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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over.

Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.

What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition.

Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.

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> Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.

And, also, survivor bias. Lots of companies hustled and hustled and died.

Elon Musk is a really good example. At one point he couldn't meet cashflow--and then the government contract for SpaceX finally came in.

3 months of delay on that contract and Musk is a goat instead of a hero.

This one drives me crazy. Sure, you have to be good and smart and you have to hustle, but you also have to be lucky, and luck is a bigger factor than anyone likes to admit. People who make it big forget the luck aspect and start believing that because it worked, they did everything right. They then go around dispensing questionable advice on the basis of 'it worked for them' while knowing full well that they're a massive outlier.

It's like when old successful people give "life-affirming" advice like "quit your job, follow your dreams, take risks, LIVE!" Which is great advice if you're already financially secure and you know that doing so didn't result (in your case) in you ending up as some peon working in a fast food joint. Never mind the other 99% of people who did the exact same thing and it didn't work out, because who listens to a failure?

I agree with you, but there's a valid psychological reason that people don't admit to being lucky more often. It's because to maximize your chance of success you have to focus on what you can control. Sitting around and looking at others to try to dissect what was luck vs skill is a sort of armchair criticism where the practitioner is immune to failure by virtue of not even trying. Ultimately the question of luck is so subjective that it starts to become philosophical at some point. After all, so many small things happen via day-to-day serendipity that anything that actually happens can be considered incredibly lucky. On the other hand, one has a lot of agency when it comes to building a company, and the art of building a startup is about matching incredibly limited resources to the highest return activities, and ratcheting that over and over again through years of changing circumstances. All the luck in the world won't drop an Instagram-like success in your lap without just the right preparation leading up to that amazing moment.

In short, it's not that luck isn't super important, but if you are thinking about luck then you probably won't be ready to capitalize on it.

Of course luck is important. Elon Musk wouldn't be where he is today without at least some luck. On the other hand, a lot of people have had much more luck and opportunities than Musk and still didn't go nowhere. And the people with the drive and capacity of Musk who didn't get lucky are almost all still quite successful.

While luck isn't something you can completely control, it doesn't have to be entirely random either. I read this article a while back talking about a "luck surface area"[0], which you can expand, increasing your odds of being "lucky" in the future.

[0]: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...

You make a good point.

This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!"

Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works.

Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".

I agree. Not just lots of companies. Most companies die. ("Hustle" or no.)

However I think that's actually a point in favor of starting small: If you're going to fail? At least fail fast. While you have time to "pivot", or wind down, or whatever makes sense to try instead.

If you're onto something, you can usually tell at a small scale. Sure, sometimes there are network effects and exponential growth. But not hockey sticks. (Source: My own opinion and anecdata.)

Haven't heard "goat" used in that context before. In my circles, goat/GOAT would be read as "Greatest Of All Time".

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro4.htm

"Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he’d go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction."

Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.

The cited first sage of "goat"-as-common-idiom-for-failure in that article is from 1912.

The acronym dates back to maybe 1992 or thereabouts: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/07/goat.html

GOAT, the positive acronym, isn't even used in today's sportswriting about basketball (at least without an unpacking explanation). It's more of a slang / online forum term.

Elon had a backup plan....if the government couldn't step in, then Google was ready to fund him.

OP here.

That is an excellent point and now you have essentially named the title one of one of my new blog posts: "What is Hustle?"

It especially rings true because something we've tried hard to do over the years on TechZing is unpack miracle functions exactly like this.

Sounds good! I look forward to it.

I don't know if hustle is enough for success, but I don't think people simply mean "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." when they use the word. Even though the precise definition is hard to pin down, you can easily spot it during its absence.

There are times when you wish to do something, and you avoid it because it just feels like you might be pushing it a bit. If you still did it anyway - what you did was hustle. In fact, I would say that if you reflect on your life and think of the times when you didn't take that invitation to an event, or that break to go on a vacation, or introduce yourself to a person who you liked, and then realized that the choice you made was too safe, and your choice (lack of hustle) didn't help you all that much long term anyway, you can see its absence quite plainly.

Having said that, I also agree with you on one front. Instead of using the word hustle, if these articles gave an example, and then maybe made a point about why that is hustle, it would read much better.

Interesting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.

Maybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.

You can sort a deck of cards by shuffling it if you have enough time.

However, if you move randomly around a discrete 3D space, you only have a ~34% of returning to your starting point, even if you keep moving forever. The more dimensions, the lower the chances that infinite randomness reaches any given point.

Your not trying to sort though. You are trying to optimise.

For how long?

Until IPO or acquihire

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