From my personal experience I would say we have this bias not only when it comes to success stories.
One person has done something good or bad. Then all people who are in that specific group must be like this. Think of Politicians. One does something bad they are all bad. One bicycle driver is riding like crazy so lets ban all of them. I had some bad Asian food so Asian food in general must be bad. Country X had a shooting once so it must be a unsafe country.
You can find examples like that everywhere.
It makes sense that we also have that bias when it comes to success stories.
Plus with the social media culture of "Do thing X" and you will be successful.
I see that all around: Write a paper journal and you will be successful. Wake up early and you will be successful. Read a bazillion books a year and you will be successful. Read my book and you will be successful. Listen to that podcast and you will be successful. Start a shitty idea startup and sell it after X years and you will be successful.
In the end success is not only hard work. Its not only doing thing X. It has so many variables and random points that we can't just replicate someones success story.
Just think about it for a second. As a European reading about US success stories. How much does it help? The (business) culture is totally different. Yes the internet makes it kind of easier but still its just not the same.
Also whats different is that you are not starting at the same time, location, community, knowledge and luck/random level.
So yeah its fun to read these success stories but they should not be your guide of how to become successful yourself.
I'm starting to see this for myself and now i'm basically decided to ignore a lot of advice after consuming a lot of it.
Instead just to have a few goals and spend time in reflection to decide if they are still what I want and how that is working for me, what I need to do to get closer to them etc and let that decide the best routines.
So many things I hear that are apparently the answer to everything just doesn't work for me. Lots of popular productivity systems, journaling, getting up early, morning routines etc. I get that they can and do work for a lot of people, but the advise I feel is close to worthless as it matters what works for you and if you use trial and error and a reflective process you can figure that out for yourself, without needing the advice or at least i've heard enough of it to know what my options are now so what I need to do is consume less of that and adjust behaviours in my own life accordingly.
I think it comes down to the basic idea that life is way more complex than we can imagine, there is just so much at play and every little thing affects everything else, everyone works quite different and each environment and situation is also unique, bringing the exact same solutions to those things is silly, the only thing to do is adapt to it along the way, it's the system of evolution, but somehow we forget that and want some magical universal solution to avoid the chaos that the real world brings.
Don't start with all these productivity systems...
I tried them all.
Keeping a second brain for me was just waste of time and being busy with writing stuff down. A quick google search was most often faster.
Journaling after a full journal did not give me anything in return. Just a journal full of crap.
Planing my whole week in a calendar when to do what... Good luck with a child doing that. Specially if you don't have the money for a nanny of sorts. A 5 months old baby gives a shit about your plans.
The only thing that really helped for me when I wanted to write a blog post every week was to do with a friend together and beetling money on who loses will pay a good meal.
That approach is problematic for some people. The depressive pile has already been mentioned, but we also have to consider that some people are less competitive than others. Some people are teachers or nurses until the day they retire. It isn't because they don't have what it takes to be principals or hospital administrators. A good many do so because that's where they see themselves doing the most good. In other cases, it is because they enjoy what they are doing. How many times have we seen developers mention that they feel pressured to go into management or being forced out of the industry as they get older? In other cases it is because people seek a better work-life balance. I left professional life largely due to the constant encroachment of work life on my personal life, and I suspect I am not unique.
There are other things to consider. Everyone who is employed serves a purpose, else they wouldn't be employed. It doesn't matter whether they're that paper pusher who exists solely to ensure everything is documented in the remote case of legal issues or the person who spawns a company that goes on to employ thousands of people. Sure, the latter feels more meaningful than the former, but that says more about our society than anything else (e.g. the failure of people to do their job, people wilfully breaking the law, frivolous or malicious litigation). Why should one group have more success when everyone is making a contribution?
Another thing to consider: in a world of large corporations that employ hundreds or thousands of people, a disproportionate number of people are at the bottom of the hierarchy. In a world of small businesses, there is hope of rising up the ranks, inheriting or buying out the business, or of setting out on your own. In a world of large corporations, there is only so much movement you can do and the form of competition to move up may not reflect the personality of those who are qualified.
My problem is that is has always been extremely difficult to find a competitive partner. Most people that are willing to compete for motivation fall into the three below categories.
1. Are already so far ahead that they just like having people to push the "I win" button on and there is no way to beat them. You can see how online games are ruined by cheaters to get a feel how many people do this.
2.People that are so unhealthy hyper competitive that they will ruin their life to "win" against you. Going as far as to sacrifice personal health/finance and general life balance just to game whatever the competition is.
3.Say they want to compete then do nothing.
There is also the initial problem of finding someone that is roughly at the same place in life as you to compete with for motivation. People have various differences that can make huge handicaps, health,money, kids, pets, parents, education, career, housing.
> Another great motivator is being told you will never be able to do something, which gives fuel to the motivation in the form of spite.
Very American of you. :P
For people already struggling this only adds depression to the bigger depressive pile, FYI.
Perspectives, we all need them. People can be beaten down to a level where every single adversity is putting them back to bed, unwilling to get out for the next day or two.
Sure, but they have bigger problems and hopefully are seeking professional help not thinking about advanced productivity techniques like this thread is about.
For most people this is a perfectly fine point. This trend of "but wait this won't work for this particular group" in online conversation isn't useful.
This obviously wasn't directed at heavily depressed people or people struggling it was directed at otherwise normally functioning people trying to have an edge.
Apologies, I didn't mean to ruin your argument by citing groups and circumstances to which it doesn't apply.
I mostly meant to question your definition of normally functioning people. IMO from a lifetime of observations the normal state of your average human is being passive, not learning, not improving, and not changing their life situation. Hence my comment. Sorry that it was worded a bit poorly.
You probably meant "your normal functioning human that also wants to improve their life", I assume.
Competition is only healthy if a reasonable baseline of safety nets exist for those who lose the competition. We don't have those safety nets most of the time and it leads indirectly to harmful consequences for those involved, making it far from healthy.
You're definitely right, advice shouldn't be taken as gospel. We definitely need to have some sort of self reflection and analysis to figure out if things are benefiting the things that really matter most to us
3. they more often than not are hyperthymiacs (related to #2).
4. they produce unlimited amounts of self-generated morale (related to #3).
5. they are stress tolerant (related to #4)
6. they are healthier in general (related to all of the above)
I don't know very many successful people with numerous chronic health conditions that impair their cognition to the point of debility, who are asleep 16 hours a day, constantly depressed and demotivated and break down at the first sight of adversity.
> 1. they are rarely stupid
not all of them but the tendency:
a) Influencer
b) pornstars
c) tv stars
> 2. they often sleep a lot less
> 3. they more often than not are hyperthymiacs (related to #2).
I asked that all of my bosses they do sleep as much as I or any other healthy person.
> 4. they produce unlimited amounts of self-generated morale (related to #3).
Internal and External motivation is a thing but sure a depressed person will probably be not successful. It does not mean that Internal motivated person will be successful or that it even helps. I would like to see some evidence for that.
> 5. they are stress tolerant (related to #4)
Again some evidence that this is a general treat would be nice.
> 6. they are healthier in general
Not really the heart attack risk in C Level or management or related positions is very high. We just don't talk about dead people anymore. Steve Jobs is the outlier here.
> I don't know very many successful people with numerous chronic health conditions that impair their cognition to the point of debility, who are asleep 16 hours a day, constantly depressed and demotivated and break down at the first sight of adversity.
Because they are either dead or don't want to be know or we just don't want to talk about them because they don't fit our perfect world view.
Also the person you are describing needs help a lot of it and I don't see how this proves that the opposite would lead to success.
This is the dumbest thing I read in a while. It doesn’t account for survivor bias. How many people met all those criteria and failed? It could be that for every million with those characteristics, only 1 succeeded.
The list doesn't appear to be meant as a formula free of bias, rather just commonalities. So folks who lack those traits may be statistically less likely to succeed.
Interesting that the criteria come from being born that way and/or the outcome of a low stress and loving childhood. Neither of which a person can control for themselves.
If you look at the GP comment they replied to (quote below), it‘s fairly clear that they didn’t mean this to be a recipe that will make you successful, but simply commonalities that may make success more likely.
> Doing what successful people do increases your odds of success.
Sleeping less doesn't mean much if you're born in a remote village in Africa or China where clean water is a luxury, in a toxic family where not being beaten up and having a stable psyche is a requirement if you want to act out your potential at school.
You don't choose whether you're depressed or not. It's absurd to me that in 2022 you're saying that learning that successful people are not depressed is an actionable advice that people can learn from.
You didn't mention what might be the most important things successful people have to get them there: a good support network of other successful people, and a good safety net to catch them if they fail (sometimes the same network). I think you can scratch away everything on that list and the network (family, friends, colleagues, etc.) could still help you be successful.
It's like a game where some people get a copy with infinite save/load and helper bots, while others get the raw version where their subscription ends after the first failure. So if I told you "being a successful gamer is about having the patience to load again and again until you manage to hit your target" you'd think I'm crazy, your copy already deactivated after the first missed shot.
The starting conditions are so varied that choosing to define successful people just by looking at the person and nothing else is more of a personality cult exercise than an objectively useful one [0]. And it's no surprise, most successful people love to make that success only about themselves.
Winning genetic lottery is a lot less debatable, and really was just a red herring to point out the role her majesty the Fortune plays in our lives from even before we are born.
I looked up Hyperthymic/hyperthymia, so you don't have to...:
Hyperthymic temperament, or hyperthymia ... is a proposed personality type characterized by an exceptionally, or in some cases, abnormally positive mood and disposition. It is generally defined by increased energy, vividness and enthusiasm for life activities, as opposed to dysthymia.
> I don't know very many successful people with numerous chronic health conditions that impair their cognition to the point of debility
You'd be surprised to find out how many highly successful creatives are bipolar. Britney Spears for instance infamously went through a very public manic episode a number of years ago. Bipolar disorder definitely fits the bill for a "chronic health conditions that impair their cognition to the point of debility".
I sleep a lot. A lot. Sleeping more than 12 hours is no problem for me. Unsurprisingly, I'm also rather hypothymiac (it runs in the family). I consider myself very successful, and others do as well.
More importantly, I also never felt that my large amount of sleep was working against me in that. Almost the opposite actually, as I can "sleep off" depression, minor sicknesses, general bad mood etc.
There are many very successful people with chronic mental health conditions that at times impair their cognition to the point of debility. Like, re-read your comment with Simone Biles in mind, who is arguably the most successful gymnast ever but did spend extensive time constantly sleeping while depressed and demotivated and broken down. Quoting her, "At one point I slept so much because, for me, it was the closest thing to death without harming myself. It was an escape from all of my thoughts, from the world, from what I was dealing with."
You can't deny that Vincent van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Virginia Woolf, Robin Williams, Marylin Monroe, Chester Bennington, Ernest Hemmingway and many others were successful despite their struggles, and those are just those for whom those internal struggles resulted in something obvious to the public. For physical issues, there's Avicii who got quite successful while touring with many serious health problems. In the field of business we have to remember that for currently active entrepreneurs there are strong incentives to hide any issues (e.g. Elon Musk has years earlier admitted struggles with depression and/or bipolar disorder, but IMHO we won't get reliable information about their extent until after he retires or dies), but there are earlier examples like Ted Turner, founder of CNN; and of course there's the famous case of Aaron Swartz as a cofounder of Reddit. Here's a study https://www.michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_files/Are%20Entre... showing that entrepreneurs have a higher rate of mental health conditions than the general public.
So I believe that your argument is based on false expectations.
I can think of at least one highly successful person (Creator of several household name open source projects), who has dealt with rather serious chronic health conditions throughout their life. Won't name names since it's a somewhat sensitive subject.
For an example from the business world that is a matter of public record, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in 2003 and he still had an active role in the development of the iPhone and iPad before eventually dying in 2011.
Yeah, seriously! Besides my own personal productivity, I also noticed in college that the amount of sleep my dormmates got correlated well with academic success, moreso than class attendance did. Of course it could be that those who struggled just had to stay up later, but I'm pretty convinced there was a terrible feedback loop in play.
I know at least 5 people who are fairly stupid but were at the right place, the right evening, the right dinner and spoke with the right people.
They all retired at 35 with tens of millions after taxes. They can coast on these savings for 10 years if they live lavishly and if they close all their businesses tomorrow.
They weren't stupid in 2-3 regards, yeah. For everything else that I chatted with them I'd call them stupid and be very confident in my opinion.
IQ is only important in the reverse direction: i.e. if it's below a certain minimum. From one point and on, whether you are e.g. at 100 or 170 doesn't matter much.
> 2. they often sleep a lot less
It's surprising that in 2022 we're still romanticizing this. Even young and energetic people can be severely debilitated by maintaining 4-5 hours of sleep a day for some mere 3 to 6 months (and I've experienced this myself, and I've seen it in dozens of acquaintances and colleagues).
The most resilient person to lack of sleep I've met is myself. I maintained a crazy sleep schedule AND was unhealthy for 13 or so years. Eventually it catches up with you. I actually understood my cognition got impaired one day, panicked, then took deep breaths and start putting myself back on track. This was 6-9 months ago and from then on I keep getting better and better at my job (again) and I heal gradually.
"Sleep less"... just no. This meme should die for good.
Seems that you bought the entrepreneur propaganda books.
> 3. they more often than not are hyperthymiacs (related to #2).
It helps if you're born that way but you can also cultivate it with diet and exercise. Or, you can be cautious and strategic and still succeed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 5. they are stress tolerant (related to #4)
Same as sleep, this is very temporary. Be exposed to stress and uncertainty for a year and it will break you.
You might be confusing "stressful situations because you might actually live under a bridge and feed off of trash cans if you keep failing" with "uncertain situations in which the person thrives, because they are a gambler by heart, but they have a safety net or investors" here.
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Sure chronic depression doesn't help but you should also account for the fact that too many failures can and do lead to depression as well. Most success advice completely ignores survivor bias and that's a shame because it ruins the chances of a good quality discussion.
I really just tried to describe a hyperthymiac in detail (they need less sleep). They have a lot of traits that help to compete. Some I’ve known worked for decades under enormous amounts stress that would probably kill most, but without any visible impact on the hyperthymiac in question. And it was all on 5 hours of sleep per days. For 20 years straight.
The larger point that everyone missed is none of these attributes are under your control. In this case, its just blessed genetics. Not sure if that’s what they tell you in books: “make sure to win at genetics” lol.
Luck factor is huge. Genetics. Early life events. Family environment. country you live in. Family connections. After that - your ability to execute on the hand the fate dealt to you.
But even that, the ability to execute, isn’t entirely under your control. Some will be untouchable simply because genetics.
This doesn’t meant one should never try, quite the opposite.
Haha, you definitely got me. Thanks for clarifying!
> Not sure if that’s what they tell you in books: “make sure to win at genetics” lol.
Nobody ever will. As Jenifer Lopez was singing:
"Life can be cruel in a way that I can't explain
And I don't think that I could face it all again"
Most people, after they move past the critical mass phase and start amassing money / assets / other-forms-of-wealth and insure themselves to be never poor ever again, will NEVER admit the role of luck, genetics, connections, rich family etc.
It is how it is. I wish them well and I am happy they made it. But I grew tired of the memes and delusions that many of them often spit out.
I actually knew a couple: a former elite prostitute/escort and her former pimp. They made a ton of money by pimping her to rich guys, she managed to get extra payments from them, gained some connections, arranged partner businesses with some of them, did a lot of money (probably shady but happily I never inquired further and I really don't care) and at one point she started acting as if she was such a shrewd clever businessman and that her success was all but preordained and the was sooooo smart that she almost made it sound as if she planned it from childhood. I kid you not, she was extremely full of herself and was looking down on literally anybody who is below the social ladder than her.
She was so hilariously out of touch that I couldn't help but laugh out loud at one point, which predictably led to losing the acquaintance. I don't regret it, I don't need such people in my life.
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So yeah, I am aware hyperthymiacs exist, I am only saying everything has a limit. One notable example is a guy who finally broke at 68-70. I seriously have no clue how was he healthy and ambitious literally from 14 years old all the way to 70 while almost never sleeping more than 4-5 hours. But they are genetic flukes as you said. I still believe we the regular humans can achieve a lot with 16-17 waking hours.
Successful people often need less sleep than what’s considered the norm. 5 hours for them is 8 hours for most people. Same with stress, stress tolerance is above the norm.
They’ve won the genetic lottery.
Not every successful person has these traits of course. But enough to see a pattern.
Sure, biologically needing less sleep is certainly an advantage. But in the context of this thread it is a bad example. There are some things common among successful people that are feasible to do and would increase odds of success. The reason "sleep less" is dangerous is because it is feasible to do, but it is not going to be helpful for the majority of people. If you are someone that functions best on 7 hours a night and you start pushing yourself sleeping 5, you will notice some cognitive decline, and very well could be decreasing your odds of success.
Stress tolerance is an interesting one, because there's definitely a huge innate component but there also are ways to improve your stress tolerance behaviorally. It's an interesting question for child rearing too, because there is a lot more opportunity to modify stress tolerance during development than in adulthood. How do you give a child the right amount of stress exposure? I imagine it varies a lot between kids.
I will concede there probably are sleep hygiene things that could be done to decrease the amount of sleep needed a bit. But sleep is one of the few things I won't mess around with much any more. Granted if your career is not going well you may be more inclined to roll the dice, but I just consistently find lack of sleep to cause nothing but issues, and I personally haven't discovered anything that allows me to feel rested with < 7 hours.
The time in which one sleeps is not the only variable that matters. I rather have 5 hours of restful, deep sleep than 8 hours of tossing, turning, and waking up every couple of hours. Plus, there are other variables like how close to sleep was your last meal/snack, what time you go to sleep and wake up at, caffeine intake, etc..
Can some people function better on less sleep? Sure, but I would need to see more data on this topic before I believe it is as widespread as I anecdotally hear it.
Are these people that need less sleep actually performing better, or they do they merely believe that because they are inhibited by their lack of sleep? I am pretty sure there have been studies observing this effect. One "thinks" they are performing better, but reality begs to differ.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger keeps saying: "Stop saying you don't have time. You have."
IMO it's really not about sleeping less. It's about optimizing your day and, provided you're full of energy and enthusiasm, you can slice and dice every 15-minute segment of your day to do something productive.
It's crazy, really. On some of my very good days (I am changing diet and do some exercise but the effects are sporadic) I was able to be productive on my computer and phone for 14-15 hours straight, with only toilet breaks and quickly gulping some snacks in the meantime. On these days I do catch up with stuff that's been eating at me for the last 6-8 weeks...
So yeah, I don't disagree that if you're very efficient you can achieve a lot. And I do agree with Arnold and many others who say that people complain about the wrong thing because we really very often do have the time. But it's hard for me to agree that systemically depriving yourself of sleep is good.
Sure, there are such things as the genetic lottery indeed. But it only takes you so far. Believe me, I've seen some rather perfect-seeming humans crash and burn, hard, around their 37-43 year old mark. In the end, you're abusing a resource that you are given genetically. Sooner or later it's depleted. We're no terminators with nuclear batteries.
But hey, if you are that genetic prodigy AND manage to make it big before your body starts catching up with the fact that it's Homo Sapiens and not an Asgardian... then more power to you, really. I was stupid enough not to use my youth and now I have to practice an olympic pentathlon (figuratively) just so I can break even in life. But complaints get us nowhere. Trying to change food, trying to exercise more, trying to reduce distractions and negative emotions etc. And it works.
Bezos famously sleeps 8 hours a night. Personally I like getting good rest but I also find my most productive moments are when sleep deprived or in the midst of insomnia.
Even the simple act of trying will improve your odds of success. Some basic strategies:
1. stay in school
2. don't do drugs
3. don't do crimes
If you want to be a pro basketball player, your odds will improve if you practice playing basketball. Want to be a guitar god? Get a guitar and start practicing. Every guitar god I've heard of have one thing in common - they played a lot, for many many years, before breaking through.
Doing nothing pretty much guarantees you won't get what you want.
This isn't rocket science.
> What do you mean by loser?
Doesn't matter what my personal definition is. I bet you have your own personal definition of a loser. You'll increase your odds of becoming one by doing what they do.
Many guitar gods use drugs, Walt Disney and Bill Gates did not stay in school, and people like Mike Tyson and Kevin Mitnick were successful after comitting crimes.
There's just too many variables in life that make success more about luck than following general guidelines.
I think the confusion here is in part because success is so nebulous a term.
Consider success in the stock market, that’d be getting significantly better returns than the vast majority of people. Success in general is the same thing. If you don’t “beat the market” ie the average by a significant margin, you don’t really standout from the crowd as a success. Like the stock market: there is not general recipe that when followed will make you successful. That doesn’t mean there aren’t general things you can do to improve your odds of success, a simple proof of this is considering the negative: if you killed yourself youd lower your chances of finding success, so not killing yourself helps. Same with not getting locked up in jail, not murdering people, etc
Another fact is: success is not entirely luck else rich people (if that’s what we’re calling success) wouldn’t have so much in common. That doesn’t mean rich people and poor people are two different species, but clearly there are traits and behaviors that tend to increase your success odds.
If it’s a recipe you’re looking for, not that I’m all that successful, I’d say: know what you want to achieve, and devote significant time, effort, and thought towards achieving it, taking advantage of every opportunity you can, learning as much as possible, deliberate seek out luck filled situations like meeting new people, and be adaptable. If you do that for long enough and you aren’t successful, then a revolution is called for.
The bill gates example always gets rolled out for some reason, he's an outlier. For most people, if they are at a good university, doing something they are good at, then graduating is probably a good idea. Bill gates made a calculated decision, Paul Allen persuaded him that they were about to miss out on the micro computer revolution. If you look at what bill gates accomplished as an under grad, there is a strong argument that he wasn't going to gain anything from staying on (Google the pancake problem bill gates). One of his professors remarked to a colleague that some kid bill is probably the smartest person he has ever met.
In short defining bill gates as a college drop out is a ridiculously narrow view. I'm guessing most people who drop out aren't on a path to success.
Wasn't his very affluent private high school one of the first schools in the nation to have a computer at the time? Again, this kind points back to something another post said about how one's success (in terms of monetary achievement) is strongly correlated to one's parental success. I mean, his mother held a high position in IBM at the time, and his father was a very successful lawyer while living in Seattle, Washington (a then, current affluent area of the US).
I'm not saying he wasn't some genius, or wasn't driven, or wasn't better than most in some way.
I just notice the part about Gates growing up in the ghettos of Baltimore or growing up in a trailer park in the deep, rural South, working multiple jobs while in high school just to survive, etc. is missing for him success story. Same goes for Musk, Jobs, etc.. Wealth doesn't guarantee success, but...
Wealth => greater % of better opportunities => greater % chance of being successful.
Luck plays a large role -- lucky to be intelligent, lucky to be rich, lucky to be in good health, lucky to be born in the right place, etc.. People hate to admit it because it takes away from their egocentric identities, but if Gates grew up in a poor rice farming village in Vietnam at the same time he grew up, we wouldn't be talking about him right now.
It's an outlier, but Gates is far from the only prominent figure in tech who dropped out. It's a whole dang cliche at this point- Jobs, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Dorsey, Dell, Kalanick, Gabe Newell, Jan Koum of WhatsApp all dropped out. Even Page dropped out of his PhD program! Not to mention dropouts from other industries, from Richard Branson to Henry Ford.
This reoccurring pattern in tech is probably why Thiel came up with his whole "don't go to college" narrative.
If you're talking about "success" as in getting a job, having a gapless resume, good background check, good credit, fitting the corporate mold, becoming the "organization man," etc., then you need to a college degree.
However, this is not a path to the _kind_ of success Bill Gates had, which has to do with getting in early on some new field's new monopoly.
Focus on the common traits not a few outliers. Also some people had success despite certain behaviours they engaged in, or started those after reaching success.
These responses just make me laugh. Do you really think you're going to improve your odds of success by failing to complete high school? from prison? desperately searching for your next drug fix?
It probably does, but it's not something you can affect, so not really of note when discussing what you can do to increase you odds of succeeding in something, which is what he was doing.
It's also worth noting that the advice applies to people born wealthy too. You aren't likely to become a guitar god without practice even if you have money. It just might be easier to find the time to actually practice.
> not really of note when discussing what you can do to increase you odds of succeeding in something
It's because it chips away at people's egos. It hurts people to realize how much of their success was pure luck. It's hard to look down on others that way. Same with intelligence -- no one chooses their intelligence, so I find it odd when people boast about their borderline-pseudo-science-better-than-you-score, I mean, IQ score.
What is the story about the emerald mining, abused Zambian worker who turned into billionaire who started their own space program again? Right, it wasn't that person, but the son of the family that owned the mines that started his own space program (Musk).
> It's also worth noting that the advice applies to people born wealthy too. You aren't likely to become a guitar god without practice even if you have money. It just might be easier to find the time to actually practice.
I completely agree. One has to use what is given to them, but it's a lot easier to use an ability when one has an opportunity.
I can't remember who, but a highly talented and famous musician , was once asked, "Who do you think the greatest <instrument> player of all time is?" He said, "It was probably some kid in a 3rd-world factory who never got to hold an instrument in their life."
I mean, I'm not going to dispute there's a massive amount of luck that goes into almost everyone's success, but I also think in many (probably even the vast majority) of cases, luck is just going to give you the opportunity, and drive and keeping on track as much as you can is what lets you take advantage of those opportunities.
The difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged is how many times those opportunities knock (or if you're really advantaged, kicks your door down and basically carries you).
Many people that have succeeded have a hard time accepting that it might not have been all their own drive and ambition and actions that account for where they ended up, because to be consistent with their view of themselves that might lead them to give some of their good fortune to others, and there's a lot of mental biases to prevent people from accepting that.
At the same time, many people that aren't succeeding have a hard time accepting that perhaps their own actions have played a large role in why some past opportunities never panned out. In the end, for your personal growth it's best to focus on what you can affect, which is not your birth circumstances and how that might affect you negatively (not to ignore it, but don't let it prevent forward movement). For society, we should look at both.
What's their definition of "millionaire"? Thanks to inflation it is now possible to become one just by virtue of having a household of two white collar workers, each making 150k annually, no kids, no cars - after a decade or two you cross 1M USD net worth.
I think it is helpful to define "millionaire" in 1920s dollars ($20M today)
It's been a long time since I've read the book, but I remember the average millionaire household they surveyed only having a single income of $70k or something.
It doesn't surprise me that there can be a lot of movement among the lower to upper middle class brackets. I suspect where the unfairness is really apparent is the bottom 20% or so. What are expected adulthood earnings for kids that grow up below the poverty line?
Once you restrict your stats to those that stay in school and don't do drugs, I'd think it is hard to correct for other causes. Like the presence of involved parents.
Actually location is the most important indicative of success in life. So if you were born in the USA you already won such a lottery that it completely dwarfs the rest of influences on your chances of success.
As to rich parents - that can't be an important indicator, just by considering how many more rich people are in the current generation compared to the previous one: who helped them?!
> how many more rich people are in the current generation compared to the previous one
Fewer isn't it? There is _increasing_ inequality.
Anyway, it's structural, whether the social systems deliver the economic product to a smaller number or larger number of people. It's not down to differences between individuals receiving or not receiving the product.
You do realize you're defending the position of "let's increase your odds from 0.001% to 0.5%", right?
You are kind of citing baseline expectations and not success boosters here.
Additionally, to play basketball for "many, many years", somebody has to pay your bills in the meantime. A luxury that most of the world does not have -- namely you being able to go all-in on your dream. Rent is still due next month.
Indeed, and exactly. But the "many, many years" part to me kind of implies that you can be now 30+ and still mainly do basketball and trying to break through. Which is sadly unrealistic if you haven't got a job or parents willing to support you for that long.
I hate to be the grim adult but reality does set in at one point and you have to accept you've missed your (probably generously big) window of opportunity and move on.
> Get a guitar and start practicing. Every guitar god I've heard of have one thing in common - they played a lot, for many many years, before breaking through.
Sure but they also got talent and were the exception and your view is biased. The ods of becoming a guitar god are very low and of course they are lower if you don't play the guitar but thats not the point. If I would just practice like one of these guitar gods the chance of becoming one is still really really really low.
> Doesn't matter what my personal definition is. I bet you have your own personal definition of a loser. You'll increase your odds of becoming one by doing what they do.
Sure if you compare doing nothing to doing something yeah you don't have to be a genies to understand that doing something is usually better. But just doing something will not bring you closer to success. its like 0.00% chance vs 0.00000001% chance. yeah the later one is bigger but that's it.
More important then going to school is learning
More important then not doing drugs is understanding how to eat healthy
Not doing crimes is such an odd thing to mention here.
I know your definition of a loser... a kid who does drugs and stops going to school. not that hard to figure that out. But maybe there are reasons why that kid takes drugs. Probably because to start with that from the start and later on we don't have the same play field. Not getting a job because you live on the wrong street is a thing not only in the US just to name one example.
I didn't say work hard. Nor did I say it will be fine. I said it IMPROVES THE ODDS OF SUCCESS.
> they also got talent
I don't buy that. When I was younger, I enjoyed competitive ballroom dancing. I was terrible at it, but I kept at it for years, and finally was able to get on the floor in a competition with the good dancers. I'd get complimented on my "talent". What a laugh. Talent is good for about 1%. The other 99% comes from working at it.
> doing something is usually better. But just doing something will not bring you closer to success.
You just contradicted yourself.
> Not doing crimes is such an odd thing to mention here
Considering the number of people in jail who thought it was a good idea, it seems an obvious thing to mention.
Dropping out and doing drugs is a choice. Odds of being a success dim considerably if you take that route.
But it isn't my definition of a loser. If you read my posts consistently, a loser is a person who believes he does not have agency in his life. They drift along, never trying, always making excuses, always blaming bad luck. Their journey through life is predictable.
You can always tell the winners, too. He may be poor, middle class, or wealthy. But he's always excited to face the next day, always has ideas he's working on, always fun to talk to, never dwells on past failures, and most importantly, takes responsibility for his life - the good and the bad.
So scammers like MLM/Gurus/Influencers and the rest are seen als winners.
Still they are what they are scammers.
That single person responsibility thing is nice in theory but breaks really fast in the real world.
Yes it works for people who already had a great start and they can decide.
But that for me is a pretty middle class western world view and has led to were we are now.
If that is good or bad I don't know but could it be better? Sure.
First we need to understand that sometimes things are not in our hands.
Sometimes the system is rigged against us (not always).
If we then start to make the play field fair for everybody then your theory would work but I don't see this happening in the next 10 years.
>Just work hard and it will be fine. Which if you look was never true.
I don't know, but I still think the first strategy beats the hell out of the alternative: "don't do anything and wait for life to pamper you" - because it won't.
Life is a fight and one's attitude, while not the only factor, will go quite far towards determining the outcome. A can-do attitude, optimistic and oriented towards success will often encourage a person to take the necessary steps and gambles.
While a victim mentality, a losing attitude will discourage a person and make it lose the fight before even starting.
I mean these sound nice in a book or in a blog post but in real life.
Attitude to fight everybody and be better then everybody can lead to being alone because nobody wants to be your friend or only as long as you have money or other stuff.
Yes some people have victim mentality but again just because someone has a winning attitude does not mean he/she will win.
The odds are bigger of course if you do something but again how much? from 0.001 to 0.002? or 0.05? Just doing stuff is most often not a better advise then doing nothing.
Its more important to do the thing that brings you near to your goal. Which these days is taking hack after life hack. Which usually only benefits the people selling you stuff.
What about the person who has to work 2 jobs? yes they still can learn that 1 hour when they have a break.
But in most of the definitions they would be a looser which they are not.
Sometimes it is the systems fault.
Sometimes it is random luck or misfortune.
What has a bigger impact on you being healthy and wealthy then doing hard work?
Your parents being healthy and wealthy.
If you look at studies this is the biggest impact not working hard.
If you put in the work on guitar, your odds of having some kind of success are very high.
The degree of success is often largely beyond your control. Maybe it'll be weekly shows at the local Holiday Inn. Maybe it'll be the cover of Rolling Stone. That part of it doesn't correlate to the amount of effort all that much.
But having any success vs having no success is very largely correlated to the amount of work you put in.
Get a guitar and start practicing is so delusional.
The guitarist Buckethead is a great example. He isn't just great on guitar, he also wears a mask and KFC bucket on his head and is good with nunchucks. The idea "talent" and hard work wins out in the end is just complete bullshit.
Marketing is far far more important. That seems incredibly obvious.
The idea of talent and hard work is some kind of Christian residual value that is still hanging around even though marketing dominates in literally every domain in the modern world.
If you want success you need to find your KFC bucket, mask and nunchucks because most domains can't really be differentiated by the actual task at hand.
This only works if your peers aren't following the same strategy of maximizing potential otherwise they would just cut you out for being the least successful friend.
Also European, and would like to point out that the major difference is the investor cash available to startups comparing to places like Silicon Valley.
Its not even about being a European. Its about the notion to become successful and start a company you need to go and raise VC.
Its a story that was sold to the world so that the dealflow is generated. Go change the world they say, go and chase your dreams of a better world... Honestly that got me into severe depression. I am not bitter, just stating the obvious that we have been sold a narrative via hustle porn media and that narrative served well.
Now time for a wake up call, all us 300k wantepreneurs cannot generate unicorns and produce a successful exit. That is just statistically impossible.
I don’t think it’s just a question of money, as far as Europe goes it’s still also very much a question of the legal and cultural “frameworks” that inhibit SV style ecosystems from forming.
The availability of cash is a factor for sure but it’s not necessary the main cause. And you can see this with some of the less developed European countries where the lack of incumbent large employers, large unions and as well as a weaker social security net do often lead to them being more entrepreneurial than some others.
And it’s also very important to distinguish between “tech” and startups.
Ireland been very successful at attracting large tech companies but it’s startup scene is still pretty poor. Whilst Eastern European and Baltic states are somewhat opposite.
On the other hand you have countries like Israel that managed to attract both whilst being pretty much at risk of war since it’s inception.
It’s also important to note that there are many paths to success, Europe found a path even if it doesn’t include startups at the same level as the US or other countries. And while it’s also clear that in some cases it does hurt them in the long term as evident by the current dominance of US tech giants it doesn’t mean that the only way out of that is to adopt the SV model.
It’s not just the money. If you announce that you are going to found a tech startup people will think that you are just going to play Space Invaders (mind, not COD or FIFA) all day and stop having showers. If there’s a chance in 200 for an American that a relative will give them some money to bootstrap the company, in Europe is even less likely that your partner or family will take you seriously.
In some European countries it is extremely expensive to found companies. In Italy 5-10K€ would maybe cover all your bureaucratic costs for the first year vs 10-20£ in the UK (or 1K£ if you hire an accountant).
In Italy the government may prevent you from selling your company to foreign entities if it is deemed “strategic”, using the so-called “Golden Power”. What is a “strategic” company is so ill-defined, that it could be applied to any company way before it reaches unicorn status or even relevance.
Its the amount of money, willingness to invest at all and in what to invest.
Sometimes the investors want to be like Silicon Valley investors but yeah its like with the success stories they have read about it but not experienced it.
Great points and with that, I would say with that success, in my opinion, should be far more an internally derived metric than an external one. Sure, material success is one form of achievement in life. However, there are so many other forms of success (e.g., parenthood, safety, etc). FOMO is real and sometimes people measure themselves so harshly against the accomplishments of others that they fail to acknowledge their own successes in life.
I have a theory that a huge amount of what contributes to success, and effective advice for people seeking success, boils down to the placebo effect. If I'm right, the content of what success stories encourage us to do matters much less than how well we expect it to work.
I'm unsure how widely I should share that theory, since naming a placebo robs it of its power...
Nobody writes it, but it's okay to have average job, with average life and average family as long as you can enjoy your life! Why burden yourself with idea of success and setting expectations. At this point I am sure life doesn't give anything unless you look for it. And even if you seek, there is no guarantee. So I think it's waste of energy.
My experience so far.
I am really glad that I learned how stability is necessary in life.
I have been led into this "work and be successful" bias my reading PG's essay, story about motivated dropouts, Outlier's etc. I thought putting hours was enough to be successful! But nah, nothing is possible without some play of luck. Luck feels like multiplier.
Therefore, now that old perspective has changed, I am able to see completely new perspective. Instead of startup I look for long term careers. Instead of chasing money, I chase my own curiosity with optimism. I accepted that I amount to nobody!!
The beauty of this approach is I can let go of "I must do something important" mentality and explore anything which may sound super dumb and useless to society. For example, the other day I was looking into Gameboy architecture, one day GDB. That day I learnt you can record and replay programs in GDB! They don't teach this at college.
The hindsight is I get to enjoy the life! To me enjoying my life is being successful ;)
It's exactly this, i've been thinking about this a lot lately.
I mean who is 'anybody' anyway. People talk about legacy, but I think it's just ego. They don't want to accept they will be one day gone and nobody cares, so they want to build something they think will extend there life beyond that.
But does it really matter anyway? Even the most successful of the successful, does it really matter? What about the person with the statue in the city centre? Does anyone really care? It might be a good looking statue but people generally don't care about that person, they didn't know them etc and this is all that they have become. That person is long gone and knows nothing of there 'legacy'
In the scale of the universe, you and Steve Jobs are of no real difference.
It reminds me of the starfish story, there was a young boy on the beach throwing washed up starfish back into the water, an older man approaches the boy and says 'look at all the starfish on the beach, you won't be able to make any difference, what is the point?' the young boy looks back at the man, throws the next one back and says 'Made all the difference to that one?'
In the scale of the whole universe who cares about you? In the scale of the earth who cares about you? In the scale of your country who cares about you? In the scale of your city who cares about you? In your street, who cares about you? But to the people you directly know and interact with? Who cares about the universe.
Your world is your own. Being 'average' is not really average. You can count and matter extremely by being 'average' to the people around you, rather than trying to be successful and effect things further outside of that, indeed really the only people you will truly matter to are those people, everyone else would just get an illusion of you anyway.
Despite all the messed up things about the world, perhaps of greatest comfort is the things that can make us truly happy are open to most, it's just the things that we think will that have lower availability.
That depends. Do I like my work that has average pay? Do I have a significant other who cares for me, and a loving family? Is the reason that I have an average paying job, because I maintain a range of open-source software projects that are widely used?
From another angle, am I only in an average paying job because I worked hard, and things just didn't work out, and did they abuse their employees and break the law to make money?
I'm not very competitive. I don't give a toss about what my parents or siblings think of how successful I am about my career. Career-wise, I only really care that I know I put in my best effort week-to-week. I don't compare myself to others based on results; I've lost incredible opportunities genuinely due to bad luck, and stumbled into amazing opportunities based on chance.
I had a conversation with my colleague recently on this. We quickly got lost in this complex topic, but what we managed to recognize was that a large part of "success" phenomenon (here, locally) is just a replacement for a social stability and respect. Atomized society loses big chunks of what makes people happy and sure about their position. And having this is much better than e.g. owning an expensive car. But when everyone around gets constantly gaslighted by success and the role of Money, including relatives or potential friends/spouses, it's hard to row against this current. We live in a pretty unstable environment and it requires much more than just a stable money to insure yourself from taking part in this nonsense, sort of a paradoxical feedback loop. I wish I were that guy who has his average successless life planned ahead, but I'm not assigned this privilege.
I fought like a mad man, because I had to try to become rich in shithole country that was busy imploding and erecting discrimination laws against my class of people... so it was not easy, but success already can be quite hard without a bit of luck... I made it... it was insane... yes it is very satisfying to have financial freedom... but oh boy the price I paid, I dunno if I can recommend it. I was the kind of guy who would crawl through broken glass (like Elon said) to get to success. I used to look. down on people who didn't persue their goals or didn't have grand goals... I do not anymore because I know it's not cowardice it could be entirely sensible. The price of. success can be very high. Sometimes too. high. Especially if you value other things that money does not buy. Still, money buys freedom and options. Which for. a creatively driven person who does not fit in well with the world, this is a VERY valuable thing.
I envy the people who can endure the drudgery and boredom of most jobs, and can therefore have stable longterm careers.
I've had a stable, long term, stress free, career working at large 'boring' companies doing high level research projects with very smart people in areas I find fascinating, and that I'm still excited to get to work on. 'Boring' and 'stable' companies still have very cool problems they need to solve.
Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories.
I've been guilty of not trying to talk sense to some of them, so much so that there's one particular marriage break-up related to a stupid tech start up blowing a couples life savings that still haunts me.
And for the record, here's some of the ideas that went down in flames...
- An application like a geo-fenced Wikipedia for Android devices, except without any content worth using and charging 5 bucks/month for it.
- A Flickr/Google maps mash up, again charging customers for a product that's executed much better, and free, elsewhere.
- A health start-up targeting a condition that affects 1 in 100k people, usually quite mildly and benignly, but involves surgically implanting a device onto a nerve in the jaw.
- A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.
Bootstrapping is for fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company. The issues with bootstrapping:
1) No one to tell you to give up except your own survival instinct.
2) You've already told yourself to ignore that survival instinct because of the success stories you've heard.
3) Even if your idea is fantastic, there is another group of folks out there who have raised enough money to pay themselves working on the same thing. You are now under-resourced and already losing.
I about 90% regret bootstrapping my first, failed startup. The other 10% I managed to make into a great opportunity to learn a lot and expand my network but I suppose I could have done that much more cheaply.
Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company.
That definitely isn't true. Tens of thousands of companies are bootstrapped every year. Some go on to be quite successful (Github, GoPro, Apple...).
You won't find all that many bootstrapped business founders posting on HN (it's run by an investment company...) but that doesn't mean they're not out there. Plus, due to the changing landscape of VC investing, most deals require a bit of traction before you even get a Series A. You have to bootstrap before many VCs will talk to you. There's also angel money, family and friends, etc, but getting that while you're pre-revenue is still much harder than proving the business is at least a bit viable first.
Aren’t all those examples “day X profitable” startups? As in startups that had a profitable business model from day 1 and it only took them some share of the market to become profitable after an initial loss (usually operational). GitHub was making money in their very first year.
Many startups these days follow the “never profitable” business model in the hopes of being bailed out by angel investors or IPO.
I’d say it’s definitely possible to bootstrap when your profit grows along with your business. Not possible when you burn money every single day forever.
Take those assumptions and spend a year burning your savings. Once you see that all your competitors raised at least a few hundred k pre-product while you’ve got a hole burning in your pocket, you’ll feel like an idiot.
If you run an already profitable business like a services company, you can get away with bootstrapping. But then it’s not really bootstrapping, it’s a pivot.
We've been bootstrapping our weird tech/bio/techbio startup for the last four years... it's NOT EASY at all, but we've made it to the point that we're ramen profitable (For now) and it's kind of an amazing feeling.
Of course I'm making like 1/5 I would at a tech company, but we're literally saving people's lives, and that really makes up for not making as much.
You may not want to hear this but four years is way too long to reach ramen profitability and it’s not a good signal for future success of that startup.
Could you please state a source or elaborate your reasoning? That is a very bold claim, especially since biotech in particular has quite high costs. Note also that the objectives may be different (e.g. save more lives, versus maximize profits early).
> Bootstrapping is fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company
This conflates people who haven't raised external funding and people who actively put money into a startup. It is possible to bootstrap a startup without plowing money into the business.
It's true that bootstrapped founders are plowing time into their business, but this is true of funded founders as well. VC money may pay a handsome salary, but taking it often means that you have to vest shares that you would otherwise own outright.
I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that the large majority of successful businesses are either bootstrapped or use traditional loans as funding. The stats don't work out any other way - several hundred thousand new businesses are started in the US each year, but only a fraction that number could possibly be angel or VC funded. Your perspective only applies to a narrow slice of SaaS businesses.
That's the thing with business advice. You can give advice with good intentions but there is almost certainly someone out there who took the opposite of said advice and became successful.
Bootstrap or don't bootstrap. You can be successful either way but it's the nuances, timing, context, chance, etc. that matter.
Nope, this was from the same supplier as used by the supermarket. In fairness to them it might have been one day fresher than the stuff you get in the shop alright.
But they sell wild caught salmon and grocery stores sell farmed salmon.There is a significant difference in quality. In fact most farmed salmon are dyed red to more closely resemble wild salmon
A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.
There's a few online fish companies here in the UK. They're doing well. It might be easier because British people are slightly obsessed with Scottish salmon, and the country is much smaller which makes overnight delivery simpler.
Nonsense, a bad foundational idea sets a start-up back so much that it makes a failure so much more likely. Most don't have the runway to pivot away to something that works.
And if you think that businesses failing are some abstract concept completely removed from any personal impact then it shows why these success stories are a problem.
It's less prevalent and more unwelcome to hear about the marriages breaking up, the homes having to be sold, and the mental issues brought about through the businesses failing. It happens though. And the survivor bias that's reinforced through success stories is a contributing factor.
I always wondered how these kinds of ideas even survived the initial laugh-test. Like, didn't the entrepreneur even have a single friend who could point out how awful and flawed their idea was before they tried to make a serious business out of it?
People used to come to me to validate their horrible business ideas. "Oh, you're a tech guy and you have a business degree! What do you think of my Online Store For Cats idea?" Usually they didn't like what I had to say, and eventually people stopped coming to me for advice. Now I know why these things don't get filtered early. Entrepreneurs tend to be positive and optimistic, and then only surround themselves with other positive, optimistic people. So, now subscription-based juice squeezers make it all the way to production and then people scratch their heads and wonder when they fail.
>Entrepreneurs tend to be positive and optimistic, and then only surround themselves with other positive, optimistic people.
I wonder how to navigate this. Quite frankly, I would not be interested in startups at all if I listened to the negative people in my life (who say to get a stable job, don't take risks). But I also don't really want to fool myself into believing a fundamentally flawed idea would be viable.
Ideas, usually have a strong correlation with failure. Irrespective of the execution.
Ideas are the base theory within which the execution revolves around. If the premise itself is wrong then no amount of execution would solve it. Think windows Phone OS, Google+ etc.
They were pretty incredibly executed products. But never took off because the base premise that another new OS with new APIs and new everything would get developer attention, killed WPos. There was no space for a facebook clone, irrespective of the integration capabilities and good image quality and that killed G+.
Crazy ideas are crazy because even great execution wouldn't be able to save it. ideas and execution need to be complimentary. Saying ideas don't matter is just as wrong as saying executions don't matter.
> even the most crazy idea can become a success - there are tons of examples.
There are multiple orders of magnitude more examples of crazy ideas simply failing (multipl times, as there's only so many crazy ideas but an infinite amount of people thinking they are the first to come across it) than there are of crazy ideas succeeding.
Agreed. That's how restaurants get their seafood and there are tons of seafood delivery companies! Maybe the flaw was this was b2c salmon delivery instead of b2b! ;)
"Absolutely, I've had friends with limited business or tech background pump hard-earned savings into crazy tech startup ideas, precisely because they've read too many of these success stories."
And due to the law of averages one of them will get lucky and be hugely successful from it... then the cycle repeats.
>- A health start-up targeting a condition that affects 1 in 100k people, usually quite mildly and benignly, but involves surgically implanting a device onto a nerve in the jaw.
What's the condition? Seems like a serious intervention for a mild condition?
The first two ideas are pretty cool, but you cannot start charging people money. You need to use the ol' reliable "deploying an app with ads that can be removed after paying some money", at least at start.
Confirmation/survivorship bias thrives when paired together with the illusion of free will.
If we were talking about a philosophical example of an apple tree in a remote closed garden, people would agree that the presence of the apple tree itself is a factor that plays a role to whether you'll eat an apple. No matter how much you can stretch your hand or climb a ladder, if there's no apple tree to climb there's no way you can eat apples no matter how hard you tried.
But the more we increase the complexity (like putting a store that sells apples close to the garden) the more people are willing to believe that it was their own ability that made them eat an apple, and not the access to the tree or the store.
Now increase that complexity even further and the noise will become high enough to make you think that everyone can get the metaphorical apple if they try, which is so dumb that is baffling to me.
I had an argument with a friend over the role things outside of his control played in getting his first job as a self-taught. We almost made this a political argument for absolutely no reason. He felt offended because I was trying to tell him that the country of birth still plays a role on not only how much money you can potentially make but also the ease of access to entry level jobs (unemployment rates are a thing outside of your control).
People would rather romanticize their self-reliance than adjust it by admitting external circumstances as ONLY A FACTOR to their success, to the point where they will feel offended and rather remove you from their life than admit the role of the environment and timing in everything we do.
There's another side to that argument, where we work back from the result of eating an apple. Eating an apple gives us some amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. In the example provided even if there was no apple tree and/or no way to get to the apple tree, the idea that one day we can eat an apple might be something that might in accumulation gives the actor the same kind of enjoyment. From a 3rd party PoV looking at the simulation you might feel bad for the actor because you know there is no apple tree and they are just wasting their time trying to get an apple, but if the actor's reality is based on a hypothetical apple to which they are working towards who are we to deny them that happiness?
Nihilism is easily rejected for things that matter. It’s easy to reject the abstracted Apple when you are not hungry. Bur when you are hungry, you are very glad you have access to these apples; no matter what social projections of privilege or not you thought these apple were representing when your belly was full.
I don't see how hunger helps you reject nihilism. I occupy a body that was designed by natural selection to motivate me to eat with increasing urgency and selfishness when necessary; experiencing that emotional reward cycle and suppression of rational thought does not count as evidence that nihilism is wrong.
I had a dumb idea about this a while ago - to do a massive completion for coin flipping.
Get thousands of entries. Each ‘match’ just involves the two people flipping coins to decide the winner.
You make a documentary about it where you ask everyone about their tactics and strategy. Someone has to win all their matches. They will have developed some ‘tactics’ that they probably strongly believe in. Of course we know it’s just completely random.
There's a funny youtube video [1] about 10 coin flips in a row. The guy apparently did tons of takes until he got it. The successful take is one in which he alternates HTHT... which makes me think that he was trying for all H, all T, or alternating HT, to make it easier on himself.
It's actually even worse than that though in real life, since (to continue the analogy) winning the first few rounds makes it easier to win subsequent rounds.
Imagine if (apologies for the metaphor) each and every sperm cell knew the odds of fertilizing an egg and had a choice whether to pursue that goal or not. I think that in that case no egg would ever be fertilized, right?
I think success is 99% dumb luck. I think everything in life is 99% dumb luck. The fact that each and every one of us exists is dumb luck. But if we resign to that belief, nobody will ever do anything interesting or grand. The remaining 1% (it's way less than 1% of course), is skill, determination, tenacity, ambition, etc. Without those, we wouldn't have any business successes.
Should you draw lessons from successes like Elon, Bezos, Zuck, Jobs? To an extent. But you can't really emulate anybody else. Everyone needs to find their own path.
But what we can do is get inspired by those people. Get inspired by the fact that some human being WAS able to achieve something interesting.
Elon, Zuck, Bezos, Jobs all had incredibly privileged backgrounds. Jobs was probably the poorest - which is to say his adopted parents were comfortably middle class - but he also had a mentor who worked at HP and deliberately scouted out smart kids with an interest in electronics.
There's a sweet spot where opportunity, mentoring, and motivation are far more evenly distributed. The ideal growth culture provides a mix of challenges for everyone who can handle them and support - of all kinds - for everyone who shows some evidence of talent and motivation.
Culturally we're nowhere close to that. So instead we have fairytales about super-special people who are incredibly smart and hard working - where in fact they're not outstandingly smart or hard working, but they may be more motivated (not always for good reasons) and possibly more divergent than average. And mostly they're born with extra opportunities which aren't available to most people.
It's debatable if this is inspiring - or at least questionable if it's more inspiring than a much wider range of successes and success stories would be.
Maybe we need this kind of optimistic bias in order to get anything new done. The road to every improvement is littered with failures, whose trying and failing was nevertheless necessary to the overall success.
This is exactly right. This kind of optimism is (usually) individually irrational, but extremely beneficial for the collective. Every time the world moves forward it's because some over-confident idiot bets everything on a hare brained idea. It's almost always ruinous, but on a societal level, the successes more than make up for all the failures.
A lot of our biggest and most transformative "successes" have come at a price, and so do some of the biggest failure. I think the jury is out on net gain.
Are you certain those dots are connected? We've had profit seeking entrepreneurship for a long time and famines haven't been gone very long, and arguably profit-driven climate change is the biggest potential source of looming famines (should they start to reoccur).
Famine was first eliminated in 1800 by the US with its free market agriculture. Collective farms have never succeeded in providing sufficient food.
Starving people are not good for the environment. They stop caring about anything but getting food.
Profit-driven farms are why you're able to type into your computer complaints about capitalism, sipping your morning Starbucks, rather than holding a cup on a streetcorner begging for an apple.
Are you saying it was eliminated in 1800 or in the 1800s? Do you have sources you can cite that makes the case that US "free market" agriculture eliminated famine? Farming in the 1800s was not free of exploitative practices such as slavery/sharecropping, nor was life easy for farmers, many faced hardships or lost their farms entirely. Sure call it a "free market" if you will, but note the evils and failures that comes with that "freedom".
US farming/agriculture actually has a long history of relying on government relief, subsidies, tariffs and low-cost/free federal land use to remain profitable.
Haber process was developed while Fritz Haber was at University of Karlsruhe, a public research university. BASF was hesitant to invest in it, but luckily employee/engineer(not exactly an entrepreneur) Carl Bosch was there to convince them otherwise, and was able to industrialize the process.
Haber process also has its negatives, such as an ammonia resource for war, and the growing use of factory/unsustainable farming actually threatens environments and clean water. It is also one of the biggest consumers of energy on the planet.
Maybe a better example is the transistor(and tons of other stuff) from Bell Labs, but AT&T wasn't exactly a plucky startup, and has a monopolistic/anti-competitive past that tarnishes its history.
Maybe both of these examples show the importance of research, and the ability to tinker/explore solutions without profit motive pressures getting in the way.
We've seen how non-profit-driven research works in Soviet countries: their spies were busy stealing tech from the west, while the country was falling further and further behind.
Maybe there are many reasons to do research and people will often learn just for the sake of learning. But to turn that research into an actual useful, available product on the shelf - you need a profit motivation. Otherwise nobody will do the unsexy work and then there will not be money and nice condition for pure research either.
The US heavily invests in public research. The NIH budget is larger than all US billionaire's philanthropic donations combined. Public funding has great ability to affect change and discover.
You're kind of citing the successes only here, not the massive number of failures along the way. Nor did I state that an entrepreneur couldn't be a success, more that needing to be profitable could impeded desires to experiment or tinker with things not deemed to have immediate profit potential.
I would like to see environments where entrepreneurs are encouraged, and where failure doesn't mean financial ruin. The current landscape sees a lot of people betting their futures, or being completely unable to participate(health insurance/family concerns).
Ehh, I'd rather society focus on stable foundations that allow for thinking, tinkering and inventions, rather than moonshot attempts at getting rich that destroy you if they fail.
This doesn't work if progress requires something like making a big jump from one cliff to another. Saying "let's move safely 1cm at a time" gets you to the edge of the cliff, and then you stop and you get nowhere.
It definitely could work if people felt more secure in taking the leap, because it wouldn't mean financial ruin and destitution for themselves or their family. Maybe even social grant opportunities to encourage it, instead trying to tap dance for venture capital.
Much also comes out of publicly funded research, and spinning those findings out into net gains for society instead of maximized profit would be good.
A beginner rock climber should generally practice how to move safely from static position to static position before trying any riskier dynamic moves. That approach will indeed limit where they can climb to, though. An experienced climber can lunge themselves through the air to grip an otherwise unreachable handhold, allowing them to climb to otherwise impossible places. Even the best, most experienced rock climbers in the world take an inherent risk when making dynamic moves like that, and occasionally die as a result.
I've gotten into climbing in the past, for the exercise and social aspects. I personally have no inherent desire to climb high enough to require a belay, and prefer the freedom of the bouldering walls in the gym. While I enjoy exploring big rocky areas of nature, I have no desire to dangle my legs over a cliff side or jump over crevices deep enough to severely injure or kill me, unless I have the appropriate safety equipment.
As a software engineer typically working on safety critical embedded systems, I try to work pragmatically and incrementally, with a focus on avoiding regressions. When I need to make a riskier move for the good of the system architecture, I'll once again make sure I have the appropriate safety equipment i.e. a peer reviewed plan, unit tests, tooling improvements, etc.
The CEO of the company I work for is actually a former professional rock climber. He and a couple other founders started the company with the goal of making an educational toy robot, and found success. They had a team of 20 or so, were shipping hardware, and had lined up millions of dollars of new investments. The founders then did some reflection, and realized that they didn't want to build toys. They took a huge leap and pivoted the company, and figuratively broke most of the company's bones in the process. Under a decade later, and it's a billion dollar company employing hundreds of people across the world, literally saving people from otherwise bleeding to death on a daily basis.
The company I work for wouldn't exist in its current form if people like the CEO hadn't taken massive risks and "taken their licks" in the process. The company also wouldn't exist in its current form if they hadn't hired methodical people like me to engineer sustainable technical solutions to serve the business's needs. It seems like there's benefit to embracing both approaches, and as a society we should encourage the diversity of thought rather than discourage one approach or another.
Also, there's risk in anything anyone ever does because life is fragile and ephemeral on a geological timescale. I'd rather live in a world where rock climbers plummet to their deaths occasionally rather than in a world without rock climbers. With the former, at least someone may one day invent Spock's rocket boots from Star Trek 5 (which he uses to save Kirk from otherwise plummeting to his death while rock climbing.)
I always liked the quote "Most advice is people giving you their winning lottery ticket numbers". There is always something to learn from others but you can’t just take their exact circumstance and map it onto yours.
I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
nor the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.
Yeah, and that makes sense. You need an OS you talk to the guy who has an OS first. What's not mentioned in any success story about MS is how they got to start talking with IBM in the first place after the negotiations for CP/M failed. It's not like they had an OS product.
Anyway, networking is essential to doing business, we all agree on it. What I'm saying is the "success story" is incomplete because it doesn't mention it. And so are most other success stories, perhaps in less obvious ways.
Want to improve your odds? Go to tech conferences. I met and talked with Gates at one in the 80s. Nothing came of it, but I didn't really try to engage him. I spent a half hour talking to Allen, too. He offered me a job. I turned it down.
"My mom" is short for you are not alone in your success. How can you describe that in a sane way when you know that just one small variable led to this specific outcome. Tech conferences did not get us Linux, it was just an idea that failed many times before and since.
For me networking has been vital because I've gotten to do so much fun, but it has been a massive waste of time for the most part.
Who knows who you're going to meet the next time you go to a conference. The last one I went to (Handmade Seattle) I happened to meet and have a great conversation with the creator of Zig. I met lots of others, too.
Never would have happened if I didn't go attend it.
Careerwise it was a bad choice for me. I spent too much time finding interesting things rather than seeking compensation. Not being bored is important I'll give you that!
I'm pretty sure that your success story will be missing some facts too if you write it. Perhaps just because you don't consider them important.
My one significant career enhancing event happened because I knew the right person. Not a parent, just another programmer friend who brought me into a job, but still.
I think there's definitely a lot to learn from success stories, but being critical and actively engaging with counterfactuals is the key to getting that benefit.
First thing you need to do is define the term: Success
Living in the US of America is already a success compared with most other places in the world.
Success for most people is not making a billion dollar company. Success for them is being able to raise a family, work on their own, pursue their interests and be free. In the US you can do that way easier than in the rest of the world.
Billionaires are not happier than other people. Sleeping on your job like Musk and working all the time will not make you happier. And most people will not do that if they have the opportunity, they will prefer doing things like spending more time with their family even if that means they don't get to be billionaires.
I have seen men living isolated in Winter in Alaska and they were happy, because that is what they wanted to do.
Obviously is you raise your bar so high (billion dollars) almost nobody will do it. But in the US you can actually make millions and have a freedom the rest of the world envies, if that is what you want, or maybe you want to surf all day long.
Probably if you want to surf all day long and make a billion company it is way harder, but even that is possible in the USA, like the GoPro founder proves(he also bankrupted the company extracting so much for himself).
In other countries the educative system selects early on(ten years old) who is going to be engineer or doctor, don't let you have kids (or now they want to force you to have them), have way less economic opportunities and horrible salaries, there are no self employed people, or tax you to death.
Also the optimism the USA HAS is an enormous economic advantage over Asia, Europe and Africa.
North Americans exterminated the native population living there very recently, almost in 20th century, and as a result have an enormous country with bast resources for a population that is small and young compared with Europe or Asia.
Also they attract the brightest talent from the rest of the world, that does not like to be confiscatory taxed or censored or prosecuted.
In most Europe and specially Asia most people is so old that Pessimism is part of the culture, it is an illness. Africa is young but pure chaos and extremely corrupt few places there have the peace you need to prosper working.
In Japan for example, if you have an idea on your own almost everybody will try to sabotage it. Your friends and your family, for your own good.
> Living in the US of America is already a success compared with most other places in the world.
> Success for most people is not making a billion dollar company. Success for them is being able to raise a family, work on their own, pursue their interests and be free. In the US you can do that way easier than in the rest of the world.
This is such self absorbed and delusional opinion!
Your point proves point of the article. US is extremely hostile to families. It is incredibly expensive to raise children. System itself is rigged against families, it tries to tear family structure apart. Even finding fertile partner who wants children is very difficult.
Let us know when you get pregnancy leave and affordable health care :)
It's very easy to make very good money in the US, compared to practically anywhere else in the world. Mundane corporate IC paper-pushers with no discernible talent can make up to six figures - which is salary restricted to mid- and high-level management in most other industrialized countries.
What's more, taxes in the US are lower than in most other industrialized countries. In result, an (non-software) engineer in the US easily makes $5-7k after taxes, whereas in Europe we gets maybe half of that (not to mention that practically everything is more expensive in Europe). That extra money is crucial for setting up a comfortable family living. Not to mention he also gets pretty good health care coverage from his job, often better than what the "free" medical system in Europe provides.
Most places and populations where people have many children are poorer than the US. Families are expensive because you have such expectations of high standards. I see it in my country. If you want an extra bedroom for every kid and a car that fits all family members, it is expensive. Meanwhile other people are raising 4 kids in a single room.
>In other countries the educative system selects early on(ten years old) who is going to be engineer or doctor
In some other countries maybe, but definitely not all. I live in Scandinavia and decided to become an engineer when I was 22 years old. Had to take an extra high school level math course and physics (which was easily done by self studying and then writing an exam), then just applied to university.
Prime example: if you go to any article about "OKR methodology" you will find the authors stating that it was OKRs that made Google what it is. If your manager sees such an article, you will be switching to OKRs instantly.
Sure if they are done right they can help.
But I know 1 company were it worked and everybody was working towards the OKRs and the product got better.
The rest people just started to game the system so they would look better on paper for the management people but the product was still a mess and awful.
Looks like the basic procedure for planning. You decide what you want and break it down into more measurable pieces. My only problem with it is why the hell isn't this called "planning", instead of opaque jargon? Is there an ecosystem of consulting firms selling it?
Besides how often plans lead to the planned outcome?
"Objectives and key results (OKR, alternatively OKRs) is a goal setting framework used by individuals, teams, and organizations to define measurable goals and track their outcomes. The development of OKR is generally attributed to Andrew Grove who introduced the approach to Intel during his tenure there. John Doerr published an OKR book which is called "Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs" in 2017."
Yes, because the most critical element of most successes which are almost never mentioned in success stories is the social connectedness of the founders to wealthy individuals. This is 99.9% of what success is. You can have a terrible idea, terrible execution but if you're friends with the CEO of a big tech corporation, you are still likely to get a ton of funding and a multi-million dollar exit. This is made obvious based on how often they shut down the projects after acquisition; they never cared about the tech... It's pure cronyism.
This also means that success in business is very much correlated if one’s parents are also entrepreneurs. Now it can be that these people are more well off but it could be also that ones who have parents running the business learn first hand what actually matters. I believe it is combination of two.
And things what actually matters is so unsexy that nobody wants to write about it.
Imagine if VCs were so good at spotting success that 90% of companies they funded were successful.
They would then be able to fund a LOT of companies... but is there even a chance that there's actually room for so many new companies? Eventually, the rate of success would need to drop drastically, you can't just inject thousands of new companies into the world and expect them all to succeed.
I always think about it like this: how many new services have I or my company actually purchased during a year, or even might want to purchase if we just had perfect knowledge about all these new companies coming up and had actual need for many of those?
I can't think of it being more than one or two at most. Now, spread that over the whole population and you'll probably find that on average, only one or two companies could possibly enter any field successfully on any given year. And guess what: that's pretty much what we see in the real world.
Yes. And I have been challenging many of these false beliefs and bias for over a decade. The amount of crap people take as gospel from VCs. ( Not hating on VCs ) Things like "Execution eats strategy for breakfast".
But this is tiring. For a different reason.
So what happen is media will now try this narrative. See if it works. And if it did, it will enter a positive feedback loop ( in terms of clicks ) and the whole PR industry reinforces itself. Mass public will now start hating on these success stories. The pendulum will swing from one end to another.
Success Stories Cause False Beliefs About Success wasn't "false" 10 years ago. It is only false now because the narrative no longer works for masses.
Everything depends on context. But no one want the context, they only want the answer.
> For instance, disproportionate attention is placed on wildly successful “unicorn” companies, while the far greater number of unsuccessful companies often goes unaccounted for.
There is a "winner takes all" market effect on success stories in general. They almost become their own trope and honestly exhausting to hear the same ones referenced in every piece of literature and copy/pasted on social media.
The reality is that if you do the things the 1% do, your odds are higher at becoming part of the 1%. The challenge though is that if everybody tells you that you need to do the things the 1% do, you're really doing what the 99% are doing.
Your success is subject to your own story. Imitate, iterate, and make it your own.
On the other hand, belief in success is often a prerequisite to putting effort or resources towards a goal. Failure can teach important lessons to those willing to learn and adapt. Probability can be an interesting tool for approximating conditions, but ultimately if we are looking to profit from our actions we need to think about things from a deterministic perspective.
I agree that a class of ridiculous "prosperity preachers" exists. These people sell a product which is similar to a diet fad. A fantasy people can indulge in without doing hard work or making sacrifices.
Most people choose to focus on their successes. They might not list all of their failures. Meanwhile, those who have failed and quit might choose to focus on their failures. Unsolved problems become unsolvable items beyond their control. Themes of unfairness and the unreasonable expectations surrounding them usually follow.
If we are to acknowledge survivor's bias, we should also acknowledge "croaker's bias". Just like there is irrationality surrounding prosperity preachers, there is also toxicity surrounding the "can't do", "it is all unfair", "he just got lucky", "because silver spoon" ideology. No effort is required to engage with this toxic ideology's self-fulfilling failure mode.
I think one trait that is a very strong indicator is ability to sell well. It's anecdotal but I literally know 0 people who are good at selling and who long term failed.
I’m no finance expert, but I’ve been semi-adjacent to finance stuff enough to end up in conversations with tons of friends/family about what makes for investment returns in everything from tech startups to US equities to crypto coins and have coined a tongue-in-cheek maxim:
Reesman’s First Law of Investment Success Evaluation: As concerns returns, that which can explained by survivorship bias is due to survivorship bias.
"Interestingly, however, the authors observed the opposite: despite seeing opposing examples or no data at all, the overwhelming majority of participants expressed substantial levels of confidence."
Which is the usual big problem - overconfidence in the absence of data.
> Optimizing predictions for sounding good as stories, when nature optimizes for no such thing, creates a bias that Nick Bostrom has termed good-story bias. [0]
If you do not think you suffer from this bias I suggest you review the bias blind spot, or the failure to believe you are biased. [1]
My personal theory is that story telling is an ancient meme that may predate modern humans. By telling failure and success stories we learn from the experiences of others, sometimes even when exaggerated or largely fictional. On the whole it makes some tribes better equipped to survive.
Even the movie Croods has the father telling failure stories each night to warn the kids. At least until meeting the more 'successful' boy.
I have chronic imposter syndrom… every success I have feels somehow like a lie… but honestly, better that way then believing to much in oneself… keeps one moving :)
I don't think the article proves that all advice for becoming successful is bunk, just that it is difficult to evaluate.
Surely "from nothing comes nothing" is still mostly true. Of course a lot of people these days believe that the only way to become rich is to inherit. Which ironically could also be a false belief about success, as per the article.
Wow. This is so useful. I'm always left a bit speechless when I come across something really useful like this. It should be a first stop for all would be entrepreneurs. Thanks.
I recommend the book The Scout Mindset which examines biases like these and advocates for a more epistemic, “scoutlike” approach rather than sheer confidence. Self help for people who don’t like self help.
This boils down to story taking precedent over fact. More specifically, there's a difference between causation and correlation;a delta that is so often ignored,even by the experienced and intelligent.
Depends on what you see as success. Often times it equates to money and that’s a bad way to view success. A good deal of monetary success is by luck and/or exploitations.
"Do <outlier> examples lead people to think that <outlier's outcome> might be theirs?"
It's everywhere:
One kid becomes autistic after the DPT vaccine, and everyone hears about it.
Someone sees you jogging on three separate days, and assumes you must do it every day.
Several people I know or know of are killed in private plane crashes, so I won't go up in a private plane anymore. (Just to show I'm not immune either.)
That is simply not true. There are countless angel, pre-seed, seed and VC funds begging founders to apply and funding any idea with the slightest chance of success. We are rather living boom times in funding, both in US and EU. What we are lacking is entrepreneurs: people willing try to work and prove ideas.
That's simply not true. The process is highly selective. Though maybe they only select from 20 year old inexperienced people on purpose (I'm in early 30s)? Otherwise, I can't reconcile observable reality with what you're describing. I've applied to 100s of incubators and seed investors over 10 years and got 2 interviews (one was from A16z though... What are the odds?) and my CV as a tech person is excellent (with a proven track record in a startup and in open source) and I've been hustling pretty hard to get interviews (e.g. attending company events where I knew the VCs would be going and talking to them). I never got any seed funding from any VC.
Then I bootstrapped my project myself and it was enough of a success to allow me to not work... It could have been a far bigger success with funding.
What "severe consequences" are you talking about?! With increased funding founders are paid better and better during startup years. And with a blossoming employment market, failed founders will easily find themselves jobs which will quite appreciate the earned experience.
I believe it's more about the comfort of regular employment which is more and more cozy and attractive (including from a financial perspective). Startups are risky and intense and for a lot of people the extra stress just isn't worth it. They can be happy with a regular 9-5 job and more free time for fun and hobbies.
Culture is another thing. Society does not value success as it used to be, the self-made rich are reviled while luck, conformity and integration in society held in high regards. Unfortunately this comes exactly as future's challenges can only by solved with courage and entrepreneurship...
One person has done something good or bad. Then all people who are in that specific group must be like this. Think of Politicians. One does something bad they are all bad. One bicycle driver is riding like crazy so lets ban all of them. I had some bad Asian food so Asian food in general must be bad. Country X had a shooting once so it must be a unsafe country.
You can find examples like that everywhere.
It makes sense that we also have that bias when it comes to success stories.
Plus with the social media culture of "Do thing X" and you will be successful.
I see that all around: Write a paper journal and you will be successful. Wake up early and you will be successful. Read a bazillion books a year and you will be successful. Read my book and you will be successful. Listen to that podcast and you will be successful. Start a shitty idea startup and sell it after X years and you will be successful.
In the end success is not only hard work. Its not only doing thing X. It has so many variables and random points that we can't just replicate someones success story.
Just think about it for a second. As a European reading about US success stories. How much does it help? The (business) culture is totally different. Yes the internet makes it kind of easier but still its just not the same.
Also whats different is that you are not starting at the same time, location, community, knowledge and luck/random level.
So yeah its fun to read these success stories but they should not be your guide of how to become successful yourself.