The annoying habits of highly effective people • Hacker News Board

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#31

Post by matwood » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #16

mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Yep, and as an example of billionaire... Notch is a night owl and rolls out of bed pretty much at any hour and he did alright with Minecraft...

Getting up early is just a sign of discipline. Ignore that Notch may be a sign of survivorship bias for second. I watched one of Ludlum dares one time and one thing I saw was discipline. There is no other way to make a complete game in ~48 hours without it.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#32

Post by UpshotKnothole » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:36 AM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #24

toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.

Bo Burnham on getting into showbiz: "Don't take advice from guys like me who've gotten very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying 'Liquidize your assets! Buy Powerball tickets! It works!'" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U )

Ah Taylor Swift, she didn’t really win the lottery though, or if she did, she was able to start off buying a loooooot of tickets. Her father worked for Merril Lynch, from three generations of bank presidents. Her mother worked in finance. When she was 14 her father moved the family to Nashville and worked for Merril Lynch there, and invested in a record label called Big Machine to the tune of $120,000. This was the company that first signed her.

She grew up rich, with the freedom to pursue her passion from the age of 10, when her mother would take her to karaoke contests. The ability to up stakes and move to Nashville, to have your father buy your way into a record label... well... it doesn’t overshadow her natural ability, but it helps to explain how she was able to leverage it so effectively.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#33

Post by matwood » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

giobox wrote: post #15

bcheung wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job. The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.

Is the idea that working on your “important goals” in the first few hours after waking is more effective an evidence based opinion? I can’t imagine myself performing my best at any task I do the first two hours after waking, and that certainly seems to be the case for almost all of my colleagues too, if early AM meetings are any indicator.

Get up and work out. Afterwards your mind will be clear and ready to work. And, as a bonus you'll have a few hours before anyone else shows up to bother you.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#34

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:41 AM UTC

bcheung wrote: post #12

mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Early rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job. The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.

> The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.

Why? I find I'm often more productive at the end of the day than the beginning. And more productive late at night than early in the morning. I find the obsession with waking up early very strange (and often counter-productive).

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#35

Post by femto » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:41 AM UTC

louprado wrote: post #27

toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.

Nearly every self-help book mentions the importance of goal setting. It is important even for those with a pedigree and born into wealth (I recognize not every student in this study was born into wealth but the median Harvard family earns at least 3 times the national average). From https://sidsavara.com/why-3-of-harvard-mbas-make-ten-times-a... “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to acc…

Myth, as referred to in an update to the link you provided: https://sidsavara.com/fact-or-fiction-the-truth-about-the-ha...

Though it's claimed that the myth did prompt an actual study (not peer reviewed?)

https://sidsavara.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/researchsum...

Which claims to support a fuzzier notion that writing things down helps achieve a goal.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#36

Post by matwood » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

Why do you think that you couldn't become the CTO? Serious question. What qualities are you lacking?

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#37

Post by foobarian » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #28

mamon wrote: post #10

I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

Getting up early is a sign of discipline, but it's only a start. It's a mentality of going after every day with a sense of urgency. Obviously not everyone can become billionaires, but most people can better themselves by adding more discipline to their lives.

Getting up early is not a sign of discipline, going to bed early is. Getting up early after having slept 9 hours is easy.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#38

Post by ksdale » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

throwaway82729 wrote: post #6

phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

I don't think it's helpful to copy what they do as CEO. I look for what they did in their lowest paying job and how they changed as they progressed in their careers. Of course, very few autobiographies cover this.

I think this is quite insightful. There was a post on here a while ago about William Faulkner being an absolutely atrocious postmaster when he was in college. Of course, a lot of artists tend to have a more meandering paths than a lot of CEOs, but his habits as a postmaster were probably just as important to his writing career as his later habits.

This may be more applicable to artists, but my own take is that a lot of people would be surprised at how much a lot of really successful people looked like "losers" for a significant part of their early lives, due to them living in their own world and not working hard enough on anything they didn't care about because they spent all their time thinking about the one thing they really cared about.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#39

Post by MetalGuru » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:46 AM UTC

throwaway82729 wrote: post #6

phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

I don't think it's helpful to copy what they do as CEO. I look for what they did in their lowest paying job and how they changed as they progressed in their careers. Of course, very few autobiographies cover this.

Have you found any source for this kind of information. Sometimes I’ll look over the work histories of founders LinkedIn, but employment history is pretty superficial information.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#40

Post by phakding » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 1:52 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #36

phakding wrote: post #3

Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that…

Why do you think that you couldn't become the CTO? Serious question. What qualities are you lacking?

Well I don't even know what a cto does. I have been in many meetings with them, but besides making high level decisions and asking for status, I don't know what they do.

Besides I was born in poverty and needed lot of efforts to be able to socialize with people born upper middle class. I can only imagine what else I need to learn to socialize within upper echelons. I can't explain it to you fully.

Thanks for asking though, I never thought through this before.