The side of Paul Allen I wish more people knew about
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
My Dad, a DEC Technician, would come home and say "There are a couple teenagers from Seattle programming the BPA mainframes."
He then built a Heathkit home computer and taught me BASIC because "Paul and Bill can do it. So can you."
[1] https://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/Legacy-computer-syst...
I can identify with this. I've founded a gamedev company, taught Computer Graphics, and worked at Google and Improbable as a SWE; but in the middle of all this I wrote a novel, I recently quit my job to become an actor/filmmaker (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10232800), and I really enjoy making Italian goodies on my free time (mostly biscotti, tiramisu, and limoncello). I'm also thinking of learning bookbinding / restoration, and how to draw and paint.
I can't tell whether I'm "doing this right" -- and by "this", I mean "life". Sometimes I feel like I'm half-assing everything, and that I'd be better off laser-focusing on a single thing. Some of my friends have, and they're further along their careers (are they happier? I don't know). Sometimes I feel life is too short to not do what I feel passionate about.
I'm 38 and I'm doing OK in life, but I feel like I haven't figured out what to optimise for. I have this lingering feeling that I could, and should, be doing better (for some vague definition of "better").
Sorry to bring a personal question to HN, but the article made me think about my situation, I can't think of a better crowd to get their opinion than this one.
My doubts come from within. It's more about my own expectations for myself. For example, at my age and with my background, am I a fool for not trying to start a VC backed startup like everyone else? I guess there's a strong FOMO element in my questions.
Fools "start startups" as a goal. Smart folks take opportunities that present themselves, sometimes through a startup.
Whatever ends up being the right amount and kind of curiosity for you, I hope you can meet yourself with love and appreciation. Even if your curiosity brings you deep dissatisfaction because of unfulfilled dreams or the impossibility of knowing it all.
For what it’s worth, I started out in a high focus, high income career (law) but quickly realized the level of focus required left me feeling a little bored with life. So I reworked things, did a masters in environmental economics and now have what I’d call a portfolio career in which I can do a variety of things, allows me to travel a little and satisfies the curiosity itch. Which if unscratched - I realise - makes me feel unhappy. However, this does give rise to an inner tension. I live in a culture which associates money with status. I’m not rich like my old law school friends, and I feel lower status for that. Because I am (probably like most people) not unaware of status, I get some negative cognitive feedback from my choices, but on balance feel it’s better for me that I pursue a diverse livelihood than get rich and bored.
It’s so important and requires modesty to acknowledge ‘negative cognitive feedback’ or doubts to put it more directly.
Doesn’t mean you are on the wrong path but don’t silence that little voice. Let it have its say.
I recently switched jobs and am moving next month to reduce my commute. I'll have an extra 7 hours a week to do whatever I want and I cannot wait.
That’s what I’m driving towards.
I’ll say that the 0-hour thing is pretty impossible, though you’ll likely not work near 40 hours ever unless you want to. The biggest takeaway I’ve found is that, aside from gaining time, gaining freedom of choice is very liberating. You’ll feel the consequences as well, which I’ve enjoyed overall (even the tedious stuff can pay out in dividends).
It’s definitely worth pursuing, but does come front-loaded with work and a lot of time spent
This can feel like bragging but I really feel that I haven't really specialized in anything. Although being a marketing consultant has been my livelihood for nearly a decade, I'm somehow not able to call myself a marketer.
I'm turning 30 and beginning to wonder if these grand experiments have been stretched too long. And if they have, what do I focus on? And can I even focus on one thing?
I really like the "can only connect the dots backwards" speech by Steve Jobs. I'm no fanboy, but this one idea resonated with me, and has served me well.
(Not spelling or grammar, eh? I kid.) ;-)
Open secret (it's like a cheat code): service to others is the most rewarding.
Recently spent 4 years living in London, and I picked up some of the UK spelling.
> Open secret (it's like a cheat code): service to others is the most rewarding.
Very interesting, thanks!
Lucky duck! :-)
I want to hide behind my auto-spellchecker (which flagged it as I was replying, which is what prompted me to tease you about it) but really I'm just more ignorant than I like to believe. Good lesson in humility really. Oddly enough, I used to have it set to British English and so used e.g. "colour", etc.
> > Open secret (it's like a cheat code): service to others is the most rewarding.
> Very interesting, thanks!
Cheers! It's like a whole 'nother level to life, like as if you've been playing checkers the whole time and now you're ready for chess. You're at the right age too: you've seen enough of the world to avoid the naivete of youth, but you still have energy and ~20-50+ years to work/play with!
Whenever you have a decision to make, ask yourself “What would I regret more if I didn't do in 20, 30 years?
The only caveat is really make sure you think of yourself in the long time horizon: would you regret not saving enough money? Not spending more time with your kids? You get the themes... some things are obvious... others less so.
In general this has worked out well for me, and I have few genuine regrets.
It sounds simple, but in my personal experience, it is the simple things that are both the hardest and most important things to do right.
I'm continuing as a software engineer to pay the bills, but I pursue music, games, and at one point in my career was a graphic designer and illustrator (though perhaps not very successfully; I'll get back to it at some point).
I'm about to start learn electronics as I'm interested in building robots and making custom guitar pedals. I don't think I could ever be laser-focussed (95% sure I'm ADHD; used to think I was bipolar but not sure about that diagnosis anymore). Embrace your neurology.
Love it :)
Best of luck with your projects, they sound like fun! Electronics and robotics are somewhere on my list, too.
His basic point is that our culture highly values the Tiger-Woods-style success story, where a person just beavers away at one thing their whole life. But there are a lot of successful people who specialize later or not at all. It definitely made me feel better about my similarly diverse resume, and has given me some good ways to think about what I want to pursue next.
People are optimization functions. Trying to define it as happiness or whatever other complex formula won't work because it quickly goes meta. Its output becomes just one of your inputs. I know that "doing what you want to do" does not seem like a useful answer to that question, but I think the problem is more in the question than in the answer.
We have these huge computation machines in our heads and we're provided with results like "I want to write a novel" based on earlier inputs and with practically all computation happening subconsciously.
Also, I don't thing you would have such a nice list of accomplishments without a laser focus. By keeping it pointed around the same direction you can achieve more in that area compared to others (because strong flashlight can provide comparable amount of energy to the same point during long enough time), but.. back to the first point (achievements are just another input)
We all die within 120 years, and if we are cremated, there will be no trace of us left in this universe. Who cares about anything except our happiness and our ability to make those around us happy during this short time we are alive?
My wife makes 50% more than me, but we bought a house that we could afford on one salary. It’s in a nice neighborhood but not super fancy. It’s the house I plan on dying in. We have lived well below our means and was able to save a good down payment that helped. Not living above your means and maintaining a standard of living well below that is the most important thing, in my opinion. Not having worked for FANG (not being able to get in because I’m not good enough to pass the interviews) and not being able to amass great wealth from stocks, basically it’s been from saving.
My wife is more successful than I am, but I stunted my career to take more of the child rearing. That said my career isn’t terrible, I make a good salary but I turn off my phone at 3pm every day. My calendar automatically rejects all meeting requests after 230pm and I pick up the kids and spend more time with them to give my wife the opportunity to further her career.
lol are you bragging in the same exact way? 20k isn't much money in the big scheme? 20k is median more than people in 136 countries have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Until I read "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[1] which makes the strongest argument I've seen for having a "talent stack" and combining skills that aren't typically combined. Each skill increases your odds and essentially this boils down to Good + Good > Excellent. You can leverage a combination of average skills to great effect.
The author describes himself as mediocre at art, decent at writing a joke and having business experience... not that noteworthy in and of themselves, but mixed together resulted in Dilbert.
1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still-eboo...
(1) Be best
(2) Be first
(3) Be the only person in a unique niche (a useful unique niche)
(2) & (3) are far easier than (1).
I've occasionally speculated that in a world with 8 billion people, there exists a job/activity for which I am the absolutely best candidate, because of the perfect match of my very specific mix of skills and the very specific mix of skills required. The tricky bit is finding that match, I suppose :)
Maybe it has to do with the growing realization that we don’t have unlimited time? I’m not sure.
The premise of your movie looks fun. Where can I watch or rent it?
My GF said something similar. Kind of like how and why midlife crises happen.
> The premise of your movie looks fun. Where can I watch or rent it?
Send me an email :)
Often I wonder if I choose the wrong race on character creation or a few eras too early to spawn. Humans are certainly capable of dabbling in many domains simultaneously, but our current social structures (and limited lifespans) generally require us to specialize in basically one or two fields in order to be significantly successful.
- rich?
- famous?
- or would you rather be happy and healthy?
Note that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I know a lot of people and I've yet to see someone that is wealthy or famous that is also really happy but I do know some people that by HN standards would qualify as poor that are super happy, and a good part of that is because they are not chasing the buck or how many people have their autograph.
Often the journey is hard, really hard, but if you are moving in a direction you are excited about and being true to yourself it's ok.
There is no success, there is no winning, there is only your own comfort when the lights turn off forever.
That's not to say you can't have financial success and career satisfaction. It's just to say that those things won't give you the freedom to die.
There was a beauty and a freedom i used to feel from that experience:
There was no tower, nor staff; just a landing strip and we would fly in - do our thing and then take off again.
It was awesome... and i loved it, because we talk about america being the “land of the free” but we are really the “land of the regulated —special terms apply such as 1) are you rich enough to be free”
But i really liked flying into that island in particular over Orcas due to how libre it felt.
Yes, such airports are a lot of fun. Some are nothing but a strip in the middle of nowhere.
Each one has a frequency assigned and you announce yourself (or at least you are supposed to) when you come in to check if anybody else is there already, maybe even using the runway.
For reference: "Non-Towered Airport Flight Operations" -- https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
I found a number, the vast majority of airports is in this category:
> There's a huge number of uncontrolled airports in the U.S. According to the FAA, there are 5,300 public-use airports. Out of that number, there are 500 that are controlled. [Mar 1, 2005 -- https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/uncontrolled-airpor...
VFR and air space classes are orthogonal. You can fly through class B (e.g. SFO, for me, learning in the Bay Area, when you transition north starting from San Carlos you first have to talk to SFO tower and then get to pass north just a bit west of the airport, right through class B) or any class. VFR/IFR means something different [0]. A flight plan too is orthogonal, you can file a VFR flight plan too. It is used for safety mostly, in case you go missing, for example [1].
[0] http://www.stephan-schwab.com/airtravel/vfr-ifr
[1] https://thinkaviation.net/how-to-file-a-vfr-flight-plan/
Well.. most people in America live in places that depend on other people to coordinate shared resources. People will likely die or get seriously hurt if you hit them on your joyride flight, so we try to put procedures in place so that does not happen.
When you have the privilege to assert a colonial ownership claim to a large land area, you don't need to coordinate with other people when you're landing on an empty part of that land.
Same principles apply to companies as they scale. It's why startups can move fast.
Note however that aviation almost requires you to have at least a middle class income now due to rising costs, even for a homebuilt. Whereas my dad was able to afford a used piper cub in the early 70s while he was a student, with no financial help from his parents.
Edit:typo
If I had $1.25m in a bank account right now I could go write a check for a crappy early 1970s vintage Vancouver Special, on a narrow lot somewhere off Fraser Street in east van, or for a 3000 sq ft craft built house on a private island with its own off grid power system. Not talking about places with their own airstrip. Islands small enough to be accessible by boat or floatplane only.
> “Our net worth is ultimately defined not by dollars but rather by how well we serve others.”
Yep, exactly.
and then when you have enough oxygen you don't have to think about it and can serve others
Old Microsoft guys tend not to be recognized as being "one of us"... maybe it was Microsoft's culture, and the systematic undermining of open source software and startups through the 90s, but Paul definitely was more like us than we probably care to admit.
This reminds me of a day at Asymetrix - a startup founded by Mr Allen. Somehow we got a very early incarnation of Mosaic and I remember showing everyone how to bounce over to each lab with just a click and what authoring in HTML meant. Asymetrix's main product at the time was Toolbook, essentially a Hypercard clone -- but this was obviously the future. Paul's reaction was muted but I think he knew "This is happening without us!"
They had the very strange idea they were going to take on Microsoft and Borland with their own C++ development system, which seemed to make no sense to me given the other things they were doing.
Here's to hoping there are more Paul Allens out there.
https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-...
If they expected 30 years of service in the first place, then they should've put a 30 year vesting term on the shares from the start.
There's no right answer, it really depends on what people want and negotiate for. I may expect to put in 5 years and then retire with whatever value we end up with. That's totally reasonable. Just because my partner decides at that point to keep working doesn't mean our deal is suddenly no longer valid.
That's why I say, if you want to change the deal halfway through you need to get the board to issue more shares.
On the other hand, it is so bad a cool guy won a 100x lottery? Worse things have happened.
Even in this case though, I don't think it means anything more than "we were so used to using our monopoly power to steamroll everybody that we expected to keep on doing that". Microsoft only ever dominated the personal desktop computer OS market. They were a minority player in server OSes their whole existence, losing first to big iron and later to Linux. The handheld market went from being owned by companies like Palm to Apple and Google dominating. I know less about the embedded market, but Microsoft has been trying to own that for 20 years, and I don't think they've ever had a dominant position. I think even their desktop OS dominance was less to do with Windows being an amazing operating system and more to do with it being the thing that ran Word, Excel, and other popular business software.
So I think tsunamifury is right. Gates got so comfortable winning he saw it as "natural", rather than a combination of luck and their willingness to be an aggressive monopolist in a newfangled industry and during a period where antitrust enforcement was falling out of vogue.
It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.
Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.
You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.
I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".
I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.
But people cannot be ultimately separated from it. Stupid capitalism flying in the face of humanism.
He screwed countless people and entire companies. You don’t get to repair that karma with some donated vaccinations and mushy blog articles.
I'm sorry, but why don't you? He's literally saving millions of lives through his foundation, and through getting other billionaires to give to charity through the giving pledge.
He was the richest man in the world. He could have done anything he wanted to with his life, and he chose to do good things. He deserves some praise for that.
While he was a tough business person and sometimes may have done things that were borderline unethical, he never murdered anybody. He's certainly redeemable. And I think he has more than redeemed himself the past two decades for any of his past transgressions.
He has promised to give half of it away but as far as I can tell is no closer to doing that since he first made the pledge. I really wonder sometimes if that pledge was just PR for the absurdly wealthy. No need to tax us! We will be giving it away! But when?
He is doing good things but there is no way I can look up to someone who sits on such an obscene amount of wealth.
I forget where I read it, but when Jeff overtook Bill, there were various articles highlighting that Bill would still have been a lot richer if you accounted for how much he'd now put through the foundation.
So just because his market net worth hasn't gone down (in fact it's gone up a bit), it's not from him not yet giving money away.
https://www.wired.com/2010/08/paul-allen-patent-lawsuit/
Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work deciding to shake down a huge chunk of the web in a cash grab really isn’t a good look.
The shorter time it took to make his wealth the better it looks because less time means better efficiency.
It's not like you're entitled to wealth because of how long you've worked. This is an idea that has lead few to financial success I imagine. Privileges and salary based on time keeping a seat warm somewhere is a union/government thing, not a common private business policy. In private business it's about the value you create, and Paul Allen and the early Microsoft team ended up creating quite a bit and did so relatively quickly.
Which model is more accurate? I guess the huge majority of the inhabitants trapped in this planet do not need to think too long about it.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it -- Aristotle