Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

asc.upenn.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 265 posts

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#181

Post by Axsuul »

sbilstein wrote: post #49
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #3

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, he…

Yep.... 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 ra…

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.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#182

Post by 988747 »

bennysomething wrote: post #155
bitwize wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some basic strategies: > 1. stay in school > 2. don't do drugs > 3. don't do crimes You forgot: 4. be born to rich parents That probably has a greater influence on chances of success than most others.

Except that 80 percent of American millionaires are first generation affluent. Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Am...

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)

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#183

Post by Noumenon72 »

hartator wrote: post #111
Arisaka1 wrote: post #101

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 wa…

This is just basic nihilism. 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.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#184

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #107
dvh1990 wrote: post #98

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 anythin…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#185

Post by nottorp »

majani wrote: post #141
nottorp wrote: post #60

Besides the survivor bias, most success stories are also incomplete. The non glamorous parts get skipped. Look up who Bill Gates' mother is if you wonder how they got IBM to talk to them for MS-DOS in the first place.

Quoted post unavailable.

Smart, hardworking parents that serve on the same board of directors as IBM's CEO produce meetings with said IBM CEO.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#186

Post by [deleted] »

polote wrote: post #29

1. If we knew the factors to make successful companies vc would not fund 90% of companies that fails 2. We don't know what has made a company succeed, so success stories only show cherry picked reasons of the overall 3. Success stories are biased towards making people look good and less socially acceptable things (like, the founder lied to the customers) are hidden

[deleted]

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#187

Post by Maursault »

Jiro wrote: post #180
Maursault wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this one: 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.

I like this version (whose source seems to be unknown, I googled it and found https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/04/race-swift/ ): The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.

But at what odds? The less your risk, the less your reward. With that strategy, ultimately, it's no longer betting.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#188

Post by andrewnicolalde »

nickpp wrote: post #178
cryptica wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at who is getting all the funding, you will see that they have rich and/or politically connected family members in 99.9% of cases.

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.

Could that be due to the increasingly severe consequences of failure?

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#189

Post by xwdv »

yawnxyz wrote: post #135
sbilstein wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep.... 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 ra…

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.

Re: Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

#190

Post by lampe3 »

lpapez wrote: post #33
lampe3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of companies doing now OKR is baffling to me. Also most companies I have seen and worked with are doing OKR as a to-do list for the management to check what people are doing.

I can see the appeal, "use this and become the next Google". However, like you said, without a clear vision and long-term strategy, OKRs basically become "management wishlist".

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.

Post reply on HN