linus troll status = epic
Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#82Chris Anderson: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them? Linus Torvalds: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified…
Tesla worked for Edison and was a person who could finish things and some of them changed the world. He was also person with vision, so I think Linus is either wrong or he is trying to put emphasis only on hard work. What if you have person like Tesla with both qualities?
> What if you have person like Tesla with both qualities?
Like Elon Musk for example (who Torvalds seems to be making a gentle dig at, in the quote above).
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#83Chris Anderson: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them? Linus Torvalds: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified…
Tesla worked for Edison and was a person who could finish things and some of them changed the world. He was also person with vision, so I think Linus is either wrong or he is trying to put emphasis only on hard work. What if you have person like Tesla with both qualities?
I agree -- you need a little bit of both qualities. The vision of what to create and the execution to carry it out. The two go hand in hand. I think Linus is putting the emphasis on hard work because we mere mortals aren't endowed with the same genius that Tesla had and for us, the best way to achieve something great is through hard work instead of "divine" inspiration.
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#84Is it just me, or is this a predictable answer from someone who works exclusively on an operating system? There is no innovation needed in his job, everything has already been made by MS, Apple etc, he just has to take existing ideas and fit them into Linux. Or even write the code that glues pieces together. Now ask someone in the VR/AR department. Everyday they have to think up is new 'innovative' ideas because they…
Invention and innovation are two different things that get conflated together frequently, but innovation doesn't necessarily mean you have to come up with something from scratch, but it does mean that you'll have to improve something. Maybe it's more like all (successful) inventors are innovators and some innovators are successful inventors. Sometimes it is the execution of the invention that was done wrong rather than the concept itself - there's absolutely value to society there. People get PhDs for finding commonalities across different disciplines and uniting them under common terms. Hence, because of the massive surface area of what constitutes innovation compared to invention, business people and others with more visibility are typically "innovators."
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#85Upvote 1000x - I'm sick of hearing people who've done nothing and "thought leaders" ranting on. I'm pleased I put my head down, did work and did something that worked for me that I can encourage others with and give evidence. I wish those who have done nothing would go away - and stop filling my inbox, and targeted advertising spots, and meetups with their crap. I wish I could help others see over the shouting and po…
'Thought leadership' is about being honest about what's happening and expressing this. Giving a voice to SMEs about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and where they think this will go; it is ideal Agile, constituting the combination of thoughts from technology, leadership and subject matter expertise. A credible message which parts on their own cannot communicate. Some organisations do this very well. When it…
Oh ffs. I can't tell you how much I hate these self professed 'thought leaders'. s/thought leader/unoriginal wanker/g is what goes through my mind and I just stop listening. Stop talking like you are on a god damn yoga retreat.
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice romantic view but the fact is that 95% of people in the western world can't afford society's perceptions of "basic needs". I'd wager that most people you hear talking about innovation, outside of Websummit and so on, are living hand-to-mouth and very much need to sell their ideas.
If you're alive, your basic needs are being met. What you do over and above that is a recreational activity. Though I see people all the time engaged in recreational activities that don't look like much fun at all.
Not sure if homeless people's or victims of abuse and exploitations' needs are being met. Some even think it's totally fine after acclimating. There are varying degrees of needs and if you approach it biologically then improving the lives of people suffering is simply participating in a "luxury" industry. Pretty sure the execs of Tiffany's and Louis Vuitton do not view themselves as fulfilling the same general needs of the world as UNICEF and other humanitarian non-profits.
This kind of reducto as absurditum is how we have people that think it's perfectly fine for unprecedented mass poverty in the US outside the Great Depression because people may have running water and TVs when most of the world doesn't. While true, it misses the spirit of the discussion and is a non-sequitur line of reasoning as a result.
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#87Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. - Thomas Edison
It's not so original and it sounds like it was copied/pasted from an old quote 100 years ago
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#88It's funny how he says "Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that", apparently without realising that Apple did exactly what he's talking about. Almost all of Apple's big innovations were stolen from other places, and then they shut up, and got to work : making it work properly, making it user friendly, making it sexy, and then selling it. Apple's slogan may have been "think different", and they have the imag…
I think it's too harsh to call them "stolen". Apple understood things about these ideas that most others didn't. The end result was something that was qualitatively very different from what preceded them. As an example, I worked on a tablet in '99 [1]. As the referenced article indicates we were not alone, nor were we first, and more came after. Around the same time there were a number of attempts at gluing together…
Very insightful post, thanks! I still stand by calling it stolen ideas though: if you go to PARC, see some cool stuff, and then come home and build it again for yourself, that's stealing an idea.
But the main point I was trying to make was : taking Apple's slogan to mean "just think of something new and the world will be changed" is wrong, Apple hardly even did the "think of something new" part, but they did the hard work of getting it to a useful state. The 99% perspiration. But you're right, Apple did have something extra, they didn't get to where they are just by doing the hard work.
So let's say "99% perspiration, 1% recognising and stealing good ideas, and 1% knowing where (not) to compromise"? :-)
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the fact is that he has attained far less value than he's created. This goes for an extremely large portion of humanity, probably > 99.99%. Very few people manage to extract all of the value they created (and sometimes more), and most of those people are not the nicest ones.
Oh well absolutely, but Linus' value creation/wealth disparity is mindblowing. Again, I'm not suggesting that money is everything, and I'm sure that he'd say he doesn't care about money. But he's advocating an ethos which wouldn't work for most people, and which barely worked for him in terms of earnings.
Now think about the man who invented writing.
The truth about most SV billionnaires is that they captured far more latent value than they created. This ethos of building a fortune of absurd proportions can not work for most either.
Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think money is important you aren't a hacker.
An ironic thing to say in a seed accelerator-owned website.
I think there's a sizable camp of HN members who just come here to read the various interesting tech articles, with no plans to join the cult of SV.