The Geek Talk with Derek Sivers | Hacker News Reader

The Geek Talk with Derek Sivers

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36 pointsnreece17 comments

I'm not impressed. It's nothing personal against Derek, I just find that site and format blasé, I guess.

Also nothing personal against Derek, because I enjoy his blog more than others, but I am sick of seeing the same people over and over again on everything that comes up on this site. I think that there's a lot of hero worship and a lot of sycophanting that goes on on HN. I think that a lot of their writings are overrated; it's not that any of them are bad, or even not good; it's just that people seem to gush over them unjustifiably.

I think I am going to start a website where I interview normal people. Hopefully mostly people with cool things to say. And then that web site will get very little notice here because it won't be full of the angel-investor all-star cast.

If you're serious about starting that site and need help, email me and I'll you set up.

I people like Derek are mentioned a lot because they're know how to express their ideas. After doing over 300 interviews, I can tell you that it's not a common trait.

But I like your idea of learning from new people. If I can help, let me know.

Try actually executing on that rhetorical flourish at the end. You might be surprised how much traction you get with it, even outside of the "angel-investor all-star caste."

Someone told me that is a culture thing, people in the bay area are known of worship "special people".

I sometimes get the feeling of: "oh, this dude sold his company for $(lot of money), he's so awesome!, I gotta upvote him". "oh, a VC guy that can give us money!, he's so awesome, I gotta follow him and upvote him".

I just gonna go ahead and compare that to South Florida (where I live), a place where having a Lamborghini is like having a Toyota or being a millionaire is nothing! Is it cool? YES!, will it make other people give you special care? absolutely NOT! actually if your Lamborghini is yellow, people laugh at you.

The weird thing about that is there are probably more millionaires in the bay area than South Florida... but culture is culture, I guess.

>I think I am going to start a website where I interview normal people. Hopefully mostly people with cool things to say.

Reading this, I realized that Rule #34 of the Internet has a non-porn analogue: If a person is interesting, we'll learn about them. I write this not to slog off your idea - after all, the way we learn about interesting people on the internet is through having other people find them and draw attention to them.

I always thought it would be cool if people who are pursuing excellence shot off their mouth before they were anybody even remotely significant. Then, along their journey, there would be a trail to measure the success of whatever it is they believed in or subscribed to.

This eliminates the annoying "survivor bias" that every skeptic is sure to hide behind. I know it is statistically relevant, but it's still annoying to hear people constantly downplay and scrutinize someones success. Tim Ferris comes to mind. Sure I get it, the guy's no saint, but we can learn from his achievements. Same goes for luck. If you want to justify your lack of achievement by citing how godawfully lucky all your peers are, go ahead, just don't poison other people with that nonsense.

Anyway, normal people run their mouth off about how great what they are doing is and then they go out and do it and see what happens! For example I would like to run my mouth about how solid my business principles are and how much I trust in the 37-signals-ish mantra. So I make bold claims about why its true and what it will work (without it having actually worked to date) . And then inevitably I blow up and nobody can cite stupid luck or survivor bias because I've been running my mouth even when I was a nobody.

'Course who's gonna read the unfounded ramblings of a nobody eh?

The end.

Two things:

1. This does exist. See Hunter Thompson's letter collections (the first one is called The Proud Highway) from 10 years before he was ever famous. It's interesting, if very unfocused.

2. If enough people started doing this, people would still cry survivor bias about those who made it. What about all the ones who didn't, but had similar ideas?

These things come and go (hopefully). A couple of years ago there were at least three Seth Godin articles per week.

Yeah. I've been a huge Hacker News fan since the beginning (was a Paul Graham fan for years) - so it was weird when my posts started showing up on it last summer. Trends, I guess.

Flattering, because you guys are my closest peers. But I'm always surprised when something I post gets upvoted here.

I do want to point out that Ruby isn't the only language that allows a function to redefine itself. Try this in your firebug console:

  var foo = function() {
    console.log('foo');
    foo = function() {
        console.log('bar');
    };
  };
  foo();
  foo();

Couldn't they at least change the questions that were in no way relevant to Derek?

I think that the word "retired" is losing its meaning. If you're your own boss and you spend most of your time working on interesting things, you can't call yourself "retired", even if you don't make money or have an official job.

What I'm saying is that "retired" should mean "stopped doing interesting things" and not "stopped receiving a salary". By that definition, Derek is not retired.

I think it means Derek no longer has to worry about earning money - he can afford to do what he wants with this time. Sounds like retirement to me!

I agree that Derek is in this position where he doesn't have to worry about money. This is the common definition of "retired". What I'm saying is that I find this definition bad.

Derek himself said "I used to think “retired” just meant “only plays golf”, but now I see it means doing anything interesting and/or useful to others, but not having to worry whether it makes money or not."

There's a reason he used to think that "retired" meant "only plays golf". The true, deeper meaning of "retired" is "someone who doesn't matter anymore". The fact that we say "retired" on someone who doesn't get a paycheck anymore is because in recent history, people made important things only in their official job. Since this fact is changing now, and people make important things outside their jobs, the meaning of "retired" should stay closer to its original, deep meaning: Someone who doesn't do important things anymore.

And, as I said, according to this definition Derek is not retired.

I don't think that "no longer has to worry about money" is the common definition at all. If it was, every CEO of a mid-level or higher company would probably qualify.

Perhaps something more along the lines of, "doesn't need money, and wants to settle down and move to Florida" ;)

Never heard of this site before but it reminds me of The Setup[1].

1: http://usesthis.com/

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