I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would make.
My advice: get lucky.
My insight porn version: 10 easy steps I used to get $500K ARR and how you can do it too
"Get lucky" is always the key - however, you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things (for example, you couldn't have gotten lucky if you hadn't started the company, nor if you hadn't bothered to talk to people).
...followed up a few years later with "I was wrong in my previous article and didn't go far enough. Read my part 2: Why successful founders should deliver groceries". You may get your chance to pitch a famous VC partner while you instacart/doordash.
No one ever talks about the opportunity cost of building up a "luck surface". What is the expected value of doing so? What do you have to sacrifice to do so? Is there any evidence the EV is positive, or is this just another selection bias?
Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative.
That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.
Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it.
The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.
Buying lottery tickets is a simple framework.
The upside of winning a lottery is significantly higher than the downside of losing one (per week or per month). So do it.
The opposite is driving recklessly to save a minute of your commute. It has significantly higher downside risks than the upside of time savings. So don't do it.
A lot of lottery-bashing people make 10000x worse sub-optimal decisions in their life and yet pick trashing a lottery ticket to feel superior about their decision making ability.
Bashing on lottery tickets due to EV also really feels like it's really missing the point. Lottery tickets are a mechanism for enjoying a fantasy. Sure you could technically just pretend that you won $10^9, but there is a hard cliff from >0% to 0%. I buy lottery tickets (very very occasionally, but who cares!) because it helps me enjoy a fantasy about being radically independently wealthy.
There's no reason to hate on people for doing something that they enjoy, regardless of what the expected value is. For god's sake, I juggle! As a hobby! Can you imagine the expected return on THAT?
If buying a lottery ticket is a good idea, isn’t buying two better? How about spending everything you have on lottery tickets? Odds are the upside for you is still much larger than the downside. Maybe you’re saying that buying a single lottery ticket improves your odds of winning the lotto so much (infinitely many times in fact) that you just need one. There are a lot of lotteries in the world so.. get one of each? Also, how often should you buy one? One a week? One an hour? Maybe once a lifetime is enough, which is what I personally recommend.
It’s almost like there is another variable that determines if this is a dumb idea, and it almost always is. Maybe those math professors are on to something after all.
Buying a single $1 lottery ticket is fine. But I see people in gas stations etc. who look like they are spending a very large fraction of their disposable income on lottery tickets. People asking for "$60 of X" when they look like they make $50K a year or less. That's fucking insane and if they make 10000x worse decisions in their life it must be like putting their fingers in the electrical socket.
Yeah, I'll defend buying one lottery ticket, even a few per week, but more than that and you very quickly cross the line between "Fun Fantasy" and "Math Tax"
No. That's like flipping a coin and then saying the probability of getting heads is 1. The fact that something happened is not proof that it was guaranteed to happen.
Re-read what the GP claimed.
Given the initial conditions of the universe, the probability it might eventually lead to my own existence may well be infinitessimal, but in the context of the probability of me winning the lottery (for example), my existence is already a given.
No, what he was saying was that the probability of you winning the lottery is quite high compared to the probability of you existing in the first place. His point was that mathematicians sometimes try to contextualize these very low probability scenarios so that lay-people don't collapse them all into a single "basically impossible" bucket. They're not wrong, but it's not a useful way to think about whether buying a lottery ticket is a good idea.
I'll quote: "the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe".
That statement is categorically wrong. If you're going to consider the probability of my ever coming to existence in the first place, you need to count it as part of the probability of winning the lottery too.
If it had said "the probability of anybody winning" I would've cut it some slack (though the probability that a universe might develop with sentient beings capable of inventing lotteries is still a prerequisite in both cases).
> I'll quote: "the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe". That statement is categorically wrong.
Yup -- it was written in a universe where the poster they replied to exists, so that probability is = 1 here.
> the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.
Is it, though? This claim ultimately hinges on the probability of life occurring in the universe, and that's pretty hard to assess given our lack of encounters with extraterrestrial life.
Once life is established and subject to evolutionary processes, I hypothesize that intelligent life is - barring some mass extinction event preventing it - just about inevitable; evolution will select for greater and greater intelligence until the local lifeforms achieve sapience (and possibly beyond even that, i.e. levels of intelligence we mere apes are incapable of comprehending).
I had an argument with my boss about this. He is a business owner and pretty successful one, and he calls the lottery a poverty tax, or a stupidity tax. If it were a game you play in Vegas, then he’d be right.
It’s my opinion that just buying one ticket, for say $2, essentially is a trivial and inconsequential amount of money that exposes you to incredible upside. Imagine if the ticket only cost a penny. At that point it’s practically free, but free exposure to life changing wealth. I don’t know if that counts as zero to 1 according to Peter Thiel, but it’s basically zero to something, for essentially nothing
What about the people who do hundreds in instant lottery, or dozens to hundreds of dollars every week for the standard games (and no, they aren't ALL pooled for a frigging office).
>there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.
I agree. Something as straightforward as being known as someone who does good work, putting yourself out there somewhat (writing, speaking, etc.), basically developing a network of people who you know at least professionally is certainly a way a lot of people develop at least something of a "luck surface." It may well not produce the big win but it can certainly lead to "lucky" opportunities.
Of course, there are other options that are more like gambles that may have negative EV but if you don't play big you probably won't win big.
All the talk about building a great "luck surface" is just an attempt to deny luck: something might seem like luck, but it's really part of an intentional strategy to maximize potential value!
For any given "luck surface" strategy, you can find far more people who haven't achieved massive success using it than those who have. Some strategies are probably better than others, but those are not foreseeable in advance.
It's luck because you have no direct control over it - it happens by unpredictable circumstances.
Think of networking, and imagine every person you meet and build a rapport with as non-parametric distribution that you're randomly sampling from over time (future interactions). You have no clue if each sample is going to yield positive results, but you can increase your chance of a positive outcome overall by increasing the number of distributions (people) you're sampling from (maintaining relationships).
So much of it ends up by random chance, what else could it be but luck?
Not just getting lucky, but being ready to get lucky. If they didn't have the company or the product already, bumping into the former manager wouldn't be enough. And I think I've just given the type of advice TFA is railing about :)
There is another layer here, which is how much you increase the "luck surface" by doing certain things. Is it 10%, so you move from 1% probability to have "success" to 1.1%? Or 50% from 30 to 45%?
Increasing the luck surface sounds smart and insightful and I have been guilty to use the term quite nonchalantly myself, but without quantification and direction of the luck-surface actions, it means very little.
In the specific case discussed, apart from the "building a company" part which is admirable but kinda to be taken for granted when selling services, it sounds like walking increased their luck surface. Had he taken a Uber or gone to a different store, maybe the company won't be here (guessing). I continue to call it luck.
> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things
....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.
Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.)
The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.
If you believe the pool of qualified candidates is much bigger than the student body for a school like this (pretty easily supportable, imo) then this is also obviously a good idea - if the primary purpose of the school is to provide a great education to any qualified individuals who exist.
I don't think any reading of the history of the ivy's and similar schools can really support the latter.
I imagined something totally different when you mentioned "a random drawing".
Perhaps they could submit 3 drawings, one of which would be randomly chosen.
All drawings would be displayed in a gallery, with a critic deciding which they like and which they dislike. A scribe would trail the critic with a notepad, writing down their critiques and informing the applicants why their drawing was declined or accepted.
It's an excellent idea for people who want to go to Harvard, and maybe even society at large, but a terrible idea for people who have gone to Harvard. And for Harvard.
And Harvard cares about the latter a lot more than it does about the former.
It essentially already is a random drawing... at those acceptance rates, you're getting admitted or rejected because the orchestra needed a flute player, or because the admissions officer was feeling gassy after lunch. Having admissions winnow down the applications to say 3x the class size and doing the rest by lottery just makes the luck factor explicit.
> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.
While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. Play the cards you have, not the cards you wish you had.
You always gotta start somewhere. Might as well start with what you’ve got and go from there.
You’re right it’s not helpful towards the goal of becoming an entrepreneur or whatever, but I disagree that it’s not helpful at the macro level.
We should all have this basic understanding of how our society works, and how our plutocrats got to be in the position they are in. We’re fed myths that they all started from the bottom and worked hard enough and smart enough to get where they are, and you can do it too! And if you can’t, you’re just not as smart or hard working as they are. These myths serve the people in power by preserving the status quo. I believe it is helpful to remind people that we should change the status quo instead of adopting a “grindset” to get yours within it.
The elite are a super disconnected group of people. My understanding is that their children don't even have the same capacity for empathy as children from other classes. Money literally changes how humans think, such that humans with significant wealth have a different psychology. There is of course nuance but let's not pretend like moneyed people, new or old, are normal.
> My understanding is that their children don't even have the same capacity for empathy as children from other classes
I don't know. It seems like you are dehumanizing rich kids which I don't really think it's a great idea.
Sure, entitlement is a thing but it's not like rich kids don't have their own struggles
> let’s be honest many successful people work hard
> there’s also a bunch unsuccessful hard working people
The key point is that the number of unsuccessful hard working people is humongously larger than successful hard working people, so working hard does not really correlate with having success, no matter what the survivor bias tell them.
I find remarks like GP useful, to put into perspective just how mind-boggingly unfair life is. This is a different frame of thinking ("headspace") than a self-improvement seeker is in, which explains the downvotes and the "boo"ing.
Imagine a civil engineer walks into the office and asks a colleague about the plans for the new housing project, and the colleague replies that the concept of a "house" is a rich and socially constructed idea that both reflects and influnces the social zeitgeist in subtle ways and is intimately tied to notions of community and private property. They are not wrong, and the civil engineer would probably learn new things if they let the colleague finish instead of laughing them off or firing them, it's just that there is this implicit shared context in the workplace, that "house" is not a subtle idea and our job is to plan and build them not talk about their history or philosophy, that the colleague is violating or ignoring.
This is a useful analogy to understand why a remark like GP's, very useful and very true and would drive you into despairing madness and perhaps the brink of suicide if you think about it honestly and deeply, is not welcome in a thread like this. There is an implicit context in the comment section (formed haphazardly in a distributed non-explicit way, unlike that of the analogy) that you have a bunch of latent opportunities that you can take for granted and build off them to new frontiers, and that those opportunities are more or less a "critical mass", you can make them into whatever outcome you want given a fair amount of work. This is non-trivial for a huge portion of humans, and yet the self-help context always assumes it without proof, and any pushback is interpreted as doomer nay-saying or unhelpful pedantry.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Yes, inequality exists and it sucks, but you still need to make the best out of what you have.
Also, a lot of people seem to far overestimate the work and risk involved. This doesn't help really poor people, obviously, but the amount of people with sufficient money, backing and time that complained they'd start a company if they "only also had $20 million backing from their parents" is staggering.
People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck - they'd rather think that Bill Gates got to where he is because of his parents (even though there are thousands/millions with similar parents and backgrounds who didn't get even close).
Because one line of thought leads to: "I couldn't do anything, the game was rigged from the start" and the other leads to "I didn't do as much as I could have done."
The game is rigged. But that merely makes it less likely that someone who's on the wrong side can succeed, not impossible. You do have to do as much as you can, with what you're given, regardless of what it is.
The real key, though, is that this tells us what we, as a society, need to change. If we genuinely value entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to create a universal safety net that lets people take risks, try things, and fail, again and again, without ending up destitute, because we know that is what leads to eventually creating a successful business.
Isn’t this what limited liability corporations help ensure?
People need a way to limit downsides, not have zero downside.
It’s like giving a student a service chance at a test to help ensure they learn the material. But giving them unlimited attempts with no risk doesn’t create the same environment.
LLCs let you avoid having personal liability for accidents, corporate malfeasance, etc. They don't let you avoid having to invest your own money into the company to try to make it go, because no one else cares enough about your idea to do so, then lose it all if it fails.
Having something like universal basic income absolutely does not reduce the risk to zero. What it does is it reduces the penalty for failure—failure which is often largely out of your hands. Rather than such failures meaning you lose your life savings, have no job, and are months/weeks/days from homelessness, they would mean you are making only the minimum needed to sustain housing, food, and clothing. For most people, particularly those of the type to try starting their own business, that still won't be enough to be happy.
The threat of death by exposure and starvation should not be what drives us to do better. We, as a society, should have moved past that already.
LLCs do provide limitations towards losing your life savings or home. They create a buffer between personal and corporate assets. I think a key difference is the benefits are targeted towards those who are trying to create value, whereas UBI is much less targeted. At least from an economic sense, LLCs seem like a much more efficient mechanism.
Sure, they prevent you losing those things if the company loses more money than it has and the creditors want to come after you personally.
They don't prevent you losing those things if you invested your life savings in the company, and you mortgaged your home to invest more. Which are both things that people trying to get companies off the ground do, especially if they don't otherwise have the means to do so.
If you're considering the primary purpose of a UBI as being encouraging entrepreneurship, then sure, they're not that efficient. I do not consider that to be its primary purpose, nor have I yet spoken to anyone who does. It is one of many, many benefits to a UBI that should be considered.
> People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck
My favorite realization from actually playing cards. We used to play a lot of rummy on vacations as a family. Like a lot.
I kept losing. Hard. Absolutely destroyed. If only I could get this one card to complete my hand, I’d win every time. But it just wouldn’t come! I had terrible luck. Someone else always ended up winning before I got the one card I needed to make the high score and beat everyone else into submission. It was infuriating.
After a while I changed tactics. No waiting. Make a play on every play. Something, anything, with whatever cards you’ve got. Find a way to make the card you just picked up work.
Suddenly I was winning almost every game. Everyone complained how much it sucks to play cards with me. How does this kid always get exactly the perfect card!?
Now I’m banned from playing cards with family. Last time I played rummy was with my girlfriend’s family over Christmas a few years ago. They banned me immediately. Cards never come up again in conversation lol.
It really isn’t about the cards. They’re just the ingredient.
This is really visible in bridge; the hands are all random but how you play them is entirely skill.
Anyone can win with a perfect hand; the skill comes in dealing with the imperfect hands. True in life, too.
Bridge is nice that you can compensate for skill somewhat by handicapping, and the less-skilled players can still get a great hand and win sometimes. I always say "bridge is a fun game to lose" - and that's a really important part of a game you want to play.
Bridge is a weird game in that the actual play of the hand is almost unimportant. You can lose the game by playing the hand badly, but you can only win consistently in the bidding.
Which is why abstract and complicated bidding systems dominate the game, which gives it that lovely, steep initial learning curve.
There's an interesting genre of card games (President https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_%28card_game%29 probably being a good representative) which are literally rigged in a way that makes the previous winner easier to win the next time and harder for the previous loser to succeed.
There is still quite some mobility, but it effectively makes for different optimal tactics within the same game as your unfair start position determines whether it's best to risk things or not, what score is achievable depending on your position, etc and IMHO it has quite some parallels with real life decision making.
To make rummy a good metaphor for this discussion, you need to modify the normal $1/point rummy gambling rules; say making gin gives you $1000 bonus from the house or something. (There's a resemblance to quiddich here, I think.) Anyway, now you have the two extreme strategies: knock if you can, which gets you a few dollars each time, or try exclusively for gin, which usually costs you money on each hand but sometimes pays off. If you're skint, the gin strategy won't work since you can't stay in the game long enough. If you're flush, the knock strategy is uninteresting because a few dollars doesn't make a difference.
Now make that bonus $10,000,000,000 and you're making some unicorns, Harry!
Now imagine you only have budget for a single round before being eliminated and some of your opponents have money to keep playing indefinitely. That would be the most accurate metaphor
It isn't quite helpful. The second half of the advice should be to tell working class people to do whatever they can to get near rich/upper-middle class people, to flatter them, befriend them, attend their parties, and sleep with them.
The more rich people around you, the luckier you get. Some rich manchild somewhere is waiting for you to be "the brains" behind something.
I'm annoyed by how true this comment has been for me. Lots of my success in life has been more about knowing the right people than about knowing the right things.
In theory, hypothetically, it could be helpful in identifying when you don't have the proper situation to make success sufficiently likely -- perhaps you want to find another path where your situation is more advantageous. OR to identify what you, unique to your circumstances, might need to do to be in circumstances to maximize your luck, that other people woudln't -- like, in this case, cultivate a relational network of wealthy people that others might have out of the box. Or find a founder partner with a different balance of advantages/disadvantages, maybe you need a partner with those networks you don't have, while you bring other things to the table.
I'm reluctant to talk about this case specifically because it is so... fraught. People get mad, in both directions.
But in theory, there is no reason identifying the challenges in your starting situation that others might not have wouldn't be helpful. Isn't all information helpful?
Identifying challenges to overcome is extremely helpful. Necessary even!
Giving up before you even start just because it’s harder for you than someone else, that part doesn’t help.
The thing here can be anything. Losing weight, running a marathon, starting a business, climbing out of poverty into the middle class. You can’t get there unless you start.
> Giving up before you even start just because it’s harder for you than someone else, that part doesn’t help.
Doesn't help with what? In general, when you have your choice of direction, choosing a direction that plays to your strength instead of a direction where you are starting out handicapped compared to competitors can certainly help with your chance of success.
If we ignore the specifics about it being about the background you were born into, I think we'd all agree taht there are some people who exist who because of personal charecteristics or even personality are ill-suited to be startup founders, and have a poor chance of success, and maybe shoudln't do it, right?
It's just when we don't ignore that we are talking about social position specifically, in America we want to believe this can't be true because of your social position, we want to believe everyone has an equal chance regardless of social position. This is an ideology though, not based on observation. An ideology that says you have to pretend it doens't matter, not even identify the challenges to overcome.
So if you know you're going to have a harder time being successful than others, and that of course most startups fail anyway, and maybe you want to try it anyway after evaluating the risk and what will happen to you if you fail, but maybe you say actually, no, I don't want to do the thing that is already very risky and I have an additional handicap for... maybe instead of being a founder I'm going to look for someone else's startup to join, or maybe I'm going to try to work at a FAANG instead -- when you say it "doesn't help", what do you mean -- it doesn't help who do what? And who would it help to do what if you were to insist upon doing it even though it will be harder for you than someone else?
You mention adjusting tactics and strategies, even goals, based on circumstances. This is what “playing the cards you have” is. You do what you can with what you’ve got.
Giving up before you start doesn’t help because it’s a shut down. You don’t even get to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk.
The point is that if you want a change on whatever dimension you choose to care about, you have to do something. What that something is depends on the cards you have. How far it can take you again depends on circumstances.
And it’s fine to not want to do things. Or see the costs and decide that kind of life is not for you. But at least you took the time to evaluate.
> Giving up before you start doesn’t help because it’s a shut down. You don’t even get to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk.
Now you're adding "before you start", who said that until you did? Ok, what if instead you've gotten to the part of assessing viability and weighing risk and then decided not to go down that path, of, say, founding a startup.
> What that something is depends on the cards you have. How far it can take you again depends on circumstances.
Right, perhaps depending on circumstances that something is not founding a startup.
I don't totally understand what we're disagreeing about. Or what you mean when you say "it doesn't help" -- help who do what?
I would say deciding your circumstances make it harder for you than others to found a startup, thus it would make more sense to join someone else's startup or look for a job at a FAANG or something instead -- could at least conceivably "help". Help you find a path that works better for you to find success. I'm not sure what you mean by your repetition that it "doesn't help", as, like, a logical a priori.
> Now you're adding "before you start", who said that until you did?
That was already in the comment your own (G)GP[1] was a reply to, so they're certainly not adding it "now."
> I don't totally understand what we're disagreeing about. Or what you mean when you say "it doesn't help" -- help who do what?
As I was going to reply to your (G)GP[1]: Help anyone with whatever it was they didn't even start on doing. Be it running a marathon or starting a company or... What does it matter? Isn't it obvious that if you never start training for a marathon, that won't help you run one? And that the same goes for starting a company -- if you never even start starting a company, then you'll never get to the point of having started a company? And the same for anything you might want to do?
What I don't understand is how anyone can honestly claim not to understand that.
___
[1]: Grandparent of your comment that I'm replying to; great-grandparent of this my reply.
It might not be helpful to the individual, but it provides a useful guideline for society - everyone is capable of doing great stuff, as long as the means for doing so are provided.
I'd bet my life on this - if every homeless person was given a place to live, recovery from addiction (if needed), mental health counceling, education and a job, a significant percentage of them would become productive members of society.
I think it is helpful. Along with the cards analogy I would say the first step is knowing what cards you have.
As an example, being upper-middle class probably gives you an advantage on networking, either family, school old mates, ex colleagues, … Which I think is quite important when starting a business.
So realizing you don’t have that since the beginning will help.
You do have to start somewhere. It's also important to know which goals are realistic relative to what position you're in.
If you're poor, do you go for the moonshot, or do you go for being middle class and then adjust your expectations once you're comfortable that you've achieved your initial goals? Going from nothing to something is more impressive than going from something to... more something.
> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.
...and yet, all poor people know it by heart (unless they were born into a rich family that has just fallen from grace), , because it's totally true.
For more good insight: wealthy families know a lot more about how to make money when you have some money. Poor families know a lot more about avoiding the risk of being totally broke from an unlucky event, because they know they'd be totally unable to recover from it (not having the safety net of education and wealthy contacts that the upper-middle class have even when they go broke).
Somewhat true except for the fact that education isn't fixed. It's a variable that changes.
You might start with little wealth and accumulate education on your journey. Therefore in the early years when you lose wealth it's difficult to accumulate more, but over time it can become easier as you are more educated and experienced.
Having little wealth when young also allows you to live on very little - when combined with an education you can use this very nicely to say bootstrap a product.
The book "Conspiracy:
A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire" is a wonderful example of how what seemed to be a lucky break for Peter Thiel was actually a product of extensive preparation for an opportunity to take revenge on Gawker.
this is only true if the "unlucky" payout is not that big, so you can increase your "luck surface" without worrying about the effects for "unlucky" results, otherwise increase your "lucky surface" could increase your downside of "unluckyness"
Technology startups are naturally kind of like this. They have limited downside and unlimited upside.
However, in my life that limited downside has cost me a lot of money in opportunity costs over twenty years. I might be retired had I been able to work for money with the same energy and time I applied to my startup projects. But reality isn't quite like that, I would have been so unhappy doing that, it wouldn't have been sustainable (I tried working that hard for money for two years and it was horrible!) Those startup projects were so fulfilling and I learned so much on the journey. Even though I haven't found success yet, I haven't given up and the journey itself has been incredibly rewarding.
Solidarity, friend. Keep doing what makes you happy, keep learning every day, keep trying new things, keep meeting new people, and you're giving yourself the best odds you can get.
My first company got its investment because one of my co-founders talked about it to a random stranger at a bar, who turned out to have money burning in his pocket.
I second your advice to get lucky.
Most of my 27 year career has followed as a domino from that. Once we'd paid back his investment and exited (for a pittance; the ISP marked we'd entered had become impossible for a small player), his lawyer happened to get a question from another client if he knew any software developers locally. That job led me to meet someone who left to start a company, and I followed. There I met one of the co-founders of my next startup. That startup hired a lawyer who later went on to hire me for one of his startups. The co-founder of that startup hired me for my current job.
There have been interludes that did not follow so directly, and there are certainly things I've done to help things along, but there are also many more examples of luck involved along the way too. I'm sure I could have gotten a lot less lucky and still done ok, or been more lucky and done better, but overall I've come out of a lot of things disproportionately well.
While skill etc. certainly also played a part - I'm not in any way suggesting that luck is sufficient -, my point was that most of these were intertwined in a way that meant they were dependent on that first domino. I probably would have done fine without it, but it'd have looked very different.
Even though my skills certainly also played a role, I could also have been equally skilled and taken another job and missed out on meeting the right people and ended up with far less satisfying outcomes. And many do. Or I could have been born somewhere where I wouldn't have had the same opportunities.
Luck and skill amplify each other, and a problem is that people often want to think it was all down to their skills. A lot of subsequent failures happen when people fail to learn the right lessons because they don't understand which parts of their earlier successes were down to luck and so try to copy the same approach in different conditions.
So what you’re saying is that I should Always Be Grocery Shopping? Because you never know who you’ll meet there.
No, don’t worry about taking the time to reply & say that of course that’s what you mean. I’m already halfway through dictating a blogpost on my way to the grocery store right now. Thank you, I never would have seen it as the rich business networking venue it clearly is without your insight.
idk if you're joking, but urbanist writer James Kunstler points out that grocery stores are the only place in the suburbs where you can actually have a spontaneous interaction with your neighbors. Maybe ymmv but in the suburb where I live, there are no sidewalks and like 1-to-3 people walk by per day.
That's actually great and actionable advice. The more draws you have the better chances you get to luck out.
The actionable part is the draw participation and you participate with your each interaction multiplied with your relevancy surface.
Do you know who did not luck out with your former manager? Those who did not had a company that does the things you do and those who might have had but did not interact with your ex manager.
IMHO lucking out is a very straightforward strategy and is relevant not only in business but in romantic relationships or friendships or any other partnerships.
Just don't expect to luck out on your first try and multiple participations is much easier than trying to design the luck on first try.
One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list.
She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she did after getting cancer, and her conviction to follow her dreams, which led to the opportunity.
That documentary was pretty good. It's awesome seeing her leverage the whole situation, interviewing with so many people, joining the SpaceX medical team, she really took the inspiration part of inspiration 4 seriously. Both her and her brother are very kind, her brother is decent at smash bros too.
"Get lucky" is solid advice, but you've also got to give luck something to work with. I think your overnight success started a long time ago, at least as far back as when you showed your manager you weren't a bozo.
Of course but there's no insight there. It's just, be smart, study and learn a lot, maintain a decent appearance, work hard on useful or interesting things, kep stretching and growing to new things, make friends, keep in touch, ask to get paid for you work. Completely normal "middle class / entrepreneur values" type stuff.
>Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern.
Not sure if 100% luck because I usually switch to the sidewalk other side of the road when i spot someone i know coming down the sidewalk that i know :D
While most would call it luck, most self-help "insight porn" from the 1800s would say it is "fortunate" because you are in control of influencing it with your previous actions.
If a complete stranger became your big customer from the same scenario, that would be luck.
Sure, there's merit involved - but that's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There's a million competent people having basically the same drive and capability. The thing that makes a difference is luck. Period.
Please note: this doesn't mean that succesful people don't deserve the success - most times they do. It's just that there are many more people, equally deserving, that didn't have the same success. Let's treat those people better.
If "luck" is a dirty word in the startup world, I would at least like acknowledgement that the pathways to success are frequently not replicable.
Sure, nothing is certain, but some career paths are much more replicable than others. Maybe not everyone can work at a FAANGAMMATRON, there's a certain amount of luck, but "get a big tech job, work it for twenty-thirty-forty years" is still a fairly replicable path to moderate wealth.
You can look at the types of actions people took to get a big tech job (probably either "attend a prestigious university, apply straight to big tech" or "attend a decent state university, work any job in between for experience, apply to big tech") and there's probably a double-digit percent chance of you being able to replicate it.
You take any of the paths founders took to a successful company, it's almost impossible you'd achieve the same outcome trying to replicate it.
> You can look at the types of actions people took to get a big tech job (...) and there's probably a double-digit percent chance of you being able to replicate it.
You think more than 700 million people can get a big tech job?
Successful people are successful because they put themselves out into the world to expand their fortune. They seize common opportunities and make them great. Those opportunities come back around like the original comment.
The whole idea of "building one's fortune" or having a "fortune be told" instills in the idea that your actions are what influences your chance of being lucky in a positive light(never negative).
What if your actions are also a byproduct of luck?
E.g. if one is born retarded or with another mental disability, that prevents them from the actions that increase the chances of luck occurrence. A less extreme example is a person born with dysthymia who possesses less of the mental energy required to put themselves out there to expand their fortune and become successful.
Conversely, if one is lucky enough to be born with high innate intelligence and drive, coupled with a good upbringing and role models, they will more likely engage in actions that bring about luck and success.
One might argue that in many cases, people are not beholden to their genetics/circumstances and can rise above them. A dysthymic person can put forth the effort to get the help they need. I might argue that even this is a byproduct of luck in that the person was lucky enough to not have an incurable form of depression and also was lucky to have access to the resources to overcome it.
It's always easy to say it's luck. But I don't think it is. You created opportunity. And that's the key thing. Create opportunities. As many as possible. I did something similar. Started with a dollar a day. Ended up with several thousands a day. The only thing I consider luck is the fact that a grew up in a stable family in a rich country where I got faced with computers at a very early age. I received enough time to explore my desires. Never felt any pressure or whatsoever. But the businesses I created where my own work.
There's an irony that people don't even recognise that they are already relatively more wealthy than much of the world when talking about "rich people".
We do create our own luck to a certain degree and for anyone born in a first world country we have so many opportunities all around us - many simply choose poorly.
this is only true if the "unlucky" payout is not that big, so you can increase your "luck surface" without worrying about the effects for "unlucky" results, otherwise increase your "lucky surface" could increase your downside of "unluckyness"
Jonathan Haidt speaks about something similar in The Happiness Hypothesis. Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour. This is why self-help book readers tend to keep reading self-help books. 4 weeks after finishing one they need another hit of epiphanies.
Even the lamest examples listed in the OP article can probably give someone a boost in productivity for a while, as long as that epiphanic rush lasts.
I've felt this in myself over the years. I'd hit a low point and try to hoist myself out of it, with some sombre new ethical code for creating a work ethic; some new note taking system; or epiphany gleaned from Shakespeare or Nietzsche.
You can see it in the Jordan Peterson clips that haunt my YouTube shorts.
> Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour.
Funny, I've experienced the same thing with philosophy.
In my teens, I've had this existential crisis where the world just didn't make sense to me. Eventually I have discovered philosophy and started reading it, and for a while the world made sense to me. However, every epiphany I've had about the world only kept my enthusiasm up for a while - after some time I'd still know all the things I learned, but they just wouldn't seem as important as before.
The world made sense... But I just didn't like the way it made sense. That's when I realized that the problem is me, not the world, and that the problem cannot be solved by pure knowledge - there is an animal inside me which doesn't give a rat's ass about all my theories of why and how, and requires a different approach.
Jocko willinck (and many others I am sure) likes to state that you can’t rely on motivation because it comes and goes. Rely on discipline, build habits using discipline if you want to get anything done. A trite but in my opinion helpful statement is discipline equals freedom.
This is not a new idea. Just a new messenger for the modern era. Marcus Aurelius was talking about this thousands of years ago.
> At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
> Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
Rough self-talk from Marcus Aurelius in this passage. Not a big fan of this kind of approach personally. I've found that if I need to do this kind of self-motivation, I should be thinking much higher-level for the causes -- why do I not want to get out of bed? Perhaps I'm not working on the right thing, and need to change careers? Or perhaps I'm not dealing with something emotionally that is preventing me from doing my best work. In my experience, especially if this apathy is persisting over weeks+, it's been something much deeper than "oh I'm lazy and I just need to get up"
Yeah, MA is very keen on the separation between brain (what he calls the "directing mind") and body, to the extent that he thinks it's possible for the brain to ignore pain because that's the body's problem, and it's only something that makes the brain feel bad if the brain chooses to feel bad about it. If your philosophical framework looks like that then it's not really conducive to "fix the things in the outside world that make you naturally not feel like getting up", because the axiom is "none of that outside world stuff should be able to affect my brain unless I want it to". I find his writing interesting but this is one of the areas where my foundational beliefs and his are miles apart.
MA was a sage, but as Seneca said we do not have to be a sage. We should instead content ourselves with walking the same path, if at a crawl.
But really, what negative external could be more intractable than the hordes of Germans lining upon the Rhine and Danube? And yet MA rose up each morning to deal with them as seen in that documentary with Russel Crowe
Something similar comes up in Buddhism. The concept that pain is inevitable, but suffering isn't. You will feel pain, because that's part of life, but suffering is you holding on to the pain or trying to prevent/stop it.
I think it does "let the world in", but doesn't hold on to it as it's passing through. If that makes any sense.
I think this point about spiders would be more compelling if we actually saw that some spiders were lazy and some were not, and the lazy ones died and the non lazy ones didn't. The fact is that spiders and birds and whatever animal just generally doesn't have the desire to "lay in bed under the blankets". If nature gave us the desire to do so, doesn't that mean it isn't wrong if we're using nature as a guide?
This is a good point if you take the perspective that we are independent of our environment. Our desires and needs are natural, therefore we should follow them.
However, if you consider that we co-evolved with our environment and all of its challenges and constraints, then our desires and how much we feel them are simply the result of optimizing our survival over hundreds and thousands of generations.
E.g. the 'difficulty' of our environment is a 50. We have to have a desire of 51+ to survive: a will to live. The 'lazy' spiders all had <50 and no longer exist.
Therefore, if we change environments to something much easier to live in, then our desires are kind of vestigial optimizations that may not provide the kind of guidance on the optimal way to survive in the new environment - they may take hundreds or thousands of generations to unwind. Modern civilization in particular has created such a massive shift in challenges and resource availability that it's not hard to find examples of this.
E.g. we have a strong desire to rest even when we don't need it because we co-evolved in environments where rest was scarce (due to need to survive), so when we had the opportunity we took it. Same with food: food used to be scarce, so we needed a strong desire to get it, but now food is abundant and we still have that desire and wind up eating too much.
In both circumstances, the environment was the pace-setter, but thats now changed, so we need to be our own pace-setter.
I don't think the GP or Willink himself has ever suggested it's a new idea. Stoicism and that military Willink/Goggins/etc type of motivation go hand in hand.
Nature in this context would be things you have to get done except more of a belief that each person has a specific pre defined role. He's still very much talking about using discipline to accomplish this role and often self admonished for not getting more of his own role done.
> "How do you build discipline if you’re undisciplined?"
Willink's answer is "Just do it." Very charitably, he suggests you should do things you ought to, even if they are painful and you don't want to do it. This actually has some backing in cognitive-behavioral therapy by starting with action first before motivation.
Uncharitably, it's not nuanced if there are deeper reasons why you should actually consider to not work on something you've planned to do (though it's hard to say when this should happen).
> "How do you decide what to be disciplined about?"
Willink talked about how his first motivation was to be very good at his assigned tasks while in the navy. Then, if I remember correctly, he said his mission after retiring was to provide for his family and to help others with his content. For others, he said to focus on physical health; emotional stability; spending money wisely; spending time efficiently; taking care of family and friends; and doing great at your (presumable) current job. This is actually a very good starting point.
My major criticism of his past work is that he seems to assume that leaders/managers work in good faith and won't exploit your hard work. In my experience and several reports by others, following his advice can lead to getting severely overworked for little-to-no reward by managers acting in bad faith.
He also hasn't acknowledged (as far as I can tell) the importance of managing office politics in advancement in many workplaces. He said that outworking someone is the best way to counter someone trying to make you look bad in the workplace, which in my view is insufficient - you also need to talk to your manager about it in a tactful way. Lastly, his current content seems to be increasingly monetized, and he's had more podcast guests who are politicians, when he used to be apolitical.
You need to have discipline in the first place to “just do it” consistently. For those who lack enough motivation, which is the situation the advice is supposed to address, I don’t see how it helps. If they were able to “do it” consistently despite lacking consistent motivation, they wouldn’t have a problem in the first place.
I guess that for some people, being told “there’s no way around just doing the things even when you’re not motivated” by itself creates sufficient motivation long-term to do the things even when they are not otherwise motivated. But for those for which that doesn’t happen, there isn’t much actionable advice.
> "You need to have discipline in the first place to “just do it” consistently. [...] If they were able to “do it” consistently despite lacking consistent motivation, they wouldn’t have a problem in the first place."
From Willink's perspective (interpreted charitably), there are many situations where it's useful to "just do it." For example, say you want to do a task, but you want to get comfortable first because you're anxious. You can watch a funny video or browse the internet to calm down, read a motivational blog post, and do various chores to 'get in the mood.' Then hours pass by, and you still haven't started the task.
A better solution is to start with the action causing anxiety, expecting the shift in mood to follow the action (before trying to change your mood first), which is supported by recommendations in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Actions first, mood follows is a good, actionable insight supported by CBT counselors.
> "For those who lack enough motivation, which is the situation the advice is supposed to address, I don’t see how it helps."
If you're disciplined despite lacking motivation, you can improve your physical health and earn better career opportunities, letting you earn more and have more freedom. Therefore, by focusing on actions more than motivation, you can improve your circumstances. This is a charitable interpretation of Willink's perspective.
However, my personal view is moderate. Motivation does matter, because it reduces the amount of willpower needed for work, and lets you choose the right tasks and goals to work toward. Though in any case, action before changing your mood is perfectly actionable advice.
Plenty of actionable advice. Start small, build habits, work your way up. Jordan Peterson (love him or hate him) talks about making your bed and cleaning your room. Then build off this and tackle something a little bigger. Small personal goal that takes a year or more of regular practice (language, physical fitness, writing, anything you highly value). If you can’t manage to build a habit of this, then maybe being disciplined and getting the benefits of it won’t work for you. Nothing wrong with that.
I was calling out the GP that the mere insight that discipline is usually necessary because you can’t rely on being consistently motivated fits the pattern of an insight that doesn’t by itself makes it easier to solve the problem. The insight can explain lack of success (inconsistent motivation combined with lack of discipline), but it doesn’t tell you how one might engender a lasting change. Also, the difference between discipline and consistent motivation is arguably small, because you somehow have to consistently motivate yourself to build up and maintain a discipline.
From your framing, it sounds like the advice is to start with a person who lacks motivation, and then tell them to be disciplined, and it's sufficient for lasting change. In this framing, the advice is absurd.
But it's far more interesting to consider how the one phrase relates to the rest of Willink's perspective. For example, he argues that that you can frame discipline and hard work as a method to be physically healthier; care for your family better; or help you earn more income or career capital.
The phrase is an introduction to the rest of his arguments, and it isn't quite as interesting to debate its merits in isolation.
I’ve always viewed his content through the lens of being your own boss, so being overworked and taken advantage of by an employer might happen, but if you don’t have the ability to work through things you don’t want to do, you can rarely succeed on your own. A boss is a great way to always have external motivation. That doesn’t exist when you work for yourself.
Great points by the way. I would also add that Jocko Willinck is a master teacher in self promotion. The pioneer of “monetize my navy seal career”, but I do feel it’s mostly genuine and valuable content.
I don’t consider that to be insight porn, which is why I found it personally valuable. I feel this is a fundamental law of getting anything done. There’s almost nothing that I actually want to do for extended period of times, but I want the result from having done that thing a bunch. For example, it’s really hard to go outside and practice archery every day, but I have to do that in order to have the result of those skills - a successful archery hunt. How do I get the results when I am way past the first month or so where motivation is waning? I have to have the discipline to work toward my goal, regardless of how I feel in the moment.
I found this insight for lack of a better word to be so fundamental that I was floored when I read it in jocko’s kids book. I saw my dad do this, he clearly embodied this value and demonstrated it while raising me, but no one ever explained it to me.
For a goofy comparison, I would consider “discipline equals freedom “ to be love making between a happily married couple, and blog spam insight porn to be actual porn.
He suggests through practice. You start with something small but easy that you don't want to do, and make a habit of doing it anyway. His favorite small first step seems to be getting up early.
I've found the best way to build discipline is to find someone with discipline and have them keep you accountable. This could be a mentor of some kind. Granted finding that may be equally as hard as doing it on your own.
Also you don't necessarily need discipline in the actual thing you want to do - you just need to know what it means to be disciplined in something and then you can extrapolate your behavior in discipline itself to then be disciplined in something.
The problem is it's not even correct. Discipline does not equal freedom. Have you ever seen a well-meaning man with all his might do the same incorrect thing over and over? Of course you have, because we're all that person in some area of life.
Viewing the phrase in isolation, this response is logically correct, but it's more interesting to view this in the context of the rest of the author's arguments.
If you're consistent with physical exercise by resisting when you feel like skipping a workout, you'll have more strength, endurance, and freedom of movement when you become much older. And if you're consistent with improving at your career skills, you'll have more career opportunities in the future. Therefore, even if you may seem less free by avoiding unhealthy food or watching too much television, you're setting yourself up for more opportunities in the long-term.
I personally do agree that you can be disciplined toward the wrong goals, though I also think it's more interesting to consider Willink's arguments as a whole, instead of focusing on a phrase in isolation.
doesn't discipline require willpower though. I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it.
That’s like saying you have a limited amount of muscular endurance per day. It’s true, but it’s completely trainable. Meaning just like you can go from barely able to run a mile to being able to run an ultramarathon, you can do the same thing with your willpower. But unlike running a marathon, training your willpower will yield real, life improving tangible benefits assuming you can correctly figure out how to apply it for your benefit. Maybe a poor analogy because running an ultramarathon requires lots of willpower :)
Regardless of whether one accepts the arguments in the comic, I doubt willpower can be trained. It's not like a marathon where you have to actually run to practice, every day you're faced with decisions and temptations that you can "exercise" your will power with. In a sense you can't really stop practicing with your willpower...
> I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it.
This keeps getting repeated but there is no physical evidence to it. We know muscles have a limited amount of power (because they run out of ATP energy) but there is nothing that suggests it's the same for willpower.
"Epiphanic rush" is such a accurate but bittersweet term for this. It must be so ingrained in human psychology from the days of shamans, prophets and sages.
Are these really examples of what is described? The spiritualism gained from those entities persist to this day. Wars were fought and people continue to live by what those entities taught. Sounds different from the short lived rush that is being discussed.
> This is why self-help book readers tend to keep reading self-help books. 4 weeks after finishing one they need another hit of epiphanies.
I read a lot of business books that could be categorized as "self-help". I tend to continuously read them because
1. I'm aware how difficult behavior change
2. It's valuable to have more than 1 perspective.
3. Few things have had an outsized impact on my career. I do not know what those are until weeks/months/years after reading a book.
For me, I'm not looking to read a single book to emulate it fully. I'm looking to read 4 or 5 books, shape my overall perspective, then have 2 to 4 things stick very, very deeply. Lastly, I can always come back to a specific book when I loosely remember it being applicable.
Yeah, I agree. Though I will say that doesn't mean epiphanies aren't valuable long term. A little boost to get you started might translate into a huge change in personal circumstances 10 years after that small boost. Without a couple months with Jordan Peterson relaying not just the possibility but the nobility of looking people in the eyes, entering the forest at the place that looks darkest to you, etc. I would almost certainly not be here typing this.
Such basic truths spruced up with a gleaming coating of old reverent narrative and ancient godlike significance through vigorous sermon is exactly the small boost I required to make the most significant and important change I've ever made in my life. I know he's quite controversial these days but you cannot deny the man has channeled something very powerful (at least as the non-explicitely-political material goes, I choose not to watch his politics)
What always surprised me about Peterson was the fact that so many people swear by his videos. There's multiple claims about how his videos changed their lives or saved them. However, his methodology couldn't keep his own life from going awry.
What exactly has gone awry? I mean, he had some serious troubles when his wife came extremely close to death very suddenly from a terrible illness but who could stay fine watching their high school sweetheart and only love ever rapidly wither right as their lives started to take off together.
Or are you talking about the political aspect? If so I really see nothing going 'awry', he's making choices, certainly not begging for money. Someone may not like what he says or who he talks with but that does not constitute a life 'going awry' inasmuch as his supposed teachings would help avoid
Out of the 3 "Insight Porn" examples linked in the article, I think the Paul Graham essay seems out of place. I know I know, this is hacker news. Yet another person sticking up for pg. But I just don't think this essay (or others) is really trying to boil some dream/goal into steps. In fact, in the "How to get startup ideas" referenced in this post, pg says:
"So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right."
To me, he is doing the opposite of insight porn. Basically saying this might not even be for you. He doesn't even suggest that you go become an expert in something. Rather, he just throws his hands up. He tries to spare you from the disappointment of hearing this by calling it "interesting". That contrasts _a lot_ with what most of the insight porn is trying to convince you of. They rarely try to disappoint you and mostly just hype/pump you up.
>"if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches"
To me, this sounds like a line from a multi-level marketing pitch. It sounds like they're saying "This may not apply to you," but a lot of people will hear "There are chosen people (and you're probably one of them)."
It reminds me of the Calvinism sect of Christianity. They believed in predestination for salvation: God has always known who be a good person and deserve salvation. So there was no point in trying to be virtuous, because the outcome was set before you were born. Still, Calvinists often adopted public shows of virtue, like meticulous gardens, to convince others they were part of the "to be saved" group.
The truth is you do have to be the right kind of person to be successful (in this context, successful at startups). A person born with severe retardation or another mental incapacity is not the right kind of person to be successful at startups.
The right kind of person has the genetic makeup, personality type, upbringing and/or access to resources to become successful. Not everyone has this and that's okay. And also, you (usually) don't know if you're the right kind of person until you try. So if you want to, try and keep trying until you don't want to anymore.
> So there was no point in trying to be virtuous, because the outcome was set before you were born.
Yeah, but just because Omega already either put the money in the box or didn't doesn't mean you should act like it doesn't matter. God is omnicient, and sees whether you'll get into heaven, but curiously enough at the end of the line we see it's the people who did virtuous deeds which wound up there. As you can't see the stamp on your soul, you might as well act like your actions will decide it, since the outcome of your choices is what God looked at when He stamped you in the first place.
It's a fairly pointless objection seeing as I doubt either of us are Calvinists, but their take on Predestination annoyed me when I learned about it, especially since they acted virtuously anyway (or pretend virtuously, whatever)!
Calvinism is still a thing among US Evangelicals btw, most famously George W Bush, which gives some pause for thought vs how hawkish his administration was.
Yeah, but there's always someone who will misinterpret you. You can try to mitigate it, but at some point you have to stop worrying about it and just be honest. Whatever the article's other merits, I don't think that's a good critique.
Consider how ineffective this advice is then. What decisions can you make? You could take this to mean that you should follow your gut, or not. Does it share anything useful for formulating a decision? And why is this approach better than the alternatives?
The problem with the OP's criticism and yours is that it starts from the assumption that PG has set out to "sell" the reader faux-actionable insights.
What he's really doing is answering the question "how can I come up with startup ideas?", which has always been asked of him and the other YC partners frequently.
And his answer is: you shouldn't try to come up with startup ideas; that's not how it works. Instead you should just notice if/when they appear before you.
He's clearly not claiming to be doing what the author is accusing him of trying to do. He's just explaining something he'd noticed after (at that time) 7 years of funding/advising some of the most successful startups.
(That said, later in the essay he goes on to offer actionable recipes for formulating startup ideas anyway).
In answer to your question: you can take his advice, or not, to stop trying to confect startup ideas, and instead just pay attention to the opportunities you notice from your own experience.
This is why I don’t get the recent pg hate that’s been happening on HN. He’s always done this, but now people are saying he’s out of touch because he’s rich/white/old. Majority of things he’s blogged are no-nonsense observations.
I think one has to take his writing of late with a pinch of salt because he writes things that only a rich, white and old guy could write. But the earlier stuff is still great. Hackers & Painters is still a wonderful book.
It's not nonsense, it's an obviously-tautological statement, made with the full awareness that it's not helpful advice, but used to explain the point. It's one sentence out of a long essay. Later in the essay he provides recipes for coming up with startup ideas, even though he warns that that approach is suboptimal. What more could be asked of him?
It's not empty, it's just way, way! too politely phrased. It's not advice on how to find ideas or how to become that person, but advice on who is ready to give founding a startup a try.
During my career I did freelance mobile app and web development for about 10 years.
In that time I came across many people who wanted to found a tech startup because "that's where the money is" and being a tech startup founder being a status symbol. Some enthusiastic youngsters, but mostly people who had a successful non-tech small business. And they were not the right sort of person and did not have the right hunches, they didn't use what they learned from their non-tech business, but instead sat down over a beer with friends to brainstorm "social-local-viral" app ideas.
The advice instead should be that if you are struggling to come up with startup ideas, you probably aren't the right sort of person at this time. You should do something entirely different for a while until you find a product that just has to exist.
Unfortunately, they had never read HN or PG, nor could I do more than politely refuse their business.
The link was specifically labeled with a line from the essay: "Live in the future, then build what's missing." PG goes on to say that's how "many if not most of the biggest startups got started," which sounds more descriptive than proscriptive, since the proscription seems like nonsense.
I think it does belong; ultimately, knowing if one has the "right sort of hunches" is only possible in hindsight, there's as much luck as anything else involved in what PG/VCs/founders do, and they in-no-uncertain-terms admit this through their their entire model of investment; throwing money at 100 companies praying that one 1000x's.
Just as how its easy to criticize ideas because criticism is cheap, its also easy to pick out if a business will probably fail; but singling out success is near-impossible. If you asked me if playing video games all day was a good way to get the brain-surgeon-rocket-engineering job of your dreams, I'd say it probably isn't; but the right way is far more elusive.
In other words, its high level, not useful, and once you get into the specifics his message falls apart. I also think: VCs are generally quick to trivialize the impact the rising economic tide of the '10s had on all investments, not the least of all in the novelty of software-related venture investments, and many people will be found without pants over the next decade. Which I only say to add that this is a common theme with insight porn; trivializing luck & privilege.
The unfortunate truth of PG's claim is that: Odds are you are not the right sort of person. You're not at the leading edge. The field isn't so much changing as spinning in place. Sorry.
But he carefully doesn't say that, and the majority of most of his essays are designed to inspire the belief that you are the right sort of person, etc.
nope, not only this guys examples are bad but he just tries too hard to be a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. i called him that & he blocked me [1] for some reason. probably there's some truth in it that he got hurt.
his examples are so bad. i've read paul graham's essays, naval's thread & alex hormozi's $100m offers book & all are quite good & easy to understand. naval's thread is a big hard but he has whole bunch of podcasts (4 hours) [2] explaining them in detail & articles [3] to accompany them.
the op's entire schtick is to sell his courses by writing articles. first he wrote an article on build a business, not an audience [4] & then did a complete 180 turn & has been building an audience ever since. then he started selling courses. it's like his schtick is to go against the popular ideas & attack them to garner following.
although, he does have some good insights in a few of his articles like when he summarized a book (nathan latka) or a video (sam parr)... rest of his posts are purely trying to hard to be a contrarian. tries to hard to be like peter thiel except he doesn't have any real arguments.
you don't have to believe me. just read $100m offers & apply it. that book could've saved me many years of trying to figure out the framework myself & has every single technique mentioned on how to make a good offer. if you actually follow the advice to the t, you will actually be on the pathway to your 1st million. not to say, the author himself is worth >$100m & has a portfolio of companies making $150m/year so he'll be a billionaire in a year or two. you don't become a billionaire without any real insights unless you are a trust fund baby.
> If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.
Right there he suggests you become an expert. An expert who is at the crest of the wave in some field is more likely to see over it and get a glimpse of what’s next. I think he is spot on. It’s no guarantee but it’s probably as close as you can get.
I noticed a common pattern in self-help publications:
1. Claim a common self-help method is ineffective.
2. Show why it's ineffective.
3. Present a different self-help method.
Point number 2 is really important. It could be anything: an anecdote, some data, a paper. But the strongest signal is if the readers themselves already tried the ineffective solution. If it was effective, there's no need for them to research more. But it wasn't working and there's this person who says there's no way it would work. And they are right, so let's hear what else do they have to say (or sell).
You've the walking proof something didn't work and there's someone who's agreeing with you. You did all the hard work and the author is tagging along.
The beauty of it is the original method might be fine, it just didn't work out for you for whatever reason. Including if you read about it, but didn't try.
This article actually provides a framework for deciding if a productivity tool is useful, by running an experiment, or at least identifying experiments, on the advice provided to see if it works for you.
They clearly highlight as "insight porn" stuff that doesn't provide actionable advice.
At the end, they invite you to apply this new "is this useful, not useful or not even bad" decision process to their own services/products.
His point is not really abandon all the insight porns - but rather pick only those that you can experiment with. And if all his advice do provide something actionable, he's living up to his words.
The "only I can truly help you" pattern is a very common one for selling hokum, so yeah I would agree this is probably a way to peel readers from other self-help gurus.
A crackhead never says "I have no money, I guess I'm not smoking any crack today". Instead, they will go to an abandoned building and strip all the copper wiring out of it. Don't let a crackhead out-hustle you today.
Some types of insight is still valuable, and tends to stick longer:
* "Your perception of [practice] is wrong". Networking isn't sales or marketing, it's helping each other and building things together without sending invoices.
* "You value the wrong things". You are paid to create value, not write code. Negotiation skills pay more than technical skills [1][2]
* "The world doesn't work that way". A lot of the content you read is sponsored [3]
* "You're doing something unpleasant". Don't ask to ask [4]
When I was in college in the late 90s I was fortunate enough to figure this out through experience.
First, there was a real fear all programming jobs were going to be outsourced. So I decided I needed programming + something else (in this case business).
Second, as a sophomore I got a job at a small custom software shop in town (it was the late 90s - if you had a pulse you get a 'programming' job). Our clients didn't care about the code, the language it was written in or anything else technical. They only cared about what it did, and if it solved their problem. It also connected 'solve customer problem' to 'getting paid' in a very direct way.
Another piece of "Insight Porn" labelled as "No more insight porn", how ironic.
And when do people like the author start labelling any over-doing, over-indulging behaviour "porn"?
Should I expect in a few decades time that people binge-watching documentary will give birth to "doco-porn"?
Catchy marketing at its worst.
On the topic though, beneath whatever words he put on top it's an age-old idea that until you start doing something hands-on, it'll be hard to tell what you already know and what you don't.
The advice giving and taking is not a new concept, and data-driven is not going to change it. If one doesn't like handling slimy things, no matter how good a piece of cooking advice is - it's not going to help. Imagine capturing meat can be slimy in datasets.
It is indeed quite ironic. This article would have landed much better had it not tried to make a better version of the insight porn that it criticises so much. Just listing the problematic content would have been better.
His six hour day thing reminds me of a wheeze a manager tried in my old company when it was coming up to crunch time. He sent an 'inspirational' email where he said that if we all were to simply work an extra few hours after work each day, then four hours on each of Saturday and Sunday, then - voila - we would magically find ourselves with the equivalent of an 8-day week. I don't think many took him up on this.
Though to be fair to him, it was very specific and actionable advice!
This resembles a meeting I had in the past. The manager said we all had to work a little harder because the company was doing bad. He suggested to stay an extra hour every day.
He then concluded with "Oh yeah, and Li is going to take over my tasks for the next 2 weeks, because I'll be on holiday".
yeah, was going to post that what he describes doesn't fit my idea of "insight porn" as it originated from the postratsphere. I might classify both his topic and his post itself as "hustleporn"
If you take the time a lot of people spend consuming content, like insight porn / productivity porn etc and instead spent that time doing more and reflecting more, you'd still likely be in a better place than the consumer
This is a perfect post on what I hate (and can't seem to quit) on my Twitter feed.
If you follow anyone in the startup space, the profiles and recommendations they generate will fill up your entire feed with useless, like-farming threads on "how to be successful in 3 easy steps".
The part about it being extra dangerous because you feel productive even though you didn't do anything, is so true. It's like a new form of addictive, useless SoMe content for people over 25.
I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed.
I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great.
The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize the same: people struggle and just wish someone would offer real advice. If everyone wishes to dig for gold, sell shovels right? Well if everyone is dealing with failure, feelings of inadequacy, and a desire to change why not sell them the hope that if you do these simple things everything will be better.
It is a desirable thing, even for me who should know better.
Another part is nobody wants the real advice, because it's often hard.
See how many diet books are sold, and see how few people actually successfully lose weight, even though the advice boils down to "stop eating so much".
Maybe that's what makes real advice so hard - too many people making glib blanket statements on the Internet. Actual advice always targets individuals, and it's never a single thing that it boils down to.
You perceive Nathan's ideas on the show as "a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed"? We must be watching different shows :)
The latter. I can barely watch him. I'll admit he's incredibly original and I really appreciate a skit or two. But he borders on sociopathic, and his latest movie is a great encapsulation of that.
A friend of mine thinks like you, he feels extremely uncomfortable watching Fielder and his brand of comedy, and any sort of "cringe" comedy about sociopathic individuals, e.g. Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I really can't empathize, because after all he's playing a character which should be very obvious.
I think for my friend, the stuff depicted in this sort of comedy hits a bit too close to home, i.e. this sort of comedy doesn't work for people who are socially awkward because it reminds them of IRL too much, and conjures up bad memories, while normal people just laugh at the exaggeration of the awkwardness.
The only reason these bad actors exist is because there are a lot of marks for their con. We wonder why there are so many alleged Nigerian princes with money logistics problems on the internet - this is the same thing, just in less obvious fashion.
A fool and his money are soon parted. The real question a society should ask itself is to what extent it should protect its fools from their own gullibleness and inevitable bad decisions.
If a business owner goes bankrupt because he believed the "insight peddlers" and their easy solutions, then according to capitalist theory, it's OK he'll be replaced by someone who is better at business.
The same also happens in the political realm. How much time and effort should a society spend on educating its fools, for example that their belief that the president shitposts on 4chan under the guise of "Q" to tell his followers about his secret plans, is based on nothing but lies and gullibleness?
Should we take our collective eyes off the ball of actual issues at hand and deal with our fools' every concern? Or should we just accept that we can't save every voter or every business man and just let the "market" do its thing? It's not black and white like that, because of course a society shouldn't be do-or-die about anything, but when the extent of foolery starts to threaten the fundament that allows it to exist, there's a limit.
That would be a very practical approach, and also could be fun for children as it's not a dry topic.
On a more general level, I think we (as in any society that's not too far gone like Russia) need to educate our young about propaganda and how to not fall for it.
Social media has been a game changer in terms of the spread of propaganda, if nothing is done about that then I fear we'll see the end of humankind in our lifetime.
It's genuinely useful to know that making $X a year is the same as Y clients paying $(X / Y / 52) a week, if you've never thought about a business in concrete terms before.
Obviously this is old and repetitive if you're a working software engineer who's been reading HN for years and has seen a ton of motivational LinkedIn bullshit, but it's the kind of thing a career councillor might go over to make running a business seem approachable. Equally obviously it would be much better advice if it came with a real-world example of a forecasting spreadsheet and a link to your government's "how to start a business" website. That doesn't make it bad advice.
The example thread from Naval is the same. Second tweet is basically "conspicuous consumption wastes money, buy appreciating assets instead," but couched in pornographic insight. One of the later tweets is "pick business partners...with integrity." They're both good bits of advice. Just because you already know a piece of advice, and just because it's given by a charismatic writer over far too many individual tweets, doesn't make it bad advice.
> One of the later tweets is "pick business partners...with integrity." They're both good bits of advice.
Really? This is good advice? Is "don't work with a known thief" also good advice? Most people know this already. They make it seem like it's this grand knowledge. it's not. It's worthless advice dressed up to sound good.
One of my (distant and now deceased) family members got ripped off by a business partner who fled the country, who he knew was slimy but decided to trust for some reason. Yes, it would have been good advice for him.
It's not grand knowledge unveiled by the Secret Brotherhood of Hidden Twitter Masters, it's just...normal good advice. You shouldn't go into business with crooks. People do it all the time, and it often ends poorly for them. "Eat your vegetables" and "take your car in for a service when it makes weird noises" are also good bits of advice, for the right audience.
> who he knew was slimy but decided to trust for some reason. Yes, it would have been good advice for him.
He knew he was slimy, and did so anyway. This advice would not then help.
> You shouldn't go into business with crooks. People do it all the time, and it often ends poorly for them.
The problem isn't that they don't know they shouldn't do business with crooks. Most of them do. Just like many know that murder is wrong and yet people still kill.
Eating vegetables is almost directly actionable. So is taking your car in for service. But this is far from the "don't do business with crooks." Which is generic, unhelpful advice. And many crooks have made it rich and made others rich too. Is the advice even always true? Many a person got rich off of corruption.
> There are people that are surprised when the partner who cheated with them in their previous relationship also cheats on them in the current.
Is it that these people don't know the risk, or they willingly choose to take the risk, because of some potential reward, such as having a partner? I say that is more likely. A lot of people know things are bad decisions and do them anyway - often because of hopes.
I often don't know whether my potential business partner has integrity, in which case this advice wouldn't help me.
If I do know, then this advice is so obvious as to be meaningless. Unless I'm an idiot, in which case, again, this advice wouldn't help me.
There is some merit in the very inexperienced learning different ways to think about revenue. "You can choose to target one or two big contracts or many smaller contracts, and those have the same result" is useful advice, not that either one is necessarily easier than the other.
But "don't choose a business partner who's crooked" seems tautological and empty.
The corollary being that people who are not peddling insight porn are often dismissed and have much much harder time to get their content shared.
I mean on one hand there is this guy with an incredibly feel good story about how all you have to do is just fill the gaps between the problem and solution and get rich. Then on the other hand there is this guy giving advice that looks like a steep uphill climb from your comfort zone where you to measure every single unique issue in your product and call customers 10 times a day to understand what's not working and why they're leaving, etc.
Most people will pick A since it makes em feel good and such wisdom like "if your why is big enough the how takes care of itself "
“Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook that they, in fact, never used themselves.”
And they rarely share the messy awkward embarrassing reality of their journey.
This is why I'm not a big fan of "Things that any [insert career] should know" or "things I wish I'd known" type of articles. The path to mastering something is always unique, messy, and unstructured. It's impossible to replicate your journey by telling someone to read X, read Y, and do Z. All of that needs to be internalized as part of a slow journey that can't be accelerated too much. Your brain needs to learn how to filter noise, find patterns and get used to thinking a certain way. You might lose a year learning something that became obsolete; guess what? You still learned tons from that. We don't need to babysit junior people too much. They can find their way into becoming great SWE just like any great SWE who complains they learned something too late in their careers or that nobody told them something before did.
Gotta hand it to The Secret (2006) for kick starting near two decades of bull shit "Insight Porn". I know a few people who got sucked into that universe and continue to read & share this kind of media today.
Sure, there's a lot of crappy insight out there, and there are also styles of writing designed to take your time. It's like Proust with product placement.
But when you look at psychology as a tool to dissolve artifacts of our internal logic that are causing suffering, using a neutralizing theory that temporarily dissolves meaning, the usefulness of some cliches and deepities becomes more apparent. These aren't positive instructions, they're a way to provoke a mind out of a kind of writers block or negative feedback loop about its idea of self.
An insight that reframes your perception of something can unlock what felt like a double bind or an inescapable situation. "I can't feel some joy because I am a this or that," is an example belief that an insight can unblock by reframing someones perspective to question the premises of that belief. Showing that your negative self beliefs are inconsistent enough for you to question them can be enough to relieve the suffering they cause, just long enough to do something about them. It's a precision tool.
It's relevant to look at the quality of insight and beliefs we're having delivered by some carefully orchestrated psychological techniques, but this one felt bit like witnessing the birth of a new thought terminating cliche.
W.r.t the "imagine your day is 6 hours long, then you could fit 3 days in one" 'advice'.
I haven't read the original article, and won't, but I'm imagining what they mean by that is 6*3=18 (+6 hours of sleep = 24).
I have two jobs right now; primary gig + ~10hr/week contracting, both tech. I'm actually a big fan of this model of thinking, though not as extreme; I'll elaborate:
Classify 3 days a week as "hell days"; 9a-6p job1 + 7p-9p job2. Tweak the numbers as you will for your own situation, but critically, for every hell day there's a heaven day: Monday you're working 12 hours, but Tuesday you're only working 6 hours, and alternate.
I've found this model to work well, even when it was only applied to a salaried 40-hour-per-week job; Mon is 6h, Tue is 10h, etc. If you've got the right gig that can support something like this (many remote SE roles can). It averages out to the same (sometimes more) hours per week, you can plan for more fluidity (e.g. i'm going out drinking with friends thursday evening, so lets front-load some hell days early in the week so we get a heaven day friday), and it tends to really vibe well with engineering workloads (hell days are great for deep focus, centralize as many meetings as possible on heaven days, whatever works for you, etc).
And sure, I'm being a little vague in how to attain this for yourself, if its something you'd even want; the sin of Insight Porn. It really comes down to "find a job that allows you to do it", and boom, Luck has entered the chat (with some mitigating "Skill" in being in a desirable field, knowing the right questions to ask in an interview, etc).
All that considered, I still like the advice. If I want to spend my free time with loved ones; its so much more valuable & meaningful, to me, to spend an entire afternoon and evening every other day, or even only once/twice a week, than just an evening some/most evenings. Everything is better without interruption; work & play; and classifying your days as "WORK/play" versus "PLAY/work" rather than trying to evenly split every day, has just been better for me. YMMV.*
Of course; extending this idea to "3 work days per day, that's 15 work days per week" or "6 hours of sleep per night" is crazy and no one should live like that.
Life is always changing. What advice you read about today may not stick nor apply to you right now, but it may in the future. Things don’t change, we do.
> Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook that they, in fact, never used themselves.
This comment feels like a rant with no justification. I know many highly accomplished people who will tell you what they did to achieve the promotion, land the deal, or deliver the project. Are they fleeting generalizations in a self-help book? Not usually. But there are visions, systems, and frameworks they have developed over the years, simply summed up as their personal philosophy.
Insights can be profound to one and dumb to another. Does it make insights a bad thing? Absolutely not. Some people are ready for them, some people are not. Some people 10x their life with a simple idea like a vision board. Some never try it because they think it’s dumb. I’m of the opinion that unless you try everything at least twice, you can’t know if it works for you or not.
My guess is that a big chunk of the "insight porn" and self-help landscape would fade away if it was subject to a data driven evaluation. Given a piece of advice or a self-help book, how many people did actually change their behaviour after reading it? And did the change persist long-term? Unfortunately, such data is not available.
Tony Robbins says in one of his audios (can't remember which, otherwise I would link), that 80% of the books he sold are just collecting dust, because people just buy them in order to pat themselves on the back for having done something for their personal development.
Ironically said in a self-help audio course itself.
I feel like a lot of that content seems to mention similar, either in a slight moment of self-awareness that their content will likely j just be that or perhaps in a slightly deluded way to try and suggest that this course / book is somehow different.
Content creators make a lot of money and have nice careers selling all this stuff, even streamers, how many of them would actually spend hours watching someone else's stream a day? Most of them wouldn't go near that stuff, but they happily stream for hours a day have thousands of people watch them and consume the content then cash that check.
It's a great life for the creator, not so much the consumer.
The same is with productivity YouTubers or self help authors, it's a create business to be in, but really your just selling out the other person.
It was not lost on me, when a popular self development podcast host, a few years ago talked about how they set up there twitter and social accounts to post via a third party app, because they absolutely must not see the timeline or engage in it in any way. These people are happy to use to tools out there to profit and capture other peoples attention, but guard there own so tightly because they know how important it is. That is likely a better lesson than anything they where actually 'tweeting' about.
Well, how sad. I have liked what Jakob wrote quite a bit but not only does this article betray a lack of self awareness as it describes quite a few of his own posts—not that there's anything wrong with that as he has published truly insightful things too and the fluff I still liked for the positivity—but then he used an essay by PG as an example of this.
And now I'm not one of those people who think that everything PG writes is gold, but it's hardly "insight porn". In fact, if that particular essay is "advice", it's the advice to not even try as it's likely just not for you, so it almost seems like Greenfeld misrepresented it just because of a single sentence.
I'm totally with the author - what he calls 'insight porn', I think of as 'grind porn' - as underneath the 'insights', I believe what the genre is really selling is the paradigm that you're not achieving enough, and you need to work harder, and because there are only so many hours in the day, you need to work smarter too, and to do that you need our insights to help you be much more efficient.
So I'd take it a step further - not just avoid insight-/grind-porn, and grind-adjacent-porn too.
By this, I mean the equally large industry around life optimisation - and consider it adjacent because of course you need to optimise your health, wellbeing, sleep, weight, muscle volume, whatever, to be a fully productive human and achieve the heights that are expected of you.
Take (possibly) the Daddy of the all: Tim Ferriss' blog/podcast. I believe it's basically well-meaning, but holy hell if you wanted to learn from and apply the life optimisations of all of his guests, you'd almost need to make it a full-time activity. (I guess that's why some of them --Peter Attia, for example-- are really appearing on the podcast to advertise their business, which [if you're rich enough] will take most of the hard work out of figuring everything for yourself.) And of course, don't get me started on trying to follow any of the advice while living in the Europe, without easy access to many of the items recommended.
And some of this slips out of the recrational space into the professional, too. A while back, I became aware of a professional/life coaching business[0] which was more holistic than the usual behaviourally-focussed professional coaches I'd experienced. Lots of well-meaning advice... until it hit me: maybe if I need to employ all of the little lifestyle marginal gains --green tea, optimised sleep, optimised diet, exercise-- just to cope with my f*cking job, the toxic demands of job itself is the problem?
Is it possible we've gone too far towards accepting and adapting to the grind... and maybe it's time to wind it back a little?
Complexity is overwhelming us all. Who doesn't want simplicity?
Simplicity is to thinking what convenience is to labour. All you must
do is reject all that baggage of education, moral struggle and
"overthinking" things, and embrace the banal.
Behind many "Epiphanies", IMHO, is a message to "Let us do your
thinking for you".
I've followed Tim for a good amount of years and the thing that hit me the most was when he talked about using tools for his socials to make sure he never saw the time line.
It made me think, he is happy to use the tool for his own gain, but opening acknowledges that it's bad for him, of course, most people in his situation would be the same, but it made me think, how all of that is mostly for his gain, not what a lot of the content consumers assume, for there gain. It's really just entertainment disguised as something more, might as well just watch Netflix.
Also it's abundantly clear that a lot of these creators don't listen to other podcasts etc, why is that? Being a creator and having a big following is a decent and fun life, but it's completely separate to being a consumer and all these consumers following this content wanting to learn to be more like the person that is creating the content, when the irony is, the biggest step they could take to doing that, is stop consuming it all.
Basically, the timeline was just another word used for the feed.
He didn't want to see the feed that everyone was posting because he knows it just saps your attention / can be toxic, but he wanted the ability to post on other people's feeds so they would see the content he wanted to promote.
I remember being annoyed by way to many "insights" and "words of advice" that sounded plausible but in environments that were way too unattainable for me at the time, hence:
A) Not really plausible at all.
B) Too much self-referential and tautologic.
They pretended too much to be useful good advice but was actually just either show-off of success in disguise (false modesty/success porn) or tautologic; like "To be a multimillionaire just need to spend less than you earn but not earn low enough". Huh? Even a pigeon is smart enough to not need to hear that.
I've never tried to give advice to people in my life since my career is mostly founded on a series of coincidences and lucky breaks. I know that luck factors into a lot of people's experiences, but in my case luck is the foundation of everything I have accomplished outside of school. I've built on top of this foundation, to be sure, but it's like saying fishing is all about waiting for the fish to jump in your boat.
>my career is mostly founded on a series of coincidences and lucky breaks
I think you'll find that's true of a lot of people. Yes, there are people who graduate from a mid-tier school in engineering, go to some large company, work their way up the career ladder, maybe switch to one of two other big companies over time doing more or less the same thing, are reasonable happy and healthy in their personal life, etc. But a lot of people have much more circuitous routes that include barely navigating some difficult situations.
>When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice.
Could you turn this into a social network where people cooperate to do these experiments? It could be used to figure out which ideas are helpful and it could be used to help people when they are stuck implementing an idea.
We could get the government to fund the experiments with research dollars, and build institutions around the country where people run these experiments with young people eager to learn and apply science and get experience with such things. Then the results could be published first in science journals for the other institutions, and then the best ones written up in popular book form for the masses to consume.
Exactly. However, the incentives are different. Academics do not necessarily care about the same questions. They are also not personally affected but just research a topic.
With a social network, people with problems can come up with their own answers. They already do, in existing networks. I think, organizing a social network by research question could be an improvement on the status quo.
Does everything nowadays? I think the analogy to porn at least here is fitting. The idea porn as a word to mean "of no substance, for easy consummation, from morally questionable sources, to make a quick buck off desperate people" quite accurately describes all these "insight gurus", which to me are grifters.
That's not what it means. Look at subreddits like /r/historyporn or /r/earthporn. These do not mean porn in any kind of derogatory sense. It literally means nothing more specific than "lots of content that people like". It really does not carry a derogatory connotation, or at least it is most widely used in positive ways
> It literally means nothing more specific than "lots of content that people like".
I think it's a bit more than that, something like: "lots of content that people like and will waste a ton of time consuming for little hits of dopamine".
I suspect we use 'porn' as a shorthand for 'hypernormal stimuli' and I suspect we have so much of it because humans have fewer evolved defenses against manipulation by hypernormal stimuli on the internet.
Like all things vulgar, they catch on. I dislike it too but it somehow fits the bill just like the original meaning of the word: we’re seeking something and instead we get pseudosomething that leaves us unfullfilled and almost worse off
Because it fits the meaning of what he is trying to convey. Porn, is immediate gratification that makes you feel good at the moment, but doesn't really satisfy the deeper needs you might have.
You can find it in all sorts of places. Here's one in video games: there are a lot of League of Legends videos by a channel called "Skill Capped" that each claim to have "one neat rule" or "5 mistakes to watch out for" to help you get better at the game. The only problem? The "one rule" is something like "don't do this thing unless you know that there's an 80% chance that it'll work" - and that's the hard part, that the video does nothing to help with.
I think that this is another flavor of "insight porn" where the video portrays itself as boiling down something hard into a simple insight - yet that insight is tautological, not useful, and/or skips the hard part.
The key is that you'll see the pros doing it because they can recognize the 80% areas, but if you can't, you shouldn't even try to do it, because you're likely putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Part of the problem is not all games can be broken down into certain definitive chunks you can work on directly (turn-based ones often do have these).
>Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook ... It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good.
Or they really are trying to package their trick in a way that's universally useful, but failing.
Because that's hard. Because people differ widely in the way they see and think. It's SO much easier to assume that they don't. But they do. One size does not fit all.
A truly sciency approach might be the missing link. Firmly establish a common context and such. But that might be tedious and off-putting.
Totally agree with author. I hate the popular books about successful success, like "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I said it to every fan of this bullshit for 10 years maybe.
Actual insight can be tough to hear. No one wants to be told they would be doing better if they had worked their ass at some innovative company early in their career instead of taking an office job with a lower ceiling. Learning they can pull off some "life hack" to become rich will give them a much needed dopamine boost.
There is very little advice that's good, but if you make a living producing content, you gotta get your quota up. The algorithm prioritizes new content. People want something to read every day over coffee, even if there's nothing new to read that's good.
My advice: get lucky.
My insight porn version: 10 easy steps I used to get $500K ARR and how you can do it too