51–60 of 111 posts
Is White Plains the Palo Alto of the Northeast? There seem to be a disproportionate amount of intelligent people doing new and exciting things from that town. Edit: spelling
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> If you stick with it, you'll be successful. It doesn't matter where you come from, who your parents are, what you know, who you know, or how you look. All that is required is a choice I'm going to present a different picture of the world. I think it's a more accurate one. Not necessarily more useful. There is no such thing as a guarantee of success -- at least, for a definition of success that includes broad recogn…
> There is no such thing as a guarantee of success. It's true there is no guarantee of success. But if you quit early there would be only guarantee failure.
There are many great examples, but to take only one consider Larry Page and Sergey Brin who tried and failed to sell PageRank to Yahoo, Altavista etc.
The world does not remember them as two engineers who failed to sell their novel idea to BigCo and make a lot of money, but as the founders of a great company called Google.
You can fail as many times as you like. You only have to win once and the world will remember you for it. Only way to guarantee a defeat is to quit. If you can keep at it, you probably should.
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The companies failed, but did the founders end up worse off than if they had been random engineers at Microsoft?
I guess define "worse off". But I would say in both cases they ended up about the same...but I will grant they learned lots of intangibles from the experiences.
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How many people have worked on their own startup in the valley for 5+ years and had nothing come of it? Before I made the leap to working on a startup full time, I searched for a while for an example where 5 or more years resulted in complete failure but I couldn't find one. Not a single data point among hundreds that I read about/heard about anecdotally. I'm very curious, anyone care to share an example where they w…
In a lot of ways, I feel that my own path has had that trajectory.
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But what no one talked about was the years she forewent hanging out with other girls in middle school, watching TV and doing her hair with girlfriends in high school. Ah the old "I knew Taylor Swift" card, hear it all the time. I will say the funniest thing about being from Wyo is how everyone in a 50-mile radius of my town/school apparently "knew" and were best friends with Taylor Swift before she left. But yeah I a…
Ha. Not from there, but every Icelander I've met "knew" Bjork, but that may be because it's half the size of Wyoming and is much, much more isolated.
"It got so discouraging that Lee reportedly contemplated learning computer science so he could find a job during this time, but was scolded by his wife when she found out, telling him to keep his focus."
I think it's an Asian saying where every great man has either a great mother or wife. How true it is.
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> If you stick with it, you'll be successful. It doesn't matter where you come from, who your parents are, what you know, who you know, or how you look. All that is required is a choice I'm going to present a different picture of the world. I think it's a more accurate one. Not necessarily more useful. There is no such thing as a guarantee of success -- at least, for a definition of success that includes broad recogn…
> There is no such thing as a guarantee of success. It's true there is no guarantee of success. But if you quit early there would be only guarantee failure.
The problem is we never know when "early" is. It could be past our patience, financial means, career window, or lifetime.
What I struggle to imagine is the distorted sense of self and entitlement required to have the opposite perspective, which seems to be the author's view - that 6 years is too long to work hard at something and become good at it???
I knew Taylor Swift growing up. Like Ang Lee, for around 6 to 8 years Taylor acted in musicals, sang at festivals, entered competitions, and recorded demos. She was bad at first (sorry Taylor!), but she kept working at it. Every day, she was writing another lyric, or taking another guitar lesson, or auditioning for another play, or switching voice teachers. The reason I knew her was that I went to school with her (sh…
you're discounting luck, chance, etc.
one bad decision or just bad luck moment and you're toast. and for female singers - if your genes made you butt ugly, no career for you, no matter how great you sing.