The whole tone of the post struck me as something like, "Hey, it's not like I'm just some stinky nerd." He's got a girlfriend, knows Mark Pincus, can afford a lifecoach...why shouldn't he be a business success? However, I didn't see any reflection on the fact that he's running a coupon site and whether that has something to do with his seemingly-persistent frustration.
Whatever the root cause is, at the end of the day it's something that prevents him from noticing the typo on the AppSumo front page, so the level of detail of self-examination in the post seems to be somewhat opposed to the level applied to the mechanics of the business itself.
He uses her as an illustration of how comfortable, unto bragging, his life is. She's flair, not a "for richer or poorer, sickness or health" commitment. The inappropriate implication of nocturnal habits implies a lack of subsequent dependents. I'll assume a due-every-month mortgage isn't involved either.
This guy doesn't know what stress and depression is, yet I'm supposed to read his lecture on dealing with it? Stress is not knowing if you'll wake up after surgery and see your baby girl again. Depression is being on the wrong side of the >10% unemployment rate. This guy is suffering "micro-burn-out" because life is too good, he's bored of his hobby, and a half-dozen people said "no" two hours after a mass email blast.
"Stress is not knowing if you'll wake up after surgery and see your baby girl again. Depression is being on the wrong side of the >10% unemployment rate."
No. Stress is seeing your best friend's brains splattered all over you in a firefight in which you lose your arms and legs. Stress is being the victim of a serial killer or rapist. Stress is spending your entire life in jail. Stress is living through the genocide in Rwanda. Stress is being waterboarded ever day at Gitmo, despite being innocent, and being locked up there without a trial for the rest of your life.
There are always people worse off than you, and compared to whom your troubles are nothing. Does that mean that what you feel is worthless? That it isn't worth mentioning? That you should "just deal with it" and be thankful you weren't a prisoner at Auschwitz instead?
I've heard this, and I've said it, and I wonder if there's an answer. Are we allowed to complain about the trivial?
I get a chuckle reading reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems, but some of those things do annoy me. I don't go around complaining about it, but it'd be a lie to say that I go without want in my privileged life.
Things that suck are always bugs, unless the suck is the feature (e.g. having to walk 20 miles to get water is lame, but being able to hike over a weekend can be fun for some people).
First world problems are still problems. It doesn't trivialize the crap that most of humanity still has to deal with, but it doesn't mean that we can't improve how we do things. And given how many small, annoying little things everyone has to deal with on a daily basis I think that we'll still be improving things for decades to come.
I'm very sorry to hear that. That must have been very traumatic.
But would even you, who's gone through such trauma, find it very difficult to name someone even less fortunate than yourself, someone who's gone through an even worse ordeal?
Anybody that puts a lot of effort into something only to have everyone else drop a big steaming deuce on it is going to be affected by it. His post was just about how he deals with that particular aspect of business.
I see no reason to begin an armchair psychoanalysis of the guy or his life.
The inappropriate implication of nocturnal habits implies a lack of subsequent dependents. I'll assume a due-every-month mortgage isn't involved either.
Of course you'll assume that. You hate him already, why not assume whatever you feel like to further your agenda?
This guy doesn't know what stress and depression is
Yes, like assuming this too. Do you know that? Have you met him?
Does your comment have a point other than hatred and derision? Other than posturing and oneupmanship about how much harder your life is?
The girlfriend mentions seemed irrelevant and out of place. I've noticed lately that more and more technical bloggers try to inject this fictional writing style to draw in readers. Most of the time it's so out of place that I immediately stop reading. My preference though is terse articles for technical discussions.
And near the end he refers to her as "my delicious girlfriend." I think it's intentional, and he just threw it in for the fun of it (he is described as "irreverent"). But that sort of thing is out-of-character for the A Smart Bear blog, which means people just find it odd.
i agree, but based on all the stuff i've read about the situation, they do all of this stuff because it works. it feels more internet marketer-ish because internet marketer-ish stuff is the stuff that converts better, and appsumo is a business, after all. convergent evolution.
I'm not talking about their tactics as much as I am about the products they've featured lately.
I don't read the emails or the landing page copy. I usually see which product is being offered, find their real product page, and read that. If it's something I want, then I buy it.
Marketing is marketing, and I'll never begrudge a company for it, but copywriting techniques are just part of increasing conversions. The bigger part is knowing your audience.
ah, that makes more sense. though, its tough to judge them on it yet. they decided to try out a different type of product to see how it works. if it doesn't work out for them, i'm sure they'll tone it down in the future.
It reminded me a lot of reading long posts on somethingawful as a teenager, which were ostensibly some interesting story but were in fact a thinly veiled way to say: "HAY GUYS I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND."
Fortunately a mere superficial resemblance. This article has come at the right time for me, I have been feeling a little of this recently. I see other people talking about burnout and they've been in the game for decades ... I kinda felt guilty that I feel a bit like this only having been out of uni a couple of years, not doing anything particularly significant. It's good to know that there are other people out there feeling this way on a smaller scale as well.
Often the best thing that comes out of these articles is not the actual advice, but simply the recognition that there are other people out there going through the same stuff. It's so natural to feel that one is alone and unique in ones emotions, however statistically unlikely this may be.
It is the human condition to feel alone, but articles like this can head it off, at least for a while.
