Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
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Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#2Innovator's Dilemma?
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#3Being too successful is a funny way of describing premature optimization and the risks behind great yet narrow specialization.
Specialists are by definition exceptionally successful in exceptional circumstances. I don't think that makes them too successful. It just makes them high risk-high reward takers.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#4The example cited is not death by too much success but rather death by not diversifying the product line.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#5This is a good example of hacker writing in 10 paragraphs the sort of thing that has often been diluted into a 250-page business book.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#6This is a good example of hacker writing in 10 paragraphs the sort of thing that has often been diluted into a 250-page business book.
The amazing thing is that there is a lot of repetition even at 10 paragraphs. Some of the other comments here sum it up in twitter-sized chunks.
The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#7This is a good example of hacker writing in 10 paragraphs the sort of thing that has often been diluted into a 250-page business book.
I can condense it down into one sentence:
If you're not careful you will specialize yourself into a corner.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#8The post made some interesting points about technical success not equating to real world success, but the whole article suffers from a poor definition of the word.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#9Funny, at Toastmasters last night our table topic was "what if you had a different mother?" and we got to pick moms from a random list. My random mom was Angelina Jolie, and I think I made a well-reasoned case that I would have fucked myself to death.
My point is that parent's success probably outdoes your own success.
Re: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004)
#10Lisp Machines weren't that successful. I was their target user, and I ditched Symbolics to use Lucid on Suns at the first opportunity.
The Lisp Machine software was appallingly baroque. Everything had every possible feature. There was no design, just implementation, and lots of it. The manuals took up a whole shelf, and it was generally faster to write something yourself than to find the predefined function that did it.
A lot of (arguably most of) the badness of Common Lisp is Lisp Machine culture showing through.