What Hacker News says

drumheadJun 2026

There's a misconception about self help books that they teach you "tricks" that you can instantly use to become a completely different person. A lot of the good ones teach you principles that you need to practice constantly to improve. There's hard work and risk taking involved which many people that buy the books are not prepared to do.

The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage.

Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.

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bonesssMay 2026

How to start riding a bicycle in your 40s, if you never developed bike skills? How to snowboard, if you never developed snowboard skills?

… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.

“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.

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Bishonen88Mar 2026

Didn't realize who's blog I'm reading. I was intrigued by the title, being a fan of 'self help' books. I mostly read about productivity (i.e. Feel-Good Productivity is a good one IMO), health, living a balanced life etc. and was expecting to find some a-ha moments in this post. I didn't. It confused me more than anything often talking about 'relationships' as if this is the only self-help kind of book there is.

And I have learnt a ton of lessons from self help books like the one I mentioned above, Arete, "how to make friends and influence people", Atomic Habits and others, without looking to fix any unhappiness, flaws of myself or whatnot. Was just curious what other, more experience people have learned about life that I can learn without having to wait 20-30+ years.

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idontwantthisDec 2023

Read How to Make Friends and Influence People. It sounds like you would benefit from learning the “rules” of conversation. You might even find out you like people more than you thought.

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idontwantthisJan 2023

How to Make Friends and Influence People had an impact on my memory ability. It has a section on how important it is to remember people's names, and it basically says people who are bad at it likely just aren't trying very hard.

For me, that turned out to be correct. I used to jokingly refer to myself as 'name-blind'. Now I intentionally focus on people's names when they introduce themselves to me and I can usually remember just fine.

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cracrecryMay 2022

Stop using labels to define yourself: Loser, Loner. If you do, at least use positive ones: Winner, extrovert and fake it until you make it.

But I would never use labels at all. I have won several times, but it came after lots of work, effort and sacrifice, before winning I lost other things.

You need to have something in your life that it more important than money or status. A mission that is not about you, but about others. In the past people had religion, country, family. We are social animals, we care more about our group than about our isolated selves.

Learn about your limitations, the more you work diminishing returns kick in.

How do you try to work smart when you are using your time as an exchange of money? The people I know that work the smartest are the people that don't have time and HAVE TO work smarter: They have kids, or a music band or love traveling the world so they need to work efficiently or else they will have to abandon their kids or music band, something unacceptable.

Working smart is a skill, and you need to allocate time for learning it. If all you do is direct work you won't be able to learn indirect work. You need to sharpen your saw. Exercise, sleep and eat well.

Put a limit on your working time and enforce it: Never work over 40 hours. Use the rest for learning, improving yourself, making friends, making love to women, the usual things that make people feel happy.

In order to work much smarter I recommend you learn about making the computer help you. Learn about a very important concept in computing: Bootstrapping.

If you have not, read and write Lisp, with the "Land of Lisp" or whatever, then read Graham "On lisp", and "Structure and interpretation of computer programs". There are lectures on the Internet.

Learn about compilers: https://buildyourownlisp.com/ https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Those tools will help you make the computer do most of your work, with things like designing Domain Specific Languages. But it takes years to master and you need to allocate time for them.

Read: How to make friends and influence people. Very important, the oldest edition is the best one, as the authors' descendancy decided they knew better.

You should also learn to delegate in other people If you want to earn a lot of money it is a good idea paying someone to make it so they give you time. Things like doing the laundry could be outsourced much cheaper that it taking hours of your precious time.

I really hate the term "networking" applied to personal relationships. I make friends and lovers, I care about them and they care about me. Stop considering people just like things that will help you in your "career".

Who gives a damn about you if you only care about yourself? You want to become rich and isolated, attracting gold diggers that will bankrupt you without the skills to make genuine friends and lovers?

Putin is paying soldiers from poor places in Russia USD5000 a month to go to war and die. It is more than what they earn in an entire year. You are already way richer that most people in this world.

Start caring about others, about your customers and people around you and you will be "successful". Start caring about the value you provide and you will get money in exchange. Focusing on money, money goes away, because you focus on yourself, me me me.

I am helping you right now. I am expending my time writing this and will not receive(or expect) anything in return. There is a small probability that you will apply something I wrote and then it will be worth it, by itself. Indians called it "Karma", in Silicon Valley "paying it forward".

The people I helped in the past had surprised me and helped me a lot, but there is really pleasure in giving.

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