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The annoying habits of highly effective people

economist.com

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Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#41

Post by internet555 »

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…

It seems like such a dull choice of reading material. I could read about poetry, a math book, a biography of someone at the level of an actual historical figure, a great religious work, or even just the news. But instead I’m going to read about some guy who sold database software or ran a printing company.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#42

Post by phakding »

UpshotKnothole wrote: post #32
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You probably misunderstood the post you replied to.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#43

Post by tomnipotent »

UpshotKnothole wrote: post #32
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> She grew up rich

Exactly - she won the lottery being born into a rich white family in the U.S.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#44

Post by tomnipotent »

foobarian wrote: post #37
matwood wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Getting up early is not a sign of discipline

Yes it is. Ask any engineering manager.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#45

Post by bcheung »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #34
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.

> 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).

I originally thought I was a night owl as well. I think it was for other reasons though and there is a legitimate benefit that is unique to mornings. It has a lot to do with lifestyle.

It's not an exact science and there's not a lot of literature on it yet but some variables to consider:

Are you referring to mornings working on what is important to you personally, or are you referring to mornings at a day job that you're just punching a clock? Motivation and interest are going to play a key role here.

Are you consistently waking up at the same time or are you thinking about a few times you woke up and were tired? It must be consistent for circadian rhythm to adjust.

Do you have time alone to yourself in the morning or are other people already up and around you? Depending on lifestyle, people often have more time to themselves at night than morning so that might be part of the reason.

Do you have a routine to wake up in the morning? Certain triggers like sunlight, drinking water for hydration, electrolytes, and moving around, don't happen for the majority of people until much later in the day. Without these people are not going to be at their best. Many people who are early risers incorporate these and other types of rituals (exercise, cold showers, meditation). Without them, their mornings would not be as productive.

Are you giving yourself enough time in the morning to be at a relaxed pace without worrying about the clock or is it a rush to get to work?

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#46

Post by UpshotKnothole »

tomnipotent wrote: post #43
UpshotKnothole wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> She grew up rich Exactly - she won the lottery being born into a rich white family in the U.S.

She won more lotteries than that. She won the lottery of being born rich, white, and connected. And in a country like the US. She won the lottery of being beautiful, of having an excellent voice and musical talent, of having parents willing to use their money and power to further her career of choice. She won the lottery of not having any crippling mental illnesses or learning disabilities, of not being sexually assaulted, and more lotteries besides.

But Bo Burnham’s quote really isn’t about that, he’s talking about getting lucky and having your career take off. The truth is that many many lotteries typically need to be won before you can even enter that lottery. My point was that Taylor Swift didn’t just “take a chance” on music, she used all of her existing wins to stack the deck in her favor. If you look at a lot of CEO’s the same is true of them, and it’s not just the luck of their career taking off, but the luck of ever being in a position to have that happen.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#47

Post by bendotero »

jiveturkey wrote: post #7
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…

Interesting perspective. Is it your belief that people read these as how-to or self-help books? I enjoy reading them the same way I enjoy learning from my co-worker's habits. I take what matters to me and throw away the rest. I'm always trying to improve how I do my current job. It's not enough to have an open mind about work habits / techniques, one has to actively seek out new information. Also it's usually an inte…

They are often sold as self-improvement books. I picked up a "wise quotes from CEOs" book thinking it'd have some gems as well. Just made realize that most of the people writing and saying these things were grossly out of touch with the people they direct.

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#48

Post by dkarl »

At one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born into it, it's all he saw growing up, every element was demonstrated for him and instilled in him as normal his whole life. Another guy is successful because he was born with nothing and had to fight for every little thing, and he kept fighting for the next thing until he had a whole company. These are both coherent stories, but they don't explain the difference between those two and all the other people who were born to success but reverted to the mean or who were born into poverty and stayed there.

I've seen people succeed with vastly different, contradictory strategies. I've seen engineers promoted to management earn respect by getting in the weeds and doing unwanted grunt work, and I've seen engineers promoted to management stay so hands-off from technical stuff that new employees assumed they were MBAs who didn't understand the work they were managing. I've seen people with humble origins flaunt them at every opportunity and others all but deny them. I've seen people who immersed themselves in detail to see the whole picture and people who carefully rationed the information they consumed to avoid being overwhelmed, systematically delegating the responsibility for details.

Conclusion: that's the wrong way to try to understand the difference between luck and skill. Suppose you ran a huge experiment where you had 1000 chess grandmasters, 1000 masters, 1000 good amateurs, and so on down to 1000 chronic duffers, and they each inherited a thousand games starting at move eight (crediting the first seven moves to luck, circumstances, and childhood.) You wouldn't learn much by asking whether the winners attacked or defended, opened the middle or jammed it up, preferred their knights or their bishops. Those aren't the right questions. A grandmaster doesn't move a knight just because she likes knights, or because moving knights is the baller thing that all the grandmasters do. It's because it accomplishes something in their situation. If life was a game you could play over and over again, with executive control gradually fading in starting in the teenage years, a brilliant player might play each lifetime very differently. It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what skills you would develop as you "played" dozens or hundreds of lifetimes! Certainly not rigid rules like "wake up at 5am" or "wear the same thing every day."

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#49

Post by [deleted] »

dkarl wrote: post #48

At one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born int…

[deleted]

Re: The annoying habits of highly effective people

#50

Post by dkarl »

shay_ker wrote: post #13

CEO biographies are interesting just like any other biography, I suppose. But never once have I heard/read, "I read this other CEO's biography and decided to copy their habits, and that was my secret."

You do read, "My success happened because of an inspirational encounter with this other revered CEO (whose own book was a best-seller, hint hint)" but that's such compelling marketing that I wouldn't bet on there being any reality behind it.
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