Notes for the New Year
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
10 years—that's the number of years it took me (in my personal and professional life) to reach a where I'm able to comfortably express what I want (although I still struggle). I often made the fatal mistake of assuming that others—like my partner, or manager—to simply "know" what it is, exactly, that I want. In retrospect, I'm unsurprised: asking for help was not something my parents, or culture (Asian), encouraged. It was the opposite.
Not only until I began managing people (in my previous role) did I realize how difficult it really is to infer what people want. I'm not a mind reader. Nobody is.
So, I agree: don't be afraid to ask for what you want.
At the same time, I figure the worst that'd happen is that they say no. That's where grit comes in handy.
If you experience a lot of denial/rejection anxiety, rejection therapy tends to help as you acclimate to the feeling. Basically, do something where you'd get rejected a lot. Afterwards, if relevant, think about factors that could have led to the denial, and what could be done to mitigate them. This trains a more positive mindset in reaction to rejection.
Alternatively, you could ask while internally expecting the denial. Plan around being denied. Having that fallback helps retain confidence, instead of letting 'what could go wrong' overly bother you. With this expectation, asking for what you want makes successes pleasant surprises!
I think the best way to pick what you want to do is to find
the intersection of what you’re good at, what you enjoy,
what the world needs, and what the world values.
Don't be afraid to look for people who need help and about whom you know nothing. Empathy will take you the rest of the way. When we started Seneca Systems, we knew nothing about local government, but no person is too far away for you to ask questions and understand what they need.
Not to take away from his advice on giving up but is there survivorship bias in this statement? How many people persist for just as long (or longer!) and still fail?
I think it might be more useful to look at success/fail rates for various levels of persistence.
> You want to find your tribe – the types of people like you that you can imagine working with for the rest of your career. Within that, you want to find a small group of people whom you trust, and whose opinions you really respect. [emphasis mine]
There are a handful of people in the world who are "like me", with whom I have any significant intersection of history, interests or identities. And though I am able to include others in my circle by celebrating our differences, this mentality (and advice) encourages them to exclude me from theirs.
I really wish the commonly accepted advice when forming one's "tribe" would be to seek out others to connect with who are different from you, but who you share enough with to forge a bond. It's not just better advice to create a healthy whole, it's idiosyncratically more interesting (and professionally more profitable) to have a variety of friends and colleagues with different histories, biases and networks of their own.
That's probably not what Sama means, but it's what is technically advised and how it's practically enacted. Surrounding yourself with similar/aligned people is just positive spin on excluding those who are different.
I believe strongly in creating one's tribe with intent, and choose it to maximize the richness of one's personal and professional life. That takes a lot more work than settling down with one's classmates & colleagues, but it's ultimately far more fulfilling (and holistically healthy for the system).
But (as said in OP) I am disappointed in how he's framed it in this particular think piece. The casual reader without out-of-context knowledge is unlikely to pick up on the nuance, and he's missed a golden opportunity to preach a better gospel.
I don't want to speak for him, but I believe Sam's point is that those are the people that you forge the strongest bond with.
I'd hypothesize that diversity is both among the best qualities to have in one's tribe and something which requires the most intentional approach to assemble. That's well worth pointing out, and probably a more helpful reminder than "make some friends".
Actually, History belongs to no one. How many of the most exceptional individuals or entities from 100 years ago does the average person in the world appreciate or even know about? Very very very few. Success (and life) is so incredibly fleeting.
Now think 200 years? 1000 years?
The ones who become wealthy through salary typically do that by converting a lot of "excess" salary into equity in something, the earlier the better.
Sam, how do you figure out "what the world needs"? As you point out, this is often very different from "what the world values" (see: Coca-Cola).
For HN its really 1) What are investors willing to contribute to or 2) What are customers willing to pay for.
If you have your own idea of the world and what the future will look like you will most probably have some ideas on what the world will need to get there.
If you ever wanted a pithy description of what separates the lives of the 1% from the lives of the rest, now you have one.
This is a great list of things I think anyone should take to heart in terms of how to structure their lives (if you're into that kind of thing) - invest in yourself, work on things that are big opportunities, etc.
Is this true, empirically, for the most successful companies? Of the "Frightful 5" (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft), only Microsoft seems to have had an extended period of only modest success before rocketing into the stratosphere. The others did so in just a couple of years.
Willing and able are two different things. Sadly, all the amazing technology hasn't really changed the need in a lot of people's minds to be physically close. We'll see if VR succeeds where phones, e-mail, chat, and video conferencing have failed.
I don't want to be catching up with my family in Europe at my 3am in the morning. Or working a hard problem at my 9pm to be in touch with people in India.
I think if you are in the same timezone good video conferencing works really well.
Although I guess I work in the industry so get a lot of good equipment.
> Don’t chase other people’s ideas of what matters.
Er...
What the world values ought to be a mostly objective question, though one that isn't easy to answer. An accurate measure of what the world values probably implies success, even. Our values are expressed by the totality of our collective actions, and are certainly not guaranteed to be consistent with what we say. The obvious (but certainly not perfect) proxy for what we value is what we choose when there are costs involved.
But other people's ideas of what matters strikes me as a completely different thing. These are constructs and abstractions that we use to help model our own individual decision making, and unfortunately we're often all-too-eager to share these with others even when they're by no means universal. If I tell you that "what matters is security and predictability" or "what matters is family" or "what matters is the pursuit of creativity and novelty", all I'm really saying is that I have this axiom that floats around in my head with a tenuous connection to reality even in the context of my own life but is clearly meaningless relative to yours! These things are not to be chased, because they’re not real.
In '99 I left a relatively standard and easy 9 to 5 type job at Intel to join a startup. My assumption was that the startup would fail, because that's generally what startups do, but it gave me the opportunity to work on systems that I found interesting (specifically Linux, which was still kind of fringe back then) and learn from very smart co-workers. I spent more time at work, but I did so because I was enjoying myself and learning a lot. Personally, I'd much rather spend 12 hours doing something I love than 8 hours doing something I hate.
Just because you are aiming for the stars doesn't mean you can't still enjoy the journey. For me, it's more fun to fail at something audacious then succeed at something mundane. Of course others are free to feel differently, and I would never claim that this is the right decision for everyone.
Loosely, from a talk i heard ages ago - the universe has no purpose. No goal or objective. It just is. Similarly, a dance or a song. It's purpose is not to end, but rather the thing itself, in it's entirety. If the objective was the finish, you'd start a dance where it ends, and be done with it.
Life is a little like that - ALL of it, every moment, is like a song. Each note is like a day, stanza like a year. Have fun, always.
...or, spend your best years slaving away for a (maybe) payoff at 40, 50 or 60, move into a retirement home and wait for death.
I love writing code, but i love other stuff that takes me away from code for months on end too. The SV thing scares the h*ll out of me. The obsession over the next big thing, being right, getting paid, being a name... I get depressed just thinking about it all.
A really eye opening experience was hanging out with my hispanic girlfriend's family. They were just content. I'd tell them about personal finance tricks, like credit card churning or buying things in bulk, and they'd blow me off. They'd rather save by putting spare change into a jar, or putting in extra hours, which did work for them. They got to go on vacations, buy clothes they liked. It was like the pain that I felt with wasting money didn't happen for them, they just took it all in stride. They weren't reaching for anything, and they seemed much happier and even more personally secure and present than most tech people I've met.
When you're moderately wealthy, you can churn cards without the temptation to use them for things that you really can't afford. If you and your family are living month-to-month, it is nearly impossible to restrain yourself when you see how much credit is available.
Similarly, if you're from a large, close family where everyone lives month-to-month, you might be perceived as greedy if you start to accumulate wealth instead of sharing with your family. For some reason it is more forgivable to imperil yourself by borrowing money to buy an expensive car than it is to let money pile up in your savings account.
If you're from a family where there is a culture of long-term financial thinking, this stuff is pretty easy. If you aren't, it isn't. It is partly that you haven't learned habits of financial planning, but also that there are cultural forces that prevent it.
What about: learn and work, solve some important problems for people around you or make their lives somehow better, die? I much prefer this outlook to both "life-objective point of view" you mentioned and the IMO nihilistic "enjoy every moment", "focus on family and relationships" lifestyle.
This seems self-contradictory. If all the world's problems were solved, what would you do? That's what's properly valuable. If you don't do some of that before you die, how did you live a good life? You have to mix instrumental tasks and actually good things to do.
This sounds like somebody who doesn't enjoy working.
I love the idea that life is a song and you should dance around all day enjoying every moment, but what about if accomplishing things, making things, doing things, is what brings you that enjoyment.
If you song is to make things, you should find some friends and make things together! It will hardly seem like work at all.
This is a common belief that is worth challenging.
I think we overvalue our "tribe", and often allow false intuition about who our tribe is mislead us into limiting opportunities for personal and professional growth.
I started thinking this a couple dozen years ago, when I was first getting involved in security and being repelled by the cliques of insiders who passed around secret security knowledge. Anyone familiar with the underground of the time knows how this worked with exploit scripts and warez, but I think fewer people realize that it's also the way that the defenders worked as well: there were secret security lists, like Core, whose members got to learn about exploits long before normal people did.
But then Bugtraq happened, and along with it the modern full-disclosure movement, and if you're a vulnerability researcher you'd be embarrassed to have put your chips down on things like the secret Core list.
The same pattern repeats over and over in our industry. The IETF, for instance, has historically functioned like a giant web of cliques. Almost anything the IETF came up with from '95 to '10 is hamstrung by IETF group dynamics and its autonomic responses to outsider opinion. If you wonder why our addresses are still 32 bits wide and our traffic is still unencrypted, that's worth considering.
My convictions about this got even firmer after I learned to hire, at a company I started called Matasano. Like every other company, we started out hiring from within our tribe. But we worked in software security, and our tribe got expensive faster than we could pay them (good for them!). We did a couple of things that resulted, ultimately, in us discarding resumes and most of interviewing altogether, and managed to drastically grow our team --- to the point where I'm pretty confident we had simply and permanently solved our hiring problem --- by looking past our "tribe".
I understand the point Altman is making here, that you start your career out with a tiny and poorly-defined network, and that it's good to find people you can rely on. I think that too! But I think it's also worth being wary of your immediate personal network, because the universe works pretty hard to keep you connected to those people, even when limiting yourself to those connections isn't really in your best interests.
People are generally pretty awesome once you get to know them. Rather than looking for a couple people to work with for your whole career, I'd urge you to instead look for sets of principles you might share with a much larger number of people, and to think about how you might identify those shared principles, in order to maximize the number of people you'll work with effectively throughout your career.
I'm in contracts hell this week and not articulating things well, but my "be careful about your tribe" thing is one of my bigger, more important beliefs, so I hope I'm somewhere in the vicinity of communicating it.
I'd phrase it like this: "find the people who are best in the world at what you want to do and learn from them". And then I would add "but get outside of their circle frequently. It will be good for them and you".
i mean, what's not work? watching netflix? chilling by the pool and drinking booze? can you really do that all day, every day? do we need tributes to that?
p.s. people worked their ass off to make netflix+chill possible for you to enjoy in your leisure time.
There's no right answer to the question I just posed, but I feel healthier when I look at activities outside my 9-5 as leisure and outlets. It doesn't mean I can't be good at them, but I would feel that I was cheapening my enjoyment of these activities (maybe by putting any value on them at all?) if I thought of them "work".
In reality, I find myself doing a lot of projects at my 9-5 where I need to be realistic and explicit about their expected value - especially when I need to be accountable to my boss who has business goals to meet, and who knows the approximate value of each hour of my time in the office. So it's nice to do things with no metrics or strings attached or bosses (besides myself) in my free time.
Luckily I don't have to justify every activity at work...such as reading/commenting on HN :)
ycombinator is a venture capital firm and pretty much all they put out has to do with work and money and making lots of it. i was responding to the op who seemed upset that he's reading about work on a site about work... which is bizarre.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090303070906/http://news.ycomb...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13321354 and marked it off-topic.