The annoying habits of highly effective people
economist.com
economist.com
But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes."
I would highly recommend people here to take a look at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
Empirical personal observation will always be very important.
If all scientific evidence says oranges are harmless, and you eat one and have to puke, then you'll avoid it, and rightly so, based on your empirical observation of 1.
You can't always do a large study, but when you're presented with one it doesn't help do give anecdotes in response.
No, but it's healthy to be skeptical of a study in face of contrary immediate experiences. After all it's a product of a flawed human process (and most are crap, even according to researchers themselves).
Have you overcome any longstanding relationship issues with anyone in your life? have you supported someone through a mental breakdown?
The very fact that you measure your success "over" your colleagues to me highlights that at no point have you been working towards making a better world.. I mean its cool that you are an aspie and all but ts actually of not much use to the humanity.
I know my comment is shitty, but i get depressed that i work in an industry that has its head so far up its own arse that the people who work in it forget that it only has value in helping people do things.
If you are not helping people do things (e.g. you are not making a tool you are trying to sell some pish or something) then you are not a benefit to humanity. and if it was not for the other peopl ebeing off doing things themselves anyway then everything you do would be of no use.
All technical skill is inherently an order of magnitude less valuable as it is a second order skill - this is something that most people in IT really dont want to accept and they cause a lot of hate and pain in the mean time trying to convince everyone else they are right - normally through bully, intimidation and the general lack of empathy that goes hand in hand with all of this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Also, it's not ok to have a trollish username on HN, since that basically trolls every thread the account posts to.)
Hard work buys you more tickets in the game of life, but luck is always there to some degree. How much is luck, who knows :)
For example, when a large company collapses, being the very worst can be an asset to get out and into new companies earlier and through less critical processes (that then end up overly critical of the people trusted to shut off the lights).
Then there always is the argument that you have access to a gym and markets with healthy food. You can always under/over exaggerate personal responsibilities.
Just like Brett Kavanaugh worked his ass off to get in Yale, which he probably did, is this negated by his family's connections? Difficult.
Conscientiousness is ~44% heritable.
Genetically I'm not much of a runner compared to my brother, but I work hard at it 3-4 times a week. But if he got around to hitting a treadmill as much as I do I'm sure he'd outperform me.
You can do things to skew the distribution, but hard work is far from a guarantee of success, and likewise laziness is no guarantee of failure.
There's no mystery here. It's the accumulation of value by the top end outliers and recognition of the value they provide by others. Preferential attachment produces a power law.
Read this: http://www.physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/papers/EPJB-17-723-2000...
The authors started with even distribution of money, and random transactions with uniform probability, yet they arrived to very uneven distribution of outcomes.
The fact that Capitalism will amplify and exacerbate any imbalance that forms, does not preclude the possibility that there are structural factors that help form those initial imbalances in Capitalism. Factors like differences in family wealth, access to education, access to connections with loan or startup capital, access to political connections, and so forth.
It may very well be that "luck" matters a lot. (And I'd argue that at a metaphysical level all of those traits are due to luck.) But that argument simply doesn't prove the result.
Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
She grew up rich, with the freedom to pursue her passion from the age of 10, when her mother would take her to karaoke contests. The ability to up stakes and move to Nashville, to have your father buy your way into a record label... well... it doesn’t overshadow her natural ability, but it helps to explain how she was able to leverage it so effectively.
Exactly - she won the lottery being born into a rich white family in the U.S.
But Bo Burnham’s quote really isn’t about that, he’s talking about getting lucky and having your career take off. The truth is that many many lotteries typically need to be won before you can even enter that lottery. My point was that Taylor Swift didn’t just “take a chance” on music, she used all of her existing wins to stack the deck in her favor. If you look at a lot of CEO’s the same is true of them, and it’s not just the luck of their career taking off, but the luck of ever being in a position to have that happen.
Nitpick, but this isn't actually true (see lawsuit she won), and we don't really have any way to know if it was true even before she became famous. I agree with your general point, though.
I think it was about both. Later in the clip he says to Conan O'Brien "We're tall white guys, we overcame nothing to get here."
From https://sidsavara.com/why-3-of-harvard-mbas-make-ten-times-a...
“Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” In 1979, interviewers asked new graduates from the Harvard’s MBA Program and found that :
84% had no specific goals at all
13% had goals but they were not committed to paper
3% had clear, written goals and plans to accomplish them
The 13% of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.
Even more staggering – the three percent who had clear, written goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.
Edit: I had often heard of this study and just pasted the first reference I found. I would delete this post, if I could, as its credibility is questionable. Thanks femto.
Though it's claimed that the myth did prompt an actual study (not peer reviewed?)
https://sidsavara.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/researchsum...
Which claims to support a fuzzier notion that writing things down helps achieve a goal.
> Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
While there are undoubtedly success stories which resemble both of these caricatures, I think they're in the minority. I can't say I'm hobnobbing with the Forbes billionaires list but I have personal relationships with many people who built successful businesses. Betting on a unique opportunity is often an amplifier, so is starting in a good place in terms of money/family. But what they all have in common is they focused religiously on the top line, they didn't fuck up the bottom line, and they worked very hard.
Where does the "harm" you talk about come from? Usually it's because there are other responsibilities you're engaged with. If you literally give everything else up to focus on one thing, these barbs aren't in your life. I'm talking forgoing rent to crash with family/friends, eating ramen, selling/getting rid of your things, live on credit cards, etc, and have a 24/7 focus that keeps you going.
You'd be surprised how much that frees you from the immediate "harm" you describe, but you also have nothing to fall back on, because you pretty much have nothing else anymore than your pursuit, and can be amassing enormous debt (financial and otherwise). It's a huge amortized, pushed-forward harm in the hopes that the gamble pays off. For many, it doesn't.
All the things you described doing are the fallback options - you have to have a family and friends, things to sell, credit to burn. Even then, family or friends have less patience to carry you when you’re taking a moonshot unless they also have a lot they can fall back on.
That's not a judgement on what they choose, but many times the "lack of privilege" is really they because they made different choices.
Having the resources to take risks is the number one factor to succeeding, I think. Being able to identify good opportunities comes after that.
Baseball is easy when you have unlimited at-bats.
I agree that having financial resources is a huge leg up, but I don't believe it's mandatory. My beliefs are formed from personal experience. I came from a working class family that lived below the poverty line. My parents kicked me out at 18 with a warning that if I ever wanted to come back I'd better be ready to pay them rent. (Resolved that I would never take them up on that offer, never did.) When I started my business I had $250 in the bank and no idea how I was going to pay the next month's rent.
For years I failed and I sacrificed where I had to. I worked long hours at terrible rates, I didn't spend a dollar more than necessary to survive, I gave up on my hope of saving and buying property, I neglected my health, I gave up on my hope of finding a partner and starting a family because women aren't interested in a nerd who has nothing to his name except dreams.
These are the sacrifices you can make if you aren't born into wealth but you want to achieve it. Some people absolutely have success handed to them. They have a safety net which allows them to fail until they succeed. For the rest of us, you sacrifice time, energy, opportunity, and health.
It took years but it worked, one day I hit on a great business and it all turned around.
Being broke certainly limits the type of opportunity you can invest in, but there's always something.
Always? It's not a law of physics...
Let's not be superfluous. Being a CEO is hard, even the 5 am rising and 'hand shaking' parts.
Not necessarily. It completely depends on the company and the industry.
If someone said to me: "you can either work in an Amazon warehouse (either shift 7.00am-5.30pm or 5.45pm-4.15am) or be the CEO of Amazon but you're going to get paid the same whichever you choose" I know which I'd do.
I think you are misinterpreting what 'hard' means.
That makes it volatile, not hard. And the stakes are much less for volatility when you already have several cool million in the bank...
The CEO of an Ambulance company I know has about 500 staff, he's been doing it for 25 years, it all seems like a smooth operation but they're constantly facing issues. Labour and training problems, international actors that won't pay and their governments won't help, shipping problems, supply chain problems. Liability issues. IP issues with some special things they do. Orders come in batches, they might have a down year and possibly have to play people off. And I'm not even getting into the very basics of product development, financing the working capital i.e. the regular stuff employees do.
People who think CEO's just show up and wear suits and have meetings, and kiss up to the board ... I don't think have any exposure to what the job entails.
A CEO compared is a walk in the park. All those issues you've mentioned ("Labour and training problems, international actors that won't pay and their governments won't help, shipping problems, supply chain problems") are there in any business (even in a single person shop).
If you can avoid that, it must be a great job. Massive pay, no labor, people do what you say, and if you screw up the politics and get fired you’re still set for life.
The implications of this are not great.
-leading a company
-dealing with finances
-constantly making important decisions
As a hard job.
Not that the CEO should be completely out of the loop (she has to sign off, after all).
But if a CEO is dealing with nitty, gritty details if finances there's a severe delegation issue at best and a detail obsessed control-freak at worst.
A European company with major cash holdings may want to diversify currency, but that could be seen as speculative. The working capital requirements and details of the revolving loans they have from the bank. The list goes on.
The value-adds from a good CEO are outstanding strategy, positive corporate brand creation, and investor/shareholder relationship management.
The first two aren't hard in the bureaucratic sense, but in the creative sense. A lot of CEOs are terrible at them - see the long list of companies run into the ground by very poor decisions.
The last one is helped a lot by having the correct class background. It's nightmarishly hard for outsiders, and can be anywhere from not hard at all to equally nightmarish for insiders.
This does not explain how CEOs such as Fiorina and Elop can inject themselves into established companies, run them into the ground, and still walk away with lavish rewards. They are in a completely different category than ordinary Workers.
And even hard to get right matters little if you have a golden parachute (as many CEOs do). You can drive a company (or an entire sector) to the ground and still get your nice bonus.
No wonder a lot of top level executives are psychopaths, the emotional detachment must really help.
Yes, a "bad" CEO will be fired, meaning that he will pocket a fat severance package and he will be able to try again in another company with almost no stigma attached.
Even if he did it so badly making himself unhireable for similar positions, he will have already earned more money that most people (even with professional jobs) see in their lifetimes.
"With great power comes great responsibility" seems not to apply to CEOs, more like "the house always wins".
on example was the campaign against a former BT CFO would not would print shares to go on a buying spree - like Vodaphone was doing
The reason the golden parachutes exist is because CEO is likely going to be 'the end of the career' for most. There are so many reasons to get fired and it will probably happen. After that, there's not much else.
Nobody in their right mind would be a 'Big Co CEO' without some kinds of rewards even on the downside - many of these folks can make quite a lot of money in some other C-level position and do just fine right there. Why put your head on the chopping block?
You might also ask the question why athletes are paid gazillions for doing something fun, that they enjoy that comes with zero responsibility basically, and can often do very well even if they don't perform, although usually that's not the case.
And FYI most CEO's don't make gazillions of dollars, that's just what we see in the news.
Much easier than many other jobs, from mining and nursing to jobs that single mothers do in 2 shifts.
And with much more perks, respect, personal influence, and earnings...
I am sure the duties are "hard" in an absolute sense, but not relative to pay and accountability, not when compared to other jobs that are hard in an absolute sense, as you point out.
Being a CEO doesn't mean you're the boss. It means you serve everyone, from employees to customers to shareholders, and are responsible for every single thing that happens. If someone doesn't do well, it's your fault. And being responsible for others livelihoods with every decision you make is definitely not easy.
Golden parachutes ensure that this responsibility means almost nothing. CEOs have driven whole companies to the ground, losing the jobs of thousands, and got their fat check in the end. Heck, even white collar crime goes largely unpunished.
This may be more applicable to artists, but my own take is that a lot of people would be surprised at how much a lot of really successful people looked like "losers" for a significant part of their early lives, due to them living in their own world and not working hard enough on anything they didn't care about because they spent all their time thinking about the one thing they really cared about.
> Faggin: Well, for the timing of the product out, that was put three-and-a-half months of my life at 80 hours a week doing the layout. I mean, that was the only way I could solve that challenge. We couldn’t find a layout draftsman. They weren’t experienced enough or fast enough. And that was the absolute, the limiting time in terms of getting the product out. Because the design, Shima pretty much was doing it all the time it was allotted, but the layout was just not getting done fast enough. And so that’s why I had to do it. You know, a CEO doing layout draftsman job was not something that would be normal, but that’s what I had to do, and I did it. So that’s how I solved that problem. And that certainly saved many, many, many months for the project. As I said, I did two-thirds to three-quarters of the chip drawing it myself.
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
I enjoy reading them the same way I enjoy learning from my co-worker's habits. I take what matters to me and throw away the rest. I'm always trying to improve how I do my current job. It's not enough to have an open mind about work habits / techniques, one has to actively seek out new information.
Also it's usually an interesting look into someone else's life, at times even fascinating.
My friends and acquitances definitely read these books to glean some sort of inspiration/hidden jem that would start them on path to riches.
My life has no parallel to lives of these people and there's nothing I could copy.
It's my opinion that the odds of me being a CEO of a huge Corp are same as a person who is homeless for years going through college and getting a job making six figures.
There are tons of these books, and the only lesson they teach is how often people fall for the trap of survivorship bias.
We can't assume that book sales perfectly represent public interest in the books sold. Anytime someone who is very well-compensated in fields other than writing has an inexplicably successful book, we have to wonder how many of those books ever touched a reader's hands. Publishers just want to sell books; they don't care if lots of them are sold to a CEO-author as some sort of vanity project.
Besides I was born in poverty and needed lot of efforts to be able to socialize with people born upper middle class. I can only imagine what else I need to learn to socialize within upper echelons. I can't explain it to you fully.
Thanks for asking though, I never thought through this before.
In my experience all C level executives do a very good job of seeming like they know what they are doing. That seems to be a huge part of the job. Seeming like you know what you are doing, seeming like you know what is going to happen in the future (despite that being fundamentally unknowable) and being vaguely intimidating.
Beyond that they select from the set of possible projects that could be undertaken ie create a new product, overhaul some existing system, lay off a bunch of people etc etc. Having made that selection from the options put in front of them their reputation improves if the project goes well (or at least looks like it did). Their reputation takes a hit if the project goes badly.
They may have little or nothing to do with the project execution upon which their career rides. It seems like a bizarre job in that regard. Decide on a high level course of action then wait 6+ months to see if you will be considered a genius or an idiot. During that time your involvement is limited to periodically listening to status updates while looking stern.
I may have told this anecdote before, if so here I repeat it:
There was a Friday meeting at a place I was consulting at, the C-level executives were outlining the way projects would run to the end of the year. It seemed in some ways less than optimal, they then in a rare bit of insight into their processes said 'I know this looks less than optimal but the reason why we are doing this is ---blah blah blah 3 sentences of finance technobabble'.
It was quite clear the suboptimal process had been chosen to maximize available moneys for projects due to accounting decisions and specific legal regulations. Although exactly how eluded me.
I was pretty sure that most of the people there understood as little on the matter as I did but everyone did that expression on their face to signify they did understand that people generally use with me when I describe how stemming/decompounding works and why this means we will have to take another way in structuring our data for the search engine.
But yes most of the time I would look at those people and say that they don't do anything.
(I don’t mean to be disrespectful; just wanted to implore you to not fall for the self-imposed bigotry of low expectations.)
Just look on Angellist and you could probably find yourself a CTO or role — or one that could quickly lead to one. Just be excellent at your job; learn how to influence and be confident: you know more than most!
That's it. Along with hiring the right talent which is the half of the job (and often invisible) so that the work actually gets done. High-level decisions can affect hundreds or thousands of people and many more customers, so fewer but more important decisions is the trade-off, then delegating the rest so that other workers can do what they do best.
This description seems minor but the larger the company, the harder it is to keep things on track for a long-term focused vision. Also people don't do things just because you tell them to and you'd be surprised at just how hard it is to keep people working towards a goal.
People become leaders by creating and commanding change that positively affects the company. Land a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue? You're getting to the top.
Working harder than the others is part of this process, and sometimes that means you come in at 5am, but it's not a requirement nor is it something that anyone in that position actually focuses on as more than just a means to an end.
From my experience this does not happen at all. Not to underclass developers at least.
Part of it is making sure contributions are measured and noticed. People can't act on what they don't know.
It's most likely that you were severely underpaid in the first place, the raises have just slowly brought you up to industry standard, just spread over 3 years.
Your title increase is also great, but keep in mind, having you feel like you are a leader is also a great retention tool for you to keep working for them, producing good work.
I recommend looking in the marketplace for a new job to really see where you can be in your 4+ years. Don't feel like they have been so good to you that you couldn't increase your salary again by 30% by switching employers.
True, but if we're going with anecdata I'd point out that it's also common to see devs (and managers) who are taller get higher titles and progress faster too. My own experience is that the correlation is at least as strong as that with getting stuff done.
Sure, in theory it might be possible to progress as a developer but in practice the roi of putting in enormous effort is simply laughable compared to the alternatives. A few percent raise realistically. Getting to the top? Not a chance.
There are a rare few who are extremely talented and productive individual contributors but most are not, so try to maximize output by working with others. Even small teams have managed to make big impacts in massive companies so I reject the notion that you can't do anything.
But regardless, many people have gotten very high up in many organizations through persistence and patience. It's not easy, and each level will get harder because you have more intense competition for fewer slots, but saying "not a chance" goes directly against the fact that many have done just that.
Unfortunately those who are the first in their family to go to uni and go into a professional job don't always get the support and informal knowledge passed to them.
One example would be read a proper newspaper - I can recall when being asked which newspaper you read was a common interview Q in the UK
But if you’re claiming that individual contributor devs never get promoted for good work, that’s just clearly and utterly wrong.
Also claim quality engineering is only loosely correlated with advancement, it is one of the less efficient ways to secure a promotion/raise. In fact, managers often have no idea who is doing a good job.
Some people don't want that change and are happy where they're at. Others cant make that change. But that's what it takes. You can definitely climb the levels by excelling at what you at that particular level. If you still disagree then I would point to the generations of millions of immigrant families that arrived with nothing and earned their way to the top primarily through raw technical merit.
And yes, as stated, impact needs to be measured to be judged. If you do something that nobody knows about, then there's not much you can say.
If you want to make the weaker statement that growing from engineer to CTO almost never happens, you’re going to need statistics.
Realistically, humans are mortal and C suite types are made, not born. While not every engineer will become a CXO just due to disparity in job openings, someone needs to be promoted to take the CXO jobs once the previous crop has aged out of the work force. Some of them will be advanced because they’re good workers, others because they’re good at politics. You’ll need some statistics to back up any claim about what percentage are good workers and what percentage are politicians in business clothing.
My boss was delighted to take credit for it while also ensuring I stayed on message that it wasn't actually a result of him screwing up and being generally incompetent. I eventually figured I had nothing to lose and talked to his boss (politely of course) just saying how successful that had been and that I had plenty of other ideas for improvement. It was not well received.
But I hear my old boss is doing quite well these days.
Had a similar experience once. A small change generated $2m/year extra revenue. That amount just about covered the bonuses of two execs while I got the standard 3% raise. Not the only reason, but I left shortly afterwards.
I put it together with the one I had from my prior project and brought a rio diamond mp3 player.
Being accurate and quantifiable without becoming confrontational is an art though, but ultimately necessary. Going over people can often lead to worse results. Eventually the truth does come out but whether it's worth the time and effort is up to you.
Why does the truth eventually come out? Or is this an assumption?
If you don't manage to build a decent career/salary/position by your mid-thirties in tech you're quite likely screwed (though before I'm too depressing, I understand there are counterexamples here on HN). Waiting a year or two for recognition is career suicide.
I'd argue that 1 year is way too short. The lack of patience causes far more problems today than building up the relationships and gaining the network and momentum to get into higher positions. Most people I know who stuck to a clear goal within a organization that has openings have done better than those who kept jumping around looking for the quick rise.
Communication is important - very important - but it's also often what people focus on when the reality is just a bigger pain in the ass ("so and so is a selfish twit who takes credit for others' work" is much harder to say than "we need to address communication issues between departments")
For example, did you have to take credit for that particular situation? What was the true downside of your boss taking credit? Why not cover for him and gain the ally? Build the relationship and you'll often find that it pays back in multiples.
Business is 99% about relationships. The only way you can get what you want is by helping others get what they want.
Why not work with them, teach them, and make them better. Instead of being upset, be on their side. Almost always, they'll help you in return. Being confrontational and going around them though, will only guarantee more negative outcomes. Remember that your boss's boss and other colleagues probably don't want to deal with someone who is seemingly more interested in getting credit rather than getting things done.
These days I'd just quietly polish the CV and move along. But I have a much better job now.
I had a colleague who once told me "the trick to making good ideas happen is to make your boss think it was their idea". And they were completely right! It didn't stop them from quitting in frustration years later having never been promoted.
You can credit him and his cohorts for having the foresight to work on products/services that turned out to be winners, especially given that he's followed that success with other potentially successful ventures. But I don't buy that work alone got Musk where he is.
Waking up at 5am because other people are doing it won't get magically get you anywhere. However when you focus on achieving similar goals, you'll probably find yourself getting up at 5am too.
Be in charge of the department/team that "lands a major deal or create a new product line that doubles revenue" and you're on your way to the top. Being the person who was in the office until 3 am working out the final details of that deal or fixing the show stopping bugs that let you actually launch the product won't get you anywhere.
Smart companies reward those workers, dumb ones often do not. This naturally pushes some of the smart and self motivated talent towards organizations where they will be rewarded.
The one other exception is personality. The toxic person who works until 3am will rarely if ever get rewarded, because people judge more on the toxicity than anything else.
There's a tendency to minimize the work by others because we don't have the same perspective, but it's rarely ever accurate. Or helpful.
If they played a material role in meeting the goals then nothing. The question is so much about who is getting recognized as who isn't getting recognized. If you want to get recognized and get ahead then simply putting your head down and doing hard work isn't going to get you there.
I would imagine similar traits lead to writing a biography that sells well.
There’s always the biographies of sports people to try I can’t make it though the cover text.
I've seen people succeed with vastly different, contradictory strategies. I've seen engineers promoted to management earn respect by getting in the weeds and doing unwanted grunt work, and I've seen engineers promoted to management stay so hands-off from technical stuff that new employees assumed they were MBAs who didn't understand the work they were managing. I've seen people with humble origins flaunt them at every opportunity and others all but deny them. I've seen people who immersed themselves in detail to see the whole picture and people who carefully rationed the information they consumed to avoid being overwhelmed, systematically delegating the responsibility for details.
Conclusion: that's the wrong way to try to understand the difference between luck and skill. Suppose you ran a huge experiment where you had 1000 chess grandmasters, 1000 masters, 1000 good amateurs, and so on down to 1000 chronic duffers, and they each inherited a thousand games starting at move eight (crediting the first seven moves to luck, circumstances, and childhood.) You wouldn't learn much by asking whether the winners attacked or defended, opened the middle or jammed it up, preferred their knights or their bishops. Those aren't the right questions. A grandmaster doesn't move a knight just because she likes knights, or because moving knights is the baller thing that all the grandmasters do. It's because it accomplishes something in their situation. If life was a game you could play over and over again, with executive control gradually fading in starting in the teenage years, a brilliant player might play each lifetime very differently. It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what skills you would develop as you "played" dozens or hundreds of lifetimes! Certainly not rigid rules like "wake up at 5am" or "wear the same thing every day."
Paraphrasing Nassin Taleb, a good player is somebody that optimises the chances of black swans to happen in life. But even this might no grant you a win.
A lot of comments in these kinds of threads just assume a kind of fatalism that success is determined purely by change and the circumstances of your birth.
Given the exponential / power law distribution of returns, if you are anywhere on the left hand side of that curve, you are doing phenomenally well, even if your actual place on it is random. This curve is the mechanism behind the Matthew Effect as well. To get there, you just need to survive long enough to end up on it somewhat randomly. The competitive environments in offices are really about getting exposure to opportunity - not reaping the rewards of work. This is why some seemingly dumb people do well. They have the relationships that get them exposure to the opportunities to end up somewhere randomly on that exponential curve.
You'll notice that people who fail or stagnate in offices are the ones who have been isolated from peers, customers, sales people, and other sources of exposure to randomness, and that is not an accident. Highly successful people ensure they are at the front of the queue for those random opportunities, and whether they do that through merit or mendacity is ultimately immaterial. Being smart is not about problem solving or abstraction, it's an instinct for always getting the option on opportunity.
Absolutely recommend Pfeffer on this.
I did this. I had just been promoted to the lowest manager position at a global bank. Our global head had a habit of starting meetings late.
After one, I asked to speak privately. I said I had been working hard with my team on improving their timeliness. They responded, and our mornings became more productive as a result. But once a quarter they came to these meetings and saw the top guys in our division stroll in late. It undid work I fought hard for, and which I continued to believe in.
He thanked me for my perspective and was never late again. (Another example: CEO assigned our intern class a book assignment. I proceeded to reject the author’s thesis.)
Organisations that don’t permit upwards feedback are, in my opinion, unhealthy.
(In the interest of balance, I have also given upward feedback that was rejected. The reasons for their rejection changed how I worked going forward, every time productively.)
Not to my knowledge. More memorable was the positive response I received to both of the aforementioned pipe-ups. Granted, I'm pretty up front about wanting open communication in any corporate culture I join, so I'm heavily selecting–during interviews and random conversations–for teams who value that.
- Richard Branson once said that he didn't like when people were late, but Virgin's trains aren't very timely
- Tim Cook would probably be just as successful if he got up three hours later (opines the writer)
- General fear mongering about the dangers of executives like Jobs and Zuckerberg wearing the same attire every day
The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.
I can’t imagine myself performing my best at any task I do the first two hours after waking, and that certainly seems to be the case for almost all of my colleagues too, if early AM meetings are any indicator.
Additionally, there seems to be some kind of slowdown that necessitates sleep. There have been studies (sorry don't have references handy) that show people who are sleep deprived are less likely to exercise self-constraint.
I would recommend the book "Miracle Morning" if you are interested in more.
As to not being productive in the morning, there is a consistency of waking up at the same time that needs to happen. In my experience, it takes 10-20 days before you can function well at the earlier time period.
Also, there are things you can do to increase alertness. Sunlight, drinking water (dehydration makes you tired and mentally sluggish), electrolytes, exercise (just a minute or 2 to get heart rate up), cold shower. All of these wake the body up and increase mental alertness. I frequently use them before I start my day and it makes a big difference. You can't just wake up and start working, you have to have a consistent routine that is aligned with human physiology.
It takes about 30 minutes after getting out of bed before I reach peak alertness.
Why? I find I'm often more productive at the end of the day than the beginning. And more productive late at night than early in the morning. I find the obsession with waking up early very strange (and often counter-productive).
It's not an exact science and there's not a lot of literature on it yet but some variables to consider:
Are you referring to mornings working on what is important to you personally, or are you referring to mornings at a day job that you're just punching a clock? Motivation and interest are going to play a key role here.
Are you consistently waking up at the same time or are you thinking about a few times you woke up and were tired? It must be consistent for circadian rhythm to adjust.
Do you have time alone to yourself in the morning or are other people already up and around you? Depending on lifestyle, people often have more time to themselves at night than morning so that might be part of the reason.
Do you have a routine to wake up in the morning? Certain triggers like sunlight, drinking water for hydration, electrolytes, and moving around, don't happen for the majority of people until much later in the day. Without these people are not going to be at their best. Many people who are early risers incorporate these and other types of rituals (exercise, cold showers, meditation). Without them, their mornings would not be as productive.
Are you giving yourself enough time in the morning to be at a relaxed pace without worrying about the clock or is it a rush to get to work?
NB - I previously didn’t believe this, and posted so in the past. After reading “why we sleep” that cites evidence to the contrary, I admit I’m wrong.
Obviously not everyone can become billionaires, but most people can better themselves by adding more discipline to their lives.
Yes it is. Ask any engineering manager.
1. verb "train (someone) to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience."
2. noun "the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience."
If people on my team are constantly getting to work late and I have to talk to them to come in early, I've disciplined them and they now change their behavior because of it (come in earlier).
How weird is it?
You absolutely do. Please take a second to actually lookup the definition of the word. It may not be added discipline in your life, but it is for many other people that don't live with the same daily habits as you. You don't get to change the definition of a word to fit your narrative, sorry.
A marine, doctor, rock star, sanitation worker, train operator, and professional athlete are all going to have drastically different things they consider good discipline.
If I have a problem responding to text messages in a timely manner, I can improve my personal discipline by introducing a new habit to take 5 minutes before I go to bed to reply to every message. If I have a problem with my weight I can start going to the gym and change what I eat, discipling myself to take more care of my body. If I have a problem finishing projects, I can discipline myself to set realistic goals and expectations of what "complete" means so I can feel more confident ending things.
Changing behavior to achieve a goal (whether it's self-imposed or from your boss) is by its very nature achieved through discipline.
Read “why we sleep”.
If you simply want to get up early because you are more productive that way doesn't require more self-discipline than staying up late for the same reasons. There is nothing "urgent" about it - you can very well do the same thing waking up at 8am or even noon (admittedly, noon has its drawbacks, but 8 or 9 am gets folks by with the greater world most times).
Don’t do it. You’ll be less effective at work and you’ll seriously damage your health. Fact.
Pertinent xkcd, Survivorship Bias:
I don't think I would sleep if that was me!
Shouldn't the author have just ended it there by concluding that neither one of these habits is necessary in order to be successful, rather than going on complaining?
Sounds pretty much like his job. Apple doesn't exist to innovate. It innovates to produce cash.
As far as innovation, have you used Apple Watch? Have you used CoreML? ARkit? Has any other company shipped a 7nm chip? Do you know the products in the pipeline?
It’s pretty easy to snipe when news reports are your only source. It isn’t like Tim Cook publishes meeting minutes or Craig F or Eddy Cue are sitting around discussing Tim’s management style.
iPhone or iPad wouldn’t have been possible without Tim because he created systems to actually produce and ship the thing. Look at the efficiency of Apple’s supply chain — nobody else can come close. That success is the very definition of “effective manager.”
If we want to talk of inept managers, we would have plenty from which to choose, but Cook isn’t one of them.