告诉HN：遗憾。仔细考虑你如何花费时间。
我在手术前38小时写下这些文字，这场手术可能我无法生还。虽然我被告知我有超过50%的机会能活到明年这个时候，但我仍然感到，尽管我年纪尚轻（刚过50岁），却浪费了太多时间。我想分享一些教训。
1. 少数成就真的有意义，但你常常不知道哪些是。 我创办了三家公司，其中两家取得了成功，尽管这占据了我生命中的二十多年，我觉得在这段时间里我总共只记得六个重要的小时。与此同时，我仍然记得大学毕业后第一个夏天为我父亲建的小屋。那些看似不重要的事情，往往是你最在意的。
2. 今天做的事情，明天很可能还会做。我浪费了很多时间，但我认识的大多数人也浪费了很多时间，这都是因为人们倾向于对今天的情况做出例外，这要么是借口懒惰，要么是病态的忙碌，这两者本质上是一样的。“我明天再做。”但明天又会变成今天。今天总是今天。
3. 伦理很重要。我不相信在这一生之后还有其他生命，但我发现自己常常反思我所做的事情。2015年，我与一家你熟悉的创业孵化器有很多接触，最终参与了关于禁止和抹去一位我们认为对我们的财务利益构成威胁的年轻程序员的讨论和计划，因为他对技术中的威权主义表示担忧。回想起来，他并无害处，但必须树立一个例子。我们决定在这里禁止他，试图让他被解雇，尽管我不知道我们是否成功，并在Reddit上用假账号攻击他，似乎效果不错，因为你很少听到他的名字。
十年后，我仍然在思考这个问题。我是那种做坏事的人吗？我曾经是。我现在还是吗？我怎么知道呢？
我不相信信仰可以作为逃避，或者你可以通过道歉或捐赠来摆脱过去的行为。你永远是那个做过你所做事情的人。
4. 对动物要友善。拥有一只狗的快乐无与伦比。我总是拒绝前妻想要养狗的要求，而在我们分开后，她养了一只。对她来说，这可能是一次升级。
5. 我培养了创办公司的能力，但我从未学会如何建立社区。这两者并不相同。你可能在公司里有三百人，你真的觉得他们是你的村庄，但他们并不是。环境会改变，人们会搬走，五年后，他们中的大多数可能不会记得你的名字。
这大概够了。我的思绪在急速奔跑和漫长的接受之间徘徊。所有人最终都会来到我现在所处的地方，我希望你能以比我更少的遗憾到达那里。
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I'm writing this 38 hours before I go into a surgery on Monday that I may not survive, and while I am told I have a better than 50/50 chance of making it to this time next year, I still feel, though I am too young (early 50s) to deal with these things, that I have wasted too much time. I'd like to impart some lessons.<p>1. A small number of accomplishments really mean something, but you often won't know which ones. I started three companies and two were successes, and even though they comprised more than two decades of my life, I feel like I remember a grand total of six important hours between them. Meanwhile, I still remember the shed I built for my father in the first summer after college. Whatever seems unimportant, you will care about the most.<p>2. The thing you do today, you will probably do tomorrow. I've wasted a lot of time, but most people I know have wasted lots of time, and it's because of the tendency to make an exception of the present day, which either excuses laziness or pathological busyness, which is a form of the same thing. "I'll do it tomorrow." But tomorrow it will be today. It's always today.<p>3. Ethics matter. I don't believe there's any life after this one, but I find myself ruminating on what I've done. In 2015, I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology. In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made. The decision was made to ban him here, try to get him fired though I don't know if we succeeded, and attack him with sockpuppets on Reddit, and it seems to have worked because you don't hear his name much.<p>Ten years later, I'm still stuck thinking about this. Am I the kind of person who does shitty things? I was. Am I still? How would I even know?<p>I don't believe that faith is an out, or that you can apologize or donate your way out of past behaviors. You will always be the person who has done what you have done.<p>4. Be kind to animals. There are few joys like having a dog. I always refused when my ex-wife wanted one, and she got one after we separated. For her, it was probably an upgrade.<p>5. I developed a knack for founding companies, but I never learned how to build communities. They aren't the same thing. You might have three hundred people at your company and you truly feel like they are your village, but they're not. Circumstances will change, and people will move, and in five years, most of them will not remember your name.<p>That's probably enough for now. My mind goes between periods of racing and long spells of languid acceptance. All humans end up in the place where I am, and I hope you reach it with fewer regrets than I have.