by Puzzled_Cheetah | 2025-11-30 11:24:24+00:00
That may be true, but it's also a trap: You can say exactly the same thing to someone at a casino with their last £50 at five in the morning. Sometimes, the advice that people give you, if they care about you, is that the smart thing to do is to walk away from a rough game - and if you don't, the end can be very bad indeed. You are a variable over the search space, and the way that you interact with it alters the results that you will get as applied to your life:

Making this specific, I used to work in employment advice. As one of the things here is a job search, I'll touch on that one: There are people who have been applying for jobs for decades. I've met many people who haven't been able to get a job in north of twenty years. It's obvious that what they're doing will never work out for them. There may be one job in the world out there that will take them, but just doing a naive search will - in all probability - never locate for them that job. The world is too large and they don't have the time to search even a single percentage of it. What they need to do is to look at all the reasons they're not getting a job and prioritise addressing those:

- Do they have all the qualifications and certificates they need for their target industry? - Do they have recent relevant experience? - Do they have a good CV? - Do they have a decent cover letter? - Do they have a good interview?

Now, that's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

The other way in which it's a bad piece of advice is that people aren't machines. When you've spent a great deal of time gambling and losing then the tendency is for people to seek bigger payoffs at higher comparative risks and/or lower comparative chances of success. The tendency is for people to be less likely to do the things, e.g. volunteering, that will improve their odds as their tally of losses increases.

Down thread, raw_anon_1111 posits the position that you've lost nothing by trying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091837 - in my experience this is not the case.

People lose time in making the attempts, they lose energy (which is perhaps more important than time,) and they lose sight of other options - which game they're playing, why they're playing it, how they're playing it. It will, in all probability, not work out within their lifetimes - and the reason that it won't work out is that following this sort of strategy has made them the sort of person for whom it is unlikely to do so. Whilst their friends went and volunteered, and took concrete steps, they just kept trying that same strategy on the assumption that at least one was out there for them that met their requirements. And there just wasn't. Not in that timespan.

Now, I'm not saying just give up and never try. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. But if you've been trying to make something work out - as a rule of thumb - for six months say, and you're not seeing concrete steps towards success - you should re-examine your fundamental assumptions. Preferably, if it's something high-stakes, with the assistance of a competent third party that you trust. Because maybe you're the problem, and maybe there's something you can do about it. And you'd best find that out now rather than spending 20 years on some warmly meant advice that perhaps isn't going to work out for you.