You Are the Exception to the Rule
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You Are the Exception to the Rule
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#2I appreciate the read.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#3This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better.
Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement.
[ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders can't do FizzBuzz" meme that generally accompanies the flowery you're-a-special-snowflake-talk. Applicants maybe, but that doesn't say much. There's tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won't get famous or found a sustainable business.]
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#4I have to say, my startup has struggled with this. We're a two-man shop, and neither of us buys phone apps, pays for virtual goods, clicks on ads, etc. It tends to make us think that other people don't do those things either, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Part of the article's conclusion is, "Get the product in front of your core audience," and I suspect that's the only way for the inexperienced to accurately gauge the value of their product.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#5This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
He wasn't saying you aren't mediocre. He's just saying that often you don't see value in the things you already know how to do, because you assume others have the same problems and abilities that you do. Essentially he's just saying you need to step into your users' shoes better, it's not a feel good post.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#6This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
He wasn't saying you aren't mediocre. He's just saying that often you don't see value in the things you already know how to do, because you assume others have the same problems and abilities that you do. Essentially he's just saying you need to step into your users' shoes better, it's not a feel good post.
I have the same problem, in that I tend to think that, if I can do it, that it must be trivial, when a lot of things that I can do at this point are not actually trivial for most people.
Still, I don't harbor the delusion that I could drop everything and write a $10k/month iPad app overnight. There's a lot of luck in that, and a lot of skills are required (marketing, presentation) that I wouldn't bet my career on me having.
I think it's worth it for people to try things that have a sub-50% chance of success if they'll learn something from it, and if they've limited their losses, but I think it's unreasonable to make major bets on not being in the N-1 out of N. The academic career racket is fueled by these sorts of unrealistic expectations (more specifically, by people who haven't figured out that the academic job market up-and-died a generation and a half ago).
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#7This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
Think about what you spend money on, and the people behind it. They might be making your lunch, bagging your groceries, or mowing your lawn. They are probably mediocre at it, but you pay them anyway.
Others will pay you decent money to do a mediocre job, and good money to do a good job, because you are the exception to the rule of being willing and able to do the thing for them at all. Most people who have problem X would rather pay money for you to solve some problem for them (even if your solution is mediocre) than solve it themselves, because that allows them to focus on solving whatever problem they care about or think they can get paid for.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#8This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
There are several orders of magnitude between getting famous and founding a sustainable business.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#9This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
Conversely, I see zero value in this kind of reactionarily pessimistic you're-average-at-everything-and-even-if-you're-good-you'll-probably-fail-anyway stuff that always turns up on any encouraging article.
You get zero points for being able to say "See, I was right" when someone fails. Completely aside from that, it's factually wrong; people on this site are quite likely to have skills and resources that the average person cannot comprehend. Being a "decent programmer" is a fabulously valuable skill in the modern world. You aren't guaranteed to be able to leverage it into capital right away, but if you work hard and get out of your own head it's fully achievable.
Re: You Are the Exception to the Rule
#10This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you're not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that's just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won't make things better. Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don't fall for the cheap words of encouragement. [ADDENDUM: I still don't trust the "Most coders c…
There are several orders of magnitude between getting famous and founding a sustainable business.
Getting famous is easier than reaching the level of competence that will give a person the ability to reliably found sustainable businesses.
(I'm not kidding.)