Ideas That Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

Ideas That Changed My Life

perell.com

49 pointslowmemcpu23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445944

> 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing.

I found this one particularly interesting

The most recent famous example I can think of is "Obamacare" versus the "Affordable Care Act".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx2scvIFGjE

"11. The Never-Ending Now: The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet pulls people away from age-old wisdom. "

I frequently find myself in this mode. Whether it's the latest youtube video or tweet. There's something to be said about looking back at past events and investigating what you might have failed to learn or appreciate.

> 9. Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company).

The problem here is making sure that you are solving a real problem at all.

There are many companies out there doing something unique, but that is because what they are doing has limited/no value. Juicero comes to mind.

Without competition, you also cannot get an honest assessment of where you stand.

I totally agree with your first point, and you lost me on the last sentence. Competition is a great data point, but just because you don't have any competition doesn't mean you aren't solving a real problem.

To me it would be extremely rare that the identification of a problem is unique. A particular solution? Sure.

On the other hand, lots of people are solving problems which are not real.

I agree that finding a unique problem is possible, but it is more probable that you are missing something.

Sure. I also wonder if Perrel is hitting on the idea of avoiding competition by Thiel.

https://mastersofscale.com/peter-thiel-escape-the-competitio...

If there is a demand for something, somebody somewhere has most likely already cobbled together a solution to meet their own need, and then turned around and resold that solution to other people.

It's extremely rare to find a widely spread problem with zero pre-existing solutions or competitors in that field.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825744

Escaping your competition by blowing past them is a fundamentally different concept than finding problems to solve that don't already have solutions and existing competition though...

This is more intensely competing so that you never compete again.

> The problem here is making sure that you are solving a real problem at all.

I understand the concept of turning a "problem" solution into a business, but there are two issues with that as far as I see. Firstly, questioning if it is really a problem, like you mentioned and secondly does it need to be fixed, and this I think points to your second point about something being unique or if it is of value.

> Without competition, you also cannot get an honest assessment of where you stand.

I don't think a company like Uber, was fixing a problem, they made a better solution and competed. So yes, agreed that competition can be good. Another way to look at it is, if there is no competition, then there may be no problem.

The issue the author has is saturation, I think. No matter what if you are solving a "problem" in a space with no "competition" and you are winning that battle, then multiple other people are going to come along and compete.

Unique solutions for unique problems which are profitable are rare, challenging, often expensive to develop etc. Take an existing idea and make it better (hmmm Apple?), you are more likely to be successful in a tested market.

I got to #15...

"15. Law of Shitty Click-Through Rates: Most marketing strategies have a short window of success, as click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example, the first banner-ad has a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers."

And I thought WOW, 70% and I was curious if that's true. At least according to The Atlantic that is not true, but the number is still pretty darn high.

"The banner ad that’s widely described as the first ever was a little rectangle purchased by AT&T on HotWired.com in 1994. About 44 percent of the people who saw it actually clicked on it."

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rH9hEb...

(Not trying to take away anything from this list, just sharing what I found)

This should be considered for every business that optimizes for "engagement". When introducing a change to increase engagement, ask yourself whether people actually want to engage. Otherwise, you'll end up increasing your metric in the short-term but lose in the long term on customer satisfaction or another metric you are not tracking (or can't track in an automated way).

> 8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.

This, at least in US, I think the society is focusing too much energy on cultivating genius, and a lot of talents are left idle with literally meaningless work (for example, convincing people to click on ads).

This is a listicle of context-free ideas distilled into bon mots. Great for going viral, especially among the VC twitter crowd.

The problem with these lists is that they give the impression that you're learning something when you're really just consuming Content.

This is true. The only way you actually learn something here is by taking ideas as a starting point to identify where they are prevalent in your own life.

Which is fair. These can be good jumping off points. It would be wonderful if Perell credited (for example) the book The Goal for his reference to the Theory of Constraints, etc.

Yeah -- I think him and those like him (Tiago Forte, etc) would argue that they have "remixed" the idea enough to call it their own... which is highly debatable IMO.

> 7. Mimetic Theory of Conflict: People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That’s why Civil Wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer two people are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.

Wars between countries are certainly more common than civil wars, aren't they? And I'm not sure I understand the link between "worst conflicts" and "greater potential for conflict."

> Wars between countries are certainly more common than civil wars, aren't they?

Far more people are killed in intrastate armed conflict than interstate:

https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Du...

#20 - The Bike-Shed Affect seems to plague everyone. In fact, this article from Perrell is what inspired me to write about how to use collaborative meeting agendas to stop this from happening.

TL;DR: Force everyone to make the simple and easy decisions asynchronously before you get into a synchronous meeting. This forces you to talk about the big, hard problems when you are meeting live. It has saved our team hours of wasted meeting time.

https://productsolving.substack.com/p/bike-shed-effect

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