Metadata
- Author:: benkuhn.net
- Full Title:: Staring Into the Abyss as a Core Life Skill
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: ✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management
- URL:: https://www.benkuhn.net/abyss/
- Finished date:: 2022-12-25
Highlights
- Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner (View Highlight)
- Starting a company requires a lot of staring into the abyss, because it involves making lots of serious mistakes (building the wrong thing, hiring the wrong person, etc.); to move quickly, you need to be fast at acknowledging and fixing them (View Highlight)
- Say, “I’m not ready.” Say, “I don’t know how to do this yet.” These are terribly difficult words to say…. Say, “I’m not ready to write code,” and your status drops like a depleted uranium balloon. (View Highlight)
- Another situation where people often procrastinate on staring into the abyss is when they take a job that turns out not to be very good. It’s common for people stay in these jobs for a surprisingly long time, even when the job market in their field is very hot and they could easily find a better position somewhere else. (View Highlight)
- One solution to the timing problem is to check in about your abyss-staring on a schedule (View Highlight)
- When I think about the other people (whom I’ve met or followed closely) whose work I most respect and who have had the biggest influence on how I think and act, they all have a similar willingness to admit that they were previously extremely wrong about things (View Highlight)
The original sentence is from Nietzche:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. (View Highlight)