You Can’t Take It With You | Hacker News Reader

You Can’t Take It With You

steveblank.com

222 pointsjason_tko37 comments

I had a conversation with a well-known entrepreneur in my city. He has created a chain of cafés (completely different from my field) but we talked a lot (in fact, he talked, I questioned and listened) and I learned a great deal.

At the end of the conversation, he said "it has been a long time since I talked that much". WHAT? It meant that I was probably one of the few lucky who had learned from his experience. I always thought that entrepreneur were sharing their knowledge to everyone once they were big enough.

I hope that he will write about this someday but for the moment, I'll just write it myself in a document and try to find a way to share it.

It properly meant that he didn't run into any good listeners.

Most people, including me at times, take part in a conversation just to say something, which means that those who listen can learn a lot.

Quick poll: When you were in school, especially college, were the best teachers young or old?

There are young teachers with talent, but in my opinion, the most outstanding lecturers were older and had a depth and variety of experience that the young ones couldn't match. Older teachers have the fabled 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to account for, as well as a diversity of experience and the time necessary to assemble some perspective on all of it.

So here's a big +1 for hiring adjunct professors from outside the usual pool of fresh young faces. Let the young people work, and the old people teach.

Both (I think).

When getting my master's the most interesting instructors were the about-to-retire grey hair teaching Software Project Management who had decades of PM war stories mostly from massive Government projects.

At the other end was the young guy (looked like he was the youngest instructor in the program) teaching Introduction to Networks. He was absolutely amazing: there seemed to be nothing that he didn't know on any aspect of either circuit-switched or packet-switched networks! I think only once did he say "I'll have to research that and let you know next week." He was probably older than he looked since he'd worked quite a while at either Alcatel or Nortel.

Better to take it one step further. Find people like this, interview them, put the videos online and let everybody share in their wisdom.

Sweet fancy Moses, please no videos. Transcribe to text.

My bandwidth reading is an order of magnitude greater reading than watching.

I've almost given up on video on the web for interviews.

I think what he is talking about would not work well in an interview, but rather book (or maybe a couple chapters of one). Interviews are great at passing on a couple "big lesson" points, but beyond that it needs to be in some other form to digest.

I think Coders at Work and Founders at Work did a pretty good job with this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430219483/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430210788/

He probably has a point about preserving your knowledge but I find his fascination with this 'Fortune 100 lawyer' a little odd. Those are the guys that battle out stuff like Microsoft/SCO vs. IBM or the hypothetical "MPEG-LA patent trolls Google for WebM", right?

He is not fascinated with the lawyer but with his proficiency in his field, the field is irrelevant.

Hmm, but:

I’ll use misdirection to get the opposing counsel thinking I’m heading in one direction

This is the wrong lesson. He's good at exploiting the legal system, that's all. It's not about who is right, it's about who has the cleverer lawyer. All this guy's "experience" is zero-sum, he's creating no wealth, he's purely parasitic. He's like a salesman who sells you something you don't want just because he's good at persuasion. Why would you want to teach the next generation of lawyers to milk their clients more effectively?

Again, the point remains (and should not be clouded by animosity towards lawyers) that its a huge win for everyone if leaders in every field teach the young their hardearned lessons. Perhaps the OP would have been more effective describing a less controversial field.

"Perhaps the OP would have been more effective describing a less controversial field."

Exactly! As I read the article, my feeling was he was being disingenuous, condescendingly mocking the lawyer and his profession.

Then the final two sections, generalizing his advice to the lawyer for other professionals, seemed like a gloss.

In an adversarial system like the US and the UK each side in the case is expected to put up the best argument possible presenting their side of the case - it's not about them presenting the "truth" (although they obviously can't lie).

You got the word order wrong on that last - it should be "they can't obviously lie".

I read a passage on a standardized exam once that led me to believe that of the US and UK, only the US was adversarial, and the UK was more inquisitorial. The point of the exam passage was the contrast: in the UK, for example, both sides had to present all of the evidence they had. Not so in the US. Perhaps it's more of a sliding scale between the systems than a dichotomy.

Now, I have to admit I never followed up on this, maybe the passage was fictionalized.

US and UK have pretty much the same legal system. The French legal system is inquisitorial and pretty much all of Europe or is it the world except for the common wealth?

Now, now, trial by combat has a long and venerable history...

Seriously, though, before you can defend against a strategy, you have to recognize and understand it.

It's important to remember that the legal system isn't perfect. It's just more perfect than the known alternatives.

Trial by combat was no joke. It was the process for centuries. It presumably had the virtue of resolving disputes in a manner short of war or century-long blood feud, and its obvious bias -- toward the better fighter -- was, I'm guessing, a design feature: In the absence of government police, any judicial system that didn't weigh the odds in favor of the stronger party was liable to be ignored in favor of extrajudicial violence. Why take a guy to trial rather than just stab him in a bar fight? Well, if the trial resembles a bar fight, but one in which the winner emerges with a clean reputation and clean legal record, nobody has anything to lose by going to trial.

But it literally involved losing limbs and eyes, followed in short order by either the legal rights or the life of the loser. I like the lawyer system better.

I said it was a venerable history ... and like you, I prefer the wimpy modern version. Less interesting as a spectator perhaps, but much to be preferred as a participant.

Any type of trial is based on the notion that the outcome will be Fair and Just. What people consider Fair and Just changes depending on the people and the time; in some communities simple consistency is apparently enough...

Having now revealed my relativist leanings, I will point out that there are certain politicians and telemarketers that I would like to subject to that other time honored judicial fiction, er, system: Trial By Ordeal.

The trick will be finding a pond big enough and a large number of heavy stones.

Well, for one, knowing an attack strategy makes it easier to defend against. Moreover, if the strategy is fair, it levels the playing field; if the strategy is unfair, making it public increases the chance that the legal system will be adjusted to plug the holes.

A great lawyer must be agnostic. His job is to find a settlement in favor of his clients. He must manipulate the context to create a situation where his client wins by a landslide, using whatever means possible.

There is no such thing as "exploiting the legal system". There is only winning for your clients. Otherwise you're making excuses why you can't win for your clients.

Logical conclusion: A great lawyer is willing to blackmail or assassinate any unfavorable judges or jurors who can't be eliminated through legal means.

Surely you don't believe that actually falls under any reasonable definition of good?

Four downvotes, zero comments. I don't mind the downvotes at all, but I would expect better from HN users than to downvote without offering any contribution themselves. Is my logic invalid? Do you not like my example? Are you simply opposed to three-character usernames? Simply downvoting does nothing to correct any deficiencies you might see in a comment.

You forgot to factor long-term risk. If I got caught assassinating Judges/Jurors -- the impact for the company would be worse than losing whatever court case was being decided. Hence winning is important - but you need to play by the rules to make it in the long run.

I think Tom the lawyer is a fictional character not least because he is described so sterotypicaly and what makes him be at the top of his profession is also sterotypical.

No, it is the legal system that is parasitic - it allows winning participants to generate great wealth for themselves without generating anything for society. However, from the perspective of someone forced to use the system (as we all are), Tom is actually generating real wealth (or protecting the client from losing lots of money), which is anything but parasitic.

Because non-tech knowledge, being harder to reverse-engineer, is harder to pass down. The main point seems kind of like Asimov's Foundation, keep from falling back too many generations by leaving key checkpoint materials while cutting out some of the initially necessary but essentially unworking steps that we just go through to reach a solution (assumption -> oh this would be no that can't be -> ok reduction ad absurdum -> next possibility).

I came to a similiar conclusion a few weeks ago and have just finished setting up a system to try and record anything interesting I learn or find out in life in text and/or video form. I can't wait to get it rolling. Merely being able to read digests of what I've read or learn before should, I hope, bring most of the ideas back. Is there a name for this sort of recording?

Yes. Its a diary.

There's an entire field devoted to this: Knowledge Management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management).

I doubt the lawyer would risk his career by giving away his strategy/tactics.

Hence the suggestion that he do it after retiring from practice.

effective trial strategy does not involve any super-secret coca-cola formula strategems - the secret is exactly as described in steveblank's post: this lawyer is very effective b/c he manages to apply strategy at all in a trial setting and his opponents typically do not - mainly because it's hard.

If you don’t teach it or write it down, the accumulated knowledge of your career is gone. Yeah. Keep your knowledge in a working memory. Keep your tools sharp. We learn by doing and so on..

Add to this that in an IT field things are changing so fast, that you need a constant daily learning to stay in a shape.

I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour.

That's been the case for the majority of human history. It's mostly the case now. Most non-religious, progressive thinking people, don't actually think through most issues for themselves. They believe in institutions - academia, NPR, etc. Most people believe what they do about nutrition for instance, not from reading studies themselves, but through accredited officials (PHD's) as interpreted by the NYTimes.

How did this get here?

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