821–830 of 1001 posts
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This is the best piece of information I have come across this year. From the depths of my heart, thank you.
I can only feel happy if my blabbering helped you. Reach out if you have any questions or need advice (although advice is a dangerous thing in general). I've been around, I learned to be kind and I love helping people when I can.
He's a C writer though. (We all can't be good at evertyhing. Personally, I have never met a person from a wealthy upbringing who could write well.)
It's too long, and I'm still not sure what he is saying?
I can offer this, but it's for ambitious poor/middle class people.
Work hard at getting ahead. I worked through school, and got out with a B average.
If you are poor getting through college, or starting a business, will not be as easy as the guy who has the wealthy sympathetic father, or mother who sits on the company Board of Directors when they are buying your company. (Easy shot a Bill Gates?)
What am I saying? If you are poor, life will be harder.
You know it already. You know you can't make too many mistakes early on.
You know there will be no one to help when the chips are down.
You won't be offered jobs, or perks in life because of your family name.
You know you will need to work harder than Biff, or Charles.
I did everything I was suspose to do in college. I made every class count, even though I knew most of it was a joke.
I then had a nervous breakdown.
Looking back, I think I should have concentrated on socializing a bit more. I should have networked more too.
In all honestly, I didn't like kids from wealthy families. I found them boring, and unimaginative.
Those wealthy kids usually become wealthy adults though, and those connections will be important later on. I still want to upchuck even thinking about using a person to get ahead though.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share your thoughts :D
As someone who leans towards "Work Smart, Not Hard", I had the following thoughts while reading this:
> Bill Gates... Lionel Messi...
These are very interesting examples, and I don't think I actually would have said that either of them actually did any "great work". What they have in common is what they are both "top of their field" in fields which are highly competitive/winner-take-all, and therefore get an insanely disproportionate amount of compensation.
When I think "Great Work", I think of scientists and inventors. Interestingly enough, many scientists and inventors were "all over the place" with their careers - many of them being polymaths who pursued a number of diverse hobbies. They often also spent time "idle", or "thinking"(Feynman was a good example of this), which is how I find that I do my best thinking as well. I see creative work as benefiting significantly from "not work" activities such as idleness. Steve Jobs had a similar line of thinking:
> Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
In summary, although hard work can capture more value in winner-take-all environments, I think creative work creates more value, and creative work requires taking frequent breaks, and yes, a healthy amount of idleness.
I worked my way through college as a mover (and came out the other side with high 5-figure debt). Many of the older guys I worked with had drug habits. I worked 16-hour days with those guys. They'd get on me for not running up stairs, for packing with too little paper around glass, for setting things down more than once. None wrote articles entitled "How to Work Hard." None knew Warren Buffet as a child (see Gates).…
> Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. This is not true. AirBnB is the top valued company that went through YC [1]. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky among others. Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design [2]. The RISD had an acceptance rate of 20% in 2020. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ [2] https:…
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The Bill Gates Mythology in this essay is a bit odd though. No doubt a hard worker, but the claim >"Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." doesn't align with the facts that have recently emerged about him. [1] Maybe PG should examine selection bias and self-reporting bias a b…
I don’t see misalignment at all. I see complete irrelevance between that quote and the facts. Why can he not be a womanizing workaholic? They are not mutually exclusive and possibly actually correlated. Sex lives need to be private or at least not included as judgement of individual as they are not relevant at all to people’s accomplishments in politics, business, academics, or any other facet of an individual’s life…
Like I said in the parent. No doubt a hard worker, but let’s not mythologize for no reason
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> ...all successful people are talented and hardworking. I doubt it. Most measures of economic mobility show this is becoming less and less true -- if it ever was. I think believing it is important though.
Suppose someone is average and lazy. They're practically guaranteed to live a life of coasting by from job to job, living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to get by in America these days. That is not success by my measure.
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Is this a joke I'm not getting? Do you think he hopped off his skateboard at 19 and became a VC?
That’s a great way to describe it. He sold Viaweb in the dot com bubble to a hyper ignorant Yahoo! Literally a stoke of luck and being in the right place at the right time.
Take my story as an example. I worked in high school as a web form developer in 1995 and 1996. Lots of demand from professors to build their course websites with forms. I was just happy to have a summer job inside with AC. I had the technical chops to build an MVP of wufoo or surveymonkey etc.. But I didn't because I thought it was trivial and underestimated it. I thought at most I would sign up a few dozen psychology grad students or something. It wouldn't be a proper business etc...
Likewise, sometime in 2005-2007 I was in SF and couldn't get a cab and thought about a mobile app but discounted it as infeasible b/c I thought cities would never legalize it to preserve their taxi medallion scheme etc... That's probably true, they would have liked to do that but the public basically demanded it and Uber moved very fast. I reasoned incorrectly and underestimated the market.
I also underestimated DropBox, AirBnB, Hotmail, even Google, Yahoo and FB. The list goes on and on. Hind sight is 20:20 but I think it is important to figure out why I discounted these ideas at the time and what biases I had etc...
I think though that if you are actually interested in something though that goes a long ways to keeping you engaged. You can see past the discounting and the haters. If you continue to work on that, then by the time the rest of the world catches up, you are way ahead.
You don't even have to be some kind of Jedi who can see the future, if you just work on it because it is interesting. As you do that you will get glimpses as to what the future might look like.
Today, I actually don't think Dropbox is "just a sync or backup feature". It is so much more than that and that market has a lot of potential. GDrive, iCloud, and Microsoft all have big problems and limit themselves which hurts consumers.
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The Bill Gates Mythology in this essay is a bit odd though. No doubt a hard worker, but the claim >"Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." doesn't align with the facts that have recently emerged about him. [1] Maybe PG should examine selection bias and self-reporting bias a b…
From the linked article: Another ex, Jill Bennett — described as his “first serious girlfriend” — said they split because of Gates’ fixation with working long hours. “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour turnaround’ — meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours,” she told Wallace. I don't see th…
I’m not claiming he was lazy, just asking “why take his provable lie at face value?”
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I could say the same about novels and be just as correct. You’ve never made friends through a shared interest in games, or even through the games themselves? You’ve never been enthralled with the story of a game, and been left richer afterwards? You’ve missed out, and you’ve missed out through snobbery.
A novel can make you addicted? Like you have to read it every day? I played a lot with friends, but I never made friends through playing. I was enthralled by games, but when I was finished I wasn't "richer" in any way, just shorter of time. It is ok to waste your time if it is fun, but trying to glorify wasting your time is just trying to find an excuse.
My wife used to spend multiple hours a day reading Harry Potter fan fiction to the detriment of other aspects of her life. It might not be designed to be addictive (same way HN isn't), but it can definitely have that affect.
>I played a lot with friends, but I never made friends through playing.
I know people who have made lifelong friends through online gaming. I do not know people who have made lifelong friends through reading books.
>I was enthralled by games, but when I was finished I wasn't "richer" in any way, just shorter of time.
What games were you playing? I've definitely felt absolutely floored by the technical achievements, storytelling and genius design in games before; the same way a good book or album leaves you shocked that a human could have created this.
According to Daniel Kahneman, mere hard-work doesn't click unless we have access to expert feedback in the domain we work. He used to compare hard working f1-formula-driver without any input from past drivers vs driver with input from expert.
Hard work without mentor won't click. Environment and people around us also matter as much as the hard-work we do.