powerful tool which can do a complete hatchet job on the person you deep down don't want to be but seems appealing in the short term, and it can be PR god to the version you aspire to be but somehow don't have the bravery and force of will to become. When you do that, and get these images in your head with enough detail that they seem real, it bleeds into reality and pushes you to becoming one over the other.
Other than that, I got nothing.