51–60 of 98 posts
Worth the read just for this: The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down."
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Actually you control luck with determination. By increasing determination, you decrease the effect luck has on anything you do.
Agreed, but I would put it slightly differently. Every goal has a percentage likelihood of success, your job (as the goal-reacher) is to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. Ex: Moving to SF increases your luck-factor/success-percentage of meeting a VC at a coffee shop. (Assuming there are a lot of VCs at coffee shops in SF) Therefore you have become more "lucky". You have probably also reduced your luck-fact…
Consider an entrepreneur. She has the ability to build a great product. Given one day at it success may not be evident, but after months, or years of persistence, she'd (eventually) achieve the result her potential affords her.
There is nothing wrong with your examples, but it's a more narrow example.
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Actually you control luck with determination. By increasing determination, you decrease the effect luck has on anything you do.
And for that matter, you can control physical attractiveness. There's always something you could do if you really had to, right? Lose a little weight, gain a little weight, hide your flaws, accentuate your good points, dress a certain way. You know how sometimes on tabloid covers in the supermarket they have pictures of celebrities wearing sweats and no makeup? It's a petty thing to fixate on, but it illustrates a va…
The link assumes that you know who is speaking. But it doesn't give that critical piece of information. Founders at Work was written by Jessica Livingston, who is a cofounder of ycombinator. She's married to Paul Graham. But do not think that she's in there just because of the personal connection. Her book is truly excellent. And in previous articles I've seen Paul say that the #1 thing that they want in a founder is…
Jessica mentions the Codecademy team launched 2 days before Demo Day and managed to signup 200k users. If I remember correctly, they launched on HN through a Show HN thread.. and so on..
What I really want to know is, how many of those initial 200k users stuck around? I was one of them and I have only signed in maybe twice since their launch.
So what does that mean? they leveraged the curious users to get VC interest? Did they really engage me, us, the 200k? is that a false positive?
I guess if the net result is a positive one Today, none of this really matters.
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This is an interesting point, at least the initial first premise. The conclusion seems off though. In order to leverage your own assets, you need to be able to size up not only your own strengths and weakenesses, but also those of others. PA, like social status, and others of the same ilk is a real (if not always 'earned' asset). As such, you should never ignore it or be oblivious too it. It falls in a spectrum of in…
There is one big difference between luck and attractiveness, though. Luck is a big unknown except in hindsight. If you knew you were going to be unlucky, there's very little you could do (I hesitate to say nothing but I can't think of anything).
Tools, techniques, and strategies for dealing with "the unknown" are a fundamental part of intelligence. As a corralary, the denial of uncertainty is the most un-intelligent of strategies.
It follows that your statement has within it a bit of insight: just knowing that risk matters. So even if you can't know (with precision) your exact 'luck' at every moment, you can build upon the fact that X,Y,Z observed variable could have gone another way had P, Q, R not happened by chance. Just being aware of the magnitude of the potential variation is a useful piece of information. For example, this can guide you to more rationally hedge your bets. Or to "make luck" by managing variables to not happen by chance. Or to just know when it makes sense to keep rolling the dice -- persistence & resiliency. Etc. In this sense, Jessica did touch on something that seems to come in handy here -- resourcefullness -- just in general but in particular when the "enexpected" happens.
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PG, mind sharing some insight on the "Panic" nickname? I'm curious about how/if the two are related.
We call her Panic because she's the office worrier. I never considered her two sides might be related. Interesting idea, but I don't think so.
Very interesting. Statistically speaking, women are better than men in reading non-verbal information. I wonder if this is a part of YC success.
Gender differences are across entire populations, but individual variance absolutely swamps them. If you want to fill a single position, you're better off looking at the individual applicant's skills, not their genitals.