Being a quiet professional doesn’t pay off in the real world, aka our market-driven capitalist economy. Soldiers live and function in what is essentially a socialist culture with rigid, strictly enforced rank and class structure. Hence the refrain: “What the hell do you think you are, soldier? An individual!?!”
I’ve lived & worked in paramilitary cultures myself. They all have the same characteristics: Be a quiet professional, don’t make waves, conform, fit in, don’t question authority.
And when you’re getting shot at in Iraq or running around fighting forest fires (like I was), this makes sense.
But in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy where people all the time come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves, being a quiet professional is sure path to peon-hood or, best case, middle management.
If you want more than the default station in life you've been handed, you gotta make noise and alert the world to your presence, it’s that simple. Either that, or you can play by the rules and hope that the man actually rewards you.
Those SEALs kicking doors, those Marines taking bullets, they do it so that people like you and me have the freedom to make noise, create new things, and maybe, if we’re lucky, make a small dent in the universe.
But they don’t do it so we can be like them; Because their world is more Soviet than anything else in the US of A.
You misunderstood the point. It's not about being a shy wall-flower. It's about not being a whiner; about not complaining how hard you have it, how everything is impossible and everybody else is so stupid, and how great you could and would and will be if only everything and everybody else didn't keep you from doing it.
It's about forging yourself into a doer rather than a talker, by taking in stride the enormous stress that comes from rising above everybody else.
Sorry, but my lens is colored by the fact that I have actually been in these "quiet professional" cultures and seen the dark side that comes with the "quiet" in "quiet professional."
JFDI––that part I'm on board with.
I just don't understand why you need to be quiet about it.
>You misunderstood the point. It's not about being a shy wall-flower. It's about not being a whiner; about not complaining how hard you have it, how everything is impossible and everybody else is so stupid, and how great you could and would and will be if only everything and everybody else didn't keep you from doing it.
Why? What possibly could be the benefit of not complaining about stuff that sucks? Sure, I understand that stuff sucking shouldn't stop you from doing it, but why not complain about it? What's wrong with dissipating the frustration/anger/whatever? Hell, sometimes, if you complain enough, people might actually help and then magically you can achieve more than you could on your own.
Biggest reason why talking about something doesn't help is that "talking" feels like real work, when it isn't.
Talking about your great idea to other people can only discourage you from doing anything about it.
And speaking of getting stuck / being frustrated, most people don't realize the real reason for their anger / frustration.
And there's nothing worse than bad advice from people that have no clue about what you're into, which is most people you know. And those that do, there's a high probability that they don't give a shit anyway.
What's wrong with dissipating the
frustration/anger/whatever?
The problem is that it doesn't work, quite the contrary -- you get more angry / frustrated the more you talk about it.
What works is identifying the real reason why stuff sucks, and learn to live with it or eliminate the factors that got you there in the first place. Only trained professionals can help you here (i.e. psychologists), but it's hard finding a competent one.
Also, that's just like advising people to work on stuff they like -- easy to say, hard to do (which makes my comment completely useless).
Yeah, this seems like the kind of thing that's gonna vary widely by personality and culture. Some people and some cultures find expressing emotion to be healing and the best thing ever (see latin america--my peeps), others think that expressing emotion is pointless and grotesque (see New England WASPs).
Truth is, there's not one right answer, there;s just: What the hell is it gonna take for you to get shit done? Does talk help? Then talk to lots of people. Does locking yourself in a room and STFUing help? Then lock away!
The key here is self-knowledge. Know what makes your productive and do that.
> Talking about your great idea to other people can only discourage you from doing anything about it.
But it also focuses you on your idea, makes you think about it, find the loopholes and so on. There's nothing like trying to explain something to someone to realize you don't understand it at all. Without trying to explain, you'd live on happily thinking you understand it.
> The problem is that it doesn't work, quite the contrary -- you get more angry / frustrated the more you talk about it.
That depends so much on your personality it's absurd. Maybe I hang out with women too much and their ways have rubbed off on me, but when I talk about my problems it helps me solve them. Don't care for the person's advice either, I just need someone to bitch at ... it helps me focus on the problem and see different ways of solving it.
It's probably similar to how pg claims writing helps him think, well, talking helps me think :)
I think it depends how you go about complaining. There are two ways in which you can do so.
The first is to go to somebody who is able to start solving the problem, and bring it up with them. The alternative is to sit around with your colleagues, bitching about how things aren't right.
The article seems to be about the latter, which is rarely a productive activity, and just results in everyone become progressively more bitter unless someone steps up and takes it to the relevant people. It seems in many businesses, especially big corporates, nobody ever takes that step for fear of seeming like they're not a team player.
Interestingly I've just been doing staff reviews with some of my team and one of the pieces of feedback to one of the team (who is very very capable) was "stop being so stoic" - complain more about the pain points.
The reason being is that we as a company need to know which bits are hard, which bits need fixing.
There's a difference between being productive and whining. The worst work environments always have people complaining about the same stuff, sometimes for years.
And what change would bring just shutting up about it? Say it, tell it, and change it. Don't all the people subject to the same crap as you deserve the change? Don't the good but misguided people (among some selfish and indolent ones) that have caused the problem deserve to know?
I think that airing your dissent is the _least_ you can do.
> There's a difference between being productive and whining. The worst work environments always have people complaining about the same stuff, sometimes for years.
But what makes you think that if they stopped opening their mouths about it, they'd suddenly stop being the kind of mediocre person who never does anything to address the issues they constantly run into?
I think you're mistaking correlation for causation. It's perfectly possible to complain and fix things. The real advice you'd like people to follow is "Don't be Mediocre"
Yeah, I follow professional bike racing, and... if you think about it, the "product" is entertainment. Winning certainly counts for a lot, but there are other guys who manage to make something of a name for themselves for who they are, how they race, how they talk, and other things that aren't just winning.
One guy that comes to mind is Joao Correia, who came back to professional racing in his mid 30ies after losing a lot of weight, something virtually unheard of in the cycling world, where you're either headed for the pro ranks by your early 20ies or you're out. He was a very active writer about his experience, both via longer articles and on twitter. Now he's going to do a book, apparently. By not being quiet, he absolutely helped his own brand, and his team.
Actually she was quite an accomplished doubles player and won many tournaments, including a grand slam, as such. They were ranked #1 for a while. Also, becoming no. 8 on the singles world ranking as quite an achievement, even without winning any tournaments.
"But in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy where people all the time come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves, being a quiet professional is sure path to peon-hood or, best case, middle management."
I am curious - who would you take as exemplars of these people that come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves?
-Paul Graham (you might have read one of his essays)
-Vincius Vacanti
-Jason Calacanis
-Chris Dixon
-Mark Suster
-Fred Wilson
-The Twilio Guys
-Tim Ferris
-Mark Zuckberg
-Steve Jobs
Interesting. My list would've gone: Larry Page, Steve Wozniak, Robert Tappan Morris, Paul Buchheit, Drew Houston, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the Heroku guys, and a bunch of early Google guys that are so private that I won't embarrass them by putting their names on the Internet.
All of those are the consummate Quiet Professionals, and things haven't worked out too badly for them. They certainly aren't stuck in middle-management.
I find it interesting that our lists are almost completely disjoint, though, and in many cases I've picked one half of a partnership and you picked the other half. I wonder if people have an innate preference for one strategy or the other based on their personality type, and then they just choose to optimize for whatever they know they'll be good at.
" I wonder if people have an innate preference for one strategy or the other based on their personality type"
Probably. But what I have learned is that you cannot optimize only for the one side except you are extremely good at that side and extremely hopeless on the other side.
There was a time when I thought I am 'smart and shy', so I should clearly optimize on being a 'quiet professional'. But later I've met really-really smart and hardworking people, without a doubt smarter and more knowledgeable than me. Kind of best in 100000s. They became mostly researchers, and they are not 'recognized' enough (with money at least) compared to how smart and professional they are. I think 'be a quiet professional' is a good advice for being a researcher for example at Microsoft Research, but if you want to make a lot of money it is not the best advice.
Larry Page - the same Larry Page that set out on world domination and who frustrated VS's for years before accepting an CEO on his own terms?
Steve Wozniak - the guy who couldn't keep his trap shut if his life depended on it to prevent drowning?
Others I do not know - but I guess that these guys are anything but quiet professionals (good soldier archetype) waiting to be noticed and given their proper place.
The point of the article - and I think that most of the readers here are missing this - is one of focus. A quiet professional focuses on the work. A loudmouth focuses on how the work will make him look. Several of the people on MediaSquirrel's list are consummate loudmouths, eg. every venture Jason Calacanis is involved with seems to be more about Jason Calacanis than the product he's selling, and every book Tim Ferris sells is selling Tim Ferris as much as the book.
Larry is the opposite - virtually everything he does is about Google, Google is not about him. He's very media-shy and tends to be distrustful of the press. He believes that the way to get people to sit up and take notice is to simply do useful things better than everybody else does it. Execution, not hype. This is the reason why I can't talk about what I do - Google has a very strong culture about not announcing products until there is actually something that people can play with, and that comes straight from Larry.
You can also have a bit of a rebellious streak and still be a quiet professional. Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit are two good examples. The key point is that they rebelled by building stuff, not by talking about stuff.
The thing is, that people mentioned are nothing like people the OP writes about. I have been an athlete for awhile and so I know what he is talking about. He is not talking about people like Larry or Steve. He is literally talking that if you want to be successful you should do what your told and mind you own business. Like top athletes and soldiers do.
That is such a pile of stink-dung. I know quite some quiet professionals - form various fields, but lets stay at sports - which I know the best intimately. I believe that OP is looking at world through romantic lenses and fails to see what is really going on. I for one hope that my kids will never want to be professional athletes. Author in his romanticism sees how these people get the work done and how everybody looks up to them - while there in the spotlight. The truth is that pro athletes and soldiers are victims. They are living in a dark - being led by people around them (trainers, managers, commanders, team managers,...) and constantly told that they should just do what they're told and all will be fine. They are given illicit performance enhancing drugs and told to shut up, they are driven to inhuman lengths in their training and work to the point of losing sanity and/or health. Guess what happens when the lights off? The machinery finds new victims - while these quiet professionals are left to fend for themselves.
Thats the truth I have seen on my own eyes. For every successful pro athlete there are 10 leeches profiting of him, just waiting to discard him at the right moment. It's the same in the entertainment industry and everywhere they tell you: "Just do what we tell you, and we will take care of you. This is too complex for you to understand just obey and all will turn out just great. You should focus on what you do best and we will focus on what we do best."
The thing is that these types are the best at taking advantage of others and conformism is great strategy - for everyone but you.
Totally! You play the game based on the cards you are dealt. If you're the Google guys, you're so awesome that your product does the talking for you. But that's not me and most companies are not like that. Where I think I add the most value is in my ability to make noise and get us noticed.
In fact, I def know we wouldn't have anywhere near the customers we do have today if I hadn't made so much noise on my blog (http://metamorphblog.com) and been able to turn that into being "interesting" enough for journalists to pay attention and form relationships with me, so that now when time comes to announce something all it takes for me is firing off a couple gChat msgs or DMs or Skype msgs. That PR has been our #1 source of leads to date.
Another great example: 37 Signals. Their product BLOWS!!! It's the web circa 2003. And yet they make so much noise that people still buy their shit anyway.
I personally find the way 37signals promote themselves to be often distasteful, but I still pay for Backpack because it does what I need it to do, and almost nothing more.
Sure, some of the interface and features feel a bit dated, but no other similar service I've tried is as simple, elegant, and devoid of unnecessary, distracting, fiddly bullshit as Backpack. Honestly, is the fact that it's not a trend surfing web developer's wet dream preventing it from being a useful tool?
OK, I think I can die now, because, someone just called the military a socialistic culture, which is something I thought I'd never hear. This is even better than my friend, who was educated at University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, believing that the salient attribute of Nazi Germany was its socialism.
The opposite of crude, narcissistic individualism is not socialism. I suggest you consult a dictionary.
(I don't have a rooster in this cock fight—my politics are a muddle of compassion and get-off-my-lawn-ism and faith in human ingenuity[ism?] and I tend to roll my eyes at anyone either espousing or accusing people of practicing socialism.)
I grew up in a Marine Corps household, at the height of the Cold War. My father often observed that the military is much more socialist, in the literal sense, than the culture at large: for example, housing, medicine and clothing are not provided by the market. My dad loved the Marine Corps, and loved America's capitalist, individualist culture; however, there is an inherent irony that the military's system is very different from the American system.
And so is your company. And your internal family dynamics.
No points for noticing that different levels of organization are structured differently.
The important thing about America is, there exists a level where you may move about freely and make your own choices. Which choices are usually about exactly what structure you want to join.
"No points for noticing that different levels of organization are structured differently."
You may want to reconsider this. I've seen it seriously put forth as a criticism of capitalism that within corporations and organizations they aren't run capitalistically, therefore it's obviously a failure. I consider the freedom capitalism offers to experiment with different organizations within its overarching framework to be one of the key reasons it is so much more successful than the organizations that include as part of their memeplex that they are the one true organization scheme for all purposes. I suspect most people in general have not thought about it enough to realize this as an obvious truth not worthy of "points".
Considering Nazism stands for National Socialism your friend was not that far off the mark. Not only is socialism != communism != Marxism, there is more than one strand of socialism.
I was going to mention the etymology of "Nazi" as a protective measure against comments like yours, but I figured that it was unnecessary. Apparently not. "Socialism" is an infinitely malleable and borderline meaningless term that does nothing to shed light on any topic unless qualified with some clarifying adjectives.
If you think my friend, who uses the term "socialism" to connect Obama with Hitler, is "not that far off the mark," as you wrote, please by all means let us all know.
No, asshole, I was using it in the dictionary definition sense. I even took the time to look it up before I wrote my comment, because I didn't want to be accused of precisely what you're accusing me of.
(And before you accuse me of conducting an ad hominem attack on you, please note that my insult, which I mean whole-heartedly, has no bearing on my point, which is that I was not, in fact, using the term sloppily.)
That's an interesting point: a republic is by definition "by the people," so saying that it's the people's republic would constitute redundant piling-on. But since it's a lie, Mao or whoever named the country should be awarded the Goebbels Medal for Excellence in Propaganda.
This is completely absurd and you should really calm down. Aside from 5-10 Fortune 500 CEOs, how many others can you name? You do understand that Silicon Valley's top VCs are rarely heard from, correct? There are literally thousands of companies in Silcon Valley that have more revenue than Twitter. I bet you can't name more than 50. Top bankers rarely get press. Can you name any? Or better yet, how many billionaires can you name among the thousands? We're not all Steve Jobs, nor do we want to be. Your idea of what it takes to succeed is bordering on asinine.
And indeed Steve Jobs is pretty quiet, and often criticized for it.
He also never talks about himself but only about the results of his company, and even then only a couple of times a year. Given that he's the CEO of one of the most successful companies in history, it's hard to imagine him being any more quiet and still doing his job.
Given that HN is related to startups and given that startups needs to sell to make a living (not just perform) that advice surely isn't well suited for most people here.
"Be a different professional" would be a much better subject to riff on IMHO.
You might be surprised how well you can sell things by shutting up, listening, and addressing your customer's concerns directly rather than making a lot of noise.
There seems to be a recent meme around HN lately that you have to be a "hustler" to succeed. I think that's been misinterpreted a lot. Most of the hustle is in showing up, staying alert, and then applying just the right insight that will let your target know that your interests are their interests.
As recently as last summer, I felt that I had to make a lot of noise to make my ideas heard. I got nowhere. Instead, I've found that by listening to other people's ideas and then carefully suggesting ways to improve them, I end up with far more influence over how things actually turn out.
This is a very hard topic to compare to Kyle's experience. First of all, Kyle is already given an audience and the success is evaluated by some metrics about his psychical performance. While marketing, you have to create an audience first. Once you're visible, you can choose be silent or keep making noise. But, usually, this is not the case with startups.
There are a lot of people in the entrepreneurial community who jump up and down and say "Look at me, I'm an entrepreneur, this is what it means to be an entrepreneur, ideas are worthless execution is everything," etc.
There are also a lot of people in the entrepreneurial community who don't go to startup events because they're at their customer's offices, showing them how their products can help them.
The second kind of professional is not "quiet." He is a "quiet professional." He is at the automotive parts distributors conference selling his software, rather than at TechCrunch50 selling his image.
> but for an entire summer I practiced 50m underwater swims (not recommended)
A couple years after I graduated, I attended a funeral for a classmate who had been training to possibly try out for the Navy Seals. He had been practicing an underwater swim in the university pool (25m) with no life guard present, no one around. They found him the next morning.
Please do not do underwater swims without someone around.
What's wrong with that? What exactly happened to the guy? I'm asking genuinely because I've done my share of unsupervised underwater swimming and never felt my life was at stake.
If you go deep enough, shallow-water blackout can happen on the way back up. I don't know what could go wrong just doing laps a few feet below the surface, though, unless he simply stayed under until he passed out.
"The secret to underwater swimming is going deep early. The trainees learn that if they swim along the bottom in deeper water, the increased partial pressure of oxygen in their lungs will allow them to hold their breath longer and swim farther."
That, plus the somewhat more streamlined profile of the upper body when under pressure. For example, blow up a balloon at the surface and bring it down to the bottom of a swimming pool and notice how it shrinks. The same thing, although much less spectacular, happens with your chest. (This is not the case when you use scuba breathing gear, which will allow you to keep the pressure of the air in your lungs equal to the pressure of the surrounding water at the depth you're at).
Surprised by how worked up this has gotten people. Kyle is making an excellent point: do your job and be quiet, then go home. A lot of people make a fuss about doing their job and what Kyle is looking to point out is that it looks unprofessional when you complain or gossip on the job. Most people feel entitled to their job and therefore take advantage of it and sometimes the people around them. A professional would avoid such behavior and just do what needs to be done.
For those who don't know, Kyle Tress is an athlete, a skeleton slider to be more precise. I had to look this up, since the causal use of the verb "sliding" totally confused me. I was completely unaware of the existence of this sport, so ... one thing learned today already.
Being a quiet professional doesn’t pay off in the real world, aka our market-driven capitalist economy. Soldiers live and function in what is essentially a socialist culture with rigid, strictly enforced rank and class structure. Hence the refrain: “What the hell do you think you are, soldier? An individual!?!”
I’ve lived & worked in paramilitary cultures myself. They all have the same characteristics: Be a quiet professional, don’t make waves, conform, fit in, don’t question authority. And when you’re getting shot at in Iraq or running around fighting forest fires (like I was), this makes sense.
But in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy where people all the time come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves, being a quiet professional is sure path to peon-hood or, best case, middle management.
If you want more than the default station in life you've been handed, you gotta make noise and alert the world to your presence, it’s that simple. Either that, or you can play by the rules and hope that the man actually rewards you.
Those SEALs kicking doors, those Marines taking bullets, they do it so that people like you and me have the freedom to make noise, create new things, and maybe, if we’re lucky, make a small dent in the universe.
But they don’t do it so we can be like them; Because their world is more Soviet than anything else in the US of A.