Why are HN and other similar pages a blessing and a curse

tl;dr
There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path

Information was and always will be important in our lives. We can’t even imagine being without the constant contact with our news sources.
There are a lot of different channels where we get our daily dose of highly valuable and useless data (respectively). I mentioned Y Combinator’s Hacker News in the title because at the moment it is one of the most useful news aggregators in the field of technology and entrepreneurship, but the following also applies for all other blogs, news sites, etc.
All this can and will help us make that next project/business that we are thinking about all the time.

The blessing

They can show you the way

It is highly noneconomic and unwise to reinvent the wheel each time when we try to do something. Why should we, if there are so many examples of good practice we can read about. That’s why Hacker News is a blessing for people who want to learn from experience of others and don’t want to repeat the same mistakes somebody already made.

The curse

They can only show you the way but you must do it yourself

Each and single day there is more information than we can process so we try to save good articles for later and to build our to do and wish lists.
This pile of info, which is just waiting for us to go through it, makes us feel that we still don’t know enough and that we need more, MORE. That we aren’t ready to do something and we have to put more time into research.

Conclusion

The Matrix quote from the beginning of the article gives us the real reason why all the news aggregators are a blessing and a curse. Let’s face it: We all know the path, we have enough info to know how to get started and where to search for answers when we are on the way. But not everybody can walk the path. Let it be fear, uncertainty or “because of reasons”.

If you are one of the latter, come with me and let’s start walking. This is me, taking my first step.