If I Knew Then

[hammeringtime]

"My one big mistake in life has been providing a trust fund for my five children. I’m very comfortable paying for an education for as long as they want to study in a reputable university. However, providing additional funds so they could have a lifestyle beyond what they have achieved on their own was a mistake."

This is one I've actually thought a lot about. Having gone to an Ivy League school, I'm not sure that it would be worth sending my kids to any university. The quality is going down, the tuition is going up. The cost of establishing a household after school is going up, so giving that 250k and 4 years to a university is a huge opportunity cost. It seems like there should be a lot cheaper and more efficient ways of building a network and developing career skills.

But I also don't want to just hand a 20-year old a trust fund of $250k instead of college tuition. So my current thinking is that I'll say: "We've saved up $250k to get you started in life. You can either spend that on a college education. Or you can get a scholarship or get a job directly, and we'll give you the money for one of the following activities: 1) starting a business 2) going to grad school 3) buying a home to raise a family in 4) Up to 6 months of travel or independent artsy work. The money will remain in the investments accruing returns until it is disbursed."

[btilly]

Find a copy of The Millionaire Next Door and read it. Particularly the last third about what happens inside of families where the parents have money.

Long story short, the "one big mistake in life" quote is exactly right.

[nugget]

Why not put the $250k into a perpetual trust that yields an inflation adjusted 4% forever? That's a comforting but not overwhelming $10k/year tailwind that they can learn to manage over time. No worries about blowing all the money. Basic income is coming at some point anyway this just gives them a head start.

[applecore]

If you're going to give, do it unconditionally.

Parents forcing their children into servitude, so they can only choose among a set of activities deemed to be “acceptable,” sounds like hell.

[andrewstuart]

Wisdom is the comb they give you when you're bald.

[chrisacree]

I always enjoy reading these bite-size bits of wisdom, but in the end I think that most lessons are only learned the hard way. Still, many of the ideas and stories here are truly inspirational.

[andrewstuart]

For the most people aren't able to absorb the message until the have made the mistakes that lead to the insight.

[Nicholas_C]

I try to read them and think about where in my life they apply and then internalize them. The hard part is to avoid reading advice and thinking "Hm, that's a great thought" and then never thinking of it again or never applying it in your life.

[msane]

Advice always seems vapid when you ask someone to create a quip or an aphorism and attach their name to it so it can be displayed in a public place.

[pdevr]

True, at least in some cases. You may like the anonymous comments then: http://hbs1963.com/wisdom/anonymous/

[mattlutze]

For a successful marriage, don't eat crackers in bed

Some of it's pretty practical.

[ilzmastr]

for epub addicts like myself: http://cl.ly/1t0y1I0C0s1C

[RyanMcGreal]

"The greatest gift you can give your children is to love one another."

[lazyant]

“Be kind. Soon we’ll all be dead.”

[MichaelCrawford]

If I had installed a lock on the door of my office, I expect Bonita and I would still be married.

[jacquesm]

That's got to be the most cryptic comment ever.

[branchless]

Feels like hacker news is drowning in touchy-feely stuff. Can we get more posts on computers and stuff?

[_egel]

I can definitely see things your way. We're overdue for some kind of a multiplayer game experiment demo thing to be shared, like that multiplayer orbiting game. Hell, here's my nodejs-powered webgl doodlepad: http://faye.pp19dd.com/index2.php

But there's a common thread here. This particular collection of thoughts on this site reflect life and career arcs. Parallelism to us is that plenty of us developers are burning out (like eeve), seeking changes, having epiphanies.

That's obviously because we're growing older and maturing like everyone else, computers and stuff are changing drastically, competition and proliferation of tools is high, and we're caught up in middle of it all. Hell, I have a fantasy of becoming a woodworker and am a tool away from having a decent set (router). Maybe I'll try my luck at flea markets.

It's definitely easier for me to center some divs and write a fractal compression algorithm than work 10-hour shifts doing backbreaking labor. I know this because I did it for a couple of weeks replacing all my floors, and I did a pretty good job of it. The part that sucks is that it was more satisfying than programming, but it'll never be sustainable for me to do that kind of labor in the long run. :/

[reagency]

Startup idea: build a way for people to be active on multiple different forums, sharing a username and karma across each, in a respectful way, so each user can tune their content but still have a common community.