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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

In general I think it's a bad idea to take advice from successful people. There's a thing that goes around, a piece by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes[1], talking about how great it was to quit his safe job and become a cartoonist. Except... how many famous cartoonists are there? How many other people quit their advertising job and just failed? If each of their stories were circulated as much, would we see this swamped by a thousand heartbreaking memes instead?

Doing what Warren Buffett does works very well for Warren Buffett. The odds are good that it won't work for you. "Choose the right things" is pretty vacuous advice.

[1] https://highexistence.com/images/view/illustrated-advice-fro...

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Bill Watterson didn’t just quit on a whim. He had been making cartoons for years and had received feedback that he was at least half decent at it. And at the time that he quit, “newspaper cartoonish” was an actual career too.

He wasn’t saying “bet it all and jump off a cliff and hope you’ll land”. He just said “feel free to stake your own path”. The quote you link also includes staking your own path as a homemaker.

The central takeaway from his advice was to try to find meaning and happiness in what you do. It worked out extraordinarily well for Watterson but his advice applies to far more pedestrian cases too.

*newspaper cartoonist

Bo Burnham says the same thing. He’s talented and taking advice from him is akin to following the advice of buying lottery tickets.

Do you think being good at something and successfully selling or marketing your work is like buying a lottery ticket?

Sometimes, yeah. Comedy is one such example: it gives huge rewards to a few celebrities, while a lot of other equally talented people just never manage to be in the right place at the right time.

It's perhaps especially true for comedy. You can see it when you watch a comic on TV: they're much less funny than in person, because you're not surrounded by a lot of other laughing people. The same routine by the same person can get little more than snickers when done at somebody's open mic night -- unless somebody recognizes that they're famous. Celebrity reinforces itself.

Burnham is very talented and I'm sure he worked like crazy to market his work. But he will also tell you the names of a hundred others who are equally talented and worked equally hard, but you've never heard of them. The market for celebrity is very fickle, heaping huge rewards on a few, but drop off rapidly for people who aren't in the hump of the long tail.

Warren Buffett isn't profiting from celebrity in the same sense, but there's a similar effect where the biggest winners are lucky as well as smart. Their advice often doesn't take that into account, and it's important to measure that in your appetite for risk.

I think those are good points. I don't know much about comedy or entertainment but I get the same feeling that getting "chosen" matters more than your content.

On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident. Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design. Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself. You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.

Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.

Absolutely. Talent, luck, and hard work. All 3 are required to strike it big. I've known extremely talented and hard working people who did well, but never got to the super star level.

Context (Late-night interview link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U

The lottery analogy is quite accurate, yes.

It’s really not practically helpful unless you have full data.

I have no idea the rate of job quitters to successful cartoonists.

Or the rate of successful cartoonists who kept their job (Adams).

I still like to read this insight, but trying to make some axiom or judgement out of it is only useful for demonstrating that I’m not very smart for saying such a thing.

This happens quite a bit.

as always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/

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