Counter point -- I usually read the comments before the articles themselves (personal preference). The tl;dr above made me go read the article. It is indeed great.
People who are driven by genius and passion never finish anything. This guy finds the best employees and businessmen are just average hard workers who pay attention to detail.
The big thing there, the part that resonated in my mind, was finish. I need to finish more things...
The person that started less 'brilliant', through finishing, can usurp the brilliance of the one that started strong. Intelligence is a gift and should be nurtured, not presumed on.
Being smart isn't good enough; you need to be able to finish what you've started. It's all about the execution and not the concept.
Furthermore, he's found he prefers to select hard workers and promote them up than to pick smart, ambitious kids from good families or good credentials. Hard work is better than sheer brilliance.
that was fascinating. reminded me a bit of the protagonist in grossmith's "diary of a nobody", but without the petulant self-absorption masquerading as modesty. the author has genuinely sat down and thought long and deeply about who he is, what his strengths and limitations are, and how he can best work with other people, and he's a great writer to boot.
Good ego masturbation for project managers if nothing else. But personally, I don't think hiring dunces for programmers or whatever else would be a right answer for startups. You only want boring, regular people for boring, regular work. For extraordinary tasks, you need those with extraordinary talent. No one else will do.
The narrator in this story... how good is he at his work? All that I can gather from it is that he hired the wrong guy and then continued to allow him to make wrong decisions. If anything, he did more harm for the company by trusting someone who hadn't produced results. The character he's speaking down to and writing off is only acting within his ability, his experience, and his competence. It's really quite funny!
He bends the meaning of words like 'brilliant' a bit and clearly lives in a time where there are no such thing as protected classes (e.g. medical) but there's a lot of value in remembering that most people develop wealth by managing risk, knowing our limits, and finishing what we start.
It doesn't seem fair to generalize everyone who is supposedly amazing at what they do as being poor workers. Seems like circumstantial evidence that might almost never be the case. Who really knows based on 1 person.
There's more than one example given in the article of a "brilliant" person who failed as a businessman. The author's opinion appears to be a considered one, based on multiple experiences, not a snap judgment based on one unfortunate episode.
My visceral reaction was that it was a huge generalization, but when I think about it more, I do have a difficult time thinking of people that are both charismatic and tech-savvy. The obvious example is Jobs, but even he wasn't the "tech" guy in a sense, we always associate that with Woz or others.
I guess for a lot of people here Musk is maybe an example of it? Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic, is it a historical, cultural thing?
Or is it just a stereotype after all? :) It seems like a fascinating topic, though.
> Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic
Nah. It's just that most techies are too busy doing brain things to learn soft skills like how to interact with people.
— a guy who struggled with being pretty awkward in high school, worked hard at socializing for a few years, and now does very well with business meetings / networking / parties even though he'd prefer to be delivering code
P.S.: "So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."
my own charisma is inversely proportional to the hours I spend each day coding. more coding -> less charisma. so I don't think it is just a stereotype at all, but rather an emergent phenomenon of how we spend our time, and where our interests lead us.
I think everyone should be highly suspicious of charisma. Charisma is a skill, not a trait, and it's developed by spending a lifetime practicing on people that one thinks are largely beneath one's self.
Charismatic people are naturally drawn towards those they can impress. The easiest people to impress are those they can best. Charismatics don't hang around people who overshadow them.
That's a pretty cynical point of view. I've met plenty of charismatic people who wouldn't think they're spending "a lifetime practicing on people that one thinks are largely beneath one's self". And then I've meant charismatic people who are full of themselves as well. Charisma and egotism don't go hand in hand ...
Don't confuse charisma with extroversion. Being an open, warm, inviting person is not the defining characteristic of those who others readily identify as "charismatic" rather than a "really nice guy". Charisma is first and foremost about impressing others with your charm, intelligence, wit, etc. The skilled ones hide their contempt and egotism well.
I think Charisma is a trait, not a skill. It is an aspect which just makes people "want to hear you". And that is extremely risky: Charismatic people can make everything sound good. They can hold the most dumb and unfounded position in an argument and still win, just because they are charismatic. And that is dangerous. One charismatic person can make for a meteoric rise of a company or he can destroy everything.
Techies could easily game the system; but that's a boring game for boring people, and in the grand scheme of things does not matter. There are much more important things to spend time on.
It must suck to be a techy and have social skills because you'll get pegged as a business gal/guy even if you can hack with the best of em. Most people can't seem to handle the doublethink of two seemingly contradictory capabilities in one person. They need to find a simple job to reduce you to.
Most people just never saw one of them. People with really good social skills and really good hacking are rare unicorns. So, if people see one they get suspicious and start looking harder.
"Cannot be ... I NEVER met someone before who was like that. Let's poke around a bit more, I'm sure I'll find the flaw."
Funnily enough, you don't need to be a brilliant person to manage a 1920s grocery store. You need someone who's reliable, honest, and good at keeping minimum wage workers reliable and honest.
Good writing and ok advice for someone who wants to run a grocery business. But it is absolutely untrue that "brilliant" men cannot also be careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills. And certainly innovation and risk taking can be just as critical in business as following proven formulas and paying close attention to the bottom line. It depends on the business and circumstance. Overall I think in the context of high technology, the article is dated.
I think the point he was trying to make was brilliant men arent exactly:
>careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills.
He was referring to the brilliant man who dress flashy, go to the hottest clubs, befriend people in higher stature, and dont really contribute to goals. They just have flashy ideas and move on to the next without realizing the goals of the first idea.
While this article can be seen as dated in regards to the definition of success that the author posits (making himself and 20 men rich by the standards of the locality), I think that the path the author lays out to achieving that success is still very relevant to this day.
The author was not denigrating "brilliant" men; instead he was explaining a type of "brilliant" person that focuses their energy on coming up with brilliant ideas, but will not stay focused long enough to see it through to finish. Imagine if you are reliant on a co-founder who wants to be pivot every 6 months simply because all of the challenges of the first brilliant idea are solved, and all that remains is the hard work and execution?
The outcome of that scenario would likely be the outcome he experienced in his first business venture with his college friend, "[Carroll] is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else's business. . ."
His use of "brilliant" has little to do with IQ. It's a conflation of (a) creativity (which correlates, as he observes, with manic-depressive patterns and unreasonable expectations of others) and (b) superficial charisma (which correlates with narcissism and substance abuse). Those are two types of "flashiness" that he makes the mistake of conflating.
I'm category (a): creative, prone to mood swings, basically reliable but bad at the superficial reliability contests that determine advancement in most organizations. Yes, someone like me can be detail-oriented and show business acumen. We can be reliable. We're just not as competitive at being reliable (especially in the superficial ways, which are important in customer service) as others. If you need +3 sigma reliability-- someone who can work 100-hour weeks and not miss details or break rules or even become annoying-- you don't want +3 sigma creativity.
Does "+3 sigma creativity" actually mean anything?
(I'm aware enough of the rough technical definition, I mean in the sense that if you think there are 500,000 super special people in the U.S. can you do anything useful to find them?)
I was just using it ("+3 sigma") to mean "high-level" creativity and could have just as easily said "99.9th percentile" or some other number. No, I don't know of a good way to test for it.
My point is that there's a strong negative correlation, especially at the competitive upper reaches, between creativity and the sort os superficial reliability that (a) tends to determine a person's ability to advance in organizations, and (b) you'd probably want in someone you put in front of difficult clients on a regular basis.
I think you are interpretating the text a little too literally. I think the author is very much aware that the “brilliant” men he describes, are in fact only so in their own minds. The text is a cautionary tale that warns about being too impressed with someone just because they act self confidently.
Why? From all I have read about Newton, he would have been the employee from hell. A genius as a mathematician and physicist, yes; but a terrible employee.
C'mon, who wouldn't want an employee who boils a watch and looks at the egg while contemplating the basic nature and equations that make up the physical sciences? ;)
He became Warden of the Royal Mint and became rather passionate about his new role - even to the extent of working as an undercover agent and personally leading the prosecution of "coiners" in court.
[NB For a fictionalized, but hugely entertaining, account of the relevant time in history I can recommend Neal Stephenson's wonderful "Baroque Cycle" - Newton is a major character.]
Start finishing things. It sounds trite but it's true. Some of the best advice I've ever been given is: the way you do anything is the way you do everything. So, finish the smallest tasks consistently and that will carry over to the bigger tasks.
I really need to work at this. I definitely have always fit the "genius but doesn't finish things" description. I've been working at this hard for 8 years because it really has negatively affected my life. I'm making some progress but it's really slow and if I slack off even a little I tend to lose everything.
Also, allow yourself some blow-out projects. You don't have to finish everything, but you want to become reliable. I.e. if you say you'll do something, then you'll do it.
The old expression "don't bite more than you can chew" epitomizes this. Don't start what you can't finish. It's in deciding what to start and what not to start that you'll make progress.
Read "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker, which addresses this in greater detail.
Thanks. I really need to either clear more stuff off my plate or sort out my work situation where I don't have post-workday burnout. Between my job, family commitments and working on my vehicle, I have trouble finding time to start anything now. I get a tremendous amount done when I'm not working.
I either have to settle with how things are now or change the work situation I think. I'll look into that book anyway.
I agree. It's more about developing good habits, so pick a small activity and see it through to the end. Bake a loaf of bread. Take out the garbage. Heck, even deciding you're going to do ten pushups and then doing them can help get you back in a finishing mindset.
What if you aren't a finisher? How can you become one?
I wish I were as good at taking this advice as at giving it.
1. Lose the fear. (This is the root cause of all the other stuff.) Or, more
accurately, experience it but don't give in to it.
2. Timebox the work (as reasonably as one can) or limit "one more feature".
3. Fail fast, gracefully, and quietly. Learn when to *not* finish.
(You shouldn't be finishing *everything* you start. The problem is if
you finish *nothing*.)
4. Succeed decisively but simply (not ornately; don't aim for perfection).
Very good list, out of experience on some fields where I'm considered a talent or natural talent/smart by my peers but I feel like I fail to deliver more than 50% of the times, the first thing you need to do is:
0. Pick up your targets CAREFULLY.
Which means value your energy and time. Be afraid of starting something, stop doing or believing you can do many things at the same time while history clearly shows otherwise is a killer mistake.
Lower the bar, start achieving small things and then, just MAYBE, you should think of adding more.
I think the fundamental reason of not being finisher may come from several reasons: lack of detailed planning (oh, there's an unanticipated obstacle), lack of energy to finish things, and little barrier of attention shift.
I would say I am not a finisher, but what I am trying to do is reducing these reasons: trying to understand/plan better to the deepest level, sleeping/eating well, getting more satisfaction from finishing things than starting one, and doing smaller things, selectively.
People close to me used have told me on numerous occasions that I fall into the category of glib-talking, high-flying, never-finishing 'charmers' that the author mentioned in the prose.
It took me a while to understand that my going-off-on-tangents had nothing to do with impatience. It had more to do with me not realizing that the last mile is the hardest. I would start everything with gusto but as soon as I hit a road-block, I would dawdle and eventually lose interest as soon as something new came up.
I now decide a (feasible) finish line in my head before starting a new activity and consciously check myself whenever I feel like I'm about to give up on it. I force myself to look at the finish line until I re-convince myself that I need to cross it before I can even think of giving up.
I am not 'there' yet but I am beginning to see some results and that eggs me on further. :)
You might want to try, if you haven't already, making public, specific, measurable commitments to have things done by a certain time. Give your word that you'll do something, in a concrete form that people can see failure or success on, to someone whose opinion really matters to you.
I've found that exercising that sort of honesty works very well for me. It's like, if you value your word, (which I do,) then you can leverage it back against yourself when you have to do something difficult.
Don't know if it works that way for everyone who values their word, but it might be worth a go. Might need some fine-running at the start, making tamer goals than you think you can achieve to prevent inadvertently breaking your word.
Take on smaller projects that you can feasibly finish. Finish them. Don't let yourself take on any more large projects until you've built up some track record of finishing small ones.
Depends on why you don't finish things. Often times, it's probably a mental attitude that's a road block.
If you quit when things get hard, maybe you need to realize that hard things are hard. Anything worth finishing will require you to bleed.
If you quit because you have to "feel like it" to work, you should work even when you don't feel like it. Hard things are hard, and nothing would ever get done if people did it only when they felt like it.
There are many reasons why people aren't finishers. You need to find out why, and then figure out similar people that have overcome it and the specific tactics they used to overcome it.
To add to that, this is how I get through the times when I don't "feel like it": I tell myself I'll just sit down and get something done. It doesn't have to be a lot, but I have to sit down and accomplish something. Even just chipping away at small pieces of a task can add up over time!
I teamed up with someone that keeps a very narrow focus to help prevent me wandering off track. Together we have kept very profitably focused for quite a few years now.
This was a beautifully written piece, but that's exactly the impression I came away with.
It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
Indeed, he's definitely talking about SALES people, who use their sales tactics to sell him on themselves. Definitely not talking about "book smarts" brilliance. The author probably intentionally mistitled the story for attention.
That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.
Employees still optimize for pay / effort, NOT absolute pay. In that respect, commissions are still FAR from perfectly aligning incentives.
You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
I'm not suggesting there is a "silver bullet" for aligning incentives that exists (commissions can be abused by focusing on short term gains at the detriment of the companies long term goals etc etc), but commissions for goal completion is a step in the right direction compared to just writing someone a blank check because their resume looks pretty.
Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.
The weird thing is, why didn't he hire this person in a way that posed less risk to his business? Why is he handing over a gigantic check worth 140,000 of today's dollars? Isn't this person crazy, or at least a terrible businessman? Yet here we all are, listening to his advice. The longer I think about this the more I dislike it.
Um, he's using this whole episode as an example of what not to do, not what to do. He says right out that hiring that person that way was a mistake. The whole point of the article is to help people avoid the mistakes the author made. How many articles that get to HN's front page are basically the same thing?
If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.
Exactly: that's what the author of the piece is doing. He's had bad luck with a certain type of person while having much better luck with other types of people, and he's analyzing the reasons for that.
It sounds like just 40% of a year's severance. Not too much to walk away.
And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.
I agree it's a terrible hiring mistake. But this is a story about a mistake he made. Without it, there would be no story. (And hopefully he didn't make the same mistake afterward)
Exactly. The lesson isn't to not hire brilliant or average people, but to trial people more gradually. The made up story also attempts to draw a conclusion from an anecdotal level of "evidence." Doesn't seem to stick for some reason.
Risk reductions can be:
- invite people over to hang out, hack on something, or work on whatever they're working on
- start people on a contract gig
- maybe another contract or what works for them
- have an extremely informal non-interview, interview process
- trial period
- eventually FTE status in a set time-frame if both sides want it
I prefer working on contracts that are renewed every now and then. In that way my contributions are constantly evaluated and if for some reason I'm not producing results then there's not a lot of drama involved in letting me go. And I think taking pressure of of clients helps them in the long run to focus on results vs just my salary.
I think that's actually his point: that its better to hire an ordinary employee who will work hard at a realistic goal than to hire a flighty genius, whether self-appointed or not.
"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."
He was good at it. He was no genius. Tesla turned out to be the better showman. Edison's envy of Tesla's flair for the dramatic led him directly to his ghastly practice of electrifying stray animals to portray AC as unsafe. Whereas Tesla almost managed to get a gigantic pie-in-the-sky wireless power transmission experiment funded using little more than his famous mad-scientist mystique. Edison couldn't hope to inspire that kind of patronage and had to rely on more prosaic methods.
What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.
There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.
People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.
Agreed. His hard work actually fits the article's concept of a non-genius pretty well. He had a very strong constitution.
One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.
So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.
I hate thinking like this. You can't say Edison didn't have a monumental impact in getting electricity to proliferate at reasonable prices across the country.
No, but you can say he wasn't a genius. In a way that makes his achievements more impressive: he wasn't the smartest kid in class, but he worked hard (and fought dirty) and turned himself into a household name.
It wasn't just word of mouth but he was also dazzled by what these geniuses were telling him and their enthusiasm. Eventually he realized he needed employees who can deliver more than talk.
our salary is a private arrangement between you and your employer - your time for their $s. If it's not enough, ask for more or leave. If it's enough, be happy.
We are becoming like dogs, where we don't know if we're happy with our bone until we've seen every other dog's bone.
"But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
My mind is cluttered and I rely on spelling correction. Hard to say if I would get the position.
That's not what the author is saying. He's saying that if you are either unable or unwilling to correctly use "your" and "you're", you are probably unable or unwilling to pay attention to the details that matter to success in his business. I agree that there's a fine line between proper attention to detail and nitpicking, but taking the author's statement in context I don't think he's on the wrong side of it.
It depends on why I admired the people. If I admired them for their success in business, then yes, I would expect their writing to show attention to details like spelling. But if I admired them for something else, I wouldn't necessarily expect that. I'm certainly not saying that anyone who is worth admiring has to spell correctly.
Since the article was written prior to the invention of automatic spelling correction, these sorts of seemingly trivial errors could tarnish one's first impression significantly. If you know nearly nothing about someone but need to form an opinion of them, you will use everything you do know to assess them, regardless of how trivial. Furthermore, you will generally be biased towards criteria that are more difficult to fake. It may not be fair but it's how humanity works, and being aware of this can help you greatly.
Confidence, intelligence, credentials, and experience can be faked or lied about. Comparing someone's written words with their speech, in person or over the phone, will give you a more reliable picture of how they think and communicate than anything else.
Reading this article is almost in perfect timing with my situation. I am 24 year old with only 2 years of college. I was learning more outside of school than in. Even though I might not be the best developer or maybe not even average, I took the jump in trying to make it. So far so good. With learning that experience is everything and know how to get help will take you far. I feel like I know twice as much as I did last year. Is it possible that a lot of us are trying to reach that feeling of accomplishment?
I most certainly pass this article on to friends and peers.
Do keep in mind that this letter (essay?) was written in an era when SMS wasn't a thing and getting an education involved (quite literally) crossing your t's and dotting your i's. A keyboard wasn't a thing yet and spell check was something witches and wizards did before their exams.
Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!
TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).
True but only one company makes the new iPhone, many companies design enterprise software that need a simple workflow and a solid working database with reliable uptime.
Carmack is actually a hard worker and writes code. Too often in the tech industry you bump into people who are "architects" and "strategists" and not hands on at all, or what this article may refer to as a "genius".
Very dated perceptions. We know now, for example, that those who stammer and struggle for words often simply possess brains that are more full of information, rather than possessing less efficient or organized ones.
In a knowledge economy built on creativity, I'll take Different Thinkers over Cogs of Constancy any day.
That's an interesting spin, especially in light of the way people talk about how "Romanized" many aspects of Christianity to increase it's adoption. However, I think you could also see Paul as a dedicated manager, frequently writing letters of encouragement and advice to all the churches.
Also, at the time of it constituting 12 people, it wasn't a great organisation. That would come centuries, perhaps a millenia later. When it was only 12 strong, they didn't even have enough influence to make the local law look the other way.
Good point. Most of the protestant Christians in the contemporary United States should really call themselves "Paulistinians," or something similarly catchy and descriptive.
Much of the ministry of Jesus occurred on the shores of Lake Galilee. In those days, there was a continuous ribbon development of settlements and villages around the lake and plenty of trade and ferrying by boat. The Synoptic gospels of Mark (1:14–20), Matthew (4:18–22), and Luke (5:1–11) describe how Jesus recruited four of his apostles from the shores of Lake Galilee: the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew and the brothers John and James. One of Jesus' famous teaching episodes, the Sermon on the Mount, is supposed to have been given on a hill overlooking the lake. Many of his miracles are also said to have occurred here including his walking on water, calming the storm, the disciples and the boatload of fish, and his feeding five thousand people (in Tabgha).
You are saying your boss goes to the trouble to get a working prototype going and even does the UI fronted and when he asks you to finish and scale it out as an engineer (which is your job) you take offense to this request?
It doesn't really sound like the boss is providing a working prototype. It sounds like the boss provides throwaway code that is a step or two better than a screenshot or whiteboard drawing.
He's frustrated that his boss is basically doing the equivalent of, "I heard about NoSQL at a conference today, all our competitors are using it, please switch us from MySQL to NoSQL. It will be great"
(Then a week after the switch is done; "Have you heard about postgresql...?")
1. "There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best -- and the others."
2. "...whether he can talk and write effectively... If you write and speak neatly and accurately, it is because your thinking is orderly; if your expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
One of the things I find irksome about the business world (and this won't seem relevant to the OP till I explain it) is that, while it places a premium on "finishing" and "delivery" (by the way, if you use "deliver" intransitively I will punch you in the face) it also makes it really rare that one can finish anything. It claims to have a culture of "shipping" but employs these people called "executives" whose function is usually to get in the way of people trying to do so.
The disorganization of his "brilliant men" (which is a conflation of two types of people already-- the charismatic and the creative) seems to be something the corporate world (at least in 2014 technology) creates.
The "brilliant" just fall hardest, I'd argue, because highly creative people (one subtype he describes) tend to be most sensitive to context, and highly charismatic people (the other subtype) can usually assume the failure patterns of the highly creative.
The not-finishing culture, I think, is a product of the incoherency of the corporate world. It's not uncommon to see people pass years in Corporate America without achieving anything for reasons not their fault: shifting priorities, projects cancelled for stupid political reasons, "re-orgs", unclear direction.
At some point, people learn that Corporate Life is survived not by finishing (in fact, that can be harmful, because now you have support responsibilities) but being able to come up with a story when things outside your control stop you from finishing. The muddling effects of subordination compound this decline of executive function. It's rather sad, to tell the truth. I wish it weren't that way.
I don't think it's just "brilliant men" who fail, in this way, amid the jarring incoherency of most business. I think they just crash first and hardest. The rest tend to drift downward over time and underperform silently.
Yes, michaelochurch, you are correct that the shifting priorities of the work place often make finishing anything hard.
But there is another way, and that is to work in secret, and fit this secret work into natural breaks in your normal work. For example, part of my job is running a suite of reports on a monthly basis. Every time I run these reports I do a little work to make them easier/quicker to run next time. Over the space of a year this kind of work can really pay off, and frees up more time to do more satisfying work, but the key is to improve in secret, it's rarely appreciated at the time.
"The letters you brought spoke in the highest terms of your sales genius. The only question which they did not answer to my satisfaction was why companies which had valued you so highly should ever have allowed you to get away!"
This is a truth that holds today (in the form of things like LinkedIn Recommendations): Outside of exceptional circumstances, people seldom talk up the people they need the most, but they will talk up the people they wouldn't mind losing.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThe big thing there, the part that resonated in my mind, was finish. I need to finish more things...
The person that started less 'brilliant', through finishing, can usurp the brilliance of the one that started strong. Intelligence is a gift and should be nurtured, not presumed on.
Furthermore, he's found he prefers to select hard workers and promote them up than to pick smart, ambitious kids from good families or good credentials. Hard work is better than sheer brilliance.
Yeah yeah "that's the way it was back then"..
The narrator in this story... how good is he at his work? All that I can gather from it is that he hired the wrong guy and then continued to allow him to make wrong decisions. If anything, he did more harm for the company by trusting someone who hadn't produced results. The character he's speaking down to and writing off is only acting within his ability, his experience, and his competence. It's really quite funny!
My visceral reaction was that it was a huge generalization, but when I think about it more, I do have a difficult time thinking of people that are both charismatic and tech-savvy. The obvious example is Jobs, but even he wasn't the "tech" guy in a sense, we always associate that with Woz or others.
I guess for a lot of people here Musk is maybe an example of it? Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic, is it a historical, cultural thing?
Or is it just a stereotype after all? :) It seems like a fascinating topic, though.
Nah. It's just that most techies are too busy doing brain things to learn soft skills like how to interact with people.
— a guy who struggled with being pretty awkward in high school, worked hard at socializing for a few years, and now does very well with business meetings / networking / parties even though he'd prefer to be delivering code
P.S.: "So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Mind elaborating on that?
Techies could easily game the system; but that's a boring game for boring people, and in the grand scheme of things does not matter. There are much more important things to spend time on.
Interesting how people think the OP story is real and many people mistakeningly think Steve Yegge quit Google (he just quit the project).
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8
'sama ! :)
It must suck to be a techy and have social skills because you'll get pegged as a business gal/guy even if you can hack with the best of em. Most people can't seem to handle the doublethink of two seemingly contradictory capabilities in one person. They need to find a simple job to reduce you to.
"Cannot be ... I NEVER met someone before who was like that. Let's poke around a bit more, I'm sure I'll find the flaw."
Funnily enough, you don't need to be a brilliant person to manage a 1920s grocery store. You need someone who's reliable, honest, and good at keeping minimum wage workers reliable and honest.
>careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills.
He was referring to the brilliant man who dress flashy, go to the hottest clubs, befriend people in higher stature, and dont really contribute to goals. They just have flashy ideas and move on to the next without realizing the goals of the first idea.
The author was not denigrating "brilliant" men; instead he was explaining a type of "brilliant" person that focuses their energy on coming up with brilliant ideas, but will not stay focused long enough to see it through to finish. Imagine if you are reliant on a co-founder who wants to be pivot every 6 months simply because all of the challenges of the first brilliant idea are solved, and all that remains is the hard work and execution?
The outcome of that scenario would likely be the outcome he experienced in his first business venture with his college friend, "[Carroll] is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else's business. . ."
I'm category (a): creative, prone to mood swings, basically reliable but bad at the superficial reliability contests that determine advancement in most organizations. Yes, someone like me can be detail-oriented and show business acumen. We can be reliable. We're just not as competitive at being reliable (especially in the superficial ways, which are important in customer service) as others. If you need +3 sigma reliability-- someone who can work 100-hour weeks and not miss details or break rules or even become annoying-- you don't want +3 sigma creativity.
(I'm aware enough of the rough technical definition, I mean in the sense that if you think there are 500,000 super special people in the U.S. can you do anything useful to find them?)
My point is that there's a strong negative correlation, especially at the competitive upper reaches, between creativity and the sort os superficial reliability that (a) tends to determine a person's ability to advance in organizations, and (b) you'd probably want in someone you put in front of difficult clients on a regular basis.
[NB For a fictionalized, but hugely entertaining, account of the relevant time in history I can recommend Neal Stephenson's wonderful "Baroque Cycle" - Newton is a major character.]
It's hard.
Also, allow yourself some blow-out projects. You don't have to finish everything, but you want to become reliable. I.e. if you say you'll do something, then you'll do it.
Read "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker, which addresses this in greater detail.
I either have to settle with how things are now or change the work situation I think. I'll look into that book anyway.
"How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives."
I wish I were as good at taking this advice as at giving it.
0. Pick up your targets CAREFULLY.
Which means value your energy and time. Be afraid of starting something, stop doing or believing you can do many things at the same time while history clearly shows otherwise is a killer mistake.
Lower the bar, start achieving small things and then, just MAYBE, you should think of adding more.
I would say I am not a finisher, but what I am trying to do is reducing these reasons: trying to understand/plan better to the deepest level, sleeping/eating well, getting more satisfaction from finishing things than starting one, and doing smaller things, selectively.
It took me a while to understand that my going-off-on-tangents had nothing to do with impatience. It had more to do with me not realizing that the last mile is the hardest. I would start everything with gusto but as soon as I hit a road-block, I would dawdle and eventually lose interest as soon as something new came up.
I now decide a (feasible) finish line in my head before starting a new activity and consciously check myself whenever I feel like I'm about to give up on it. I force myself to look at the finish line until I re-convince myself that I need to cross it before I can even think of giving up.
I am not 'there' yet but I am beginning to see some results and that eggs me on further. :)
I've found that exercising that sort of honesty works very well for me. It's like, if you value your word, (which I do,) then you can leverage it back against yourself when you have to do something difficult.
Don't know if it works that way for everyone who values their word, but it might be worth a go. Might need some fine-running at the start, making tamer goals than you think you can achieve to prevent inadvertently breaking your word.
If you quit when things get hard, maybe you need to realize that hard things are hard. Anything worth finishing will require you to bleed.
If you quit because you have to "feel like it" to work, you should work even when you don't feel like it. Hard things are hard, and nothing would ever get done if people did it only when they felt like it.
There are many reasons why people aren't finishers. You need to find out why, and then figure out similar people that have overcome it and the specific tactics they used to overcome it.
It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
But let's not forget that he lived in different circumstances than today.
That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.
You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.
This is "I got fucked up and crashed my Ford into a tree, so I'm never buying a Ford again."
If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.
An insightful business owner will review their own psychology first and ask others for their impression in a way that doesn't reveal their bias.
And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.
Risk reductions can be:
"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."
He was good at sales and marketing, however.
What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.
There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.
People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.
One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.
So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.
My mind is cluttered and I rely on spelling correction. Hard to say if I would get the position.
If you think this way, it's worth going back and examining the writings of people you admired. You might be surprised! Or not.
Confidence, intelligence, credentials, and experience can be faked or lied about. Comparing someone's written words with their speech, in person or over the phone, will give you a more reliable picture of how they think and communicate than anything else.
Reading this article is almost in perfect timing with my situation. I am 24 year old with only 2 years of college. I was learning more outside of school than in. Even though I might not be the best developer or maybe not even average, I took the jump in trying to make it. So far so good. With learning that experience is everything and know how to get help will take you far. I feel like I know twice as much as I did last year. Is it possible that a lot of us are trying to reach that feeling of accomplishment?
I most certainly pass this article on to friends and peers.
Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!
TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).
You'll end up with Windows Mobile.
We suspect that they probably have restrictive workplace policies, helpdesk in India and office politics. Those things OP won't like.
In a knowledge economy built on creativity, I'll take Different Thinkers over Cogs of Constancy any day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee#Ancient_and_Cla...
Much of the ministry of Jesus occurred on the shores of Lake Galilee. In those days, there was a continuous ribbon development of settlements and villages around the lake and plenty of trade and ferrying by boat. The Synoptic gospels of Mark (1:14–20), Matthew (4:18–22), and Luke (5:1–11) describe how Jesus recruited four of his apostles from the shores of Lake Galilee: the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew and the brothers John and James. One of Jesus' famous teaching episodes, the Sermon on the Mount, is supposed to have been given on a hill overlooking the lake. Many of his miracles are also said to have occurred here including his walking on water, calming the storm, the disciples and the boatload of fish, and his feeding five thousand people (in Tabgha).
(Then a week after the switch is done; "Have you heard about postgresql...?")
1. "There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best -- and the others."
2. "...whether he can talk and write effectively... If you write and speak neatly and accurately, it is because your thinking is orderly; if your expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
The disorganization of his "brilliant men" (which is a conflation of two types of people already-- the charismatic and the creative) seems to be something the corporate world (at least in 2014 technology) creates.
The "brilliant" just fall hardest, I'd argue, because highly creative people (one subtype he describes) tend to be most sensitive to context, and highly charismatic people (the other subtype) can usually assume the failure patterns of the highly creative.
The not-finishing culture, I think, is a product of the incoherency of the corporate world. It's not uncommon to see people pass years in Corporate America without achieving anything for reasons not their fault: shifting priorities, projects cancelled for stupid political reasons, "re-orgs", unclear direction.
At some point, people learn that Corporate Life is survived not by finishing (in fact, that can be harmful, because now you have support responsibilities) but being able to come up with a story when things outside your control stop you from finishing. The muddling effects of subordination compound this decline of executive function. It's rather sad, to tell the truth. I wish it weren't that way.
I don't think it's just "brilliant men" who fail, in this way, amid the jarring incoherency of most business. I think they just crash first and hardest. The rest tend to drift downward over time and underperform silently.
But there is another way, and that is to work in secret, and fit this secret work into natural breaks in your normal work. For example, part of my job is running a suite of reports on a monthly basis. Every time I run these reports I do a little work to make them easier/quicker to run next time. Over the space of a year this kind of work can really pay off, and frees up more time to do more satisfying work, but the key is to improve in secret, it's rarely appreciated at the time.
This is a truth that holds today (in the form of things like LinkedIn Recommendations): Outside of exceptional circumstances, people seldom talk up the people they need the most, but they will talk up the people they wouldn't mind losing.
Conversely, if you accept excessive volatility by taking big bets, you can end up broke even if your expected value was positive.
Rule #1 according to Buffett: Never lose money. Rule #2: Don't forget Rule #1.
I learned this the hard way. Maybe I was brilliant.
>Rule #1: O(1). Rule #2: You don't need anything else
Or maybe Buffet just meant don't misplace your money, as in losing a $20 out of your wallet and finding it in your dryer after the laundry.