Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

Money quote:

> Personally, I've long idolized Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But most of our heroes got to where they are by being unlikeable, not likable.

I fundamentally disagree with that view of being an asshole as an important part of success, but I also feel it has been rehashed an incredible amount of times already.

A slightly different take on this is the "don't rock the boat" mentality. This is usually a counter productive advice for anyone in a creative field, and pushing against settled ideas, trying things that people are not comfortable exploring is a valuable trait.

It can mean confrontation, refutal from a majority of people, and pushing these ideas requires a strong character. But I think there is a fine line between being firm and strong on ones opinion and being a jerk.

View on HN

My biggest problem with Musk is him being an asshole in areas that have absolutely nothing to do with his businesses. Like the Thai cave pedophile thing. Just cut that shit out. We can debate the value of being a jerk in business, but there's no reason to subject members of the public to it on a large scale.

Jobs was known for being an asshole outside of work too, but it was either on a small scale (driving without licence plates, or parking in handicap stalls), or within his family (relationship with his daughter).

> our heroes got to where they are by being unlikeable, not likable.

They really didn't though. At the most, their likability is insignificant. I'm reading the Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs and I can tell you: Yes, he was annoying as fuck, but that's not the reason he was successful. If anything, it hindered him repeatedly. He got to where he is because he recognized the genius of Wozniak and knew to push in a way that Wozniak never would have (and not because he didn't possess the talent, but because Wozniak chose not to take leadership roles; it's something his father taught him and something he decided for himself).

I think one important thing to note is being "unusual" is ONLY celebrated for wildly successful people.

If you make it like Steve Jobs people will over-analyse everything you did and said and try to somehow link that to your success.

If you are not wildly successful people just consider it a boring personal flaw and they will not tolerate your attitude.

“The distance between genius and insanity is measured by success”

Every co-working venue seems to have at least one idiot wandering around in a black turtleneck being deliberately selfish and rude to everyone.

Never seen one of them actually be successful at anything except annoying people.

So far my personal "black turtleneck success ratio" is about 100:1 failure/success, and I never met the single success. I include Elizabeth Holmes, who I haven't met either, on the failure side.

They really should be going barefoot if they’re trying to cargo cult their way to success by mimicking Jobs

They just get the order wrong. It's more like, being very successful means you can get away with being an a-hole a bit more. Steve Jobs really put himself in danger doing elevator interviews. That isn't someone I would mimic the behavior of.

Yeah, but if you ever see someone paying attention to them you know they are talking about something great. If you see people talking to nice people you have to listen and evaluate the ideas yourself.

I think a big part of it is being stubborn about rejecting things that aren't good enough. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk both also have a reputation of perfectionism, and lots of stories of telling their employees to start over because they didn't hit the minimum requirements (or in Musk's case, just firing people outright over seemingly small things).

Especially when one of your employees is pushing you hard for a feature they want or something they spent a lot of time working on, it can be difficult to reject their proposals over and over but by experience I've seen that this can lead to a lot of technical debt or significant compromises on the product.

Over time I'm becoming increasingly in favor of being really stubborn about certain technical choices and product choices, even where it can hurt employee morale.

Linus torvalds is a good example of this where the "asshole behavior" didn't spill over into the rest of his life.

Is Musk really an asshole? The stories I've heard about Jobs show that he was abusive and manipulative. Maybe I'm out of the loop but I haven't heard such stories about Musk. He's said some dumb things that seemed uncalled for on Twitter, but everyone makes mistakes, and if he really believed them when he said them then that doesn't make him an asshole. And firing someone over something seemingly small is not asshole behavior, that's just taking charge, who knows what lays behind a decision like that.

Are there any examples of Musk doing something mean for selfish reasons?

'Unlikable' and 'Asshole' are different things.

A lot of people are just cold, unsociable, not charismatic, don't buy into the latest social trend - and are therefore 'unlikable' to many.

It's possible to be 'perfectly good' and yet perceive as 'unlikable'.

Personally, I like those people, but the mob turns on them quickly.

Being needlessly callous, or mean, lording over people, excess egoism i.e. 'asshole' - this is unnecessary.

Being 'demanding' is not being an 'asshole'.

Firing people on the spot for missing this or that, is 'asshole'.

Emotionally, a lot of it can feel like the same thing, so it's confusing. And often people are a mix of both things, and are otherwise professionals, but let slip some emotional stuff now and again. The more demanding or terse a person is, the easier it is to cross the line into just being a jerk.

And it's not even necessary to be 'unlikable' either, but for 1/2 the population who tend to be 'people pleasers' maybe they need to learn that it's not just a popularity game, and the system would benefit from honest input.

My instinct says that Jobs and Musk are 10% nice, 80% terse, and 10% asshole.

Most of their actions seem to be on point, the kind of 'hard truth' actions that some people seem to admire in business types, but they can also be needless dks.

Some people are just plain callous jerks and actually have no business ability at all, and yet millions of people seem to believe their acting! Trying to think of an example ...

From the people I know who worked with Jobs, he was more than 10% asshole.

Being unwaveringly decisive (eschewing discussion) is often considered antisocial (although it's admired by some). Brutal honesty is considered "unnecessary" in the corporate environment. I believe this culture contributes to bureaucracy far and above the risk it mitigates.

For example, nobody wants to look at evidence that an long-established process is an unnecessary cost-sink. It's safer to leave it alone. Participants (and their allies) will perform all kinds of political and process acrobatics to defend their known knowns.

If you are jumping from company to company (which you should every few years outside your stock options), you can see how established companies have internal structures that prevent innovation and shoot themselves in the foot until whole departments are dismantled. At that point, most of the participants look at each other like "what happened?" or "this asshole came in and tore the dept apart".

It's a pain point of mine. The more money you make, the more you see this stuff and I'm usually the asshole brought in to break up the status quo (without much political support). I've been successful as often as I have failed. Jobs had much better positioning and was better at identifying the people and tools necessary to inspire change.

My 2c - I think being contrarian, over long periods of time, turns you into a jerk, because you have faced all kinds of opposition and subconsciously you've realized that the most effective way to get people to stop arguing with you is to be a jerk.

> I fundamentally disagree with that view of being an asshole as an important part of success

It can be correlation without being causation. The things that make such people successful—corporate authority, self-confidence, intellect, high standards, low tolerance for bullshit—may well expose or amplify the asshole tendencies lurking in all of us.

Yup, the other popular one is being contrarian. Its a dned epidemic at the moment, I find people arguing things for no other reason than to sound smart bt challenging, usually on a technicality, a really obvious assumption any normal person would take at face value.

So, Narcissism essentially? This is a quality of it. I feel like this runs deep in Tech.

Depending on the age of the persons involved, this could actually be healthy. When I first learned about logical fallacies I could not keep my mouth shut. Everyone was a moron and dag nabit I knew exactly why. After a few months of pissing everyone off, I settled down in to a "You can be wrong if you want," kind of mentality.

I wish some of this energy could be channeled into creating forum software that explicitly recognized and accounted for logical fallacies.

It would help clean up a lot of shit (same as comment voting). It's not a panacea (just as voting isn't) but it would help to be able to flag/confirm/reject logical fallacies in textual online arguments.

Seems like that would require an understanding of language that far exceeds the current state of the art. And much of the time logic doesn't even apply because the text is incoherent.

You don't need that. You can use humans to flag and verify logical fallacies. The computer can just be tasked with labeling.

A contrarian rejects popular opinion, not to be antagonizing, but in an effort to show that group think may be off slightly. It is more an argument about what may be right (or what is dogmatic), than just being difficult to be difficult.

People who are difficult to be difficult are just assholes. Contrarians frequently get put in that bucket, but have different motives. Keep in mind the term is used a lot in investment.

For example, stating children should go back to school this fall works within "popular" demand or belief that masks are a solution to spread. A contrarian would indicate an abundance of caution about what is yet to be known about how this is spread, and that perhaps masks don't exactly work the way we think they do.

Holding a contrary view that masks don't work doesn't make someone an asshole, but it could be viewed that way if the ones who disagree are unable to come to a conclusion contrary to that view based on empirical evidence, and not overwhelming abundance of popular opinion based on irrational understanding.

The crucial part of this is that they are only able to be arseholes because they are successful.

Musk can be a prick because he's sitting on billions. Bezos can exist perfectly well after having his empathy surgically removed, because he has wealth to feed all starving people in the world and still be have 100 billion change.

Nobody does a favour to someone who is a dick, unless they have to.

I was/am a sysadmin. I am successful precisely because I'm not a dick to people. I am helpful which means I got promoted, and a reputation for being useful. When people moved to better companies, they would recommend me.

This not because I was a better engineer, its because I was useful.

Be kind, its good for you, and those around you.

I think you should examine how you were useful and at what expense. It might be interesting.

Selection bias? Picking 2 people who seem to fit your belief doesn’t prove anything.

Maybe a larger study of people?

That and Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

They succeed in spite of being jerks, not because they are.

Musk hit big with paypal, then attempted the "impossible" with tenacity. He surrounded himself with the right people and provided a concise, clear vision for his teams to strive towards:

    Build sports car

    Use that money to build an affordable car

    Use that money to build an even more affordable car

    While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

I think there's a difference between being a jerk for no reason, and just being disagreeable in situations where you genuinely disagree. Steve Jobs had genuine disagreements between his vision and the people around him, some of his disagreements were productive, and some of them were surely pointless, but some of those productive and difficult disagreements were doubtless a component of his success.

Steve was also a bit of a dirtbag though, if what I've heard about his relationship with his daughter is correct; though probably there's also more to that than we are meant to know.

You only get to be a jerk if you are the boss.

I think the real common trait of successful people is a willingness to hold unpopular/anti-orthodox views, even in the face of scrutiny and criticism. Being a sociopath like Jobs probably makes it easier to do this, but is not necessary - you can be highly successful and avoid the traps of common wisdom while being kind and even pleasant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com