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Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

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Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#151

Post by georgemcbay »

radley wrote: post #148

I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success. I guess he's just in a rut. I read a great book called "How High can You Bounce?" It's all about if you've taken a downturn how can you spin it to your advantage so you rebound better off than where you were before the fall. Knowing this is possible is simply the first step. Think Dave just needs some bounce.

"I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success."

Virtually everyone is a failure depending upon who or what they compare themselves to.

The odds against being a pro basketball player are astronomical -- everyone in the NBA is a huge success relative to those who didn't make it, but if they aren't Kobe Bryan, Lebron James or Dwyane Wade they may consider themselves failures. And even the top active guys live in the shadows of Jordan, et al.

I'm pretty sure this is the root of dmc's problems. The nature of his work has him surrounded by insane statistical outliers (some of whom are probably more lucky than 'good', though I'm sure there are both). His feeling like less than a success in this situation is unfortunate, but probably a perfectly normal human response.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#152

Post by DenisM »

michaelochurch wrote: post #120
cs702 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been arguing the same thing about investing for a long time: is it a game of luck or skill? On one hand, there are academics saying it's always mostly luck, and their typical argument goes roughly like this: Say 100,000 orangutans enter a coin-flipping contest in which 'heads' wins and 'tails' loses; so around 50,000 orangutans will win on the first throw; of those orangutans, around 25,000 will also win…

I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players a…

The most educational post per byte I ever read on HN.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#153

Post by gscott »

ygmelnikova wrote: post #122
oijaf888 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What graphical ecommerce site was that? Given it predates Mosaic and the commercial use of the web I'm surprised its not more well known.

Before the interweb was popular they had this little thing called a BBS and RoboBOARD/FX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX

Here is San Diego at the height of BBS'ing with about 1,100 boards very few used RoboBoard. Must have been much more popular in Canada.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#154

Post by Rhino55 »

I honestly thought Dave McClure was a multi-millionaire. Apparently not.

The rich people I have interacted with and observed are huge dorks. They may be decent, hard-working people, fair, and generous, but they are ultimately dorks. Why? You can ask that of a psychologist, but it all comes down to a big word, "dis-inhibition". Basically if all of the people around you treat you like royalty, you tend to act like a jerk. See "The Emperor's New Groove" for details.

Silicon Valley, as the engine / furnace of American Capitalism, could use a lot fewer dorks and lot more hard-working, honest, thoughtful people like Dave. That is all.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#155

Post by larrys »

michaelochurch wrote: post #108

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

"Business is obviously not "random" in a true sense, but it's obviously not a pure-skill game because so many idiots get lucky and a lot of really talented people (like DMC) don't."

DMC had choices to make and his talent didn't extend to making the right choices.

Forgetting luck for a second which is obviously important, talent could be thought of as a collection of features that all come together to create success.

So simply saying that DMC has "talent" and that someone else who has made it has "inferior talent" ignores that you need varying degrees of talent and quality in many areas which also depends on what you are doing. Not a jack of all trades, master of none but a proper balance (just like you would want in a product). Stylish, good gas mileage and plenty of headroom say for a car.

In addition to luck then DMC was lacking talent in a few areas that would be required to be successful (to the degree he or anyone thinks is success).

As only one example consider the ability to have attention to detail and product quality. That might be super important when selling an expensive luxury product but an impediment if creating products for dollar stores.

Take any super successful person (by whatever definition) and put them in the wrong field. Do you think Bill Gates would be teacher of the year? Do you think pre-presidential Obama would be good running an incubator?

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#156

Post by jroseattle »

I really like this post, it resonates with me as well. I have parallels with Dave's story -- mostly figuratively, but still felt like I've been along the same ride with him.

The fact that Dave is still going strong at 46 and trying to make a difference shows there is much more substance to him than many others I know in this business. If there is one thing I've observed, it's how the perceived "lack" of success in those who expected great things of themselves have knocked so many people off their perch.

Good job, Dave. In my book, the very fact you recognize this in yourself qualifies you as successful.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#157

Post by gavanwoolery »

dasil003 wrote: post #83
gavanwoolery wrote: post #77

I'm only 30, and I feel like I've made a million wrong turns. There are many people, who at my age, have already created their own billion-dollar company. However, I only work on what I believe in (aside from the mundane work I do to pay the bills), which I readily acknowledge is probably the worst route to traditional (i.e. monetary) success. There are many ways to flip a worthless company for a profit in the softwa…

I'm guessing very few people have actually created a billion dollar company by the time they're 30. Just sayin.

I'm a fan of exaggeration ;)

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#158

Post by stfu »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #136
stfu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have somehow trouble with these high numbers. By looking at the front page, the points for top stories are still staying relatively at the same level. These relatively low numbers of votes makes it still seem to be a relatively close community but maybe just many of the new visitors can't be bothered to participate.

I assure you these numbers are real. I have no inside knowledge, but I have submitted a few StackOverflow posts (with my username attached to them) that made it to the front page, and I watched how many of them were from my link on HN. "Stuck due to “knowing too much”" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4037794 ), 68 votes, about 15,000 visitors "What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?" ( http://new…

Very interesting, thanks a lot for sharing! But this makes it only even more mysterious, why so few people vote or take part in the discussions.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#159

Post by graeme »

stfu wrote: post #118
arohner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png )

I still have somehow trouble with these high numbers. By looking at the front page, the points for top stories are still staying relatively at the same level. These relatively low numbers of votes makes it still seem to be a relatively close community but maybe just many of the new visitors can't be bothered to participate.

It's the nature of web forums. I run a subreddit, we get 100 uniques a day, roughly. Generally they make about one submission per day, collectively.

I'm told that's a pretty normal rate on reddit, given our size. It's easier to consume than to produce. (nb. People may be producing more elsewhere while not participating here)

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#160

Post by rfugger »

Udo wrote: post #97
simonsarris wrote: post #7

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gu…

I found it difficult to relate to his position. By all accounts, he is already very successful and, more importantly, financially independent so he has the freedom to do anything he likes. Labeling that kind of lifestyle as either "late blooming" or "being a loser" is a gross insult to the majority of people who are still trying very hard to achieve his level. By his standards, I'm worth less than a handful of dirt.…

Yeah,what I mainly got from his post is that the author suffers from low self-esteem.
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