IMO, this would be an order of magnitude more impactful if each point were illustrated with vivid examples, although I understand that would take more time to write. There's a vast gulf between saying, eg., "take more risks" in the abstract, and doing some specific thing that seems dangerous right now. Past risks that worked out always seem justified in retrospect, so it would be super cool to go into detail on eg. just how crazy SpaceX seemed back in 2002.
- Have your sales point ( why should they do business with you and not with someone else, who does the same. The sales point doesn't have to be related to the thing you are selling / consulting on. They have to improve your overall image. Nothing else). I seem to be able to sell better in person, than anyone i ever saw ( but the work takes time...).
- Grow your network or know people who have the network
- Filter your network. Don't spend time on people who will never be in your niche. I filter it to simple: business. ( doing computers in the past, they were the most understanding clients) and no websites ( personally, i only create them for friends)
- Take risks
- Spend money when you can outsource, because your time is expensive.
- Have a long term plan, which niche are you growing into. If you have been "doing everything and nothing", than what has been the most profitable with the least amount of time spend.
- Prioritize, because your time is expensive
- A plan can take time to come together. Sometimes links ( helping someone out 2 years before, pay out later in the future). Don't be afraid to help them remember, when you helped them in the past.
- Don't be scared to drop clients. Especially if they are extremely rich/have no good business, they will consume all of your time and question every invoice you send.
- Don't partner up for doing a cloud application for "free"/"low-fee" in return of being a partner. Most cloud applications fail.
- If you are a developer, your "online-business" will probably fail in online marketing ( the chance is big). Get a plan how you would grow the business, before you have clients. Don't count on online marketing for it.
- Solve problems or iterate on solutions for existing problems
#2: Have almost too much self-belief. Self-confidence has been something I've struggled with my entire life, to the point where its crippled my career growth as a developer. I've been told that I'm a good developer, but if I only believed in myself I could go a lot further and become truly great. However, it's hard for me to believe in myself when I don't have a lot of data points to prove that I AM competent and capable. Over the past 3 years of working full-time yes I've accomplished some things, but none of them were truly difficult or ground breaking. I'm always pushing myself harder to learn more and get better, but it never feels like its having enough impact on me actually growing. So if all I have are at best average/mediocre accomplishments, how do I convince myself that no, I AM great, that I CAN do this? I feel like if I start having a lot of self-belief it'll just become a lie that will blind me from my weaknesses and cause me to stop growing.
I've been trying to find solutions myself - I'm trying to use some strategies listed in this book: The inner game of tennis, by Timothy Galloway, and I'm seeing positive results so far. He talks about 2 versions of self: self1 - the doer and self2 - the judgemental self, which is constantly evaluating self1, and adversely affect self1's potential. He has some useful suggestions on how to limit the impact of self2, and I found those pretty helpful so far.
If there's a common pattern of anxiety or lack of concentration in life, then it may be worth it to go to a family doctor or therapist to talk about it. This isn't an easy black-and-white decision to make either. It may take months or even years of self-reflection to come to terms with that, and even more time to work up the courage to seek help for something so ambivalent.
It's hard to be your successful when you're not the best version of yourself.
OMG, you've been working for 3 whole years and haven't done anything ground-breaking?! Seriously though, maybe you aren't 'great', whatever that means exactly, and I doubt it's necessary for you to believe that, whether it's true or not.
You might find (books like) Albert Ellis' New Guide to Rational Living useful - I did! It's about observing and recording your recurring thoughts, particularly ones that make you feel bad, and replacing them with more accurate, helpful ones - stopping the self-sabotage. It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves without noticing. We're trained to be nice to others, without including ourselves in that. I used to do a lot of extremely negative, paralyzing self-talk - saying nasty things to myself I'd never dream of laying on someone else; sounds like you do this too, maybe. This falls under "How to love yourself", something I had to learn to do. Louise Hay has a great 12-point list of things under that heading, stuff like "Treat yourself like you'd treat someone you really love." Then as you get older, you realize you aren't so terrible, and others aren't so great..
I think 'self-belief' comes naturally with untangling that stuff, and otherwise isn't always a good sign, e.g.
"Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." ...I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"it never feels like its having enough impact on me actually growing"
Then you aren't outside your comfort zone enough because when you are, there will be NO DOUBT you've grown.
Do you know what the difference between a shitty golfer (like me) and a slightly better golfer (like my brother) is? Maybe 25 rounds of golf per year. If I played 25 MORE rounds of golf, I could beat him solidly.
Do you know what the difference between say Tiger woods and the very best Amateur golfer in the world is? A thousand rounds of golf. Ten thousand?
Point 1: Down here in the land of the unwashed masses of basically average developers like you and I, you can make noticeable strides by just consistently working a little harder. You can make leaps and bounds by consistently working A LOT HARDER.
Point 2: Once you start advancing past people, it gets harder and harder to advance past people. There's only so much room at the top, in every possible hierarchy. Check out some Jordan Peterson on Competence Hierarchy.
And I guess....
Point 3:
The only real way to be successful is to be comfortable in your own body. I have some bad news for you buddy, this part of the article is complete horse shit.
"The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more."
Cultivate what early? Delusion? Self confidence? \eyeroll
Success means actually liking yourself and nothing more. Some people call this CONFIDENCE. Same exact thing.
How do you become confident? Achieve.
How do you achieve? Apply your knowledge.
How do you get knowledge? FAIL AT THINGS
How do you fail at things? Try new things.
By the way "success" is such a stupid word. I have worked very, very closely with someone who has $100M in the bank. I was his computer guy for all his properties around the world and guess what? He's jealous of another guy we know with $1B in the bank.
Success != Money
Confidence != Money
Success == Confidence
OH and guess what shows up when you have confidence?
> Over the past 3 years of working full-time yes I've accomplished some things, but none of them were truly difficult or ground breaking.
3 years? Fuck. It sounds like you're on track for a long and successful career. Not everyone peaks early. Give yourself a break, spend a little more time networking and a little less time on your hard skills and you'll probably find greater opportunities for ground breaking things through relationships than through your skills.
Hmm, your post made me think of machine learning somehow, because a life does seem like finding a good place in a maze/forest/mountain to me. Do you want to reach the absolute highest (i.e. global maxima)? I can tell you that it might be impossible, because you might have landed at a bad starting point! Some people try that anyway, but I found that's not really my style. Instead, I try to reach some local maxima and be happy about it (depending on your situation or upbringing). It's quite doable. Every day you nudge yourself to a slightly better point that is reachable. Sometimes you want to choose a steeper slope which is harder but also gains a lot. Rinse and repeat. It won't get you to some remote place like Mt. Everest, but hey, a nearby hill can be still pretty good! What's important is that you get an actionable plan instead of a vague and seemingly unachievable goal. Here's my favorite quote which put it quite nicely:
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. - Theodore Roosevelt
You need objective metrics of two kinds: absolute and relative.
Relative metrics will show if you really are better than most other people. Absolute ones will show whether or not you can, in fact, do X to some standard.
I do not suffer from Imposter Syndrome. That's why. I find measures that show me what I can do, and to heck with all the sturm and drang from most people.
It's also very successful, if you have built a stable business and a way of supporting yourself and a few others around you. Being successful doesn't always mean having a 1BN valuation. But sure, it's nice to think that one day, it could happen. I'm just grateful every day that what I've got now - stability and plenty of resources - was a result of pretty much what Sam said. Believing in ourselves and not giving up, and building something meaningful to others that isn't easily duplicated. Sometimes I feel that's not enough, here on this site, but it is. The business I have right now: it just can't get that big, the wider market doesn't need what I make. But I love what I do and I have insane amounts of freedom and to my friends, I'm wildly successful. I'm reminded by that each time I know I'm doing well enough to live the life I wanted, and can support my family. That's success, too.
Absolutely. There are a range of definitions for successful, but I think in many ways it's best left as "in the eye of the beholder", in the sense that it's about achieving your own personal threshold. If you build a way of life that is sustainable for yourself and provides you with personal and psychological stability for you and your dependents, and if you feel at least reasonably fulfilled in this, you can call yourself successful.
If you don't think you're doing what you should be, or think you could be doing So Much More, or that you have wasted potential, then maybe you're not successful yet, even if you're doing better on paper than some people who do view themselves as such.
Given how many marriages end up in divorce, and how many more must stick together but create a hostile environment for children, avoiding that should be seen as an achievement too.
As a force multiplier have a stable business that supports you but doesn't take all of your time can be huge. It allows you to take risks that others won't.
That said, there is something to having risks be actual risks. A friend of mine who has been much more successful than I have decided to take out a huge second mortgage on his house to start his own business (at the time it was an ISP and he spent nearly all of the money he pulled out on building out his data center and network). I advised him against it, after all if it failed he would lose his house. But his response was sobering, it was "Chuck, I need to know that if I fail I'll lose my house to keep my feet to the fire of not failing." Gutsy? Stupid? He made it work and is "retired" to his own boutique winery. Would I be as impressed if he had failed? I suppose it would depend on what he did after he got through that.
This motivation is real. I never worked harder than in the first 3 years of my bootstrapped business, when finance was precarious.
I didn't face any big financial loss, I had no mortgage, debt or capital requirements in the business. Just my own living expenses.
But I really, really, really didn't want to fail. That would mean moving back in with my parents and getting a job.
It really worked. If I had had enough money that I could have been in modest comfort indefinitely, I don't think I would have gotten off the ground.
I see a lot of people who would like to start a business. And they make some efforts here and there. But they have a decently comfy life, and they don't seem to have that drive that motivates you through the tedium, the tiny initial results, the lag between effort and something tangible. I consider it a virtual guarantee of failure.
Decades ago, I heard a [possibly apocryphal] story that was already decades old about an encounter between a man famous for his vast wealth (I can't remember who, Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller..?) and a fan. A man recognized the rich guy on the street and approached him. "Are you <whoever>?" Yes. "Tell me, what does it really feel like to have so much money?"
"Young man, I could probably ask you the same question." The young man looked puzzled. The rich man continued, "Do you feel as though you have enough money?" "Well, sure, I suppose, but it would be great to have more."
"How does it feel--feeling that you have enough money and more would be a luxury? I've never once felt that way, so I can't stop until I feel that way, too."
Devoting your life to getting above some very high percentile in money is not the best use of your only life for most people, in my opinion, but as long as they're not stealing it, it's okay with me if others want that for themselves (and I don't feel entitled to a share of it.) I think we all should take seriously the responsibility to support ourselves and to help others who can't, but beyond that, there are countless forms of success that are as worthy as "owning lots of valuable things".
Yep I agree, the meaning of success is very subjective.
Imho success shouldn't be numbered in $ or PhDs.
I've met simple people, with not much money or education, although they are successful to me cause they managed to create a nice family and have a happy life. Something that usually its hard for people working towards their careers 24/7.
Hesiod once wrote 'Moderation in all things'. That personally is my moto. I don't have to have done something that is out of this world to be successful. I can be successful enough by valuing my own time, raising my kids in a proper manner and generally being happy. If I am happy, I am successful.
I could not agree more. In fact I said the same thing to a post on HN not a month ago: why are people aiming to be the 1% in their careers or markets when just being great at what you do, and for enough people, will bring happiness and joy for all involved.
You hit the nail on the head. Success is most definitely not measured by how many steaks you've in the freezer as opposed to the next "less" or "more" successful guy. From what I can glean about your post, your aim was to be -content- more than -successful-, and from what you've said, it seems like you are (e.g. you speak of more life balance)
Notorious B.I.G. - may he rest in peace, has a great song which IMHO is pure wisdom when it comes to money - "Mo' money, mo' problems"
So be -content- with what you have. And being content is an art form - easier said than done.
I agree, some of the advice feels more like
‘How to be a better high risk vc startup founder’ vs ‘How to be a better 1M/yr “lifestyle” business founder’.
Eventually if you want to scale yourself in the exponentiation formula you become a vc, vs grist for the founder mill.
You only have so many 1% 5 year adventure chances to do a startup before you find your 50 and dont have much to show for your life.
how many people would you say try and fail 50 times?
of course, failure can be defined in many ways. But I wouldn't think you end up in a bad place without having learnt a lot.
Because of survivorship bias, you usually never hear about these people.
Many people also try only 1 or 2 adventures, and if unsuccessful go into normal employment. But you jump off the 'potential exponentiation train' that sama describes by doing that, and you've lost out on 5-10 years of potential compound savings growth, which for many who can work at FANG instead means a million or two.
You also get to learn a lot and do fun stuff at FAANG employers too.
A far from incidental detail. But is there sourced information available about his parents' actual income level?
We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling:
For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
The New Yorker interview said his mother was a dermatologist, so I would tentatively assume his background is upper-middle-class. That's obviously an advantage, but then, most children of such families don't become rich and famous either.
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success?
it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples.
and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success?
No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
The movie Gattaca covers this concept quite directly - I think ironically because it frames the problem as one the individuals involved had no original say in.
Am I the only one who finds the concept of privilege resentful?
It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.
The idea is not to "feel bad about" being male, or white, or having four functional limbs. The idea is to recognize that these characteristics - which others can't "strive" towards - may give us advantages that aren't earned.
If I suddenly became black, and nothing else about me changed, studies have shown I'd likely be treated differently by police, potential employers, medical facilities, etc.
Recognizing that fact may make it easier to combat. Perhaps the next time I interview a woman I might be more conscious of the fact that what I'd perhaps have seen as "assertiveness" or "confidence" in a male candidate is being noted as "pushy" or "bitchy" in the female one, and back off from that assessment somewhat.
It just plays into the classic class warfare theory that seems to be common these days.
It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
In the end though it only hurts those who believe in it because those who believe in it also believe that it is a waste of time to work hard, be innovative etc because it will only lead to failure. So they never try. People also use it as a way to justify why they are poor or unsuccessful...not their fault...it is the privileged that made them poor! Their other political views will mainly focus on "economic justice" like more regulations on successful businesses, higher taxes for the rich, welfare programs for the poor (basic income basically a dream come true in their eyes) and so on.
Seems to be a very popular view these days among young people.
> It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
This is a completely incorrect idea of what people are arguing privilege means.
Privilege is a step up on the ladder. It doesn't get you the whole way, and someone without that bonus step can still get up the ladder, but it changes the difficulty somewhat.
Yeah, I really would too. It always irks me when some highly successful businessman gives a talk about "do what you love and you will find success". As if billions of people before him that weren't particularly successful hadn't already tried that.
It definitely takes years. I went back to school 6 years ago and graduated 3.5 years ago, I optimized for financial security (went to community college followed by the cheapest 4-year available, worked 40+ hours a week throughout, went into a high-paying field), and I've only recently gotten to the point where I'd consider myself financially secure enough to easily take risks. 4-5 years is probably a reasonable lower bound in those cases - you could maybe get there a bit faster if you somehow land a job at a FAANG out of school, but good luck with that.
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves).
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Like you say, these stunted people already exist. They already do everything in their power to minimize their work time, including trying for disability or welfare. UBI won't create more of them, and it won't end the ones we have, but it may add stability to the working poor.
How do you know that UBI won't create more of them? It's a common refrain, like with legalization ("anyone who wants to smoke weed is already doing it"), and I know several people who didn't smoke before it became legal, and are now smoking regularly. It seems reasonable to think that UBI would enable some class of people who would otherwise exert themselves, to no longer bother.
Because there's already social safety nets those people can use. And yes, absolutely, there are probably going to be groups of people who are barely working now that will stop, but given there's already means to not work, I can't see this being a huge group, and really, this is an optimist / pessimist face-off, which is sad, because that's how we probably see the possible outcomes too. The only way we can know if it'll work or not is for someone to try it - which, thankfully, YC is.
Not sure if you've ever used those social safety nets, but they are not easy to qualify for and/or sign up for, so only the stubborn and/or desperate actually take advantage of them. There are also disincentives, like misinformation, run-arounds, and social shaming. From what I've heard, these reasons are exactly why UBI is a better strategy than those social safety nets--and why we can expect more people to take advantage of them.
The modern welfare state (post-1930) did create a huge number of these stunted people. UBI will create many more, and it'll be a generational compounding effect, as the stunting increases through generations and we develop familities where no ancestor has worked for 3+ generations.
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
If there were no stunted people, why did the welfare state get created? And do you have any evidence of this increase, or did it just codify the problem that already existed?
>>All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
The wealthy control us with the, 'I don't want to pay for it trick.'
Any new idea, like UBI, that might equal out the playing field, a bit, is so easily shot down by scare tactics.
I foresee a future of just rich people, and the exploited. I truly find it depressing. The wealthy have us all blaming the wrong people. The middle class blame the poor. The whiter ones blaming the darker ones. Just blame someone except the rich boys, and the buying power of that family money.
All the while, the crafty boys are controlling our thoughts, and actions.
All this cheap tech surveillance, and cheap psyops, just make the wealthy chaps goal of keeping us enslaved easier.
My uncle is a perpetual slacker and alcoholic. Last winter he got frost bite on his feet so bad that they ended up amputating both of them. He couldn't be bothered to get up and stoke the fire.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
Even assuming you had any facts to base your assumption, why is that a bad thing? There is nothing holy about work, especially work for the enrichment of others.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
I also have a hard time buying that. Wouldn’t that mean that high tax countries with more welfare would be more probable to have big drug problems? E.g. Sweden does not have a bigger problem with drugs then the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale... (and of course you are not saying that social welfare is the only parameter)
It will probably do both. "There are people who will take risks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to with a basic income" and "there are people who will do nothing of value to anyone besides themselves if they have a choice in the matter" are not mutually exclusive.
I think it can be balanced by the amount of UBI. UBI should just be enough to make sure no one goes hungry or has to sleep out in the cold. That, in addition to public health care and education and access to libraries and opportunities for self-growth. Anything more can and will be misused. Anything less makes it too risky for people to experiment and fail. At least that's the theory I have in my head. How exactly to determine this amount fairly? I don't know.
Basic income solves the problem of how to get spending money to consumers. This is an important problem. If consumers don't have spending money, then the economy won't function properly.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
> Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).
Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.
For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Is there a way to build character and the grit to succeed without forcing people into extreme poverty?
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
I don't know why I couldn't upvote you but this absolutely. Also in India where there was universal basic income one of the positive side effect was that it reduced domestic violence as it gave financial freedom to women.
What most people don't understand is that UBI is not about giving free money. It's about giving the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to survive and shine in this unequal world.
Sure a certain percentage of the crowd will take advantage and be a "dole bludger" but these are persistent even in unemployment benefits schemes.
Depends where it comes from. If it's just printed by the government, yes. If it's taxed and redistributed then in theory no, but accounting for all the incentives that taxes create on both sides of the transaction is tricky and the result in most cases is "unintended consequences."
The idea that a tax will prevent inflation is an intuition that a lot of people have, but it's not correct. If your basic income is going to cause inflation, then a tax is not going to help. What matters is the level of consumer spending and the level of production that the consumer spending is chasing.
If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:
A basic income will only cause inflation if the amount is too high.
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.
I can appreciate your intention, but unless you really believe that 10,000 monkeys can type the complete works of Shakespeare, the "big swings" you envision have to be informed by some level of education, morality, and social sensibility. Basic income alone is not the solution.
I know there's a lot of people for whom BI would help them do great things: I think this is a small minority that we in HN community are familiar with.
But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.
Seriously, it's incredible that someone could write this, redraft it at least six times, have it read by sixteen (16!) people, and not once acknowledge the boost provided to his life and career by family background (also race, but that can be for another post).
Sure but just being wealthy is more than enough and if you can get VC money that kinds of covers your base.
Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire..
Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"
I have to admit, I was going to post this - but it's probably a very polarized opinion.
The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit.
When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful.
Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class.
I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network.
I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds.
Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.
For sure - you have connections to money which can help fund your startup.
The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process.
I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking.
I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job.
Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly.
So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!
>I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
This is what really gets to me. Those companies will go bankrupt, the investors will lose out, the employees will get laid off, and the founder will have paid himself $300k/yr for those 5 years of fiddling around with nonsense and playing with other people's money, as he goes off to the next venture and spouts platitudes of success. There's absolutely no connection anymore between actual business success. Gaining "funding" is seen as the end all be all goal, and anything after that is just whatever.
And I think the reason you see less diversity here comes down to a class divide in moral values. No working class person can possibly even comprehend thinking like that. It comes off as completely sociopathic. Yet there is a class of people who are perfectly comfortable doing it, and we just let them for whatever reason. It starts to make you understand where class based revolutions have come from in the past.
Don't get hung up on the investors, aside from the f&f's class (who should know better to never lend money you can't afford to lose). Most investors know the risks, spread it appropriately and get tax advantages so that a loss results in a financial hit equal to small proportion of that loss. If anyone feel sorry for the tax payer, but then again you're paying for job creation, so swings and roundabouts.
Great post Sam! My two cents is to try and compete against yourself: quantify your actions with some set of metrics and loop your measurements of those metrics into a feedback loop of improvement. That way, you never feel left behind and have your improvement cycles interrupted or lost, and you gain a good deal of self-introspection, which is invaluable in a world where people nudge/push you around. Your understanding of yourself has to be the ground truth where all other personality traits, habits, and higher-level tasks evolve from, and these combine to generate high-quality work and personal roadmaps.
> My two cents is to try and compete against yourself
This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.
For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"
I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).
Great article! I think sales is one of the most important tools to life, and it's one as a computer science major that was the hardest to cultivate.
Those are all positives directions but I also think about what attributes are really important. I think working longer in a single industry is more important than working hard for a brief amount of time inside. Most of the opportunities comes later as you are deeper inside and just staying till that point is important.
This is the most important point in the whole post:
As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people
That goes straight to the concept of scalability. Usually we talk about it in terms of businesses scaling or benefiting from economies of scale, but this is talking about scalability on a personal level. Not to be understated.
I'm not successful, but my strategy for getting there is specific....
-- never put yourself in the position to go bankrupt
-- stay in the game - keep your overheads down to the minimum practical for you
-- learn to program so you can implement your own ideas without need for a cofounder or need to pay for anything more than hosting and a domain
-- just keep banging out your ideas into products until one catches on.
-- try to bootstrap and if possible avoid raising capital - it's too distracting and costly and dilutes your time massively
-- do your very best to avoid employing anyone until you really can't avoid it
-- don't get a cofounder if you can possibly avoid it - it can lead to arguments and business failure... if you really need help, bootstrap till you can employ someone
-- repeat until success or giving up, not because you're forced to stop
Forgot where I read this but the article said that you'd better pick the options that have the most probability of high returns. A way to save energy. I'm naturally drawn to hard and long and get stuck and exhausted.
By and large, this is the same algorithm I use. I've really only deviated on one point.
That said, I'd add to this the idea of thinking in terms of "Return on Capital Invested" where your time and effort are a from of Capital. IOW, it's important (IMO) to figure out how to direct your attention towards the efforts that are most likely to yield the outcomes (whether financial or otherwise) that you seek. The problem, of course, is that you don't know in advance how things will play out. So you have to experiment, but once you begin an experiment the big question becomes "do I keep going on this, or redirect my effort to something else which has a higher probability of success?" (for however you define "success").
One thing worth bearing in mind when bootstrapping a company is that to be successful you just need to earn enough to cover costs and pay yourself something at the end of the day. Which is completely different to 95% of the companies you read about on here.
If you are building it on the side even just making a few hundred dollars per month is going to completely change things for you, and give you the freedom to explore more risky ideas. We may not have a universal income, but with hard work and dedication ("showing up is half the battle"), I believe anybody here could build a side business to supplement their income in a meaningful way.
A more accurate title for this is "How to Be Financially Successful".
I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.
"On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. ..." - G.K. Chesterton, The Fallacy of Success
To be honest it just seems a bit like playing with words. Of course you can use "success" in sentences where it loses the meaning intended in the current context, but it seems clear to me that when someone writes "to be successful" there are implications that it means being successful on some measure that the author finds valuable or intends the reader to think valuable (in order to sell a book or something).
And of course people can argue all day about what is "being successful", since you could mostly put it as a matter of taste depending on what one finds satisfaction in, in life. It is indeed true that someone who doesn't have the same frame of reference for success as the author will have a harder time finding useful information in such a book/article, but that doesn't mean that because the measure of success can vary from person to person, it doesn't exist at all.
When such an article or book talks about that, there is a meaning behind those words that is conditioned by the cultural context in which it is used (as materialistic as it can be) and obviously this is pretty much never meant to be understood as "how to act as to be able to formulate statements that match 'I successfully did .*'", which is how this quote feels like to me...
You should read the article I linked to! Sadly it was a bit too long to paste the whole thing.
When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.
You really should read the whole article. I definitely recognize what he talks about.
"It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating." (...)
"You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." "
And the article then ends with:
"At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?"
As I was reading point 1 of Sam's article, Compound yourself, I was thinking, ah ok, teachers are in the wrong field evidently, for Success. They can never be exponentially increasing their force and effect in the way suggested.
Although there are people like Gilbert Strang, making his excellent courses (e.g. Linear Algebra) available online, which over a million people around the world have watched and benefited from, and helping to create a world with an amazing variety of free online course videos available in all subjects. That is success for a teacher, I suppose. And we're asked to believe (in this culture) that making a lot of money is or could be in any worthy sense a greater success..
>"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."
Let's take this to its logical conclusion though. Is the happy drunk a success?
Success is defined by your culture, not yourself. It's an intrinsically social property, whose value is determined by your worth to others. Defining your own success is akin to deluding yourself.
Being a successful human, on the other hand? Is it measured by one’s own satisfaction with life? By one’s impact on the society? By the number of offspring one produces? It’s all very confusing.
The only difference is, the metrics I listed are all metrics of success in life (according to different viewpoints). The personal feeling of satisfaction is a metric from the viewpoint of an individualist. The impact on society is a metric from the viewpoint of a socialist (or possibly a historian). The number of offspring is reproductive success, which is all what counts from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist. (And of course I completely forgot to account for the viewpoint of a theologian.)
I recently discovered, which was difficult as an atheist, a huge body of work on this, under the topics "spirituality" and "philosophy". It makes so much sense now, but we've lost touch with it in our modern society. The idea of "what makes a successful human life" has been the hottest topic of written literature for all of history, it's just that we've lost a little touch it.
If you acquire a billion dollars and give 10% of that to give well, I will say you have been a successful human, since it is "only" estimated to cost 175 billion a year to end poverty in 20 years[0], which means we only need 1750 such individuals each year for 20 years to end poverty, worldwide, forever, which is a goal worthy of humanity[1].
[1] One of the goals of the UN is to end extreme poverty by 2020, a very worthy goal, but this is going one step beyond that and ending global poverty, in all its forms, forever.
Isn't success defined by your own metrics at the end of the day? You need to choose what are the things you are willing to tolerate/live with and what is your end goal in life.
It's hard nowadays to define such thing with so much information around, moulding what a "successful" life should look like, how should it feel and where should it be lived.
It's up to us to define what we care about and how to measure our happiness.
The opening two lines says that it's also about building something important, and subtly imply that's the better goal of the two.
As a non-profit founder I found the advice useful. If you think the incentives of the world are such that doing something important is basically the same goal as making money, then that's great, but I don't think so.
Re-reading this made me notice the overlap between the two posts. Most of the suggestions across both posts fall into a few common themes. I find having a shorter list of "keys to success" helps me keep them top of mind day to day. I see four main themes here across both posts:
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
These lists are always the same and never say anything new. Work hard, have goals, be focused, etc etc. No fucking shit. Everyone has heard this stuff X1000. The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
I agree a tough background makes it a lot harder. But I don't think that takes away from the fact that people find these kinds lists helpful in moving forward from their starting point. I can think of a few famous examples of people who attribute their success partly to crafting and refining their own personal guidelines. Charlie Munger of Bershire Hathaway and his "mental models". Ray Dalio of Bridgewater documents the principles that helped him in a landmark book called Principles. Now I'm curious to look up people's backgrounds to see what successful people from tough backgrounds put in their lists.
> The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite ...
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
This post embodies everything I dislike about success fluff. I look up to people I admire - Tesla, Nick Drake, Mingus, My highschool Chemistry teacher - they meet maybe 0-3 of the list. Creation of value is such a delicate thing, we should not flatten it that way.
As a side effect, if we widen our view of success, there will be more place up in the 99.9%...
I think one of the problems with trying to understand how to achieve success is that by referencing the successful we often are dealing with outliers and not rules. I think this is why a lot of people here like seeing startup failure blogs instead of startup success blogs. So much survivorship bias.
I hear this a lot, but I’m not convinced there aren’t enough successful people to learn from. There are probably tens of thousands of “self made” multimillionaires. Surely there are patterns.
FWIW, here’s a success/failure/success sandwich...
My dad is extremely successful in his field of expertise, one of the top experts in the world, but he hasn’t been able to turn that into financial success for his family. At the same time, he’s an incredible husband and father.
In many ways he’s inspirational, a great source of wisdom and a role model for me. If he was able to turn his talents into wealth it would have acted as a multiplier for him, his family and those around him.
Looking at his bank balance, he’s a total failure. But knowing him, and the person he is, how dependable, persistent and stoic he is, he embodies a lot of what I think leads to success in the broader sense.
It's very common to over-analyze and generalize the specific behaviors of successful people, rather than acknowledge the stark reality of what truly separates them from others. There's a tendency to focus on the "symptoms" of their success rather than the root cause.
An accurate description of reality is both less flattering and seemingly less useful to others. But it does at least have the virtue of being real.
IMHO there are three major factors in changing the world:
#1 High general intelligence and ambition (genetics)
#2 Highly educated well-off parents (environment)
#3 Support of powerful people (opportunity)
You probably can't do much without at least one of these factors. Most people that do big things have all three working in their favor.
I can't speak for the author, but in my opinion if you treat this as a checklist to follow instead of a set of observations, you will probably be intolerable to most people and will probably fail at your goal of being successful.
I think this is like a checklist for people to follow on their on volition. There cannot be a single recipe for success that applies to everyone. Hence the "Independent Thought" point in the post.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] thread- Work hard
- Have your sales point ( why should they do business with you and not with someone else, who does the same. The sales point doesn't have to be related to the thing you are selling / consulting on. They have to improve your overall image. Nothing else). I seem to be able to sell better in person, than anyone i ever saw ( but the work takes time...).
- Grow your network or know people who have the network
- Filter your network. Don't spend time on people who will never be in your niche. I filter it to simple: business. ( doing computers in the past, they were the most understanding clients) and no websites ( personally, i only create them for friends)
- Take risks
- Spend money when you can outsource, because your time is expensive.
- Have a long term plan, which niche are you growing into. If you have been "doing everything and nothing", than what has been the most profitable with the least amount of time spend.
- Prioritize, because your time is expensive
- A plan can take time to come together. Sometimes links ( helping someone out 2 years before, pay out later in the future). Don't be afraid to help them remember, when you helped them in the past.
- Don't be scared to drop clients. Especially if they are extremely rich/have no good business, they will consume all of your time and question every invoice you send.
- Don't partner up for doing a cloud application for "free"/"low-fee" in return of being a partner. Most cloud applications fail.
- If you are a developer, your "online-business" will probably fail in online marketing ( the chance is big). Get a plan how you would grow the business, before you have clients. Don't count on online marketing for it.
- Solve problems or iterate on solutions for existing problems
- Money earns money, if you use it
I've been trying to find solutions myself - I'm trying to use some strategies listed in this book: The inner game of tennis, by Timothy Galloway, and I'm seeing positive results so far. He talks about 2 versions of self: self1 - the doer and self2 - the judgemental self, which is constantly evaluating self1, and adversely affect self1's potential. He has some useful suggestions on how to limit the impact of self2, and I found those pretty helpful so far.
It's hard to be your successful when you're not the best version of yourself.
You might find (books like) Albert Ellis' New Guide to Rational Living useful - I did! It's about observing and recording your recurring thoughts, particularly ones that make you feel bad, and replacing them with more accurate, helpful ones - stopping the self-sabotage. It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves without noticing. We're trained to be nice to others, without including ourselves in that. I used to do a lot of extremely negative, paralyzing self-talk - saying nasty things to myself I'd never dream of laying on someone else; sounds like you do this too, maybe. This falls under "How to love yourself", something I had to learn to do. Louise Hay has a great 12-point list of things under that heading, stuff like "Treat yourself like you'd treat someone you really love." Then as you get older, you realize you aren't so terrible, and others aren't so great..
I think 'self-belief' comes naturally with untangling that stuff, and otherwise isn't always a good sign, e.g.
"Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." ...I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images#id00026
Then you aren't outside your comfort zone enough because when you are, there will be NO DOUBT you've grown.
Do you know what the difference between a shitty golfer (like me) and a slightly better golfer (like my brother) is? Maybe 25 rounds of golf per year. If I played 25 MORE rounds of golf, I could beat him solidly.
Do you know what the difference between say Tiger woods and the very best Amateur golfer in the world is? A thousand rounds of golf. Ten thousand?
Point 1: Down here in the land of the unwashed masses of basically average developers like you and I, you can make noticeable strides by just consistently working a little harder. You can make leaps and bounds by consistently working A LOT HARDER.
Point 2: Once you start advancing past people, it gets harder and harder to advance past people. There's only so much room at the top, in every possible hierarchy. Check out some Jordan Peterson on Competence Hierarchy.
And I guess....
Point 3: The only real way to be successful is to be comfortable in your own body. I have some bad news for you buddy, this part of the article is complete horse shit.
"The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more."
Cultivate what early? Delusion? Self confidence? \eyeroll
Success means actually liking yourself and nothing more. Some people call this CONFIDENCE. Same exact thing.
How do you become confident? Achieve. How do you achieve? Apply your knowledge. How do you get knowledge? FAIL AT THINGS How do you fail at things? Try new things.
By the way "success" is such a stupid word. I have worked very, very closely with someone who has $100M in the bank. I was his computer guy for all his properties around the world and guess what? He's jealous of another guy we know with $1B in the bank.
Success != Money Confidence != Money
Success == Confidence
OH and guess what shows up when you have confidence?
Only everything you want.
3 years? Fuck. It sounds like you're on track for a long and successful career. Not everyone peaks early. Give yourself a break, spend a little more time networking and a little less time on your hard skills and you'll probably find greater opportunities for ground breaking things through relationships than through your skills.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. - Theodore Roosevelt
Relative metrics will show if you really are better than most other people. Absolute ones will show whether or not you can, in fact, do X to some standard.
I do not suffer from Imposter Syndrome. That's why. I find measures that show me what I can do, and to heck with all the sturm and drang from most people.
What does he mean by this?
If you don't think you're doing what you should be, or think you could be doing So Much More, or that you have wasted potential, then maybe you're not successful yet, even if you're doing better on paper than some people who do view themselves as such.
Even a boring thankless job for me is where many of my peers dream they could be.
That said, there is something to having risks be actual risks. A friend of mine who has been much more successful than I have decided to take out a huge second mortgage on his house to start his own business (at the time it was an ISP and he spent nearly all of the money he pulled out on building out his data center and network). I advised him against it, after all if it failed he would lose his house. But his response was sobering, it was "Chuck, I need to know that if I fail I'll lose my house to keep my feet to the fire of not failing." Gutsy? Stupid? He made it work and is "retired" to his own boutique winery. Would I be as impressed if he had failed? I suppose it would depend on what he did after he got through that.
I didn't face any big financial loss, I had no mortgage, debt or capital requirements in the business. Just my own living expenses.
But I really, really, really didn't want to fail. That would mean moving back in with my parents and getting a job.
It really worked. If I had had enough money that I could have been in modest comfort indefinitely, I don't think I would have gotten off the ground.
I see a lot of people who would like to start a business. And they make some efforts here and there. But they have a decently comfy life, and they don't seem to have that drive that motivates you through the tedium, the tiny initial results, the lag between effort and something tangible. I consider it a virtual guarantee of failure.
"Young man, I could probably ask you the same question." The young man looked puzzled. The rich man continued, "Do you feel as though you have enough money?" "Well, sure, I suppose, but it would be great to have more."
"How does it feel--feeling that you have enough money and more would be a luxury? I've never once felt that way, so I can't stop until I feel that way, too."
Devoting your life to getting above some very high percentile in money is not the best use of your only life for most people, in my opinion, but as long as they're not stealing it, it's okay with me if others want that for themselves (and I don't feel entitled to a share of it.) I think we all should take seriously the responsibility to support ourselves and to help others who can't, but beyond that, there are countless forms of success that are as worthy as "owning lots of valuable things".
The topic is more about attributes of people who do large scale endeavors. Success should not be used in this context.
I've met simple people, with not much money or education, although they are successful to me cause they managed to create a nice family and have a happy life. Something that usually its hard for people working towards their careers 24/7.
Hesiod once wrote 'Moderation in all things'. That personally is my moto. I don't have to have done something that is out of this world to be successful. I can be successful enough by valuing my own time, raising my kids in a proper manner and generally being happy. If I am happy, I am successful.
Notorious B.I.G. - may he rest in peace, has a great song which IMHO is pure wisdom when it comes to money - "Mo' money, mo' problems"
So be -content- with what you have. And being content is an art form - easier said than done.
Eventually if you want to scale yourself in the exponentiation formula you become a vc, vs grist for the founder mill.
You only have so many 1% 5 year adventure chances to do a startup before you find your 50 and dont have much to show for your life.
If each have a %1 chance of success, it's very likely that the 6 adventure person wouldn't have much to show at the end of it.
Ending up an equivalent of mr. bullet ball is horrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leHwNiXgnh0
Because of survivorship bias, you usually never hear about these people.
Many people also try only 1 or 2 adventures, and if unsuccessful go into normal employment. But you jump off the 'potential exponentiation train' that sama describes by doing that, and you've lost out on 5-10 years of potential compound savings growth, which for many who can work at FANG instead means a million or two.
You also get to learn a lot and do fun stuff at FAANG employers too.
We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling:
For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples.
and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?
No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.
If I suddenly became black, and nothing else about me changed, studies have shown I'd likely be treated differently by police, potential employers, medical facilities, etc.
Recognizing that fact may make it easier to combat. Perhaps the next time I interview a woman I might be more conscious of the fact that what I'd perhaps have seen as "assertiveness" or "confidence" in a male candidate is being noted as "pushy" or "bitchy" in the female one, and back off from that assessment somewhat.
It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
In the end though it only hurts those who believe in it because those who believe in it also believe that it is a waste of time to work hard, be innovative etc because it will only lead to failure. So they never try. People also use it as a way to justify why they are poor or unsuccessful...not their fault...it is the privileged that made them poor! Their other political views will mainly focus on "economic justice" like more regulations on successful businesses, higher taxes for the rich, welfare programs for the poor (basic income basically a dream come true in their eyes) and so on.
Seems to be a very popular view these days among young people.
This is a completely incorrect idea of what people are arguing privilege means.
Privilege is a step up on the ladder. It doesn't get you the whole way, and someone without that bonus step can still get up the ladder, but it changes the difficulty somewhat.
Survivorship bias at its best: https://xkcd.com/1827/
1. worked extremely "hard" for 20 years 2. sacrificed relationships/family/living life 3. found moderate/average success, but never caught a break
>Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks
that could easily take 10+ years?
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
Any new idea, like UBI, that might equal out the playing field, a bit, is so easily shot down by scare tactics.
I foresee a future of just rich people, and the exploited. I truly find it depressing. The wealthy have us all blaming the wrong people. The middle class blame the poor. The whiter ones blaming the darker ones. Just blame someone except the rich boys, and the buying power of that family money.
All the while, the crafty boys are controlling our thoughts, and actions.
All this cheap tech surveillance, and cheap psyops, just make the wealthy chaps goal of keeping us enslaved easier.
Some people are defective. It's just the truth.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).
Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.
For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
This is a recent blog post I wrote:
http://www.greshm.org/blog/life-is-just-a-game/
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
Any chance for an edit?
What most people don't understand is that UBI is not about giving free money. It's about giving the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to survive and shine in this unequal world.
Sure a certain percentage of the crowd will take advantage and be a "dole bludger" but these are persistent even in unemployment benefits schemes.
If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:
http://www.greshm.org/blog/tax-revenue-is-meaningless/
http://www.greshm.org/blog/the-wrong-thing-to-tax-is-money/
http://www.greshm.org/blog/theres-only-one-way-to-pay-for-a-...
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.
But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.
By giving people the freedom to spend their time how they choose, they'll at least have the option of doing something useful.
We can probably do even better than that, but basic income can at least help us clear this low bar.
Andrew Carnegie, a Scotish Immigrant, was born in a one room cottage; in the last 18 years of his life he gave away more than 300 million
But yeah, being born with some wealth to sustain you is a huge help.
Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire..
Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"
The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit.
When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful.
Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class.
I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network.
I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds.
Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.
The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process.
I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking.
I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job.
Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly.
So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!
This is what really gets to me. Those companies will go bankrupt, the investors will lose out, the employees will get laid off, and the founder will have paid himself $300k/yr for those 5 years of fiddling around with nonsense and playing with other people's money, as he goes off to the next venture and spouts platitudes of success. There's absolutely no connection anymore between actual business success. Gaining "funding" is seen as the end all be all goal, and anything after that is just whatever.
And I think the reason you see less diversity here comes down to a class divide in moral values. No working class person can possibly even comprehend thinking like that. It comes off as completely sociopathic. Yet there is a class of people who are perfectly comfortable doing it, and we just let them for whatever reason. It starts to make you understand where class based revolutions have come from in the past.
This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.
For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"
I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).
Those are all positives directions but I also think about what attributes are really important. I think working longer in a single industry is more important than working hard for a brief amount of time inside. Most of the opportunities comes later as you are deeper inside and just staying till that point is important.
https://youtu.be/nAV0sxwx9rY
2. Do what interests you
That goes straight to the concept of scalability. Usually we talk about it in terms of businesses scaling or benefiting from economies of scale, but this is talking about scalability on a personal level. Not to be understated.
-- never put yourself in the position to go bankrupt
-- stay in the game - keep your overheads down to the minimum practical for you
-- learn to program so you can implement your own ideas without need for a cofounder or need to pay for anything more than hosting and a domain
-- just keep banging out your ideas into products until one catches on.
-- try to bootstrap and if possible avoid raising capital - it's too distracting and costly and dilutes your time massively
-- do your very best to avoid employing anyone until you really can't avoid it
-- don't get a cofounder if you can possibly avoid it - it can lead to arguments and business failure... if you really need help, bootstrap till you can employ someone
-- repeat until success or giving up, not because you're forced to stop
That said, I'd add to this the idea of thinking in terms of "Return on Capital Invested" where your time and effort are a from of Capital. IOW, it's important (IMO) to figure out how to direct your attention towards the efforts that are most likely to yield the outcomes (whether financial or otherwise) that you seek. The problem, of course, is that you don't know in advance how things will play out. So you have to experiment, but once you begin an experiment the big question becomes "do I keep going on this, or redirect my effort to something else which has a higher probability of success?" (for however you define "success").
If you are building it on the side even just making a few hundred dollars per month is going to completely change things for you, and give you the freedom to explore more risky ideas. We may not have a universal income, but with hard work and dedication ("showing up is half the battle"), I believe anybody here could build a side business to supplement their income in a meaningful way.
Good list in general. But identifying a market and seeking to serve it is a better recipe.
You still want to get stuff out there and test it rapidly. But having some idea as to whether a product will be useful is a good idea.
I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.
Read more - it's extremely funny and wise: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11505/11505-h/11505-h.htm#THE...
And of course people can argue all day about what is "being successful", since you could mostly put it as a matter of taste depending on what one finds satisfaction in, in life. It is indeed true that someone who doesn't have the same frame of reference for success as the author will have a harder time finding useful information in such a book/article, but that doesn't mean that because the measure of success can vary from person to person, it doesn't exist at all.
When such an article or book talks about that, there is a meaning behind those words that is conditioned by the cultural context in which it is used (as materialistic as it can be) and obviously this is pretty much never meant to be understood as "how to act as to be able to formulate statements that match 'I successfully did .*'", which is how this quote feels like to me...
When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.
"It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating." (...)
"You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." "
And the article then ends with:
"At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?"
Although there are people like Gilbert Strang, making his excellent courses (e.g. Linear Algebra) available online, which over a million people around the world have watched and benefited from, and helping to create a world with an amazing variety of free online course videos available in all subjects. That is success for a teacher, I suppose. And we're asked to believe (in this culture) that making a lot of money is or could be in any worthy sense a greater success..
Let's take this to its logical conclusion though. Is the happy drunk a success?
Success is defined by your culture, not yourself. It's an intrinsically social property, whose value is determined by your worth to others. Defining your own success is akin to deluding yourself.
This advice need not come from a rich person.
The answer is to be surrounded with deep and valuable human relationships.
Being a successful human, on the other hand? Is it measured by one’s own satisfaction with life? By one’s impact on the society? By the number of offspring one produces? It’s all very confusing.
I am not sure these viewpoints are reconcilable.
As opposed to financial success.
[0] http://www.anielski.com/real-cost-eliminating-poverty/
[1] One of the goals of the UN is to end extreme poverty by 2020, a very worthy goal, but this is going one step beyond that and ending global poverty, in all its forms, forever.
It's hard nowadays to define such thing with so much information around, moulding what a "successful" life should look like, how should it feel and where should it be lived.
It's up to us to define what we care about and how to measure our happiness.
As always, good reading material: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-...
As a non-profit founder I found the advice useful. If you think the incentives of the world are such that doing something important is basically the same goal as making money, then that's great, but I don't think so.
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
Do you have any alternatives or are you just venting your frustration?
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite ...
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
As a side effect, if we widen our view of success, there will be more place up in the 99.9%...
My dad is extremely successful in his field of expertise, one of the top experts in the world, but he hasn’t been able to turn that into financial success for his family. At the same time, he’s an incredible husband and father.
In many ways he’s inspirational, a great source of wisdom and a role model for me. If he was able to turn his talents into wealth it would have acted as a multiplier for him, his family and those around him.
Looking at his bank balance, he’s a total failure. But knowing him, and the person he is, how dependable, persistent and stoic he is, he embodies a lot of what I think leads to success in the broader sense.
[edit] a word
An accurate description of reality is both less flattering and seemingly less useful to others. But it does at least have the virtue of being real.
IMHO there are three major factors in changing the world:
#1 High general intelligence and ambition (genetics)
#2 Highly educated well-off parents (environment)
#3 Support of powerful people (opportunity)
You probably can't do much without at least one of these factors. Most people that do big things have all three working in their favor.
Regularly get your vitamin levels checked and make sure to get adequate Vitamin D3
Regularly get your hormone levels checked for any imbalance.
Exercise, breathe, sleep well, and eat healthy.