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Find Your People

foundersatwork.posthaven.com

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Re: Find Your People

#51

Post by ip26 »

jll29 wrote: post #40
jumploops wrote: post #38

As someone who has “reinvented” myself more than once (mostly due to school/job transfers), it seems what wasn’t said is equally if not more important. Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go. The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow. Easier said than done. Whether it’s the negative influence of a…

> or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent For what it's worth, I teach my students not to listen to their parents, because while most parents want the best for their children, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.

As categorical guidance, that seems like a problematic thing to teach. First, parents don’t know everything, but they know their kids and have witnessed their journey, so they have a unique perspective to offer. Second, parents will begin to (justifiably!!) grow suspicious of your institution and develop resentment, which is a serious structural problem.

Hopefully what you mean is something like you teach them to think critically about their parents advice as one input among many, understanding where the advice comes from and its inherent strengths and flaws.

Re: Find Your People

#52

Post by jll29 »

The talk is suitable for the target audience, the young undecided.

For the rest of us, especially here at HN, it would have been interesting to learn a bit more about how she got to that Fidelity job first and how she then "drifted" towards "her people", namely the startup people, and then the book and Y Combinator in specific. Some Y combinator early anecdotes would have been great, too.

Re: Find Your People

#53

Post by bkeyes »

jll29 wrote: post #40
jumploops wrote: post #38

As someone who has “reinvented” myself more than once (mostly due to school/job transfers), it seems what wasn’t said is equally if not more important. Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go. The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow. Easier said than done. Whether it’s the negative influence of a…

> or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent For what it's worth, I teach my students not to listen to their parents, because while most parents want the best for their children, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.

For what it's worth, I teach my children not to listen to their teachers, because while most teachers want the best for their students, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.

Re: Find Your People

#54

Post by joshstrange »

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.

Well put!

This is something _so many_ college kids don't seem to understand. I had many friends who graduated then just stood around looking for where to go next. It hadn't come up in discussions but it became apparent they were surprised by the sudden end to the "tracks" while the students who saw them coming (or were told better/more often) all were befuddled, "How did you not see this coming?", "Did you expect someone to just walk up and offer you a job?", "You have never even interned in your field??".

I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal, I talked about this specifically (in blog post) when I dropped out of college to go full-time into my profession. For me, learning "there are no tracks" and more importantly "you don't need to go to the end of the college track before you decide next steps" was freeing and empowering while also being a bit terrifying.

Re: Find Your People

#55

Post by ip26 »

apsurd wrote: post #3

Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life. The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts. I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actu…

A wide perspective is good, but that is orthogonal to what they experience as normal. You can select for a good, healthy normal AND provide a wide experience.

Your child doesn’t have to attend a school where educational attainment isn’t valued, to understand that perspective exists.

Their “normal” will strongly influence their choices. For example, if you wanted your child to attend college, I would argue the single best way to ensure they do is to enroll them in a high school where 90%+ of the student body later goes on to college.

Re: Find Your People

#56

Post by nathan_compton »

"Which leads me to my final point about getting ambitious plans: you have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that's enough to stop you, you're doomed. So you have to learn to ignore it. And that's harder than it sounds—social pressure is so powerful. But everyone who does ambitious things has to learn how to resist it."

Lots of people who learn to do this cause lots of chaos and destruction in their wake. I don't care if you need this attitude to be a founder, it still sucks.

I worked at a startup where the technical founder had this attitude and was, at least with respect to the product at hand, totally incompetent and it was truly catastrophically absurd and stressful and a huge waste of tons of people's time and money.

Re: Find Your People

#58

Post by phkahler »

How much of that is hindsight? Was she drawn to Y-combinator or did she drift into it like she did Fidelity? Recognizing it was the right people and the right thing obviously happened, I'm just questioning when she actually knew that.

Re: Find Your People

#59

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ketzo wrote: post #45
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a poverty level school, my partner went to one of the most elite schools in the US. My friends are also stuck in poverty or the lower-middle-class while my partner's friends seem quite conventionally successful. But several of my partner's friends are quite frustrated with their career choices. They feel like they were hemmed into high-prestige careers. A lot of them are not particularly successful in their…

It’s certainly true that there are real downsides to both ends of the spectrum — but all things being equal I’d rather be wiping my tears with hundred dollar bills than tissues

You say that, until you start spending those hundred dollar bills on therapy. I'm only being a bit silly here, a pretty high number of these folks are in therapy dealing with the alienation they feel over their life for being forced into a career path they felt like they had no choice in.

Re: Find Your People

#60

Post by jxjnskkzxxhx »

Hmm ok. What she's arguing for is "fake it till you make it". Think about it, the first thing this person did when she started steering, was write a book about startups even though by her own admission she didn't know anything about startups.

I liked the rails/steering advise, disliked the fake it till you make it advice.

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