I think removing frictions from starting new things & automating the mundane things like project setup, doc setup etc. goes along way to cross the bridge from 'wanting to build something' to 'building it'.
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
This is unfortunately, me.. I've slowly come to the conclusion of not using to avoid it completely (that's to hard), but rather timebox it when i catch myself drifting
> Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever.
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
That's my standard approach to work, I always try to invalidate an idea before investing my time (or the team's time) in it. If we can't invalidate the idea I feel much more confident that we're going in the right direction.
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
Invalidating an idea is a bad idea because old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good. For example, before Napoleon, cannons were often a terrible idea: unreliable and rarely decisive. Then the technology caught up to the idea.
Which is why it is good to know why things are bad so you know when they no longer applies. If you just try to be positive then you'd try to use cannons when they were still not good enough to be practical on the field.
> old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good
Sure, for an idea to become suddenly very good you either have to rely on technology advancements / innovation, as in the case for cannons that before Napoleon were unreliable and dangerous, or you have to make a controlled bet to test your hypothesis, as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
So my key point is, if an idea becomes very good (i.e. through innovation) it'll be harder to invalidate it, and if you invest in an idea that you aren't comfortable with yet (i.e. venture capital) there'll be a higher risk attached to it.
> as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
This. VCs have an endless supply of disposable entrepreneurs in their portfolio.
For every 1 person that has PG's version of edgy, devil-may-care entrepreneurialism and succeeds, there's 99 that fail. VCs operate more like brokers than entrepreneurs. The only place they're not playing a numbers game is in fostering business connections and hiring.
Acting as if the SV financial Goliath is David is just, I dunno, old. That assembly line has been cranking out the same "apply software to an existing problem" model for a long time now. And they do it because it works, and actually building things takes longer, has less leverage because of up-front capital, and is much higher risk (and taxation).
> I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?"
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
Humans naturally think linearly. This is because our lizard brains have evolved over millions of years in environment where linear processes were the most important to understand for survival. When we see a lion that is 1 mile away we know that we have 2x the time to run away than when the lion is .5 miles away.
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
I have to disagree - I feel like most successful investors explicitly look for ideas that can grow in the exponential fashion you describe. YC particularly doesn't seem to show any interest towards linearly-scalable businesses AFAIK.
EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.
I got put onto this quote/video by @garry here on HN, when he included it in his most recent YouTube video where he discusses how he made his channel grow & be successful. It's definitely something I've struggled with for a long time, and I wish I had found it sooner.
Why do certain days seem better suited to doing good work?
Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days.
But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.
That differs from person to person and you'll have to find out for yourself.
I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
Likewise and I have to add that mornings I am usually not very productive anyway, regardless of the environment. I've been working from home for the past few Covid months and the bulk of my work is done in the afternoon. That's not very convenient for me as I'd like to enjoy my time off after 5, but I usually end up past that to take advantage of the momentum built.
Seems like a strange comment for the article but since you made it,
For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard.
I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too
I don't know whether this is true, and I'm writing this out of curiosity and not bad faith, but the most parsimonious explanation for this being the top comment is that both the writer and voters assumed (as I did before reading) that the essay was about time-of-day work rather than time-of-project-lifespan work.
But it's a good point! Faith fluctuates by day, and those low-faith days are when a small project is abandoned. I think graham's solutions (supportive friends, ambitious city, historical examples) are a good way to hold the faith when the general public and the project itself don't seem to warrant it.
I really connected with how you said you are feeling because it is how I have been feeling. I work for a small innovation group (not a startup), so my work environment is flexible. I am also trying to bootstrap a startup project in my free time.
I will have days that I am super productive and can get through a ton of work, but then I have other days that I just can't bring myself to work. It feels weird cause when I force myself to work I get way less done, so I then feel like it is pointless cause I get such little done compared to when I am in the mood for the work. I don't really know how I should feel about it cause I feel guilty on the days that I don't get as much done, but it feels like a waste of time and is draining to just sit there and force out a small amount of work.
If those days go into all-nighters, you might have bipolar disorder. I went undiagnosed for years, and didn't believe it myself until I charted the moods with the help of roommates and a doctor. I began to notice being happy at inappropriate times (funerals), and sad at others (weddings). My moods would mysteriously cycle and I really had to take advantage of the upswings.
I went undiagnosed for such a long time because managers would often point at me as an example of startup dedication, and then when I crashed and they got disappointed I would jump to a new startup.
Now I stick to a schedule and never deviate from it. When I do, the monster returns.
I don't have an answer for you, but I have a very similar experience. some days I wake up and it's "go time", sifting through source files and crushing multiple bugs in eight hours, often forgetting to eat lunch! other days I'll try over and over to start working, but every time I look at a line of code, I feel an immense pressure to alt-tab to the browser or get out of my chair and pace around my apartment. if nothing else, it's good to know other people are like this.
I've tried to examine correlations between my focus at work and my sleep schedule, diet, social life, etc. and I don't really see anything. sometimes my best weeks of work will coincide with eating bad takeout and staying up til 2am playing factorio every night. sometimes I go to bed at 10pm, eat three healthy meals a day, and accomplish absolutely nothing at work.
For me after significant journaling and recording, it seems to be when nutrition, sleep and stress are all correctly managed. I can even have several days in a row that are optimal for deep work if I'm careful, but life likes to throw in a wrench from time to time of course.
The big things for me have been to eat a very nutritionally heavy breakfast (I hate eating breakfast, it still takes me forever) and to calorie count both to make sure I'm getting enough and to make sure I'm getting a decent balance of carbs/protein/fat. For sleep, going to sleep early and having wind down time so I sleep well (tea and a book are a winning combo for me there usually).
Stress is of course the difficult one we have the least control over. Exercise is a huge help but that can also change up the nutrition equation. Even then, it's still easy for bad stress days to also muck up the sleep side of the equation and it can take days to get that sorted out.
I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.
I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
> How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
In New Zealand, we call it Tall Poppy Syndrome. The typical acceptable way to be successful in NZ without receiving ostracisation in some form is to attribute your success to the country, rather than to yourself.
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
Has paulgraham.com never had TLS or is it just more obvious now because of Chrome UI changes? I find the old-school style & minimalism helps focus on the content, but shouldn't he at least have a LetsEncrypt cert up there or something? Or is the argument that because the site has no interactivity, it's not a big deal?
It has a TLS certificate for the Yahoo Store domain if you browse to the https:// version, but I agree that PG should add something easy like Let's Encrypt or put it behind Cloudflare. It's been "modernized" with a mobile version already, so I think that HTTPS is a good next step. It can't hurt, at least.
There are two places where it is possible to see early, "lame" work. One is YouTube - most channels with well-made videos would retain their earliest works, and the first few dozen can be quite instructive.
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
One of my favorite podcasts [1] is a great example of this. A friend recommended it to me and told me to start at the beginning (already a couple years of back catalog at that point). I almost stopped after the first few episodes, which were interesting but not very well produced.
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn.
I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums.
The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
Webcomics work that way - quite a few webcomics have been written over the course of many years, and you can see the art style slowly changing and the artist's skill improving.
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
Foot note number 8 of the essay notes that Michael Nielsen made the same two observations when reading an early version of the essay. For some reason Paul Graham has decided to make the footnote labels almost invisible in the text of the essay. I agree that it is best that in short essay reading that skipping the footnotes until reading the whole essay is usually the best way to approach them, but I like when they were more visable. In the spirit of the essay though, it is nice he has not changed older essays to fit this new style and one can go back and see the footnote indicators get lighter over time.
Those websites are so cute, particularly Airbnb's :) It's always great to see fledgling companies distinguish their business proposition to a market that doesn't even know about them yet.
I'm curious though: the AirBnB website is often presented as how unprofessional-looking an MVP can be, but contextually, it didn't look super horrible compared to the websites of the time. Here's a bunch of "professional websites" in 2008.
I think expectations have evolved and the minimum standards of aesthetics in 2020 presents a higher bar. I wonder if an MVP that looked like that would work in 2020? I'm guessing the bar these days is at least a Bootstrap UI.
I wonder if a good hack would be to think in terms of how I would react if a (my) child showed me something they made? Children are often doing something for the first time. I've noticed this breaks down my barriers to what I consider impressive.
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
I had one thought forming while reading this piece, then read to Carmack's quote in the footnote which encapsulated it. I learned how to program modding games as a teenager, and as an adult now looking back on it, I realize how rough and ready the game engines were in 1996-1998, and how that rough and ready state, combined with my teenager's imbalance between time and money, led to a bunch of what Graham is calling early work where my bad 3d modeling skills, terrible art sense, and ability to sling values around in text files and use tools that other community members made, allowed me to make an entire faction for Total Annihilation that was clearly lower quality than the originals, but really not that much worse. Contrast that to about 2017 when I looked into what it would take to make a very small mod for XCOM, and boy oh boy, so much more work. What advantages I gained from being in that place at that time...
I had the same experience except modding Motocross Madness and Carmageddon.
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
Modding is definitely one of those things that has become harder. Often due to lack of availability but definitely in terms of skill level to get near a similar quality bar.
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
I've never heavily modded anything, but I made some mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4. In that case, the game engine is anticipating the extensions, so it's a bit easier. Add in community tools and it was stupid easy to do any sort of scripting alterations to a game. I can only imagine the complexity you have to grapple with when wading into a modern game not built to enable it.
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
>> Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
On the other hand, that same thing can inspire you.
I was never a musically inclined kid in any way, shape or form. Nobody in my family played, I never had an instrument as a child, but when I heard Days of the New for the first time, I ran to Guitar Center and bought an acoustic.
For about a month, I practiced and played and played. I never got anywhere, gave up after a month, and looking back on it, I should have realized that level of playing was going to be years away, even if I had a professional teacher. But I didn't care at the time.
I think the trick is to have achievable targets (I am beginner), simple strumming, chords progression. Just like PICO-8 advice above or "hello world". At least half of the time I play to enjoy myself, the songs that inspired me "BRUTTO - Вечірнє сонце" [1], "Green Day - Good Riddance", "Oasis - Wonderwall".
It is extremely important to tune guitar perfectly. I tune it before each session and found it usually got slightly out of tune if I don't enjoy playing anymore. It is surprisingly hard to sing while playing, it fills mind while hands gets practice.
It is easy to excel in first months because there is not much yet. Playing without looking at guitar, working on posture, accurate timing (not tempo!). Find something to enjoy, Brushy One String plays one string and it drives [1] .
Scene is another big thing, and in the article, Graham draws on SV as a scene, too. That community can be really sustaining, even when you move past the organizing reason. I have not modded Total Annihilation in nearly 20 years, but I still post on the community forum at times because of the people still there.
> Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
on the flip side, most skills seem to respond asymptotically to practice/effort (rapid progress at the beginning, diminishing returns near the top). the very best guitar players in the world are not radically more technically proficient than the classical/jazz guitarists at your local conservatory. you can see this in esports a lot. players come out of the woodwork all the time who have trained hard and smart at a game for two or three years and dethrone people who have literally been playing since they were eight.
being the world's best X is usually more about gaining proficiency in adjacent skills Y and Z and having a bit of luck than it is about being lightyears ahead of everyone else at X itself. this is how roger federer dominated tennis for so long. he wasn't the world's best at any one stroke, but each one of his strokes was among the best, and he invested heavily in a style of play that was uncommon on the tour at that time.
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
> But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
IMO this has little to do with “taste” and more to do with analytical/critical ability. The more experienced and knowledgeable you become in a creative endeavor, the easier it is to self-critique and (especially in visual art) see mistakes. When you’re starting out drawing for example, you literally can’t see your mistakes. You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why. Figuring out that last part puts you on the road to mastery.
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
I think what Glass misses in the grandparent post is that this analytical/critical ability is not innate, but acquired along with the performance skill, and at times the analytical ability gets ahead of the skill.
Many years ago, when I was in a youth choir and we were practicing a lot for a festival, I asked our director why we sounded worse at each practice. His explanation was that we actually sounded better, but that our analytical abilities developed even quicker than our singing skills.
> You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why
I think that is what the GP is referring to as "taste". You already have that intuitive sense that some things suck and others are good. What you need to develop, as you say, is being able to tell exactly why something isn't good when it isn't, so you can fix it.
That video is one of my favorites as it really hits home for me when I try to learn something new. You can know what makes something good, but you don't quite have the muscle memory or skill to reproduce it and it's frustrating.
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
It can be discouraging, even if you know this is true for so many people, though, to see the "young genius" types. They're exceptions to almost every rule by definition, but it can be hard to remember that when you see someone years or decades younger burst onto the scene and seem to eclipse what you can do with far less effort.
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
A couple of decades ago, I set forth to create something every day. It could be as simple as a bit of prose, writing some code, or as involved as a birdhouse. I haven't succeeded in creating every day since, but I did successfully create a habit of behavior that I cannot break. I've built games, websites, apps, written blogs, filed patents, built siege engines, been published, painted, carved wooden toys, remodeled houses, and much more. I've also started a couple of companies, one of which went through YCS17 and is still growing.
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
Scholars of literature sometimes speak of "juvenilia", the work a writer does when beginning. This can be quite readable--Jane Austen's are very funny--but not up to the standard of the mature work.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
There is creating new work and there is judging early work. One hack I’ve used for both is to realize that your brain is different at different times of day and in different levels of exhaustion/sleep/context etc. You are almost a different person as time passes. That novelty gives you new perspectives and new ideas with time. So always document new ideas (i have even built a new tool to make that as fast as possible) and then live with them for a bit. A good one will haunt you in that it will keep showing itself and resurfacing in other contexts. If the regret of not having it is heavier than the effort to put it together just use a weekend to put it together.
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame.
Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model.
An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.
Because the initial price would be steep. Let's say you spend $70 dollars on shoes and they last 2 years, so that's $350 for 10 years. It would be hard to design a single pair of shoes, especially at the beginning, at lasts 10 years. The goal would be to replace that pair after 5 years.
No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
I mean you can already buy really nice expensive leather shoes that will last a long time. To last even longer you buy two pairs and alternate them. You can also then get the sole redone if the upper remains in good shape.
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could.
An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.
So much of the advice I see from YC (PG in this case, I know he isn't YC, but it's all cut from the same cloth) is about how to change your outer circumstances to accommodate inner impediments, such as Fear. They'll offer hacks or "mind games" to trick yourself into moving past the fear, as PG talks about here:
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
I've been (mostly) quietly working on this for several years, after my initially-promising YC (W09) startup failed to take off, having been afflicted by what I realised on deep reflection was mostly fear, egotism and self-sabotage.
Like you I think the concept has huge potential, and I've found some modalities that you haven't mentioned but that I've found particularly powerful, and could be more broadly beneficial for founders and creators generally.
Feel free to hit me up (email in profile, or in Bookface) if you want to connect and discuss further. (Offer is open to anyone else interested too.)
I've found one way to conquer fear and develop perseverance is to just (gradually) go thru enough hard things and learn to be okay w/ discomfort.
I've never been as active as I wanted in my young years due to weak health, and recently started engaging in outdoor activities I always wanted to do (long-distance hiking, climbing, scuba diving), mostly because I don't enjoy hitting the gym and looking at a wall, but I didn't anticipate the benefit it would have in my psyche.
Now, when faced w/ hardships of life or random sources of stressors, I can relate back to some past experience and think "hey, I did that crazy thing, of course I can handle this other thing here". I don't know if this psychological phenomena has a name, I would only describe as "developing thick skin". I think it also happens naturally to individuals who had a hard upbringing and are hard working nonetheless. Maybe there's some idea to explore here.
Yes, this! I start my days by jumping into an unheated swimming pool (or stepping into an ice-cold shower, when the pool's covered for the coldest months), and one of the main reasons / benefits is the self-mastery involved. "No, I don't want to do this. Yes, I can do it anyway, and start my day with a small victory."
You don't want to conquer fear entirely. Fear is an important signal. Physical fear keeps you out of danger; ego fear keeps you from wasting lots of time on fruitless things or doing things not in accord with your values.
You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
Not the poster who you are replying to, but from the references he gave, I assume he was more or less saying the same as you.
In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.
You are right, there is huge potential in broader knowledge and practice of "consciousness practice".
Wim Hof has been making the rounds on HN lately. His latest book just came out, and I would recommend anyone who is looking for a super straightforward and practical way of systematically facing and overcoming fear, to check out either the book or just download the Wim Hof method app to do the breathing and the cold showers. You really don't need to "believe" anything, just need to try out the basic exercises and see what you feel, then decide if it's something that you want to keep doing or not.
This is exactly the type of thing we can explore that pays dividends in ways that has a halo effect over everything in our life, not just our startup performance. Thanks for mentioning!
> Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
Constant reinforcement made by little, constant and almost predictable successes. Read the psychological literature on self confidence (but skip bloggers and influencers)
> One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
I suggest real transcendence of polarity comes from holding both sides of the argument in your mind at the same time until they merge, and spending some time really understanding the other side than the one you're attracted to is a route there.
He made this site in the early 2000s using the store builder he coded in the 90s. His framework probably doesn't even have support for SSL (because it was written in the 90s).
It's actually using yahoo store builder. pg has no control over it, because yahoo owns it. He mentioned that to me when I reported that the mobile interface broke various parts of his site.
I don't disagree with the point on overconfidence but it is a bit exhausting to be surrounded by 10,000+ overconfident CEOs of 3 person companies in Silicon Valley, most of whom will never succeed. It contributes to a culture that can be toxic and alienating for other personality types. Maybe that is the price we pay for innovation.
I think that's more the product of VC culture; as a founder you're in a constant case of "selling your company" which in most cases is also selling yourself to people, i.e. investing in a startup is tantamount to investing in the person in the early stages. I haven't seen this mentality nearly as much in folks that are bootstrapping without the "extreme growth" required by VCs.
And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive.
TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
Perhaps we don't need as many overconfident risk takers, and I think of this whenever I read about the quiet millionaire or people who have a flourishing business that is not sexy.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being confident and contrarian, as look as you have some type of validation, or driving force, grounded in a reality. Often founders, especially those with less founding experience, over-value confidence "hustle" and under-appreciate experience and advice; I don't have much empathy when dealing with that particular cohort.
I have the same reaction. Also, there's definitely a local optimum for being surrounded by people who are all trying to hock their crazy "world-changing" dreams at the same time.
A population of 10% crazy dreamers is inspiring. A population of 90% crazy dreamers is maybe inspiring in limited doses. Being surrounded by that kind of person, every day, all the time, is tedious and uninspiring. I can see how it's great for investors (who only really care about that 1 success in 100), but for the other 99 people involved, it's enough to make you very cynical.
One reason why I believe TikTok took off so fast is that they made it ok for videos to not be very good. They're not supposed to be overly polished and perfect. On Instagram, what you post is a reflection of you and how you want the world to see and judge you. TikTok is the opposite: videos are ephemeral, fun little things that you don't have to take seriously.
> But the most conspicuous feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley investors weren't.
Tim Draper was friends with Holmes's family and his kids grew up with hers. He invested personally, but I don't think his firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson did.
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
DFJ put in $500,000. At their scale, that's chump change. They can safely invest that much money even in companies that are unlikely to succeed. And IIUC, Theranos wasn't a fraud at that point—there was still genuine hope that their product would work.
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
Pushing back on Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital is a fine point to make, but that's not the point he made. He said Theranos' cap table had an "absence of Silicon Valley firms", which is false. Also DFJ is not the only SV firm that invested. So did Larry Ellison in the $28.5M Series C. This is all very easy to find information.
It seems like a weird point to nit-pick, but in most of PG's essays, there are so few demonstrably easy-to-disprove facts. This one is easy. And the misplaced hubris in thinking zero SV firms were foolish enough to invest in a fraud makes you question all his other assertions.
The early stage of Theranos wasn't really a scam, they tried to build the actual product. The scam started when they failed to do so and then lied about it.
> t also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible. Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken? Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own.
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
100 of 100 people are never overconfident (by definition). Overconfidence is infectious (because not everyone can vet every claim). Overconfident people are inherently predisposed to selection bias by others.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadAs well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas)
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI
https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd74...
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
It's funny, this. According to the movie, they just ask MZ to clone another uni's digital facebook. Presumably because that one worked well enough.
Sure, for an idea to become suddenly very good you either have to rely on technology advancements / innovation, as in the case for cannons that before Napoleon were unreliable and dangerous, or you have to make a controlled bet to test your hypothesis, as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
So my key point is, if an idea becomes very good (i.e. through innovation) it'll be harder to invalidate it, and if you invest in an idea that you aren't comfortable with yet (i.e. venture capital) there'll be a higher risk attached to it.
This. VCs have an endless supply of disposable entrepreneurs in their portfolio.
For every 1 person that has PG's version of edgy, devil-may-care entrepreneurialism and succeeds, there's 99 that fail. VCs operate more like brokers than entrepreneurs. The only place they're not playing a numbers game is in fostering business connections and hiring.
Acting as if the SV financial Goliath is David is just, I dunno, old. That assembly line has been cranking out the same "apply software to an existing problem" model for a long time now. And they do it because it works, and actually building things takes longer, has less leverage because of up-front capital, and is much higher risk (and taxation).
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days.
But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.
I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard.
I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too
But it's a good point! Faith fluctuates by day, and those low-faith days are when a small project is abandoned. I think graham's solutions (supportive friends, ambitious city, historical examples) are a good way to hold the faith when the general public and the project itself don't seem to warrant it.
I went undiagnosed for such a long time because managers would often point at me as an example of startup dedication, and then when I crashed and they got disappointed I would jump to a new startup.
Now I stick to a schedule and never deviate from it. When I do, the monster returns.
I've tried to examine correlations between my focus at work and my sleep schedule, diet, social life, etc. and I don't really see anything. sometimes my best weeks of work will coincide with eating bad takeout and staying up til 2am playing factorio every night. sometimes I go to bed at 10pm, eat three healthy meals a day, and accomplish absolutely nothing at work.
The big things for me have been to eat a very nutritionally heavy breakfast (I hate eating breakfast, it still takes me forever) and to calorie count both to make sure I'm getting enough and to make sure I'm getting a decent balance of carbs/protein/fat. For sleep, going to sleep early and having wind down time so I sleep well (tea and a book are a winning combo for me there usually).
Stress is of course the difficult one we have the least control over. Exercise is a huge help but that can also change up the nutrition equation. Even then, it's still easy for bad stress days to also muck up the sleep side of the equation and it can take days to get that sorted out.
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
- You're not to think you are good at anything.
- You're not to laugh at us.
- You're not to think anyone cares about you.
- You're not to think you can teach us anything.
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/kiasu-is-oxford-engli...
[2] http://asingaporeanson.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-sinkie-pwn-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
[1] https://www.philosophizethis.org/
I think it's actually from 2009 though, since wikipedia says that was the first episode? It was just uploaded later I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience
Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn.
I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums.
The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
Compare this: (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3) to this version of the same strip, drawn much later: (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1601). That’s the same artist. There was no abrupt change in style, either, the artist’s style just slowly changed over time.
Almost as large an improvement can be seen by comparing this first strip: (https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-12) with the same strip, redrawn much later: (https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-07-27). Same thing there; same artist, no abrupt change in style, just slow improvements over time.
e.g.
Wayback machine:
- Airbnb (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080310025433/http://www.airbed...
- Uber (2010): https://web.archive.org/web/20101126114649/http://www.uberap...
- Twitter (2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20061127012643/http://twitter.co...
Show HN:
- Analytics.js / Segment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
https://www.wolfstad.com/2008/12/my-top-5-websites-of-2008/
I think expectations have evolved and the minimum standards of aesthetics in 2020 presents a higher bar. I wonder if an MVP that looked like that would work in 2020? I'm guessing the bar these days is at least a Bootstrap UI.
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
[1] https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
On the other hand, that same thing can inspire you.
I was never a musically inclined kid in any way, shape or form. Nobody in my family played, I never had an instrument as a child, but when I heard Days of the New for the first time, I ran to Guitar Center and bought an acoustic.
For about a month, I practiced and played and played. I never got anywhere, gave up after a month, and looking back on it, I should have realized that level of playing was going to be years away, even if I had a professional teacher. But I didn't care at the time.
It is extremely important to tune guitar perfectly. I tune it before each session and found it usually got slightly out of tune if I don't enjoy playing anymore. It is surprisingly hard to sing while playing, it fills mind while hands gets practice.
It is easy to excel in first months because there is not much yet. Playing without looking at guitar, working on posture, accurate timing (not tempo!). Find something to enjoy, Brushy One String plays one string and it drives [1] .
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKNWS2eKD4U
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8H-67ILaqc
on the flip side, most skills seem to respond asymptotically to practice/effort (rapid progress at the beginning, diminishing returns near the top). the very best guitar players in the world are not radically more technically proficient than the classical/jazz guitarists at your local conservatory. you can see this in esports a lot. players come out of the woodwork all the time who have trained hard and smart at a game for two or three years and dethrone people who have literally been playing since they were eight.
being the world's best X is usually more about gaining proficiency in adjacent skills Y and Z and having a bit of luck than it is about being lightyears ahead of everyone else at X itself. this is how roger federer dominated tennis for so long. he wasn't the world's best at any one stroke, but each one of his strokes was among the best, and he invested heavily in a style of play that was uncommon on the tour at that time.
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
"Talent is feeling how should not be."
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
Many years ago, when I was in a youth choir and we were practicing a lot for a festival, I asked our director why we sounded worse at each practice. His explanation was that we actually sounded better, but that our analytical abilities developed even quicker than our singing skills.
I think that is what the GP is referring to as "taste". You already have that intuitive sense that some things suck and others are good. What you need to develop, as you say, is being able to tell exactly why something isn't good when it isn't, so you can fix it.
This sucks, because...
This doesn’t suck.
The three phases
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model.
An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.
No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
Like you I think the concept has huge potential, and I've found some modalities that you haven't mentioned but that I've found particularly powerful, and could be more broadly beneficial for founders and creators generally.
Feel free to hit me up (email in profile, or in Bookface) if you want to connect and discuss further. (Offer is open to anyone else interested too.)
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” ― Carl Jung
I've never been as active as I wanted in my young years due to weak health, and recently started engaging in outdoor activities I always wanted to do (long-distance hiking, climbing, scuba diving), mostly because I don't enjoy hitting the gym and looking at a wall, but I didn't anticipate the benefit it would have in my psyche.
Now, when faced w/ hardships of life or random sources of stressors, I can relate back to some past experience and think "hey, I did that crazy thing, of course I can handle this other thing here". I don't know if this psychological phenomena has a name, I would only describe as "developing thick skin". I think it also happens naturally to individuals who had a hard upbringing and are hard working nonetheless. Maybe there's some idea to explore here.
You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.
Wim Hof has been making the rounds on HN lately. His latest book just came out, and I would recommend anyone who is looking for a super straightforward and practical way of systematically facing and overcoming fear, to check out either the book or just download the Wim Hof method app to do the breathing and the cold showers. You really don't need to "believe" anything, just need to try out the basic exercises and see what you feel, then decide if it's something that you want to keep doing or not.
Constant reinforcement made by little, constant and almost predictable successes. Read the psychological literature on self confidence (but skip bloggers and influencers)
I suggest real transcendence of polarity comes from holding both sides of the argument in your mind at the same time until they merge, and spending some time really understanding the other side than the one you're attracted to is a route there.
And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive.
TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
A population of 10% crazy dreamers is inspiring. A population of 90% crazy dreamers is maybe inspiring in limited doses. Being surrounded by that kind of person, every day, all the time, is tedious and uninspiring. I can see how it's great for investors (who only really care about that 1 success in 100), but for the other 99 people involved, it's enough to make you very cynical.
Not really a good defense of Silicon Valley, considering that Tim Draper was Theranos's first investor and a pretty big proponent of them https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
In Theranos' earliest SEC filing, "Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund VII, L.P." is listed as a Beneficial Owner.
Filing Date 2005-01-03
File/File Number 021-72626 05000011
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
It seems like a weird point to nit-pick, but in most of PG's essays, there are so few demonstrably easy-to-disprove facts. This one is easy. And the misplaced hubris in thinking zero SV firms were foolish enough to invest in a fraud makes you question all his other assertions.
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
For an excellent demonstration of the importance of luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en