The difference between talkers and doers | Hacker News Reader

The difference between talkers and doers

getrichslowly.org

59 pointsbjhess31 comments

Whenever the urge to game strikes, I’m going to ask myself the following questions:
* Have I exercised today? * Are the house and yard tidy? * Have I run all of my errands? * Have I written and/or edited at least two articles for Get Rich Slowly? * Does my inbox have fewer than 20 messages?

What we need now is a mod for Steam that asks the right questions before starting any games. It could be partially automated, synchronizing with your e-mail inbox and task calendar.

I've thought about this a bit more, and I think it would be possible to make this a web service. You become friends with a bot, which then checks your online status and your Gmail inbox, and texts you or messages you in-game telling you that you have e-mail. Please let me know if anybody actually implements this or wants a hand doing so.

"By doing instead of talking, things started to happen."

I really hate platitudes. Especially if they're truisms. It's a bit like saying "By walking instead of standing still, I started to move forward."

People often fall into the self deceptive habit that thinking about doing something is doing something. Such truisms merit being in a self help article.

Do you really hate platitudes? Haters gonna hate.

I'd argue that writing a blog is not exactly a doing. Much less blogging about getting rich.

Writing isn't doing? I think J.D. would be surprised to learn that he makes a living by not doing.

Writing a web app is doing. Writing a blog post about writing a web app is talking.

I don't know J.D and I don't know the blog. If he makes money off of talking about doing, good for him.

That seems like a very narrow concept of "doing" which presumes that writing is an unproductive activity.

This may be true for programmers (whose most productive work is generally unrelated to writing), but is untrue for writers.

I agree, but that's one reason I disagree with the original post, because the two blend together in fairly complex ways. Sometimes, thinking about things, mapping out possibilities, comparing alternatives, etc., without doing any of them, is itself productive. For example, Alonzo Church mostly theorized about what computers could do, came up with a bunch of thought experiments, proved some things impossible, discussed why other things would be possible, etc., but never really got on with the business of actually making computers do much of anything. But that's fine, because his main contribution was precisely the thinking & talking--- giving us a better understanding of what computers could do, not actually making computers do any of them, was his thing.

You could phrase it as "productive talkers", whose talking is important, versus "unproductive talkers", whose talking is just hot air, but that starts to get close to being a tautology: the bad kind of talking is bad.

He also wrote a book: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Missing-J-D-Roth/dp/0596809...

I tend to agree with you, though.

Would you say Stephen King or other writers are also not doing anything? What about teachers?

A blog and a novel are different things entirely, and he's written many novels.

I'd say it depends on what your goals are. If you want to build a following for your blog then it is definitely doing, but if your goal is to lose weight or renovate your home, then it is talking.

Would he be known as a "doer" if he were known to have renovated his house and lost weight?

He means writing about renovating his home and writing about losing weight not the actual losing of the weight. So if he did do that and wrote about that then I would say yes he is a doer.

Why on earth not? Also, do you have a blog to show for that you wrote in your non-doing time?

Well, see, over here "getting rich" means earning millions in a few years through sheer entepreneurial perspiration. Over there, it means eliminating debt and reducing expenses, building up a nice, six figure retirement account over a lifetime of frugality and careful saving. Get Rich Slowly.

Which the author is doing and helping others do through his blog. I think it's definitely a doing.

Whether writing a blog is "doing" depends on the blog (obviously, I suppose).

But this kind of moots the original point. Human beings are social animal who communicate with language. By that token, the leaders and creators in human society use language to accomplish things, to "do". So most doers and the most effective doers are talkers along with those who are less effective - "just talking".

Mentioning "doing instead of talking" can sound good though - it be can effective talking in some circumstances.

I checked out his getrichslowly.org stats on alexa -- seems his site is getting 150-200k uniques per day. Is that considered high enough for a blog to generate decent income?

Well, considering that this is J.D.'s primary source of income, I suspect so.

In the personal finance niche- that's enough to get rich! He can easily get $10 CPM for his posts. At 150K pageviews a day that's $1500 a day profit.

You wish, or he wishes! A month possibly, maybe double that, but a day!

I assuming parent is correct and he gets 150K uniques a day, which is probably on the high side.

However, I maintain that getting $10 CPM for a finance site, even one without an ad sales team, is trivial.

4.5M to 6M uniques sounds extremely high for a personal finance site.

P.S. According to compete.com, his site gets 300K uniques per month - http://siteanalytics.compete.com/getrichslowly.org/

I tend to think that trends.google.com has the best approximation of traffic:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=getrichslowly.org&sa...

In any case, yes, this blog has a decent sized audience, and would generate a fair amount of income.

How do you read the actual traffic numbers from that chart?

if I go by google numbers then daily uniques are closer to 50k which is still decent for a blog.

Here are the numbers from when he quit his day job and went to a full time:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/11/11/quitting-the-da...

This is a critically important message. I tell people this all the time when they ask "how I do it" -- well, the answer is that I just do it. While they are watching TV and faffing around, I'm trying things and building things. You do it by just fucking doing it already.

this strikes at something i've been thinking about for a long time, a good manager learns to leverage his people to get things done, he/she is paid to drive people to get things done. there's an age old adage that says you should not give people fish, but teach people to fish (i am paraphrasing).

and what i've found in my transition from individual contributor to manager is that what made me good as an individual contributor has not helped for management. now i spend my time doing less and directing more, it's taken significant effort for this transformation because i've always relied on myself. but in a sense, this is still doing because i'm still getting significant things accomplished, but channeling my energy elsewhere.

one other side comment is that it almost seems to me that people that are naturally lazy seem to make good managers, their natural tendency to not want to do stuff drives them to push things on others (not exactly the only management style).

what are your thoughts? i probably should post something else rather than ruin this post.

You can be both really. I'm not much of a talker, but I HAVE been talking about getting my truck registered again for the past year. My excuse: it's a lot of money, and I don't use it :)

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