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Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#22Good content, but my favorite part of the article is the anecdote about how Paul started at Google. Putting yourself in a place where you have the opportunity to be lucky makes up some percentage of the total likelihood of being extremely successful (yes, I consider Paul extremely successful along many axes), but I think a much larger portion of this equation is actually being lucky. I guess if you iterate over and o…
"Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
Repeating a comment I made a couple of weeks ago on another post on serendipity - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786959 -
This is even stronger than Pasteur's famous, "Chance favors the prepared mind" - if you are not actually working on a problem, there is no possible way to benefit from serendipity.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#23Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did. How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bon…
I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coin…
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Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#24Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did. How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bon…
I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coin…
I'm not saying the guy isn't smart. Just throwing out a little "outliers" to grease the wheel for the rest of us donkeys.
Sometimes reasons to hope are not best expressed by those who have nothing to regret. This is one of those times.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coin…
I'm not saying the guy isn't smart. Just throwing out a little "outliers" to grease the wheel for the rest of us donkeys. Sometimes reasons to hope are not best expressed by those who have nothing to regret. This is one of those times.
There are few people over the age of 5 who have nothing to regret, and I don't think PB is one of them.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#26The problem I have with this is that you're extracting a formula (or non-formula rather) after the fact. It seems as if you lived your life like any other person, and things just eventually happened to you.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#27Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did. How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bon…
Well all the 'young fliberdygibbits' who started with pets.com might not be successful by "your" definition, but majority of them might be very happy in their lives by their own standards.
There could very well be a cafe owner down the road who might exactly say the same thing about serendipity as PB did in this blog post. He could be happy with the choices he made in his lifetime and the chances he took that got him all that is good in his life (by his definition).
It all comes down to whether a person has a positive outlook or not. One can keep regretting the things that didn't work out, or choose to see the good things in his/her life.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#28My philosophy on planning your own life: You should think enough (and just enough, no more) about what you want in life so that when unusual opportunities arrive, you notice them, and jump at them.
"You should think enough (and just enough, no more) about what you want in life so that when unusual opportunities arrive, you notice them, and jump at them."
This is more or less my take on it. There are opportunities all around us (IE: the luck part of the equation). But, if you don't have the knowledge, expertise, or ambition to act on them, you won't be able to take advantage of it (the skill part of the equation).
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#29A closely related story, from HN user kenjackson ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647146 ): "How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, to…
Very inspiring - thank you. Yes, it strikes me that Ed was not squandering his time at all. He was making the absolute best possible use of his time as he amassed more and more insights and understandings that he was able to channel into his ultimate calling.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
#30A closely related story, from HN user kenjackson ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647146 ): "How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, to…
That's an amazing story. Makes me wonder...
As the narrator says, this is not an usual pattern for people to migrate from one thing to next. And if that's the case, then chances are there are many many more people which may end up never finding "that calling". In a way, the above story illustrates the anti "pure hill-climbing" approach: the initial assumption/premise is that you should find a hill and then go really, really far in hopes of making a big contribution. Whereas Ed Witten's story shows that picking one single hill is not necessarily a good idea (local minima!) ... In fact, every once in a while (or systematically), you could jump to a different hill and still come out as a winner. Now the real puzzle is:
a) You could make the argument that your chances of finding the optimal hill for you, on the first try, are very slim. Hence, you should jump at least a few hills.. i.e, your real aptitude lies somewhere else.
b) Jumping too much will/may cause not enough time with anyone subject to make significant contribution - hence it's an optimization problem.
c) The "cross-discipline" question: its often acknowledged that bridging different knowledge areas is very helpful in terms of making interesting discoveries. Does that, in turn, mean that you should jump at least a few hills? If so, how many, and how much time?
Fun questions to ponder... Clearly there is no black and white answer either! Depends on your field, context, etc.